Weekly Love Letter 26/09/25 - Busting the Myth of Struggle

Welcome back to Life & Legacy Secrets, my weekly love letter in which I reveal how wealthy families create, grow, and expand their reality—and where I share the secrets to ridiculously improve your family’s future.

So far, we explored the "Family Bank" Secret, showing you how strategic lending can empower your family and the difference between revocable and irrevocable trusts.

This week, we're tackling a deeply ingrained belief that often sabotages the very legacy it aims to protect.

Many successful individuals, having built their wealth through hard work and by overcoming challenges, believe their children must "struggle the way I did" to learn resilience, work ethic, and the value of money.

This often leads to the idea of leaving little or nothing to their children, or at least making them wait until much later in life to inherit.

While the intention behind this is noble—a desire to prevent entitlement and "spoil" their kids, the wealthiest families understand Secret #3.

Secret #3

Wealthy families use their resources to educate their children to become conscious, resourceful, and intentional creators by investing in them early and often, giving them plenty of opportunities to make and learn from their mistakes.

Wealth families know that simply making their children "struggle" doesn't make success inevitable; it often just creates confusion, resentment or a lack of understanding about how to manage significant resources.

Instead, wealthy families leverage what I call “karmic reward” to involve their children with the family resources early, sharing as many details as possible as early as possible, and giving their children the opportunity to leverage family resources for their own experiments of trying things, making mistakes, learning, evolving and growing.

Why the "Struggle" Myth Falls Short:

❌ It's Reactive, Not Proactive: It's a response to a fear (spoiling children) rather than a proactive strategy for growth.

❌ It Lacks Intentionality or Evolution: It leaves the children to figure out complex financial realities on their own, without the benefit of the family's accumulated wisdom and resources.

❌ It Can Foster Entitlement Anyway: Children who are cut off from family resources often still feel entitled to it, but without the tools or understanding to manage what they will receive, responsibly.

The Conscious Creator Approach: An Upward Spiral

Instead of withholding details about family wealth or financial support in the early years, the most successful families leverage their wealth and family structures to:

✅ Educate for Conscious, Intentional and Evolutionary Creation: They understand that true wealth is about more than just money; it's about the ability to create value. They use their resources to teach their children financial literacy, strategic thinking, and the principles of value creation and responsible stewardship.

✅ Infuse Resources with Values: Wise and wealthy families don't just pass on money; they pass on the values that created that money. Through family meetings, charters, and structured engagement, children learn the "why" behind the wealth and how to use it as a force for good. And, when structured intentionally, these meetings can even be tax write-offs, and subsidized by the government.

✅ Build-in Education Mechanisms: Structures like the Family Office, Family Bank, and Family Foundation are not just financial vehicles; they are powerful educational platforms. Children are incentivized to learn, contribute, and participate in the family's financial ecosystem. They learn how to become trusted contributors, even if they pursue careers outside the family business—whether they become artists, authors, or choose low-paying jobs.

✅ Incentivize Contribution, Not Just Reception: By engaging children in the family's financial structures, the junior generation learns how to access resources wisely and are encouraged to create and contribute, rather than simply waiting to receive an inheritance. They become active participants in the family's ongoing legacy.

✅ Financial & Estate Planning as a Rite of Passage: If you want your kids to struggle like you did, it’s because you recognize the value of struggle to hone, forge and sharpen in a way that doesn’t occur without it. By using financial and estate planning as an intentional rite of passage and an initiation into adulthood, we can keep all the benefits of the struggle without any of the downsides.

This approach transforms inheritance from a passive event into an active journey of learning, contribution, and conscious creation. It ensures that wealth becomes a blessing and a powerful tool for future generations to expand their own realities.

Your Action Step:

Reflect on your own beliefs about wealth and your children.

💡What values do you want to pass on to the next generation?

💡 How can your wealth be a tool for teaching, rather than just a handout?

💡How can you involve your children in discussions about the family's financial future in an age-appropriate way, fostering their understanding and sense of contribution?

Begin to shift your mindset from "protecting them from wealth" to "empowering them with wealth” and consider that your kids could be the one’s to reclaim the idea of “trust fund kids” being a negative term to something all kids would be thrilled to call themselves.

Next week, we’ll reveal another secret: how the wealthy use their life insurance for much more than just a death benefit.

To your eyes (and heart) wide open life,

Ali Katz

P.S. ➡️ Save These Dates/Attend These Events:

September 30th at 4pPT/7pET is our next live Estate Planning Masterclass with me. If you’d like the invite, email [email protected] and let us know so we can get you registered.

Financial Liberation Challenge starts on October 20th at 9aPT/12pET: Want a personal invite as soon as we open registration? Just email [email protected] and let us know, and we’ll send you the personal invitation as soon as we open registration and you can get in at the lowest investment.

P.P.P.S: If you’ve hit reply and asked for a resource from my prior Love Letters, and you haven’t gotten what you requested, please email [email protected] and try again as we’ve been in a transition of systems, and it’s possible your request was lost. Thank you for your understanding.