Family meetings may sound daunting and challenging but they don’t have to be. Hosts Whitney Reagan, wealth advisor, and Daniel Sharkey, senior wealth advisor, discuss making these financial meetings with your broader family productive. They’ll cover what is a family meeting, why you should have them regularly and what topics are important to include. 

Transcript

Whitney Reagan: Imagine you’re told that you’re having a family meeting. It sounds a little scary and kind of like you’re being summoned, right? Well, we are here to tell you that having a family meeting does not have to be scary, and in fact, it can be very valuable and add deeper connection with you and your family. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks on having a family meeting.

Welcome, welcome. Thanks for joining us. This is Your Life Simplified. I’m Whitney Reagan, wealth advisor here at Mariner, and I am thrilled that we piqued your interest on the family meeting topic. I’m also very excited because I am a new co-host of the podcast. It’s a dream come true for me, so this is very exciting. I am also very fortunate to be joined by my colleague and also one of my favorite people, Dan Sharkey. He is a certified financial planner and a senior wealth advisor here at Mariner. He’s also actually new to the podcast hosting team. How you doing, Dan?

Dan Sharkey: I’m great. It’s great to be here. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, so this is tremendously exciting.

Whitney: That’s right. So hopefully we don’t screw anything up, right?

Dan: From your lips to God’s ears.

Whitney: Yeah. Okay. So I feel like, well, actually you thought of this topic, and I was equally as passionate about it, so I want to jump into asking some questions. But I think first and foremost, we should probably kick off things by telling the audience why we are even qualified to talk about this topic. So maybe add a little credibility here and give us a little background on why this is important to you and why we should be talking about it.

Dan: Sure. I mean, I think that’s probably the fairest question to ask right off the jump, so thank you for kind of teeing that up. First, we don’t really want to portray ourselves as some sort of family expert or guru. That’s really not the goal here. To do this job well, you have to have a requisite level of humility. So what we’re just trying to do is talk through what our experience has been, some of the tools and tips that you mentioned to help families address these concerns and hopefully that you can take away some of those things and put them into practice in your own life. So in a previous life before Mariner, I was a client advisor at a family office. In my role here as a senior wealth advisor, this is really one of the core elements that we have for families.

We’ve done dozens of these family meetings, and that goes from everything from actually being in the room and leading them and stewarding those directly, advising parents and other clients in how they can do this on their own or just really walking them through as to why this would be a good idea. From my perspective, it’s really one of the more critical functions that we have, and we’ve seen firsthand families who have implemented some of these tips and tricks really have more successful outcomes. And one of the points that I want to make, especially for everyone listening, is that you do not need to have hundreds of millions of dollars to do this successfully.

The amount of wealth is really an irrelevant point here. It’s really more about ensuring that we have these open lines of communication and that you can do these things with your own family to make sure that you get a better outcome. So very similar to all the kind of sophisticated planning techniques that we utilize for all our clients. It doesn’t necessarily define you based on a wealth number. Anyone can really do these things, and they’re applicable up and down the wealth spectrum.

Whitney: Great, and thanks for those points, too. I think that’s important to say in the beginning. From my perspective, similar to Dan, I’m a wealth advisor, and we have a lot of clients across all different levels of wealth, and we have helped them to … We’ve given them guidance on talking to their families or their children around money. We’ve also prepped some families for just having these family meetings without us, and we’ve also facilitated some family meetings, so we have experience there. But from my personal life, that’s professionally, but personally, I feel like I have some experience also because I’m fortunate enough to be a beneficiary of a large family office, and we have over 60 family members spanning across four generations. As you can imagine, Dan, 60 people and four different generations, that adds some complexity, and there’s just a lot of things to navigate with that.

So there’s a lot of differences of opinion. There’s different ways of communicating. I mean, think about the youngest generation versus the oldest generation. There’s also vastly different geographical locations. So we’ve had to navigate a lot, and it’s just been really awesome to see how our family has grown and evolved, and we’ve changed the different services and things that we offer to our family to meet the growing needs of our family. So I think my experience there has helped me to understand the importance of having a family meeting. And I’ve also been the recipient of that phrase, “We’re having a family meeting,” and I thought I was in trouble, but I realized that it’s actually really powerful to have a family meeting. And it’s amazing that you have a family member that cares that deeply that they want to share in being transparent about money with you.

Dan: And it doesn’t need to be like being called to the principal’s office. I think oftentimes people have a misunderstanding or a misconception about what we’re really trying to accomplish. So we’re going to talk more about those themes right now. But it’s really important to know that this is … needs to be viewed as a positive slant. This is no negative connotation to it, it’s really more about building those connections across generations. And you’re a perfect example of it, in four generations, spread out geographically. I’m sure as we’ve all evolved and as you have that wide of a gap between the oldest and the youngest, it spans the political spectrum, religious spectrum. There’s a whole bunch of views that are encompassed in there. But by doing some of the things that we’re going to talk about today, you can really bridge those gaps and really ensure that everyone has a successful outcome in the end.

Whitney: Absolutely. So I think that I’m glad that we talked about our experience first because I feel like that helps build a little credibility. And now that we got that out of the way, I want to start with a question around the type of meeting that we’re talking about. Maybe we can explain what this type of meeting is, because you might be thinking family meeting, are we talking about what’s on the calendar this week? Are we doing a weekly meeting? What type of meeting are we talking about?

Dan: Yeah, it’s a great question. And defining the purpose allows you to establish the foundation, and I think having that scope is really important. So let me just start off by saying what this is not—this is not where we’re going on vacation, talking about meals for the week, kids’ practices, all the things that when you run your normal household come up on a … For parents, we both have three kids, these things come up all the time. That’s not what we’re talking about. The fact that we’re having lasagna on Wednesday is not an area that we’re going to focus on.

So what are we talking about? Well, what we are advocating for specifically is figuring out how to talk about your wealth, your values, and your goals with your broader family. Typically, that involves the wealth creators or what we would affectionately call generation one and perhaps their children, their grandchildren, but it can also include all non-traditional families, that’s stepchildren, godchildren, nieces, nephews, partners, whatever the case may be. If the family dynamics continually change, and that’s a wonderful thing. And these techniques and tools apply to all of those different situations that you may have. Every client’s going to be slightly different, but know that this applies to your situation even if you don’t fall into one of those kind of classical categories.

I also want to just clearly define what we mean by wealth, because typically people think wealth and they think financial assets, and that is certainly a part of this conversation. But we also think about what we would call human capital. What are the different talents, attributes, viewpoints that broader family has? That is all tremendously important. If you think about a family’s balance sheet, those elements need to be captured on there. And just look at your own personal life. You mentioned 60 different people. They’re all going to have unique things that they bring to the table and that those attributes and differences should be valued, and it’s just as important as the actual family’s money.

Whitney: Absolutely. Human capital is a huge piece of that, and I think people just forget about that. I’m glad you mentioned it. So now that we’ve talked about the type of meeting, let’s just get into what you can accomplish through these family meetings. Why have them? What can we get out of them?

Daniel: To summarize it briefly, what we really want to do is talk about what the mission of the family is. And I don’t mean to make that sound like this overarching theme that is hard to grasp, but what are the values, goals and finances that you have that can create a successful outcome for what you want your family to be able to accomplish? To briefly summarize, it brings to the forefront, well, what is the plan and more importantly, what do we potentially want the plan to be? And I’ll give you a clear example.

So typically when we talk about estate planning here at Mariner, it’s a core pillar of what we do for all of our clients. When we think about what that plan is, we want to be able to communicate what … again, going back to generation one or the wealth creators are, what the plan is? How is it going to impact those of subsequent generations? How do we make sure that we avoid any future conflict? One piece of advice that I think is we would both hold dear is don’t be the family that say, “You know what? All my kids get along, they’ll just figure it out when I’m gone.” I promise you that that type of approach may work for someone, but it’s going to work by accident. It’s fraught with issues, should be avoided. And what we really want to do is figure out how can we have a conversation so that no one fills in the void with their own narrative.

Going back to the estate planning example, we’ve had clients, and they’ve come to us after the fact, but one child got, let’s say, a vacation home and the other child got financial assets because that’s what mom and dad thought that they would want, but perhaps that’s really not what the kids wanted or there’s some other way to have that potentially split up. And when you allow those types of scenarios into your life, there’s a lot of confusion and potentially some resentment that is created. So by having an open conversation and really understanding what the plan is, you can really create this long-lasting success, and you can allow that plan to be driven by what’s important to you as a family from generation to generation.

And let me just say this, this goes beyond money, too. Being able to hear family stories, understand the connective tissue that brings you all together is really, really important. And one other piece that I think is critical, and we’re going to talk about here in a second, but you don’t necessarily need to talk about all the nitty-gritty details, about every dollar and every cent. You can really start small. But being able to just have the beginning stages of this conversation, realize it’s not something that you need to shy away from. And by bringing it to the forefront again, you’re really increasing the odds that not only will you be successful in what you want to do, but that you’re setting up your beneficiaries, heirs, children, grandchildren, whoever may fall under that umbrella into a much more successful future.

Whitney: Wow. You covered a lot of ground with that response, and I don’t even know what to actually highlight here because I think you really summed it up so perfectly, talking about how you definitely want to start with values, and you want to keep open lines of communication. You want to hear everyone’s voices and make sure everyone in the family is valued and leaning into each person’s strengths. And also, not assuming, not making assumptions, because that gets us all into trouble. And if you put responsibility on your heirs and whether they’re receiving some kind of benefit like a family home, like what you were talking about, or if they’re actually responsible for being durable power of attorney or health care power of attorney. Those types of responsibilities need to be talked about. And that is exactly what we’re saying here is just to be transparent and have these open lines of communication.

Dan: And I think you and I have talked about this privately, but the idea of accountability, right? And getting buy-in from others that are impacted by this plan. With great privilege comes great responsibility, and I think being able to communicate that ensures that you empower those other beneficiaries, whoever they may be, to understand what their roles and responsibilities are. This all can be done positively, but what we’re really suggesting is that by bringing these things to light, you don’t need to hide from them, you don’t need to run for them, and you need to have an honest conversation. And the families that do that, again, I sound like a parrot, but they really do have more successful outcomes. One thing that I would ask you is you mentioned four generations in the same room. How do you navigate those generational shifts? And I would imagine that if you look across the age differences and again some of the other viewpoints, whether they’re socially or whatever have you, they’re very different. So how do you address those gaps?

Whitney: Great question. Navigating different generations is … it has its challenges, but I think something that we’ve learned in our family is that for one thing, talking about the family history and talking about the origins of wealth is … it’s really important to me, and it’s really important to our family, because I think that understanding where you came from and the wealth that’s been generated, where that’s come from, it really helps you to feel grateful and practice gratitude. On the younger generation side, we’ve also come to realize that younger generations have a very big emphasis on impact and meaning and where their dollars are going. They want to make that meaningful for them. So understanding how the younger generations want to use their money and understanding how their giving is impacting the world around them. So I think that’s just something that we’ve come to realize within our family and try to lean into some of those strengths of the different generations.

Dan: That’s a great point and something that everyone should think about.

Whitney: I want to ask one last question before we close out, and I just wanted to ask you, when should families start thinking about actually having this family meeting? Is there a right time or a right place type of thing?

Dan: It’s a great question. And to be candid, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. I think you have to have as a parent, if that’s the mold of the family, a very honest conversation about when you think your kids are ready. Typically, we see either late in college or when they become full-fledged adults, is that the level of maturity, education, focus on developing their own path in the world? That’s usually the time that this is introduced. But some clients have children, for example, that espouse that maturity level much earlier. It really is custom to you, and you have to have that honest conversation. What I would suggest is that we’ve often found that the second generation has a greater aptitude to absorb these things if they really feel like they’re being brought into the fold sincerely. So don’t underestimate that element of it.

And I think you can really determine when this will be, but typically we would see early 20s is the time that you can do this. And I just want to reiterate one earlier point that I made, we are not necessarily advocating for you showing them everything, but beginning to have the conversation about that this is a comfortable topic, this is a safe space that we can begin to discuss. You can layer in the dollar and cents signs later on. They don’t necessarily need to come in meeting number one. This is something that you’re going to do repeatedly over the subsequent years and decades. So start small, but don’t be afraid to have that conversation.

Whitney: Great points. And I think the earlier you start, the better. Just giving your kids a chance to learn financial acumen is hugely important and it’s valuable.

Dan: Absolutely.

Whitney: So I think that’s all we have time for today. I really enjoyed hosting with you, Dan. This has been dream come true, and I also want to say thank you to our listeners. Thanks for joining us. We hope that you really liked the topic today, and if you enjoyed it, come back for part two. And if you did enjoy what you heard today and want to hear future conversations, please like or follow, subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and we hope that you come back next time, and I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your week.

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