Category: Family CFO
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Stepping Into Family Wealth Stewardship: Next-Gen Challenges
Stepping into the role of “point person” for your family’s wealth and investments is both an honour and a burden. It can feel exciting and purposeful but also heavy and awkward. Many next-gen investors don’t plan to make this their full-time job, yet they still want to protect their family legacy, create alignment, and ensure
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Three Ways to Get Unbiased Financial Planning Advice Before Selling Your Business
When someone is preparing to sell a business, financial complexity tends to spike all at once. A future liquidity event collides with legacy obligations from a prior divorce, questions about lifestyle and cash flow, the need to update an estate plan, high stakes investment decisions, and a big tax bill. At that moment, the most
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What Canada’s 2025 MFO Survey Really Reveals About “Family Offices”
The newly released Canadian Family Offices Multi-Family Office Landscape 2025 report provides a clear view into what Canadian Multi-Family Offices (“MFOs”) actually look like; who they serve, how they charge, and how they operate. But beneath the numbers lies a deeper story about what is and is not a true family office. Two findings stand
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Would You Rather Build a Complex Tech System or Simply Hire Another Admin?
As family offices grow, the volume of data grows with them. More accounts, more private assets, more custodians, and more reporting requirements. At some point, every wealth-holder or family office faces a pivotal question: Would you rather embark on an overwhelming new tech project with a long onboarding process that nobody on your team is
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How Canadian Family Foundations Manage Their Investment Portfolios
Across Canada, family foundations take many forms—from small, entrepreneur-led charities to large, multi-generational organizations with dedicated staff and professional advisors. How these foundations manage their investment portfolios can vary dramatically, depending on their size, history, and governance structure. Below are some of the most common approaches used by family foundations today, along with the strengths
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Family Office Checklist for Canadian Investors
Successful family office wealth management doesn’t depend on being the greatest investor. Optimizing for risk and return matters, but financial goals can often be achieved with plain-vanilla, liquid portfolios. The greater challenge for wealthy investors is succession. When families fail to prepare the next generation to take responsibility, no amount of hot stock tips will
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Are You Paying Too Much for Investment Advice?
When it comes to investment advice, many wealthy families are paying far more than they realize. The standard model of charging a percentage of assets under management (AUM) seems innocent enough. But hides conflicts of interest. Since, the bigger your account grows, the more expensive it gets. And, not with a proportional increase in value
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Beyond Returns: Aligning Wealth With Values
When families think about their investments, they often focus on financial returns alone. But for many families today, that isn’t enough. They want their wealth to reflect their values, to become a force for good in the world. Not just a way to grow capital. Recently, we thought about a family in this situation, and
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Active Returns, Benchmarks, and the Truth About Performance
Many investors describe their portfolio performance in raw returns, like, “my portfolio made 15% last year” or “my portfolio gained $300,000”. While such statements may be true, they don’t tell us the whole story. And cannot tell us whether results have been good or bad. Since, what if the average return was 20% compared to
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Family Governance: The Missing Link Between Wealth and Legacy
For many families, the challenge isn’t just how to grow wealth. It’s how to make it last. Generational wealth is often lost not because of poor investment decisions, but because of a lack of structure, clarity, and shared understanding. This is where family governance comes in. Yet despite growing interest, most families still ask a