Beyond Wealth.
Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
A guided, conversation-style session built for families who have created significant wealth and now need a clear, shared framework for managing it.
Over the next few sections we will work through the core building blocks QuarterFive uses with every family client: how capital is structured across your life and business, and how a portfolio is actually put together and why.
There's no jargon you need to arrive with. The goal is simply to get everyone on the same page and help you reach your own "ah-ha" moment about what matters most for your family's wealth.
How to use this page: every section below is interactive. Tap, click and drag the sliders, cards and diagrams as we talk through each topic together.
What we'll cover today
Step 1 of 4 — Your Investment Policy Framework
Today's session is the first of four structured workshops QuarterFive runs with every family on the way to a documented Family Wealth Investment Policy Statement. Click each stage below to see what it covers.
01 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Capital Allocation
Before we talk about investments, we need to talk about your life. Every family's balance sheet can be split into three buckets: Lifestyle Capital (the things you own and enjoy), Investment Capital (the assets that fund your lifestyle and future) and Entrepreneurial Capital (the value tied up in businesses you actively run or hold). The mix between these three buckets says more about your financial risk than any single investment decision.
How to use this: click each category below to see what typically sits inside it, then use the calculator to explore how your own numbers might look, both before and after a major liquidity event such as a business sale.
Try it with your own numbers
Choose a scenario, or build your own split between the three capital types.
The Investment Capital figure above is your Investable Capital, the reference figure used throughout the rest of this workshop wherever a dollar figure is shown.
- Many families accumulate wealth with almost everything sitting in Entrepreneurial Capital, concentrated in the businesses they built.
- The "Pre-Exit" example shows just how lopsided this mix can be.
- After a liquidity event, the goal is usually to rebalance towards a healthier mix of Lifestyle and Investment Capital.
- This means the family's financial security no longer depends on a single business or asset.
02 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Family Cashflow
Significant family wealth is rarely held in one place. It's usually spread across a family trust, a self-managed super fund (SMSF), one or more companies and personal accounts, each with its own investments, cash account and tax treatment. The challenge isn't managing any one of these in isolation; it's understanding how money moves between them so the family always has clarity on what's available to spend, save or reinvest.
How to use this: the diagram below maps a typical structure. Use the buttons to highlight how income flows, how it gets reinvested and how monthly distributions ultimately fund the family's personal accounts. Click any box for a plain-English explanation of what it is and why it exists.
- Most families can answer "what do I own?" but struggle with "how much cash actually lands in my pocket each month, and from where?"
- Mapping these flows is often the single highest-value exercise in a first family office review.
- It usually reveals idle cash sitting in entity accounts that could be working harder.
- It can also surface distributions that are inconsistent and hard to plan around.
03 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Investment Philosophy Attributes
Before any portfolio is built, every family needs a clear answer to twelve questions. Together, these form your Investment Philosophy: the rulebook that guides every decision QuarterFive makes on your behalf and the benchmark we use to check that the portfolio still reflects what matters to you as circumstances change.
How to use this: click each tile below to tick it off and see what it means, along with the Key Discussion question we'd want to explore together for your family. Work through all twelve tiles to build a complete picture of your investment philosophy.
Select an attribute above
Each of the twelve tiles represents a dimension of your investment philosophy. Click a tile to tick it off and read more, then work through all twelve to build a picture of what's most important to your family before we move into portfolio construction.
04 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Portfolio Construction
Once we know how much capital is available to invest and what your philosophy is, we build the portfolio in two deliberate stages. First, we define the Income Investments: the sleeve of the portfolio designed to reliably fund your lifestyle. Only once that's settled do we layer on Growth Investments: the sleeve designed to build wealth over the long term.
This sequencing matters. A family that defines its growth strategy first, without first locking in a reliable income strategy, can end up needing to sell growth assets at the wrong time to cover income shortfalls.
How to use this: drag the master slider to reflect roughly how much of your portfolio you think should sit in each sleeve today, then use the two scales underneath to describe how conservative or aggressive each sleeve should be.
Income Investments
Define income strategy first
Growth Investments
Followed by growth strategy
- There's no universally "right" answer.
- The right balance is the one that lets you sleep at night while still meeting your goals.
05 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Preservation vs Growth
Once the Income and Growth sleeves are roughly sized, we need to decide where the overall portfolio sits on the spectrum between Preservation and Growth. This single decision has a bigger impact on your long-term outcome (and on how bumpy the ride feels along the way) than almost any individual investment choice.
A family early in its wealth journey, with decades ahead and no near-term need to draw down capital, can typically sit further toward Growth. A family relying on the portfolio for income today, or with a shorter horizon, will usually sit closer to Preservation.
How to use this: move the slider to where you instinctively feel your portfolio should sit today.
- Think about whether the position you chose reflects your actual financial position, or simply how you've felt about risk in the past.
- The two don't always match.
- That gap is often where the most useful conversations happen.
06 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Liquidity Premium
Some investments let you withdraw your money whenever you like. Others ask you to commit your capital for a fixed period (sometimes many years) in exchange for the potential of a higher return. This extra return is known as the liquidity premium, and deciding how much of it to capture is one of the most personal decisions in portfolio construction.
There's no right answer here either: it depends entirely on how much of your wealth you can realistically afford to "lock away" without it affecting your day-to-day life or your ability to respond to opportunities and surprises.
How to use this: drag the slider below to explore each point on the 1-10 liquidity scale, then use the allocation builder underneath to map how your own wealth might be spread across multiple points at once.
Build your liquidity allocation
Most portfolios don't sit at a single point on this scale. Instead, allocate percentages of your wealth across multiple points, for example 30% at 2, 60% at 5 and 10% at 10, to build a realistic liquidity profile.
- Think about your Personal Cash Buffer and Working Cash Account from the Family Cashflow section.
- Anything sitting beyond what those accounts need is a candidate for moving along this scale.
- Where would you set the slider, or split your allocation, for that portion of your wealth?
07 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Investment Instruments
With your Income/Growth split and Preservation/Growth and Liquidity preferences in mind, we can now look at the actual building blocks: the asset classes and structures that make up the portfolio. Broadly, every instrument falls into one of two camps: Defensive, which prioritise stability and income; or Growth, which prioritise long-term capital appreciation.
How to use this: click any instrument below for a short explanation of what it is and the role it typically plays in a portfolio.
Defensive
Growth
- As a rule of thumb, Defensive instruments tend to deliver more of their total return as income.
- Growth instruments tend to deliver more of their return as capital growth, usually with higher volatility along the way.
- The next section, Asset Class Performance, puts indicative numbers against each of these.
08 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Asset Class Performance Over The Years
Now we can put indicative numbers next to everything we've discussed so far. The tables below show how each asset class typically compares across investment period, liquidity, transparency, cost and expected returns. These are long-term, indicative ranges only; actual performance in any given year will vary, sometimes significantly.
How to use this: switch between the Defensive and Growth matrices, then click on any row label for a short explanation of what that measure means.
- Notice how Income Return and Growth Return combine differently for each asset class.
- Fixed Income delivers almost all of its return as income.
- Growth Alternatives deliver almost all of theirs as capital growth.
- Where your portfolio sits across these asset classes should reflect the Income/Growth split and Liquidity Premium positions we discussed earlier.
09 / Family Wealth Investment Fundamentals Workshop
Endowment Investing
Large university endowments and institutional funds have long allocated meaningfully to alternative investments (private equity, venture capital, hedge funds and real assets) alongside traditional shares and bonds. The chart below shows why: adding alternatives to a portfolio can shift the entire efficient frontier upward, meaning a higher expected return for the same level of volatility, or the same expected return for less volatility.
How to use this: each dot represents an asset class, plotted by its expected volatility (horizontal) and expected return (vertical). Click a dot for more detail, and use the toggle above the chart to compare portfolios built with and without an allocation to alternatives.
- The "Including Alternatives" curve sits above the "Excluding Alternatives" curve across most of the chart.
- This is the core argument for alternatives in a family portfolio: not that they're a free lunch, but that a modest, well-chosen allocation can improve the overall risk/return profile of everything else.
- The trade-off, as we discussed under Liquidity Premium, is that many of these instruments are illiquid and not transparently priced.
Up Next / Stage 2 of 4
The Risk & Behaviour Workshop
Today has been about the landscape: how your wealth is structured, how it flows between entities, and the building blocks available to construct a portfolio. The next workshop in your Investment Policy Framework turns the lens onto you and your family: how much risk you can genuinely tolerate and how you're likely to behave when markets get uncomfortable.