The Brower Quadrant

Where’s Your Wealth?

If someone asked you, Where’s your wealth?, how would you respond?
If you immediately thought about your bank account or house, you’ve got it all wrong!
(And if you pointed to your heart or thought about your children, you’re only partially right.)

The time has come to see the concept of wealth—and your contribution to the world—in a whole new light. Welcome to the Brower Quadrant.

Take a moment and try to evict the term “financial planning” from your mind. Let go of the numbers and actuarial charts and graphs you typically relate with estate plans. Forget about terms like trust, tax, insurance policy, power of attorney, and so on. Erase that dollar sign from your head. See if you can start with a clean slate so you can then adopt a new definition for this idea of “wealth.” Ready?

The Four Questions

Now think about the following four questions, answering an honest yes or no:

Do I have a healthy relationship with those I love, meaning I can communicate with, and express appreciation for, them openly and effectively on a regular basis?
Do I have a method for sharing my skills with family members?
Do I have a functioning plan that ensures my legacy and life’s work will endure and leave a lasting, positive impression on the world?
Do I have a dedicated team of advisors and/or mentors helping me achieve my vision for financial success?

If you answered No to any of these questions, then the Brower Quadrant is especially for you.

The Quadrant Living Experience begins with you and what is most important to you and, perhaps, never ends. Remember, planning is an evolutionary, always improving process.

For more information on this planning process, click here

The preservation and empowerment of long-term family wealth is based on the education and behavior of each family member. It is a dynamic process that must be re-energized in each successive family generation. We believe that the most important “assets” a family possesses are its individual members. The family’s Financial Assets are tools to support the growth of the family’s Core, Experience and Contribution Assets. Each family member needs to recognize the relative value of each asset and act appropriately in order to optimize each asset.

Congratulations on taking this step in building your road map to an ever-increasing understanding and optimization of your “TRUE WEALTH.” No matter how large or small your estate or income level, you can take the steps towards optimizing the True Wealth within your family.

Let’s get to know each category of the Quadrant Living Experience.

What are the outcomes of identifying your greatest True Wealth Assets? Four chief things:

CLARITY: Clarity brings Energy! Think about it. When your family, you r employees, your team members, etc., have clarity about where they are going - they have increased energy. When they understand the why and the how of where they are going, they have even greater energy. With greater energy comes greater results.

BALANCE: Top notch engineers know that to increase speed in race cars they must have balance. They must eliminate the “wobble.” When we are balanced in our Core, Experience, Contribution, and Financial assets, we eliminate the wobble. Consequently, the outcome of Balance is Velocity! You do more in less time.

FOCUS: If you have clarity and balance you understand what matters most. That allows you to focus on those activities that generate the greatest results. You don’t waste effort on activities that may be important but are not essential to achieving optimal results. The outcome of Focus is Accuracy! You achieve more with less effort.

CONFIDENCE: With clarity, balance, and focus, you can’t help but have increased confidence. Lack of confidence makes you a repellent. Radiating confidence makes you an Attractant! With increased confidence, the law of attraction takes over, attracting greater relationships, opportunities and experiences.

Core Assets

This is perhaps the most overlooked Core Asset that you possess—the unique gift bestowed upon you that you, in turn, have the privilege of sharing with the world.

But this is only one sector of Core Assets. Family members and personal friends are Core Assets. These are the people who will stand by us, the people with whom we share our greatest triumphs and tragedies, the people who are “there for us.” We don’t choose our families, but we do choose that circle of friends, mentors, and go-to people who help us get through the tough times and with whom we share our transcendent moments. We are wired to want to be with others, to form bonds of love and security. It’s part of our nature and we honor it when we take time to recognize the depth of the relationships we are privileged to create.

Religious faith, ethics, values, and heritage are also part of your Core Assets, as well as health and peace of mind. In all, think of Core Assets as the traits and characteristics that make you, well, YOU. They are the very features that define you as an individual.

Experience Assets

When we talked about Core Assets, we were considering those abilities and gifts intrinsic in us—those capacities with which we were born or to which we gravitate simply because of who we are. By contrast, Experience Assets are those we develop over time: skills, knowledge, techniques, systems, and even the networks of people with whom we establish bonds of mutual support. If the Core Assets are intrinsic to us and part of our very nature, Experience Assets are extrinsic—we acquire them in life. But these Experience Assets only have value—become capitalized—when we first capture them and then share them with others. Experience Assets include both good and bad experiences, and each family member is empowered when these assets, are shared.

Contribution Assets

Contribution Assets relate to the manner in which you give back to society—not only with money in the form of taxes and charitable donations, but with your time, energy, relationships and experience. The Quadrant System helps you not only organize these assets, but to also instill in your family your passion for supporting specific social and civic causes. Properly structured, Contribution Assets will add tremendous value to your Core, Experience and Financial Assets for generations to come.

Financial Assets

Financial Assets are the assets most people are familiar with from traditional estate planning. They are those tangible assets like money, stocks, retirement plans, trusts, personal and real property, and businesses that insure financial independence, provide for family legacy, and enrich political and social involvement. But Financial Assets rarely survive the third generation because our society places emphasis on the wrong assets. We get so caught up in the money game. On top of that, we don’t have a system that focuses on the capture and enrichment of our Core and Experience Assets. Financial Assets are the means, not the end, when it comes to moving all of our assets to . . . and through . . . future generations.

When you begin to look at life in terms of your family’s unique Core, Experience, Contribution, and Financial Assets, it becomes quickly apparent that the sum of the whole of these assets is worth far more than the constituent parts.

How do I capture family knowledge and experience?

Tiger Woods is considered one of the world’s greatest golfers. He has earned millions of dollars by winning golf tournaments and by giving endorsements. If Tiger Woods were to offer you his golf clubs and trophies, or his golf swing, which would you take? His golf clubs and trophies would make nice conversation pieces in your home; but, his swing would allow you to make a few million dollars of your own. Using his swing you co d buy your own golf clubs and earn your own trophies.

The possibility that you will receive Tiger Woods swing is remote (although you can buy his video game!). But, you and your family members have activities, experiences, stories, knowledge, and events that if captured, maintained and shared co d advantage current and future generations—both personally and financially. This knowledge should be captured, maintained and shared in some form of family knowledge repository.

Items that can be integrated in this repository include the following:

Special “How To” knowledge possessed by family members. This includes how to develop an investment portfolio, how to create a web site, how to paint a room, how to make Grandma’s special cookies, etc.
A list of hobbies enjoyed by each family member for sharing and teaching other family members.
Resources found to be useful to family members including internet sites, advisors, books, etc.
Genealogy records and histories of family members, both those deceased and alive.
Systems used by family members to achieve success in various areas including speed reading systems, physical fitness programs, earning college credits while in high school, etc.
Stories and photos of family events.

As you implement these steps, you will identify additional strategies and systems to optimize your family’s True Wealth. This process of self discovery is a natural and powerful result of all your efforts. Also, be aware of the byproducts that evolve from participating in these Quadrant Living activities. Byproducts are ideas and results that come from working toward a specific objective. Often these byproducts provide results of greater value than the original objective you were seeking to achieve.

I wish you the best as you travel the road toward optimizing your True Wealth.

Lee Brower