The number one question ultra-high net worth families should ask a financial advisor is apparently a thing that exists. Someone wrote an article about it. Someone else will read it.
The uber-rich need help finding advisors because their financial needs are complex. You know what else is complex? A Rube Goldberg machine. Also useless when you could just flip the switch yourself.
Here's what kills me. These families have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes but they need a quiz show strategy to vet the guy managing it. What's the question? "Can you count past a billion?" "Do you know what a trust is?" "Will you pretend my kid earned his Tesla?"
The premise assumes these families don't already have seventeen advisors, each one hired by the previous advisor, each one taking a percentage to recommend the next guy in the chain. It's advisors all the way down. A human centipede of fee structures.
Ultra-high net worth families are worried about complexity. Regular families are worried about whether they can afford chicken or just rice this week. But sure, let's dedicate eight hundred words to whether Pennybags III is asking his wealth manager the right opener. Really pressing stuff.
The article promises to teach you how to gauge a prospective financial advisor. You gauge them by checking if they're breathing and if they went to the right school. That's it. That's the whole thing. The rest is theater so everyone feels like they earned their position instead of inheriting it from Grandpa's textile mill.
I checked the charts. They don't care about your question. Any question. The advisor will smile and answer it perfectly because you're worth nine figures and he gets paid whether you ask about tax strategy or his favorite color.
The only question that matters is "What's your fee?" but nobody asks it because talking about money is gauche when you have too much of it.
Photo by Cyril Muhammad on Unsplash
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