There is an old saying in Italian families; “you never come between an Italian and their money, nor an Italian and their children”.
I grew up hearing this. And the older I get, the more I understand why those two things, money and family, are spoken of in the same breath. They are not separate. They never really were.
In my Nonna's kitchen, I watched this play out quietly and consistently over many years. Women would arrive at her table carrying financial problems that were never just financial problems. A husband gambling the family's future away. A property that needed to pass to the next generation, but nobody could agree on how.
A woman who had spent decades trusting someone else to manage the money, and who suddenly found herself alone, needing to understand it all from the beginning.
Underneath every one of those situations was family. The dynamics, the history, the unspoken rules, the loyalties, and sometimes the fractures that had been there long before the money became an issue.
This is something I have carried into my own work. When a family comes to me to talk about succession, or inheritance, or what happens to the property when the time comes, the conversation is rarely just about the plan. It is about who they are to each other. What the land means. What fairness looks like when every child's relationship to the property is different. What legacy means to the generation handing things over, and what responsibility feels like to the generation receiving them.
Money, in these moments, is the surface. Underneath it is everything else.
I have come to believe that about ninety percent of the complexity in family financial decisions has nothing to do with the financial structure itself. The structure is often the straightforward part. What takes time, and care, and patience, is understanding the human architecture beneath it. The relationships, the roles people play, the fears that go unspoken because nobody wants to be the one who starts a difficult conversation.
My role is not to rush any of that. It is to sit with it. To help families’ slow things down enough to understand what is really at stake, and to move forward in a way that honours both the financial reality and the relationships that matter most.
Because when it comes to family and money, you cannot truly serve one without understanding the other.
They have never been separate. And in my experience, the families who navigate these moments best are the ones who find the space to talk about both at the same time.
