Mutual Trust brings long-term planning to the next level, developing succession plans for wealthy families that look ahead a hundred years.

The ‘three-generation curse’ is a widely held belief across countries and cultures. Family wealth generated by hard-working entrepreneurs is dissipated or squandered by its inheritors – or so the belief goes – rarely surviving beyond the grandchildren.

But it doesn’t always have to go that way. Wealth can be smoothly transferred to well-adjusted inheritors who successfully take up their own entrepreneurial or charitable endeavours and later pass the baton to children of their own.

Australia’s largest multi-family office, Mutual Trust, wants to make smooth wealth transfers much more common, pointing to the flow-on benefits to the Australian economy that come from the lasting prosperity of wealthy families.

The enterprises of wealthy families employ 6.32 million Australians and annually pay $294 billion in wages – just under half of the total private sector wages–according to a white paper commissioned by Mutual Trust and based on first-of-its kind research by the University of Adelaide.

The white paper, ‘Why the modern family office matters,’ found that every one percentage point improvement in annual return on wealth managed by Australian family enterprises will result in the creation of over 45,000 full-time jobs, $3-4 billion in annual wages and $6-7 billion in gross domestic product.

Tracy Conlan, Head of Strategy at Mutual Trust with decades of experience in strategy and business consulting for firms including McKinsey & Company, Deloitte and EY, argues the next few years are a critical window to ensure smooth wealth transfer between the generations of wealthy families. An estimated $4.9 trillion in Australia will be passed between generations until around 2030 as part of a ‘great wealth transfer’ from baby boomers, according to CoreData research.