Article
How a family office can support your financial goals
Aug. 26, 2021 · Authored by Gretchen Lucas, Torre Hammer
If managing your personal finances takes on the same complexity as running a business, it may be time to consider starting a family office.
A family office can provide insight and transparency into your spending, while helping you invest and preserve your wealth for future generations.
Below, learn how a family office can simplify your finances, provide peace of mind, and more.
What is a family office?
A family office is a personal financial team that’s designed to streamline a family or individual’s accounts, spending, and investing.
These teams can manage complex financial structures, assets, and investments, while helping individuals preserve and protect wealth for future generations. Family office teams can be fully in-house, fully outsourced, or a combination of in-house and outsourced resources coming together.
Family offices become helpful when individuals accumulate more wealth than a principal or single bookkeeper can efficiently — and accurately — manage.
Components of a family office team
What qualifies as a family office?
While nearly any financial team can qualify as a family office, some structures are more effective than others.
Here are a few family office approaches individuals often take.
Self-managed personal affairs
Self-managing your personal affairs means you continue to pay your bills and manage other personal operations.
Often, a personally managed family office distributes responsibilities across family members. For example, a spouse could act as the primary bill payer or person designated to handle the home operations.
Alternatively, the individual or family could hire a single bookkeeper or continue to use a business-employed executive assistant to assist with portions of the family office. However, the key decision makers are still in charge of managing the family’s personal affairs.
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