Ssmith
GURU HUNTER
Posts : 18153
Join date : 2012-04-10
 |  Subject: What is a Family Office by FXStrategist  Fri Oct 07, 2016 3:49 pm | |
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WHAT IS A FAMILY OFFICE? (ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT KRE8CHANGE ON 6-9-2016) BY FXSTRATEGIST
A Family Office is a structure for managing you and your new resources. It's like your own company that handles everything for you, from finding wealth or project managers, CPAs, lawyers (in-house or sub-contracted), concierge services, security, IT, home management, health management, whatever you want or need or can imagine. They will help you determine whether a particular activity or transaction is best accomplished by a Trust or an LLC. They can help you structure a system for gifting friends, contributing to outside projects, creating and managing your own projects.
You can consider yourself as the Executive Producer. Find your Producer (Family Office President) who will work with you to hire your people and decide what functions you need full-time in-house, or sub-contract on an as-needed basis. There are existing Multiple-Family Offices that you can just join, with the structure already in place and the capacity to hire whomever you need personally, dedicated to just you.
Depending on your size and the level of complexity (number of projects, purchases, activities, &c), you will want a sovereign office (just for you) or a multiple that you can also start yourself. There are Family Office brokers, according to my intended manager, who can locate talent for you. I do not have that information from him now. I'd asked him to be on and create a panel for the Kre8Change convention, but since we will want that information before then, I will gather it and share it with you in plenty of time.
If WF offers us a shell or skeleton trust, and I understand they will, we can park our funds anonymously, get our outside accounts hydrated, buy our homes (in LLCs, need a lawyer for that). If WF also offers a Family Office, I believe you can take advantage of it right away, and then move to your own Family Office over time. That Family Office, and WF itself, will provide you, the very wealthy individual that you are, in-house legal and accounting advice. So you will be able immediately to buy that home or car. So, we will have time.
I hope that gets you started understanding this. It's really quite simple. You have a structure and you'll get "people" — professionals, advisors, assistants, managers. It's heaven! As for managing it, you can instruct your F.O. President and let that person execute everything for you and choose the level of involvement you want. I will have physical offices and keep track of things on a daily basis to prevent the pile-up of weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports. If you want to be more hands off, you can just get reports. Obviously, it's important that you trust your management, and have a good set of checks and balances.
For my F.O., I plan to have my top management share in the wealth first. They are people known to me for many years, whom I've worked with before. This is unconventional, and even someone in my group warned they could just take the money and run. If they did, so be it! But they are all interested in doing the same humanitarian work, and they will have enough from me to contribute and participate and they relish this. I would not be doing this with arm's-length managers, so if you don't know them already, take time before you give them a stake, if at all. This is just me, and I work on opportunity and trust.
In the short term, I plan to financially hydrate some "hard cases" among my friends, family, and acquaintances by first talking to them and telling them I will stake them financially. I already had my first meeting with one of these cases in NYC last week. First, I will flush her checking account with an initial amount for the first month. She will get medical attention, quit her job, and get badly needed mental health care. Then I will send her to a person who I will have set up in my F.O. for individual staking.
She will work out with their help a generous monthly stipend and a trust from which she can request money for a house or whatever else she needs. Of course, this would be all according to how much you have and what the individuals need. My instructions to the F.O. Trustee will be to give her whatever she asks for. As she is joined by many others, the trustee will report to me only those people who seem to be abusing the situation or going off the rails somehow and need more directed help.
Otherwise, what the beneficiaries will ask for and do with the money will be invisible to me to avoid awkward feelings. I have told people that I have done well in an investment (believable because of my background in Wall Street and the VC world), and that the investment itself and its other participants have to do with humanitarian efforts around the world. I will tell them, "We are pooling our funds and creating foundations to help people. Please call this person at this number.
My instructions to the fund will be this: [for this first person] You will receive an initial injection of $xxx in your bank account. You can use this any way you wish. Then, the Foundation Trustee will help you determine income needs. If and when you need or want something bigger, say a house or a car or college tuition for your kids, you may go and ask for it. Again, my instructions will be to give you what you need. If your request supersedes the amount currently in the Trust and is not inappropriate or dangerous to you, more money will be added to the Trust.”
At first, I will make these Revocable Trusts until I see how things are going. But eventually, I may make them Irrevocable for the security of the beneficiaries. You can also create Special Needs Trusts, with appropriate oversight, for people with mental or health or age issues. These are my ideas at this point having discussed them at length with very experienced people who are also willing to think outside the box.
I come from a place of trust and limitlessness, and that is not everybody. Take your time, and find the right people for your F.O. We will have an amazing network that can help you, and I believe WF is geared up for us and that their F.O. may work very well for people in the long haul. I will be starting a film production company and will employ them soon to create short informational videos to help beneficiaries and project partners to navigate in the New Paradigm. I will obviously make these available to all of you and probably more widely via YouTube or our own Cable Channel. |
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