Health: The Fifth Dimension of Family Wealth

If one of your clients were given a million dollars at birth to cover all of the expenses in his lifetime, would you advise him to just cross his fingers and hope that it would last until his last breath? Or would the strategist and optimizer in you leverage the potential power in that million dollars, building that financial asset into a substantial and powerful gift, able to fund a lifetime of living? Most likely, you would advise your client to make that original capital work for him—you’d help him find the highest-return investments, advise him to continue contributing to his lifetime “expense account,” and you would feel confident that you had done your job in encouraging him to proactively build that asset. As a steward of his assets and as a trusted advisor, one thing you would not do is stand idly by while he did nothing to grow his million dollars, instead spending it thoughtlessly until the account closed with a zero balance.

Just like money and property, health is an asset. Health is the fundamental element of every individual’s longevity, creativity, physical stamina, short-term mental acuity, long-term mental clarity, and overall quality of life. In the absence of adequate health capital, the power of financial capital is greatly lessened—it becomes an accumulation of money and property with a significantly diminished ability to be applied to the pursuit of living one’s life and realizing one’s life vision. Why treat the health assets of clients differently from their financial assets?