How to Keep Your Family’s Money for Life w/ Melissa Hoyer!

In this episode, Melissa Hoyer, a financial planner and wealth coach at The Wealth Conservancy, discusses the challenges of inherited wealth and how to successfully manage and sustain generational wealth. She explains how many inheritors feel overwhelmed, the different stages of inherited wealth, and how financial coaching helps heirs transition from uncertainty to confidence. The conversation also explores estate planning, avoiding family disputes over money, and teaching financial responsibility to future generations.

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Introduction

And with no further ado, Melissa Hoyer, thank you so much for joining us on a Generations of Wealth show. How are you today? I’m doing great. How are you doing? Well, you know, we were just talking before we hit record. It’s winter and we both might have little sniffles, little coughs going on. But yeah, before you know it, summer will be upon us. I was thinking the same thing today. I drove in to work, got out of the car and I heard the birds chirping and it felt like spring and I know it’s a bit early for spring, but it’s coming one of these months. Well, I mean, we talk about mindset and different things and we can either let the winter blues get us down or we can look forward to the opportunities coming, you know, with the spring. So but before we get into any of that stuff, tell us a little bit about who you are and where you come from, what your background is and all that fun stuff. Okay, well, I started working here at the Wealth Conservancy when we moved to Boulder, Colorado from Chicago a little over 20 years ago. And at the Wealth Conservancy, we’re a small fee only financial planning firm who work with people who have significant inheritances. So you know, I was a French major in college, had nothing to do with financial planning, got a job here and became a financial planner and loved the coaching aspect of what we did. So then I got my professional coaching designation. And so I’ve been on a journey to love what I do.

And that really resonates with, you know, what I was hearing you talk about too, in terms of loving your work and allowing it to support you and make your, you know, life dreams come true. So it’s been a journey and I’m so grateful to be where I’m at at this point in my life with my work. Well, it is a pleasure. And I know you did live in Chicago for a period of your life as well. We were talking before the show about you vacationing in Wisconsin. So you’re somewhat familiar with my part of the world. And I’ve spent plenty of time in Colorado. So it’s fun to be able to, I guess, have that connection a little bit, at least upfront. But let’s, I guess, get into a little bit more on the business side, right? You work with clients. How does that process work? What does that beginning of that process look like? Well, because of the kind of clients we work with, it is the beginning of a very long relationship. So most people will come to us when they’re feeling completely overwhelmed.

Stages of Inherited Wealth

And in fact, this might be a good time to share the stages of inherited wealth, because there’s oftentimes what inheritors experiences, this big life change when they inherit wealth. And if they’re not prepared, then they may go through different phases like denial or innocence where they just aren’t relating to the money at all. And they really have no idea what they have or how it works or how much they can spend. Or it’s just a really tricky place to be. It’s not very empowering. And then something will happen where they’re like, you know what, I have to figure this out. It might be they had a child and they have to figure it out because they want to educate their children. Or it might just be that they’re sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed. So they decide, I’m going to do something about that. And that’s usually when they come here to the Wealth Conservancy. And then we start this process of meeting every week for as long as it takes. And it could be years, it could be a year, it could be five years. And we simply gather information and we unpack it to understand everything that’s there and put it all in perspective. And we find out, we do a lot of wealth coaching to find out who they are as an individual and what’s important to them so that we can help them, you know, live with their inheritance in a really empowered way and make their own life dreams come true. Well, I imagine a lot of these people are just like lottery winners, right? If they don’t have this financial education before they win the money, they can squander it very quickly. Right?

The “Shirt Sleeves to Shirt Sleeves in Three Generations” Phenomenon

Yeah, there’s actually a proverb called shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. And what that means is the wealth creator will create this wealth, hand it down. And by the third generation, they’re right back where they started. Yep. I have seen it personally in a company that I’ve worked with in the past, right? By a third generation, it was definitely going down. Yep. So that’s, I mean, somebody gets in touch with you, you start coaching them through what’s phase two? Well, I would say phase two is they get to enjoy their life. And they have clarity and confidence in managing their wealth. They’re clear about who they are and what they want. They have healthy, happy relationships. And they continue to challenge themselves in ways that brings them joy and brings joy to the world around them. So I mean, are you guys staying involved and guiding them in their investments or all of these things? Yep, absolutely. So if people choose to have their investments managed here, that’s an ongoing thing. And we meet with clients over the years regularly to keep in touch. Of course, all I think financial planners do that to keep in touch. And if there’s any changes, we adjust. And we could just continue to support them. And some people just, they’ve gotten what they need, and they’re just living their lives. And we touch base to make sure we’re all on the same page. But it can become, you know, less time spent together doing the coaching phase once they’re all good to go. So if you’re the wealth creator, the one that’s building up this business or these assets, what’s the best way to get your future heirs to be on the right track?

Estate Planning & Preventing Family Conflicts

Because I have to imagine it, and I’m just thinking about my own life, right? My three children, my oldest is 18, and then 18, 14, and 7, essentially. So very different parts or phases in their life, right? I can talk to my 18-year-old daughter about business and financial stuff all day long. She’s been involved in our business for years. Clearly, my 7-year-old doesn’t have that same mindset. So when we’re looking at our estate planning and what would happen if my wife and I were both gone, there’s this fear as the wealth builder, will everything we worked for get squandered or get wasted? What advice would you give to myself, the wealth creator? It’s a really good question. And so where I would start is to really get clear for yourself and you and your wife as a couple on what is it that you’re wanting to pass down and why. And so when you’re clear about that, that helps all the other decisions come into alignment in terms of how you prepare your heirs and how you create and plan your estate planning documents. So we’ve done that. And some examples of what we’ve done is, there is, I won’t give specifics because I don’t actually want to steer anybody into the way we are doing it, but our children have to be members of society that are doing something. They don’t get to just sit on their butt after we’re gone. And if they’re doing charity work, there’s a certain amount they have to do, right? Can’t just be, well, I go to church every Sunday and give a donation in the offering plate so I’m charitable. That doesn’t count. Also if they happen to be in prison, they don’t get anything, just different things like that. But my question is more along the lines of how do we explain this to the heirs? My kids are still fairly young, but a lot of people listening, their heirs may be in their forties, fifties, and sixties that have established their own lives, their own children, all these things, but may not have any experience with running a business or owning real estate or anything else that I’ve built up.

Training Your Heirs to Be Responsible with Wealth

So I have seen, and I have personally been involved in buying estates that destroyed families as they start bickering over the money or the assets. So what advice do you give to the estate builder on training their, maybe not young kids, but their kids in general, how to not end up squandering everything? Because this is before you start coaching necessarily the heirs, how do you coach the wealth builder? – Right. It’s such a big question. Well, I do think that any family dynamics that exist are like amplified during a situation where a parent passes away or something like that, or just even talking about it. So there’s that. And regardless of your family, whatever the dynamics are, I think a really important thing is to be transparent and to be in dialogue and to recognize that everybody is a different person and just have an understanding of that. So being really clear about what you want to pass down, being transparent about what you’re thinking, get feedback from your adult children, and nobody likes to be surprised. And that’s why I think transparency is so, so important. And I’ve seen a lot of the fighting happen after a parent passes when there’s disagreements about what happened or they were surprised.

And so I think it’s actually a huge gift to give your family when you’re able to have that conversation with them and to iron it out before the plan goes through. – Well, this is a totally a side note, but I was on a phone call with a probate attorney a couple of days ago, and we were comparing notes on different estate cases that she’s worked and things that I’ve bought. And she said her worst one was there was 38 heirs to an estate and none of them got along. It was essentially the couple that passed away just felt like they wanted to spread everything they had evenly between these 38 people, but had no plan in place. I cannot imagine, and I don’t think this was a very large estate, but I cannot imagine wealth coaching 38 heirs through an estate. That would be a nightmare. – Well, you bring up a good point though, is have a plan, have a will, have a trust, whatever it is, and make sure that the people who need to know where it is, know where to find it. I know that’s a simple thing, but that’s super important. Yeah. And one other thing is I would say like, whatever you put in your estate planning documents in a way is like your final act. And I’ve seen people around you who know you, love you, your friends, your family, they all take some meaning from that. So understanding that, I knew one person who put everything to charity and all of her friends and family were like, “Oh, okay.” I mean, it just was a surprise. And I don’t know that this person really knew what the impact of that would be. So I think just really understanding like this is your final act for people. – Well, and another example of what we’ve set up, sometimes trying to make a family member or a sibling be your trustee of your trust.

The Importance of Having a Trust & Appointing a Trustee

And all of a sudden you put them in a position of being the bad guy when they literally have to follow through with your last wishes and your last act, as you said. So in our case, we didn’t want to do that to our family members. So we were using or have contracted with a trustee company. And I feel like that’s something that nobody had ever talked to me about until we started getting into the, establishing our state and our trust plan. But that’s another point is so many people wait way too long or never do it. And then there’s probate, then there’s the state gets involved, then there’s attorneys that are “helping” you figure out what the intentions were. And that’s bad. I imagine you’ve gotten into some of these scenarios over your years and years of experience, these bickerings, these battles, but you’re trying to get ahead of it, right? You’re trying to coach way in advance. – Try to get, I love being able to get ahead of it if we have an opportunity. And oftentimes, you know, here we work with one person of the 35. We don’t work with all 35 typically. And so then we can coach that person through the situation and try to make the best of whatever’s happening. – So what I asked a lot of my guests the same question, what’s a question that I should be asking you that I haven’t, and it can pertain to anything. – Good question. – I have one thing on my mind that I want to share. And we’ve been talking about how to prepare when you have adult children, but I just wanted to say a word when you have younger children too.

Financial Education for Younger Generations

And so when you do have younger children, as you know, they just watch everything we do. So I think a lot of what we’re hoping to pass on and the harmonious transition, whatever we want for them, comes through just our family systems that we create. And the dynamics that we create and modeling for them, what we want, and also just preparing them from the technical standpoint. There’s a really great book called “Financially Fit Kids.” And what I love about that book is that there’s a chart and it goes through all the different age groups. And in each age group, it’ll tell you what are some appropriate activities you can do for that age group to help them learn money skills, the basic money skills. – I love that. I just wrote that down. I’m going to look that up because we’ve spent time with our kids. So we host an event called the Generations of Wealth Voyage. And it’s on a cruise ship. It’ll actually be happening before this show airs. And the whole point of that is we encourage people to bring their kids on this. It’s a real estate, advanced real estate strategies, a networking event. But our kids are building a network of their own, number one. But they are seeing and hearing all of these different stories from all these different parents that are entrepreneurs. And they’re also spending a week on a cruise ship together.

And everything they’re hearing is not about go out and get a job. It’s go out and do something you enjoy and turn it into a business. And so we’ve really embraced that with our kids for many, many, many years and love that. But here’s where the challenge is. They go to school and they don’t have any friends that are like them in that mindset. So it’s challenging. And so as you said, the family dynamic is huge. We have to have a lot of conversations with our kids. And fortunately, our kids are very social. So they have no problem talking to our friends and their friends’ parents if they have questions. Yeah, that’s great. And I love that you’re doing the cruise with them and they are developing a network that’s slightly different than the one that they go to school with every day. And really, they’re developing a broad understanding of who is in the world and how it works and where they fit in. So that’s great. And I love the name Generations of Wealth. So maybe the question to ask is, what is the reality of Generations of Wealth?

Building a Generational Wealth Mindset

Well, for us, the reality that we want it to be is it’s not just financial wealth, right? It’s spiritual wealth. It’s physical wealth. It’s time wealth. All things because long time ago, actually not all that long ago, six or seven years ago, I was like every other entrepreneur. I worked seven days a week. I’d answer the phone anytime it rang because God forbid I miss a phone call, I might miss a deal. And what I was doing was missing the time with my family. And so as we started, and it didn’t happen overnight, especially with me, I’m a little hardheaded. As I started figuring out money is not everything, time is not infinite. And we started embracing more time with our kids and our families and just taking, I mentioned this in a show a few episodes ago, a mentor of mine had taken a 30 day RV trip, but I was envious of that. And I told him so. And he said, well, do you have it written in your vision that you want to take a month long trip with your family? And instantly I said, well, no, because there’s no way I could ever do it.

Right? Like that’s just the default. There’s no way. However, we did, we wrote it down in our vision and we blocked the following year, which was 2021. We blocked the month of July and we were gone five weeks. And the first two weeks I had the shakes because how is my business going to survive without me? By the third week, I was starting to calm down. By the end of the fifth week, I changed my mindset on many things that I wanted to do within our business. And our staff was great. I didn’t have to micromanage everything. They didn’t need me 24/7. And I’ve in that case, that mentor told me I was only one of two people that ever took him up on taking 30 days off. And he had challenged many, many, many people with that over the years, as have I now. And I don’t know of more than one person that I’ve talked to and challenged with that, that has done it.

It definitely, I guess, gives me clarity. And I will also admit living in the upper Midwest, our cost of living is lower. I don’t need to make $100 million a year to have what I consider to be a decent living. And the time with my family is more important to me than going out and making more money. So that’s, I guess, a not so short version of what the Generations of Wealth stands for. I love that you are acknowledging all forms of wealth, not just the financial wealth. And what that experience gave you, it was an enriching life experience that helped you gain wisdom. Well, and by the way, we’ve done that every summer since. It doesn’t just stop because we did it once. Because now, once you get a taste of that, and especially once your kids get a taste of that, and you’re like, these are the memories that will stick with them for life. And so what we’ve been able to do, and for us, we travel with a travel trailer. We like to RV.

So we can go see the world, the country, whatever. And so we’ve done multiple cross-country trips. We’ve been to Europe, all these things. I can honestly say that if I had that 30 days back each summer, maybe I would do one or two more real estate deals. Big deal. That’s not going to change my life. But enough about me. Back to you. No I love what you’re talking about. And I think there’s so much value to planning ahead in 99% of people in my space of the entrepreneur world don’t do it. And I don’t know how to get them to do it until it’s too late. Right. One more thing on your experience and just the impact of inherited wealth for beneficiaries is that there’s something about working that provides challenge that we grow from as people and can be really fulfilling. And I think oftentimes we want to give our children a better life. I think that’s a natural thing for parents. And when inheritors receive wealth and they don’t necessarily, maybe they’re born retired or they don’t have to work, then they miss out on some of those opportunities that grow them.

And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges of inherited wealth and something that I would want the wealth creator to be aware of is how can you pass down the wealth and create a better life for them in a way that doesn’t take away those experiences that enrich their life that mature them, that grow them as people that is so rewarding. That’s where like, I know I have a daughter, she’s 16. And when she accomplishes something, she has the, like, she looks the most happy more than going on vacation more than, you know, they’re all important things also, but I can see in her face that that’s what really makes her feel good about herself. So yeah. I would add to that, if you just hand your kids money, regardless of their age, young or old, that’s not what they want. They’re not going to be unhappy to take it, but they want you and they want time with you. For us, as we travel, yes, we go to nice destinations and we go to different places that are, that are fun and cool and touristy. But I will say that most of our best memories are in the middle of nowhere, parked next to maybe a lake or a river. And you know, the kids are throwing rocks in the water or who knows, right? Making up a game. They’re not on their electronics, they’re not on their phones and tablets. And it’s, it’s almost, dare I say what it was like when I was young, before all that technology came into play.

Final Thoughts & Contact Information

So I love that aspect of it, but that’s, everybody’s different. Everybody has a different model of what happiness should look like. So yeah. And going back, I feel like I’m flip-flopping, I apologize, but hearing what you said before too about, you know, getting people to get a plan right before it’s too late. I think out of love and respect for your family, that’s the single most important reason to get a plan because it does make a difference to your heirs. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Well, I, again, I just appreciate your, your experience and your knowledge, Melissa, and you sharing your time with us today. And that’s, people ask me what this show is about and I tell them, we don’t just bring on one type of like just real estate investors or just financial planners, whatever. Like we want a broad discussion. And so this has been great. I really appreciate it. Anything that we can do to, you know, the generations of wealth family can do to serve you, how can we get in touch with you, follow you, all that stuff?

Okay, thank you. I can be reached at my email, which is melissa@twcinc.org. That stands for the wealthconservancyinc.org. And I can also be reached at, people can check out my coaching website, which is called way into wealth.com and read about the coaching program I do for people and call the office 303-444-1919. If anyone uses the phone anymore, that works too. Fantastic. Well, and beyond that, I, again, really respect your experience and your time. And thank you so much for sharing on the generations of wealth podcast. You’re welcome. It’s so great to be here. I absolutely love how you’re thinking about this generationally, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Thank you. Of course, for the rest of you, long time listeners, thanks for being here. Just found us. Thanks for finding us. Anything you can do to help us grow the show, you know, give us the feedback and the, all the love on social medias. We appreciate anything I can do for you. Don’t hesitate to reach out, go to the generations of wealth.com to find out everything we have going on at any time. And until the next show, live your vision, love your life. See ya.

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About Melissa Hoyer