We hope that you and your family enjoyed a relaxing Fourth of July holiday this week.  To help ease you back into the routine of things, we’ve compiled a brief reading list of items we’ve found to be interesting and informative in the past couple of weeks.  Think of it as your Family Business Director summer reading list.  Don’t worry – next week’s post won’t include a test.

Family Office

In this piece, Deloitte takes a look at a few ways that families can protect, preserve, and grow their wealth, even in the complex tax rate environment we currently find ourselves in.

Family Business Magazine provides a set of considerations for families looking to start up a family office in this recent article.  As with any worthwhile endeavor, the article stresses the importance of defining the end goals of a family office as the starting point of the process.

Estate Planning

The National Law Review gives a concise look at a few of the estate planning tools at the disposal of couples subject to the federal estate tax in this recent overview.

Firm Management

This case study from The Family Business Consulting Group highlights the importance of alignment in family businesses with multiple generations of shareholders and the difficult, but necessary, work needed to ensure that shareholder incentives are aligned within a family business.

Finally, we turn to Mercer Capital’s RIA Advisory group for a look at some considerations regarding your buy-sell agreement that should help align expectations in a triggering event.  While this blog piece was written with RIA owners in mind, we think that the considerations laid out are applicable to businesses across a wide swath of industries.