Thank you for checking out my blog, and a big thanks to Dr. Jim Dahle for letting me post on his. If you’re not reading The White Coat Investor regularly, you should be. Regardless of whether you’re in the field of medicine, or are just a typical white collar office jockey like me, you’ll glean valuable financial insights.
About Our Family Fortune
Our Family Fortune is a blog dedicated to the concept of building a Great Family. A great place to start would be my post on Real Family Wealth. To me, a Great Family has a combination of five characteristics, each of which must last through generations:
- Financial Capital: Everything is easier when you have money. Since this blog is very much focused on family finances and investing, there are many articles worth checking out. From portfolio theory to the concept of Family Money, a little bit of everything is discussed.
- Your Family’s Financial Moat
- Family Money and Inherited Wealth
- The Real Risk to Your Portfolio: Drawdown
- Building Optionality in Your Investment Portfolio
- Financially Independent or Retired Early?
- Human Capital: Preparing the next generation to lead, maintain, and better your Great Family is key to ensuring that your family stays a Great Family beyond a single generation or two. You kids and grandkids will be the ones responsible for averting the “Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Three Generations” curse. Ensure that they are ready.
- Do You Have Enough Grit to Succeed?
- The Family Mission Statement: Your Family’s Guiding Principles
- Be Even Steven
- Be Accountable: Track Your Progress
- Social Capital: Social capital combines who you and your family know with how well you interact with others. New ventures are formed at the intersection of good ideas, availability of financial capital, and great people leading the charge. Without any one of these, failure is nearly certain.
- Supercharge Your Career in Your 30s
- Career Foundations: Skills, Contacts, and the Right Job in your 20s
- Intellectual Capital: There are certain basic skills that all successful people share, regardless of their chosen profession. Building good habits and good processes, being accountable, getting stuff done, and performing work that others find valuable are all common components of success. All family members must possess these.
- Spiritual Capital: Spirituality helps guide your heart to doing what’s right. Without it, negative detours can happen, setting the entire family back (either temporarily or permanently). Being strong in mind and spirit helps keep our family on the right path.
Finally, one of my favorite posts, although admittedly a little morbid, is dedicated to ensuring that your family is set to carry on financially once you’re gone. While this post touches on things like wills, trusts, and beneficiaries, it is more focused on ensuring that your family knows how to manage your family wealth in order to generate income and prepare for the future without you. Please check it out, and if you haven’t developed or discussed a plan with your family, now is the time to do it!
My Story
My wife and I live with our two children (soon to be three!) in the beautiful Midwest. I am a professional investment manager, currently managing a multi-billion dollar endowment. Before that, I spent twelve years on a trading desk as both a portfolio manager and strategist with a buy side investment management company. There, I managed money for pensions, endowments, and corporations. An endowment is very similar to a Great Family, in that while both have extremely long lives (measured in decades and centuries), both have to be concerned with drawdown risk. The major difference between the two is taxation, as an endowment is a tax-exempt pool of capital. It is from this work that I draw much of my investment advice.
I only became focused with the concept of a Great Family when I had children of my own. Interestingly, both my wife and I come from large families (three siblings each). You would have thought I would have been interested before then, but neither of us had great financial role models. The closest one I had was my grandmother, who taught me about investing in stocks. Now, with my immediate family and my large extended family, I strive to serve as a role model and patriarch to others. Figuring out where to help and when to stand back continues to be a challenge. I hope to share my successes and failures so that others may learn from them.
Keep building my friends.