In this webinar Jayson Lowe explains why roughly 70% of wealthy families lose their fortune by the second generation and presents the systematic solution his family uses to preserve wealth across generations. He argues that the primary causes are a lack of shared values, education, and formal rules, rather than taxes alone. Lowe describes the creation of a detailed family constitution that codifies the family’s purpose, values, golden rules (respect, responsibility, kindness), and expectations for wealth stewardship. Central to the system is a family banking model built on the Infinite Banking Concept, where life‑insurance policy loans are made to family members at a fixed 10% interest rate with negotiable repayment schedules. Children are introduced to the system as early as age nine, with an opt‑in/opt‑out choice: participation grants access to the family trust and death‑benefit proceeds, while opting out results in the transfer of policy ownership to charitable entities and exclusion from the trust. The family holds annual family‑office meetings, led by a long‑standing family attorney, to educate members, review loan activity, and reinforce the constitution. A strict one‑strike default policy enforces accountability: any member who defaults without prior communication loses all future borrowing privileges. Lowe emphasizes treating family finance like a business, modeling responsible behavior, and fostering a culture that forbids saying “I can’t” while encouraging asking for help. The webinar showcases how these structures create a durable, repeatable wealth‑preservation system that can outlive its founders.
Chapters
Why do 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation? If you have a family with money but no rules, wave bye-bye to the money. Families decay when money grows faster than character. The greatest threat to your wealth is taxes. If you sat down in a room with 170 wealthy families, not one of them is going to tell you that. What they're going to tell you is some iteration of the greatest threat is a lack of shared values. Can you build a system that outlives you? The biggest myth: generational wealth is easy. This is the hard part. Why do 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation? I'm curious, why do you suppose that occurs? Lack of— lack of education? Nobody teaches literacy? The hardest part is hoping your children will listen to you. Lessons not passed along to children, poor management, and so on. These are all understandably very good reasons why we would suspect that happens. When I show you this, and as you're looking at it, don't focus on our family's journey, okay? I want you to imagine what your timeline could look like and What nobody sees is the beginning and the moment that everything changed, and I'll help you understand why. When you think of what we were encouraged to do growing up, whether it was from people in our circle, like maybe family, maybe a mentor, somebody in our lives, and you may have heard things like, "Someday you're going to move out and start your own family." Someday you're going to understand what it means to have financial obligations, to pay the bills, to make the money go round in the family. I have been blessed and humbled to be introduced to and acquainted with and surrounded by a number of very wealthy families. Not one of them has ever spoken that way. Not one. What I hear them say and continue to say, and we say the same in our family— this is all my kids have ever known from birth— is that we circle the wagons in our family. We want to keep the money in the family. Someday you are going to be called upon to be a steward of the family banking system. All of the loans, mortgages, Cars, businesses, equipment, appliances, vacations, weddings, college degrees, all of it flows through the family banking system. Our family attorney is going to sit down with our kids, not me, not Rebecca, our family attorney who's been with us for as long as I can remember. And our family attorney is going to sit down. So Britt is going to say to the kids, you've been attending annual family office meetings, and the family banking is an element of the annual family office meeting. This is all that you've known since birth, but your parents do not want to force you to be included in the family banking system. So the purpose of us meeting is for you to understand your options. Your options are you can borrow from the family's money pool and you repay those policy loans at an interest rate of 10%. That rate is not subject to negotiation. What's subject to negotiation is the time frame. So the amortization schedule, the repayment time frame, is absolutely negotiable. But the rate is not. You agree to finance everything that you need throughout the course of your lifetime through the family banking system. If you choose to do that, if that's your decision, when your mom and dad pass away, you will also be included in the Lowe Family Trust. And provided that you fam— that you follow the family constitution, both you and your heirs will will never have a bad financial day for the rest of your lives. Option B is that you can shop outside the home, meaning you can borrow from someone else's bank or finance company because you've decided that the lower rate is more appealing to you. That is your privilege to do that. If you choose to do that, your parents will transfer ownership of all the policies that they have on your lives They will transfer ownership of all of those policies to charitable organizations of their choosing. You will not be included in the Lowe Family Trust, and you will not receive any death benefit proceeds from your mom or dad's life insurance contracts. Take all the time you need to decide which option is best for you and let me know how you plan to proceed. First policy loan for my firstborn son was at age 9. His money flows through the family banking system. That's all that he knows. My oldest daughter actively borrows and repays the family banking system. My twin daughters, who are aged 14, are entering that phase of their lives now where they are borrowing and repaying the family banking system. And when they mention a word of this to any of their peer group, it's deer in the headlights. We at Ascendant Financial in the United States and Canada are going to change that. Can you build a system that outlives you? There isn't a single person on this webinar that cannot do that. And again, I'm living proof of it. We didn't come from money in my family. There was nothing silver in terms of spoons or anything other than that. We didn't come from that. The life that I dreamt about as a young boy is the life that we're living today because I was surrounded by people that would never let me say the words "I can't." And my kids, those two words combined are forbidden in our family. You never say that. You can say "I need help," but you can never say "I can't," ever. Let's go deeper here. What happens if somebody doesn't repay? In our family banking system, we have a one-strike-and-you're-out indefinitely So if a family member accesses a policy loan and life happens, which it happens to everybody, and that family member experiences a temporary financial setback, job loss as an example, and that family member sits down and says, "I'm about to experience a temporary financial setback. I'd like to take a look at my loan repayment schedule." 'And if possible, I'd like to work out some temporary relief. Maybe we capitalize some payments on the back end of the schedule, whatever we can do.' That's proactive, right? That's proactively communicating. We absolutely work with that in our family should that need arise. But if the family member was well aware of the temporary financial setback on the horizon, didn't communicate it to anybody, and defaulted, it's one strike you're out. Not two, not three, one. You will never access another penny from the family banking system again, ever. And again, that can be received as harsh to some people, but this is a business. It's not a daycare center. What the primary cause of marital breakdown is? Finance, money. And one of the primary reasons is that it's not being discussed. It's not being treated like a business. It's not receiving that degree of attention and priority. And so it drives a wedge in what would otherwise be very good relationship in marriage with these couples that are breaking apart and these poor children that are affected by that. I lived through that with my own family. My mom and dad were great at arguing about money. Nobody told them what I'm sharing with you today. Had somebody have stepped in and influenced them in a positive way in their lives, who knows where that may have led. But I was the referee of more arguments than I can count between my late dad and my late mom, and those are very painful memories. And so when I place this degree of emphasis on treating it like a business, there's a reason for it. I know what the other side of that curtain looks like, and I have a soft spot in my heart when I work with families and they've got young children and they're coming up in the world, and these families want to do right, they just don't know how. The biggest takeaway from today is the family constitution. Is there anybody on the webinar who does not want to have a glimpse at our family constitution? So this is the original document in its original format, word for word. Now what we do as a family is we— these are professionally printed, we have the family seal on it, everyone in the family gets a copy of it, everyone who shows up in the family in the future, all the grandkids and all that, they're going to get a copy of it, and Printed double-sided, it's 55 pages. Single-sided, it's 110. Our family constitution outlines— Now, I want to show you a couple of key things that are very— I'm obviously not going to walk you through 110 pages. I hope nobody's concerned with that. We're not going to walk through 110 pages of material, but I want to point out some key, very key aspects of this family banking element that is within the Constitution. But I want you all to see something. So first and foremost is a letter from me, and there's accompanying video. This is ours, and this is read out loud at our annual family office meeting. And it's a member of the family who steps up to read it out loud. At our last family meeting, it was one of my twin daughters, Charlotte, and she read it out loud to everyone in attendance at the meeting. It describes who we are, why we exist. It describes what we believe. It describes how we operate. It describes what is expected of us. It describes our relationship with wealth, our commitment to giving, our legacy, our promise, and our declaration as a family. So, we developed 3 golden rules in our family. The first is to be respectful, be responsible, Be kind. And that is embedded in our family constitution to be passed along from one generation to the next. Any behavior, good or bad, can be attributed to either one or all three of those golden rules. And when I mess up— and I do, I'm fallible, I'm human— if I raise my voice with one of my kids, I'll say, I dishonored all three of our family's Golden Rules. What I did was disrespectful, it was irresponsible. I'm the parent, and it certainly wasn't kind the way I handled that. Will you accept my apology? And now I listen to my kids when they have an argument with each other, and they're talking about the Golden Rules, and they ask each other, will you accept my apology? Your kids are listening less and they're watching more as it relates to what you do. So can this be transferred as it relates to your implementation in the Infinite Banking Concept and any other aspect of how you're building wealth in your family? Absolutely. They're going to watch what you do. So if you're creating a loan repayment schedule, you're repaying it, and you're letting them watch you do that What are they going to learn? They're going to learn what the right way is. If they watch you having conversations, steering, guiding, leading a conversation, a family office meeting, what are they learning? The right way. If they watch you handle money, and you're handling it responsibly and you're prioritizing premium, you're prioritizing wealth creation. What are they learning the right way? Capture it, record it. So in the future, Your son, your daughter can say, hey, don't just take my example and my word for it. Watch how grandpa did it. Watch how grandma did it. That's all going to be there. Can you build a system that outlives you? There isn't a single person on this webinar that cannot do that. And again, I'm living proof of it. We didn't come from money in my family. There was nothing silver in terms of spoons or anything other than that. We didn't come from that. The life that I dreamt about as a young boy is the life that we're living today, because I was surrounded by people that would never let me say the words 'I can't.' and my kids, those two words combined are forbidden in our family. You never say that. You can say I need help, but you can never say I can't. Ever. Forbidden. I believe that all of you can. Money flows. Once you begin to observe the pattern of flow, you start seeing something that most people miss. Money is always being stored somewhere and borrowed from somewhere. You've got car payments, credit card payments, loan payments. You're paying cash for things.
