Mammoney - Your Ultimate Guide to Personal Finance & Investing

The Psychology of Wealth: Why Family Protocols Must Address Emotions, Not Just Money Introduction Wealth preservation across generations is often treated as a purely technical exercise: trusts, tax strategies, asset allocation, and legal structures. Yet century after century, the data remain stubbornly consistent—approximately 70% of wealthy families lose their fortune by the second generation and 90% by the third (according to studies by The Williams Group and Roy Williams). The surprise is not that taxes, markets, or bad investments destroy wealth; those factors are manageable. The real destroyer is almost always human: emotions, unresolved conflicts, mismatched values, entitlement, shame, guilt, sibling rivalry, and the unspoken psychological weight of inherited money. Family protocols (also called family constitutions, governance charters, or family agreements) that focus exclusively on financial rules while ignoring the emotional and psychological architecture of the family are th...