where I really feel like I can own what I have—the power, the decision-making, the capacity to have money? Do I believe in myself enough, do I have self-esteem and how guilty do I feel about it?’” Goldbart says. “Obviously gender plays a factor. Women have been disentitled from money until this recent generation.” That’s something Marlis Jensen became keenly aware of when she gave up her full-time career to be a stay-at-home mom. “I stayed home with our two girls for 11 years and that is really a big piece of why I’m doing what I do today,” she says. “It helped me see how people respond and ascribe value to people. What was my value as a mom? “The way that translated into the work we do today is that we see an entire family system. When we talk about the values in the family, the values come from both sides. It doesn’t matter where the money’s coming from.”
The Jansens at the fountain on Main Street in Tiburon, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the Bay Area. [Photo by Sierra Jansen]
and the Jensens offer has grown in interest and demand has led to the creation of organizations to support professionals who serve family enterprises, including Boston-based Family Firm Institute, founded in 1986; Denver-based Purposeful Planning Institute, founded in 2010; and New York City-based Ultra High Net Worth Institute, founded in 2019. “There are more and more families out there doing this and there are many, many more advisors doing this because there’s a need,” says DiFuria. “And a lot of the financial advisors and estate attorneys are saying, we really need to take care of the human side of wealth." “In America, we assume that the currency of happiness is money,” Goldbart says. “If you have money you’re better off than not having it. But you’re still left with the same human questions of what is the purpose of me and my life and how can I best employ it? Plus, you have all the cultural messages, social stigma, about what it means when all of a sudden you have money. So, I think we have to separate the money, which is the fuel, from what it means to be a satisfied, fulfilled human being.” Having money “doesn’t take away one’s pain,” DiFuria adds. “Building trust is a huge theme in all the work that we do,” Marliss Jansen says. “Building trust between family members so that the family can support each other and become truly a learning organization. The goal is always to help family members realize the values they share with other family members.” And if they can embrace that, wealth is less likely to fracture the family and more likely to enhance everyone’s life. “The idea is to help our clients build an opt-in culture that’s too good to pass up,” she says. g
It also informs what they call financial advocacy. “If you think of a person who has been thrust into the position of leadership by the death of a spouse or a divorce and never had to take care of the finances and all of a sudden they have to, that is a terrible place to be,” she says. “That leaves you vulnerable.” Typically, that’s a woman because even in moderate-income families, wives tend to defer to their husband when it comes to all things financial, according to a 2020 survey by UBS, sometimes because they want to avoid arguing, or they don’t know where to begin, or they believe their spouse is financially savvier, or they prefer to be “taken care of.” One of those women was Kris Jenner, who told the Wall Street Journal that when she divorced her late husband of 10 years, celebrity attorney Robert Kardashian, she didn’t even know how much they paid the gardener because he handled all their money. “Women will be holding the wealth in the next probably decade,” DiFuria says. “If we don’t have our own voice about the wealth, we can’t make the difference we can possibly make in the world. We have a lot of power with money. We can use that well, but if we don’t have a sense of entitlement about our voice or our rights, we can’t take advantage of what old White men are doing now with their money and power.” Billions and billions Finally, they are seeing a rise in multi-billionaires. The issues between multi-billionaires and billionaires are subtle, they say, yet akin to talking about kings and queens. It’s a phenomena DiFuria and Goldbart have started to pay attention to. “What is the degree of psychological difference in the millionaire families, the billionaire families, and the multi- billionaire families, where you know that money just cannot go away?” DiFuria asks. “That becomes a whole other echelon.” That the kind of high wealth consulting that DiFuria, Goldbart
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September 2024
NorthBaybiz 29
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