When Was Your Family Hungry and Poor?

The uncomfortable truth? Most families are only one or two generations removed from grinding, abject poverty. We all came from somewhere — and that “somewhere” was often another country, another struggle, another life defined by hardship that is almost unimaginable in the context of our present affluence.
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Yet many families behave as if their wealth magically appeared. Silence. Secrecy. Sanitized history. Often driven by shame, these omissions are quietly sabotaging wealth transfers today.A family cannot responsibly preserve and transfer wealth if the rising generation has no understanding of where that wealth story truly began — and who, in their lineage, paid the price to change the family’s trajectory.

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When we share these stories, we do more than recount history. We embed gratitude. We model humility. We teach perspective. These are not sentimental exercises. They are acts of preparation. Kindness, gratitude, and humility are not “soft values.” They are the psychological infrastructure required to steward the thee hundred million inherited every day by Canadians -- $3 billion inherited everyday by Americans.

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What does our own personal history have to do with estate planning? Everything. History teaches a lesson many wealthy families resist: wealth created for the benefit of others is more enduring and more meaningful than wealth created for personal consumption.
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Teaching heirs to build for others, as others once built for them, is transformative. Too often, patriarchs and matriarchs leave their children with a distorted narrative: I alone created this. There is grandiosity. Their silence about those who came before them — parents, grandparents, mentors, partners, even luck — quietly breeds entitlement, fragility, and disconnection.

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The myth of the “self-made business founder” is frequently just that — a myth. Someone had a hand in the founder’s success. Who? Tell that story.

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In my newest book, The Happy Inheritor: How Successful Families Prepare Heirs and Transfer Wealth, I explore a reality advisors witness every day: Wealth can be transitioned with care, clarity, and joy. Or it can be used — consciously or not — as a final instrument of control. Families who engage trusted advisors to design family meetings — where stories are told, retold, and woven into family culture — create something far more valuable than financial continuity.
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They create connection, cohesion and purpose. This is how dynastic wealth is actually built: one honest family conversation at a time. Call it family governance — or don’t. Either way, it’s how successful families teach their children to remain hungry in times of affluence.

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Thomas William Deans, Ph.D., is the author of three books on family wealth transfers: Every Family’s Business, Willing Wisdom, and The Happy Inheritor. Advisors have shared more than one million copies of his books with clients and prospects.