Bill Bonner & William Bonner 
Family Fortunes 
How to Build Family Wealth and Hold on to It for 100 Years

Selected as one of Motley Fool’s ‘5 Great
Books You Should Read’

Advice on managing your wealth from bestselling author Bill
Bonner

From trusted New York Times bestselling author Bill
Bonner comes a radical new way to look at family money and a
practical, actionable guide to getting and maintaining
multigenerational wealth. Family Fortunes: How to Build Family
Wealth and Hold on to It for 100 Years is packed with useful
information, interwoven with Bonner’s stories about his own
family’s wealth philosophy and practices.

A comprehensive guide that shows how families can successfully
preserve their estates by ignoring most of what people think they
know about ‘the rich’ and, instead, training and motivating all
family members to work together toward a very uncommon goal. This
book is a must-read for all individual investors–even those
who do not plan to leave money to their children–because it
challenges many of the most ubiquitous principles and rules of
investing.

You might expect a book on family wealth to be extremely
conservative in its outlook. Instead, the Bonners announce what is
practically a revolutionary manifesto. They explain:

* Why family money should NOT be invested in ‘safe, conservative’
investments

* Why charitable giving is usually a waste of money, or
worse

* Why it is NOT a good idea to let children go their own way

* Why you can’t trust wealth ‘professionals’ and why you should
never entrust your money to money managers

* Why giving your children as much education as possible is NOT a
good idea

* Why Warren Buffett and the rest of the rich people asking for
higher tax rates are wrong to take ‘the pledge’

* Why Wall Street is a graveyard for capital, why most celebrity
CEOs are a threat to the businesses they run, why modern capitalism
is a failure, and more

You will come away with a very different idea as to what family
wealth is all about. It is not stodgy. Not boring. Not moss-backed
and reactionary. On the contrary, it is the most dynamic,
forward-looking capital in the world. The essential guide to
passing wealth from one generation to the next, Family
Fortunes is filled with concrete, practical advice you can put
to use right away.

Table of Content

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xxi

Introduction: Families That Won’t Fail and Money That Won’t Die 1

Chapter 1 Who Ya Gonna Call? 7

Chapter 2 The Family 35

Chapter 3 What About the Money? 73

Chapter 4 Making Your Fortune in Business 119

Chapter 5 Making Your Fortune in Investments 153

Chapter 6 Our Beta Bets 191

Chapter 7 Hard Structures 215

Chapter 8 Creating Prosperity for Generations 249

Chapter 9 Families with Money 275

Chapter 10 The Family Stronghold 295

Notes 307

About the Authors 313

Index 315

About the author

BILL BONNER is President and CEO of Agora Publishing, one of the world’s largest financial newsletter companies. He is the creator of the Daily Reckoning, a financial newsletter with more than 540, 000 readers of six different global daily editions, including French and German. Bonner is coauthor of the international bestsellers Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt with Addison Wiggin, as well as Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets (coauthored with Lila Rajiva), the New York Times bestseller. In 2011, he wrote Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets and Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas. He files his Daily Reckoning dispatches from a ranch in Argentina, the home office in Maryland, various joint ventures, and other hot spots around the globe.

WILL BONNER is Executive Director of the Bonner & Partners Family Office, an independent estate planning and investment research group. Will got his start working in the ‘mailroom’ of the family business, Agora, at age eleven. Later, he helped launch, and served as CEO of Early to Rise, a leading self-improvement publishing business. In 2007, he opened Agora’s South American office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and set up a successful business partnership that is one of the largest investment research and education companies publishing in Spanish. He is a graduate of St. John’s College’s Great Books program, earning a double major in philosophy and mathematics. Bonner lives with his wife and two children in Delray Beach, Florida. He’s the eldest of Bill’s six children.