The Family Balance Sheet

A family can be prosperous on paper and fragile in practice. The statements do not show whether anyone can speak about money without strain, or whether the next generation has been prepared for anything except receipt.

Financial wealth is transferable by instrument. Family wealth is transferable only by attention.

Governance sounds like a cold word for something that is, at its best, a set of agreements about how people will treat one another when the numbers become large. Who decides. Who is informed. What is private. What is shared.

Without that architecture, families improvise. Improvisation works until it does not — usually at a death, a divorce, or a disagreement about a house.

The work is not to professionalise the family. It is to give the family a language that can hold both affection and capital without confusing the two.

Written for general reflection. It is not advice, and it is not an invitation to invest.