Can you give too much?

Passing on family wealth can be really stressful. Parents worry, and often rightly so, about the effect it would have on their children to inherit a lot of money. Partly it's worrying about blowing the money, but it's really about changing their children's values. Work ethic, moderation, desire for education - all of those things can go out the window when a child (of any age) inherits a significant amount of money.

In my practice, I see this concern mostly from business owners. They started with little and built a successful company through sacrifice, creativity and plain old hard work. Their children are accustomed to living in a wealthy family without really understanding the effort that went into achieving it. The business owners worry that if the children inherit the family wealth, they will never even try to accomplish anything themselves.

A recent article from http://www.capitalmagazine.ca/ talks about two cases in which wealthy parents came up with creative solutions to this problem. Click here to read the article.

The attached photo is also from that article in http://www.capitalmagazine.ca/ .