Introduction

This book, designed to be a guide for practitioners who wish to advise ultra-wealthy families, focuses on the difference between the ultra-wealthy and the ‘merely’ wealthy. With this in mind, the chapters devote little time to issues on which most financial advisors spend most of their time—retirement planning, IRA accounts, home mortgages, planning for college tuition, or financial planning in general. Practitioners working with the ultra-wealthy will instead need to grapple with complex tax issues, matters associated with the ever-changing world of trusts, the special world of the family office, money managers that are not available to anyone who is not an accredited investor or who enforce very high minimum account sizes, the family dynamics and human capital issues that destroy both families and wealth, and so on, all of which will be covered on a global scale in this book.