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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

You can definitely preserve and transfer wealth provided you are disciplined enough do certain things.

Be careful to not reproduce in excess. This is the main thing. You don't want wealth to divide too rapidly between quick generations. Ensure you invest heavily in training people to teach them how to grow their wealth through age old tested ways: Gold, Real estate, well trained children. Ensure your accumulation rate is above your spending rate.

Modern day trusts too come to mind. Kennedy's, Clinton's, Rockefeller's and Rothschild's of the world.

Wealth doesn't last for long if you don't have the discipline for it. Most people who tend to lose wealth are generally the ones who completely lose a grip on reality. Deviate so far away from the very reasons that bought them there. Bad things happen from there on.

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Just a nitpick: gold is not going to grow your wealth, it will preserve your wealth. One ounce of gold is worth about a loaf of bread every day for a year. That was true in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar (600 BC), and is roughly true nowadays.

Invest heavily in creating crop-destroying pests and as bread gets more expensive, so will your gold reserves. Genius!

Yeah and losing this discipline is even harder when going from one generation to the next. The guy who built the empire knows all the sweat he put into achieving it, and he knows how it is to live with nothing. Therefore he has internal motivation to keep his wealth. But his children and their children don't know anything else but wealth. They might not even understand that it won't always be like that.

>Be careful to not reproduce in excess.

You can reproduce in excess, but you have to practice primogeniture.

> Be careful to not reproduce in excess

Or, alternatively, reproduce abundantly and use your children to make alliances with families that actually do matter.

You're advocating having few children in a thread related to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom whose founder had 20+ wives and some 100 children. That is how all the warring clans in the Arabian Peninsula were united and pacified: by marriage.

But we're not talking about pacification, we're talking about maintaining wealth within the family.

An inheritance split between 100 children, and then split again between their children a generation later is going to run out pretty quickly.

Even if it's only 4-5 children per person it will run out within a few generations.

That is a matter of wealth preservation. What about wealth creation? How much Saudi wealth is there without stability and security?

Also, why should all children inherit equally? Marry the daughters into wealth, and make sure only capable sons inherit.

> and make sure only capable sons inherit.

In an ideal world, that's a great idea. In reality, see above about camels, Mercedes and Lamborghinis.

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