On the corner of his desk, he keeps a yellow legal pad that has soft edges due to frequent handling. He has written the names of every family he has counseled over the course of 41 years on it in a meticulous hand that hasn’t changed since the 1980s. There are now tiny black marks next to three of those names. He refuses to explain the meaning of the marks. He is not required to.
The advisor works from a quiet office in a glass tower in Greenwich, the kind of building where the lobby smells slightly of lemon polish and old money. I’ll call him Halbrook because he asked me not to use his real name. He has spent his professional life observing the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next, and he claims that the moment of transfer is rarely what the founders had in mind. “They think they’re giving their children a gift,” he said to me. “They are at times. They occasionally give them a loaded weapon.
After the war, the first family he witnessed disintegrate had made its fortune in industrial chemicals. A father who passed away before they were seated at the same table, three brothers, and a common trust. Halbrook recalls how the youngest brother gazed out the window at a parking lot while the lawyer read out the percentages during the will reading, which was strangely held in a Cleveland hotel conference room. They were suing each other within five years. Ten minutes later, none of them were talking. Technically, the money was still there. However, the family wasn’t a functional unit.
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations is a statistic that is frequently mentioned at wealth management conferences. It is sometimes expressed as an Italian proverb and other times as a Chinese one. Although the literal validity of this antiquated notion has been called into question by research from the CFA Institute, Halbrook claims that its spirit endures. The first generation makes money. The second generation succeeds. The third generation views it as scenery because they were frequently raised without understanding how the money was made. Then the landscape falls apart.
The second family was not like the first. Old money, the kind that isn’t as prevalent as people think. The DuPonts and Mellons amassed wealth through banking, oil, and gunpowder, and the majority of those dynasties still exist today. However, the family Halbrook counseled was not as fortunate. The patriarch left his estate divided unequally between two daughters. He was a collector of vintage cars and seldom expressed his emotions. According to articles in The Times, sibling relationships can be subtly destroyed by unequal inheritances, even when they are justified, in ways that the deceased did not foresee. Halbrook saw it unfold in real time. Within a year, one daughter sold her share and relocated to Portugal. The other is still not well.
Sitting across from him in that office, I’m struck by how unsurprised he sounds. He’s seen this enough times to recognize the story’s structure. He doesn’t seem to be sharing anything with me that he hasn’t shared with the families themselves, frequently years before things went wrong. “I warn them,” he uttered with a near shrug. “They give a nod. For the planning, they write checks. They don’t have the conversation after that.
He won’t go into great detail about the third family. It had to do with a foundation, an unprepared son, and a mother who neglected to update her paperwork for too long. He barely brought it up, almost as an aside, before shifting the topic. Nowadays, it’s becoming more common for affluent families to draft mission statements together in an effort to articulate their principles before the money is transferred. Halbrook has doubts about these records. They are helpful, he says, but only if the family could already communicate openly. A mission statement would just be a piece of paper if they weren’t.
As he closes the legal pad and slides it back into its drawer, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the most heartbreaking cases have nothing to do with money. They have to do with quiet. The inheritance itself was not the cause of those three families’ demise. It was everything that was left unsaid prior to its arrival.
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