September 2024

make as a family in order to ensure money is a resource, it’s an ally, not an enemy of your kids’ development?” Goldbart says. “One has to take a very proactive stance. It may be counter to the culture of your community. Your kids may be surrounded by kids who get Teslas and Jags without having to do anything. That may be true throughout their life. The question is, what are you going to do?” Something they all recognize, however, is that sometimes uber-wealthy parents aren’t all that present in their children’s lives. “They just throw money at them,” Goldbart says. “The impact of wealth on identity development has a lot to do with age, maturation and the degree to which that individual was an active participant in the creation of that wealth,” Goldbart says. “It has less impact on a 65-year-old who spent 30 years building a business and has raised kids than a

25-year-old who signed up with some startup and two years later has money. Or at a further extreme, a lottery winner who has done nothing. The less you’ve actually done and the less you understand about money, the greater the impact is going to have on you and more likely to suffer from what we call ‘sudden wealth syndrome.’” No longer a laughing matter All four have seen changes in their field since they started. “What we do has been accepted in the world whereas it was largely laughed at in the late ’90s when we started,” says Goldbart. “That’s a radical shift I would say. I think people understand that money is not an endpoint, and everybody needs a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives and it’s going to have an impact on how you manage it.” Despite that, many still have judgment

about the work they do, says Kjartan Jansen, who has worked two decades in finance, including technology consulting, equity research and venture capital. “This is a triggering subject to people. It’s not acceptable to work with people who have a lot of money. We should just ‘eat the rich.’” They’ve also seen a rise of family offices in the past decade. According to research from Preqin, a London-based investment data company, the number of family offices hit 4,500 worldwide in 2023, with 1,682 in North America alone, managing some $6 trillion or more. They’ve also observed that many wealthy clients have been hiring wealth learning officers to educate family members and to think about the future of the “family enterprise,” which can be defined in several ways but generally includes members of a family who are involved in a family business or businesses and are committed to seeing it continue, flourish and be sustainable across generations. Another huge change they have experienced is that there are more wealth creators and inheritors who are women. Regardless how they got their money, women often have a harder time than men do, they say, especially if they have more wealth than their male romantic partner. One woman wealth creator DiFuria and Goldbart worked with told them she’s given up trying to find a boyfriend—her wealth gets in the way. Women inheritors who don’t have a career often have a huge sense of guilt about their money and can fall into long- ingrained gendered roles, DiFuria and Goldbart say. They work to help women feel comfortable and entitled to their money, no matter how they got it, and also to have a voice. “There’s a sense of, ‘Am I entitled

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28 NorthBaybiz

September 2024

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