How to hold a family meeting about money: the agenda, the ground rules, and what to say first

Because it is called after a diagnosis or a death, with no agenda, in a room where one person knows everything and the rest are guessing; because it starts with the numbers, which nobody can absorb, instead of the reasons, which everybody wants; and because it is held once. The Williams Group study of 3,250 families found that the transfers that failed did so overwhelmingly for breakdowns of trust and communication, not for bad documents, and that the families that succeeded had talked about the money, in a room, before it moved. A family meeting is a habit, not an event.

The principal or principals, every adult child, and, at the family's choice, their spouses. Spouses are the hard call: leave them out and they hear a version of the meeting that night; bring them in and the family's business is now their business. Most families bring them in from the second meeting, once the first has set the tone. Not the adviser at the first one. Not the grandchildren until the second. If one child cannot be there, the meeting waits; a meeting that happens without someone is the first grievance. Video counts if it is the only way; a phone call does not.

1. Nobody is being told what they will get. This meeting is about how the family decides, not what it decides.

2. Everyone speaks; nobody speaks for anyone else.

3. Questions are allowed; demands are not.

4. What is said here stays here until the family agrees what to write down.

5. It ends on time, with the next date set.

Family meeting, ninety minutes.

0:00 Why we are here (principal, five minutes): what the family owns is not the point; how we will make decisions together is.
0:05 The three questions (everyone, forty minutes): see below.
0:45 What exists (principal, fifteen minutes): the documents that are in place, where they are, who is named in them. Not the values, not the amounts.
1:00 What we want to decide together (twenty minutes): the list, not the answers.
1:20 Next meeting and who writes the notes (ten minutes).

Where did the money come from, and what did it cost? What is it for? What would you never want it used for? The principal answers first and briefly, then everyone. The answers are the family's first draft of its values, and they are the reason the meeting works: nobody argues about a will after they have heard their father explain what he would never do with the money. The third question does the most work, because it is the one the documents never ask and the one every later argument is about.

The second meeting, six months on, is where the amounts come in: a one-page balance sheet, the plan as it stands, and the questions from the first meeting answered. The third is where the family decides something small together, a gift, a charity, the holiday house, and finds out whether its way of deciding works. By the fourth, the meeting has an agenda the family sets, minutes someone keeps, and a rhythm; that is a family council, and it does not need to be called one.

Someone cries; that is fine, and usually the meeting's best moment. Someone leaves; the meeting stops and the principal calls them that evening. Someone raises a grievance from 1994; the rule is that it goes on the list for a separate conversation, and the conversation happens. Someone asks the amount; the answer is "at the next meeting, with the documents", and then it is. The meeting that fails is the one where the principal answers the questions the rules said would wait.

Notes, circulated within a week, agreed by everyone. The next date in the calendar, six months out. Then the documents the meeting pointed at: the constitution if the family has a business or a trust, the letter of wishes if there is a trust, and the three answers, recorded in the principal's own voice, because the notes will be read once and the voice will be asked for again and again.