If you don’t have a plan for your family wealth, what’s stopping you from creating one?
One big reason is effort — or the lack of it when it comes to family governance. Forum Co-Managing Partner Nirav Batavia, CFA, offered this insight: “[We] put a lot of effort into our business lives, into how we run our firms, how we build for the future, our career path. But a lot of times, we don’t put even five percent of that towards our family governance.”
Nirav recently sat down with Mark Gochnour from Dimensional Fund Advisors on their widely viewed Informed Investor podcast to discuss family governance, generational continuity, and the importance of stories as the glue that binds together a family’s mission, vision, values, and culture so that families can escape the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” proverb that is so universal across cultures globally.
The full podcast is below:
“How High-Net-Worth Families Can Protect Wealth for the Next Generation.” The Informed Investor Podcast (Episode 54), Dimensional Fund Advisors, August 28, 2026.
Getting Started on a Family Governance Plan
A family governance plan is more than a collection of financial documents and numbers on a spreadsheet. In fact, the non-financial aspects are the most critical for long-term continuity and success. Start by building out your family’s mission, vision, and values. This, combined with the stories about those who have come before us, shape the family culture in a way that it can survive and thrive for generations. This is less “thinking about dollars and cents” and instead more “thinking about what is the impact that we want to have on the family and on the greater world.”
Once a family builds out that framework, they can turn to financial governance tactics, keeping in mind that a family’s financial capital is meant to support the family’s collective intellectual and human capital. Financial capital is not an end in and of itself.
What happens to the “excess” of your wealth (the wealth that you may not need for your ongoing living expenses)? There are only three things that can be done with that “excess” wealth:
- You can spend more than you already do.
- You can gift to family, friends, etc.
- You can give to charity.
Focus on which of these three levers you want to pull, and how much to pull each one, until you have built a basic framework around the goals for your excess wealth. Then the hard work of deciding the “when” begins. Sure, we can wait until we are gone, but that’s probably not the point of time that will bring us the most joy! Deciding the timing — especially for the charitable and gifting buckets — is critical.
The mission/vision/values and culture, combined with the wealth planning framework, then dictate the tactics used: which vehicles are most efficient for gifting and charitable goals. This is where your advisor, your accountant, and your estate lawyer can form an effective team to guide these discussions once the goals are known.
Setting Up Annual Meetings
Once you’ve built a family governance framework, how do you want to introduce the plan to your family? When you bring together family members for a meeting, that’s the perfect time to reflect on the core values and shared history that make up your family’s culture.
What family stories immediately come to mind that you want to share and preserve for the next generations? Which part of the meetings should the kids or grandkids be a part of? How can we incorporate the next generation, not simply as passive listeners but as active participants, so that the sense of ownership and stewardship is passed down? Giving everyone the chance to share their perspective is one of the most valuable parts of a family meeting. As Nirav maintained, “In the end, it comes down to communication.”
Keeping the Process of Continuous Improvement Going Over Time
“It’s overwhelming if you try to do everything at once,” Nirav said. “But looking at it as an annual process, which will get better as you do it 20, 25, 30 times or more, is key. Don’t try to get it perfect the first time.”
Unsure about your next step toward creating a plan for your family that will last? Nirav shared some words of encouragement: “Basically, doing anything at all, no matter how small, is better than doing nothing.”
Want to get started? Reach out to your Forum advisor to brainstorm ideas and start building a plan that will be there to guide your children and their families for generations. In the meantime, here are two book recommendations to get you started.
- Family Wealth: Keeping It in the Family by James E. Hughes Jr.
- Die With Zero by Bill Perkins
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