By Ali Katz
Say the words "family office" and you probably picture something like this: a coordinated team of lawyers, accountants, and advisors working in concert for a household with eight or nine figures in assets—the kind of arrangement that comes with a private jet and "our man in Zurich." It sounds like the financial equivalent of a yacht: nice to have, irrelevant to anyone without one.
That image isn't wrong, exactly. It's just incomplete. A family office isn't fundamentally a structure that wealthy people set up after crossing some invisible finish line. It's a discipline—and the discipline is not only available at any asset level, it’s likely necessary at yours, right now.
What a Family Office Actually Is
At its core, a family office means making sure the different parts of a financial life actually talk to each other. Legal documents, insurance coverage, investments, and taxes aren't separate transactions handled by people who've never met. In a real family office, they're one connected system, working from a shared picture of the whole.
This matters because the alternative—treating each piece in isolation—is the default for almost everyone, regardless of how much they have. And the absence of a system doesn't become visible until it's tested: by a death, an illness, a market shift, an unexpected big tax bill or simply the slow accumulation of small gaps that nobody noticed because nobody was looking at the whole picture.
The families who've built durable wealth across generations figured this out long ago—not necessarily because they started with more, but because they started treating what they had as worth coordinating, long before "family office" was a term anyone would have applied to their situation.
The Cost of Keeping Finances in Separate Rooms
Here's a version of this that might sound familiar: an accountant who files taxes once a year, a financial advisor managing the investments in the stock market, a lawyer nobody has spoken to since signing your will, and an insurance agent known mainly from holiday cards. None of these people knows what the others are doing. Some of them don't know the others exist. And, you’re the one left holding the whole big picture, while secretly knowing you are likely not doing the best job at it.
The gaps between those silos are where money quietly disappears—sometimes in dollars, sometimes in relationships that fracture once the dollars run out. Death has a way of introducing people who should have met twenty years earlier. And those same gaps are exactly what fraudsters, predatory advisors, and bad investment pitches are built to exploit.
The Moment We're In
This is the backdrop for what's often called the Great Wealth Transfer: an estimated $124 trillion moving between generations over the next twenty years—houses, businesses, retirement accounts, family stories, old resentments, and the occasional garage full of mysteries nobody wants to deal with.
Cerulli Associates estimates that roughly 22 million Americans between 35 and 65 will inherit somewhere between $200,000 and $10 million in the years ahead. Northwestern Mutual's research suggests that around 40 percent of people in that range either believe they don't have enough to need a plan, or have a plan that's likely to fail when it's actually tested.
That's not a wealth problem. It's a thinking problem.
Most coverage of the Great Wealth Transfer focuses on the dollar figure, and most people assume it doesn't apply to them because they don't think they have "enough" to be part of it. But this transfer isn't only about what gets passed down. It's about how much of it your family actually keeps—in your own hands, your own relationships, your own community—versus how much quietly flows out to whoever is positioned to extract it.
The real risk isn't the size of the number. It's everything that doesn't happen because the number seems too small to matter: the conversations that don't take place, the documents that sit unread, the assets nobody is tracking, the adult kids who assume their parents have it handled, the siblings who stop speaking over an estate that should have brought them closer.
My Family Office
When I look back over my 25 years of learning to be an adult around my legal, insurance, financial and tax reality—what I now call LIFT—I can see that I began to build my family office well before I ever knew I needed one.
It started with my personal assistant and my nanny. They were teenagers back then. A young, smart couple helping me handle my personal reality after my divorce, while I was raising two little kids and running two businesses.
I needed help. They were there. And, most importantly, I trusted them. I didn’t trust them to know everything, but I trusted them not to steal from me.
During my divorce, my husband hired a forensic accountant because he was worried I’d hide assets. During the audit, the forensic accountant looked at me directly and said “wow, Alexis, your books are really messed up”—which some part of me already knew because I had no idea how to manage business finances.
Fast forward two years, and I opened the mail one day to find a letter from the IRS auditing my taxes from 2005—the same year I already knew was messed up.
After crying for two days and beating myself up, I redirected my personal assistant to work with an accounting team I had hired to handle the audit and told them: “Don’t even bring it up to me unless there’s something specific I can do. Otherwise, please just handle it.”
I took the energy I would have otherwise put into berating myself and built my second business to a million dollars of revenue.
But I still didn’t really know how to look at my LIFT life. I knew how to earn money. But I had no real idea how to steward it. So I put my head down and worked to earn more.
That was a losing strategy, and even though I was winning the money game, I couldn’t sustain it. Ultimately, I’d walk away, go through bankruptcy, and rebuild on a new foundation. The personal assistant who had handled my audit and his girlfriend, my nanny, stayed by my side through it all.
We really had no idea what we were doing. But we learned together. They went to college, got married, started a bookkeeping company to serve others besides me, and we created tools together that would allow me to look at what I had and learn to steward it wisely.
Today, after 20 years of work together, they are the managers of my family office: coordinating my legal, insurance, financial and tax matters. In many ways, they were the initial template for what I now call a LIFTed Advisor: the person who quarterbacks your legal, insurance, financial and tax team and systems so that you know that you are seeing what you have, becoming your own best advisor, getting the right support, and ultimately building with people you love.
Building Your Family Office, Starting Now
None of this requires waiting until you are "rich enough” because, if you do, you may never be. I certainly never felt rich in the early years of building what I have today. And if I had not wised up to the reality that I needed to steward what I was creating wisely, I would have never become rich.
The structure isn't the point—the seeing is. And seeing what you have is available to you right now, at whatever level you are starting from. It’s making sure the pieces of your financial life know about each other, instead of operating as strangers who happen to share a client.
That starting point looks different for everyone, but it tends to begin the same way: with a real look at what currently exists, who currently manages it, and where the gaps between those pieces actually are. From there, the work is less about adding complexity than about connecting what's already there—so that decisions made in one part of your financial life account for the others.
The number that would finally make this feel worth doing doesn't exist. The decision to see yourself as a steward of your family’s resources is the starting point, and making the choice to run your personal financial reality like a family office is where it begins.