A Divorce 20 Years From Now Could Affect Wealth You're Creating Today

And it may not even be your divorce.

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If you've spent decades building a successful business and accumulating substantial wealth, you've probably thought about what happens to your assets when you die.

But have you considered what happens ten, twenty or thirty years after your children inherit them?

A successful South African entrepreneur in his early fifties recently found himself confronting exactly this question.

He wanted his children to benefit from everything he had built.

But something worried him:

"If one of my children gets divorced one day, what happens to the wealth I leave them?"

That apparently simple question led somewhere unexpected.

Because divorce wasn't the only possibility.

What if a child remarried? Encountered creditors? Moved to another country? Died unexpectedly? What happens when the wealth eventually passes to grandchildren?

And what if the divorce occurs before your children inherit anything — and it's yours?

The entrepreneur began to realise that the real question wasn't simply: "Who gets my assets when I die?"

It was: "What happens to everything after they get it?"

What began as a concern about divorce ultimately became a much bigger examination of how family wealth should be owned, governed and preserved across generations.

The family had created the wealth. What they had never created was a firewall around it.

A South African Family Wealth Case Study

Building Your Family Wealth Firewall™

How Successful Families Can Protect, Govern and Preserve Wealth Across Generations

By Scott Oliver

Discover why divorce turned out not to be the real problem, why timing proved critically important, and why Mauritius only entered the conversation after the family had identified what it was actually trying to achieve.

You will also see why simply leaving substantial assets to your children and preserving family wealth across generations are not necessarily the same thing.

If you've spent decades building substantial wealth for your family, this case study may raise questions you've never previously considered.

READ THE SOUTH AFRICAN FAMILY WEALTH CASE STUDY

Educational case study. There is no single structure appropriate for every family. Appropriate legal and tax advice should be obtained based on individual circumstances and the jurisdictions involved.