I just attended a fabulous wealth management conference – the Family Office Super Summit at the JW Marriott Miami. It was a production of Wilson Conferences and family office expert Richard C. Wilson, who appeared recently on my show.
At the conference I became acquainted with Thomas Handler, one of the top wealth management and asset preservation professionals I’ve ever met.
Handler is a managing partner in Handler Thayer, LLP, and he made a post-conference appearance at Fried On Business to talk about emerging family office trends.
It’s becoming more and more difficult, Handler said, for families to preserve intergenerational wealth. First, there’s unprecedented global regulation in the form of the PATRIOT Act, Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, FATCA and more.
“These are serious, voluminous regulations, and families are stuck dealing with them,” he said.
Then, there’s the exploding litigation market, not to mention the host of excessively aggressive government agencies functioning with little to no congressional oversight.
With that in mind, family office planning and design becomes more about long-term risk management across the board, Handler said.
“It’s about crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s. And it looks to me like this trend is likely to escalate going forward,” he said.
“It’s really about not making mistakes that are wealth destructive events.”
The details are myriad, and that’s where the family office experts like Richard C. Wilson and Thomas Handler come into the picture.
We’re going to be focusing a lot more on family offices in the coming days, so stay tuned.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Thomas Handler of Handler Thayer, LLP.
