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The Northwood Perspective

Chairman’s Message: New Wealth of Wisdom Book

BY
Tom McCullough

Managing significant wealth is a complex affair, with many opportunities and challenges. In our first book together in 2018, Wealth of Wisdom: The Top 50 Questions Wealthy Families Ask, Keith Whitaker and I brought together the world's leading experts in each relevant field among the foundational topics of family wealth.  

The result was a single, definitive source and reference of practical ideas and actionable solutions from the best minds in the world and the most successful families around the globe. The early feedback from clients and advisors has been extremely enthusiastic.

In this new book, Wealth of Wisdom: Top Practices for Wealthy Families and Their Advisors, we are extending this work to focus on the practical tools, exercises, and activities to help wealthy families and their advisors put these ideas into practice.

They say “you should write the book you want to read”. This is that book!

The new book (Wealth of Wisdom 2.0, as we call it) identifies practical activities wealthy families take to ensure their continued success and development.  The book is organized in nine sections:

1. Thinking through what matters most

2. Becoming a learning family

3. Planning thoughtfully

4. Investing wisely

5. Seeking sound advice

6. Raising the rising generation

7. Navigating family dynamics

8. Making shared decisions

9. Giving together

And in similar fashion, in this new book we share our own experiences in the family wealth field (over 50 years combined). We also invite global experts and leaders in family wealth to contribute the very best practical tools, exercises, activities, cases studies, questionnaires, and worksheets that families and their advisors can use to put the key lessons from the first book into practice.

Each section will feature chapters from our recognized experts in which they share practical tools than families can use to develop this area of their life and wealth.

Examples include the following:

• Four Profound Questions for Families

• Tapping Character Strengths to Move Families Forward

• Learning from Your Money History and Writing a New Story

• Developing a Family Wealth Education Plan

• Managing a Shared Family Property

• Creating a Family Bank

• Creating a Family Owner’s Manual

• Building a Smart Aging Plan

• Managing the Risk of Diminished Capacity

• Creating an Ethical Will

• Constructing an Investment Portfolio to Support Family Goals

• Assessing Your Family’s Financial and Family Management Needs

• Choosing Trustees with Care and Wisdom

• How Can You Ensure the Success of Your Successors?

• Using Genograms to Understand Family Patterns

• Enhancing Sibling Relationships

• How to Balance Family Stability with Resilience over Generations

• Leading Successful Family Meetings

• Facilitating Grandchild-Grandparent Philanthropy

• A Roadmap to Successful Philanthropy

The book is a practical, on-the-ground how-to guide that will provide advisors and clients with helpful exercises and tools they can use to develop successful and healthy families. It also provides additional reference to other books and resources that families can turn to if they want more information and depth on a particular topic. And you’ll find many charts, tables, and graphs as well as checklists, questionnaires and case studies that make the book extremely practical, and user-friendly.

The book will be targeted to high-net-worth families (over 5 million households in North America and 15 million globally) and their advisors across family office, investment, tax, legal, philanthropy and family consulting (estimated at more than 200,000 in North America alone). It’s already being translated into Vietnamese and other languages to come.

There are no other books that bring together all of the top tools from the best family wealth practitioners in the world all in one place. We hope that every family and all of their advisors will enjoy the book and see it as the most helpful, idea-packed and stimulating guide to improving the management of the wealth, relational health and family legacy.

We are also building upon the success of our Wealth of Wisdom podcast series, which contains over 60 episodes. Every week we one or two new episodes. You can find it at www.wealthofwisdombook.com/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Order the book today at all major booksellers including Amazon.

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Tom McCullough

Tom McCullough is Chairman and CEO of Northwood Family Office. The combination of his background, along with his own family’s desire for a truly ‘comprehensive, customized and confidential service, led him on a search for a multi-family office. Tom is a frequent speaker on issues relevant to families of wealth and is the co-author of Wealth of Wisdom: The Top 50 Questions Wealthy Families Ask and Family Wealth Management: Imperatives for Successful Investing in the New World Order and the soon-to-be-released Wealth of Wisdom: Top Practices for Wealthy Families and Their Advisors. He is an adjunct professor and Executive-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management MBA program. He is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Western University’s Ivey School of Business and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Wealth Management. He was recently awarded ‘Best Individual Contribution to Thought Leadership in the Wealth Management Industry’ by the 2020 Family Wealth Report Awards.

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