1. Develop a Common Purpose
Foster engagement among your heirs. This will help them feel connected so they can overcome any temptation to feel jealous when they have to share an inheritance with others.
2. Share your Story
Help your children and grandchildren be grounded by regularly sharing your origin story and the story of their ancestors. Reinforce the sacrifices made to establish the family legacy. Appreciating the sacrifices you and those before you have made helps inheritors overcome feeling shameful about what they receive.
3. Forge Traditions
Family culture shows up through your traditions. Build on the traditions you already have. Grow them, encourage involvement, and find ways to make more of them. Feeling like they belong prevents inheritors from acting out, even if they feel lonely once their parents die.
4. Define Roles
Without having responsibilities within the family and in the management of an estate, inheritors can feel contemptuous. This is a very strong emotion, which undoubtedly will lead to immense conflict once you’re no longer around. Define roles for each person to perform, and practice those while you’re still alive. The responsibility that comes with having roles helps each family member feel respected.
5. Promote Humility
If spiritual modesty is not already part of your family culture, consider using awe and wonder to stimulate compassion. Recognizing your place in the larger order of things will influence future behavior and deter selfishness.
6. Nurture Independence
Striving to create self-sufficient heirs is critical to peaceful intergenerational transfer of wealth. Giving your heirs the space, opportunity, and support to do things on their own, along with giving them the permission to fail helps them move from enmeshment to independence.
7. Encourage Giving
Giving of your time, talents, and assets alongside your beneficiaries helps model and demonstrate love and teaches generosity. It also becomes an antidote to greed.
8. Create a Safe Environment
Show your inheritors you trust them. Let them know they’re enough just as they are. Intentionally reinforce that you are proud of them and that you support them. This will help those who are feeling insecure feel confident with what they bring to the table.
9. Overcommunicate
Transparency and regular communication are key to avoiding surprises. Have regular family meetings. Doing so gives everyone confidence and the correct expectations. It also removes fear, which is toxic when settling an estate.
The Greatest Gift Book
This book is for anyone who values relational wealth as much as they value financial wealth. It’s for anyone who envisions their heirs thriving and living in harmony someday after they are gone.
This book is also for inheritors, a current or future beneficiary of a family with enough wealth and possessions to understand the potential pitfalls of wealth transfer and wish to be a catalyst for proactive conversations with their family, or anyone else who might share in the inheritance.
Everyone knows a story of an inheritance gone wrong. Unfortunately, they may have experienced it themselves, or perhaps they simply observed it, maybe through a friend or family member. It may be a story passed down of a time someone was cheated out of their rightful share to a family inheritance, or a family heirloom and they are still bitter about it.
This book ensures families will not be the subject of a Dateline episode or the next Hollywood disaster blockbuster.
Consider this book an easy preventative maintenance guide so inheritors are not at war with each other—or worse—after the death of their parents.
Sean Maher has identified 9 Principles through his career experience and focused interviews with families who were able to navigate a peaceful inheritance. The book reinforces the 9 Principles with real life-inspired stories of inheritance gone right contrasted with inheritance gone wrong.