I Rejected Wealth Protection. It Gave Me Wings.
How leaving my family office and redistributing my inheritance set me free.
Published in Modern Women on Medium May 28, 2026
By Katherine Hayes
It hit me while having dinner with a cousin who serves on the board of Andersen Corp., the company our great-great grandfather founded: As I told her about my exit from my family’s wealth protection pillory, I felt wings growing from my back. I sensed she felt trapped, as I had. But now I was liberated.
In the days following that dinner I realized how grateful I was to be on this path. Growing up in a family with considerable wealth, I was taught that preserving and perpetuating our fortune was not just a financial responsibility, but also a moral one. I’ve unlearned all of that and moved on to encouraging others to grow their own wings.
Mine developed through a series of learning opportunities and years of experience and reflection. First, my branch of the family decided to sell our shares of Andersen Windows when I was in my 20s. Then I worked within the family office and learned the systems of wealth protection. And finally, I gained the courage to leave the family office and redistribute my wealth in line with my values. Each stage nourished my wings.
The Hatchling Stage: Immersion
Once we sold our Andersen shares, we set up a family office to manage the proceeds and oversee a family foundation established by my grandparents. The many family trusts were moved into a private trust company in South Dakota, a tax haven for wealth holders.
When my family office was formed, I eagerly joined as the only family staff member among professional asset managers. Immersed in the office culture, I gained an insider perspective on how money grows and the systems designed to perpetuate wealth.
For 13 years I worked as the portfolio manager for my family’s investment partnership. Filling a role within the family office gave me a tangible connection to the money, which had a profound impact. I hadn’t earned it, but now I played an important role in maintaining and growing that money. It was self-esteem boosting. Though it was nepotism, it was a real job!
I ate up the corporate culture. Business casual attire, exercising over lunch, having a paid parking card I could use on the weekends. I showed up every day and did the work. And I learned first-hand the mechanisms used to defer capital gains tax and reduce one’s tax burden through philanthropy. I was proud of our 15-year track record of paying nearly zero in capital gains tax annually.
I fully embraced the mindset of wealth preservation and created systems that made the work more efficient. I believed in trusts, the importance of purchasing power, and avoiding taxes. I also made mistakes and took the heat. It felt great to be more connected to my inheritance. But my immersion in the system began to produce a germ of discontent.
Feather Development: A Turning Point
I was confused by the office staff’s reaction to my mom’s work funneling most of her inheritance into her community (Bayfield, Wisconsin) through social benefit entrepreneurship and by creating and supporting local nonprofits. The office staff put my mom on a leash and required her to ask three times before they would fund a request from her. They said she was too generous and created too much risk to returns.
But I saw it differently. My mom chose redistribution despite enduring harsh criticisms because it enhanced her quality of life. Instead of playing like the typical inheritor she paved the way for angel and catalytic investors before our culture had the terminology to describe that behavior. I had a growing admiration for how she had lived her life, and I saw her as aligning her wealth with her values.
My mom’s modeling also opened up a different view of the impact we had on communities—such as South Dakota. I was uncomfortable from the start with the use of South Dakota’s tax haven laws when the Native American reservations there were so underserved by their state government. Overseeing the trust company that held our assets in South Dakota gave me a clear perspective on these inequalities. Billions of dollars pour through South Dakota Trust Companies but residents, especially Native Americans, see little benefit from that wealth.
Eventually, I left my position in my family office to pursue changemaking work. But I remained the Trust Company Board Chair and participated in the governance of the family office and family foundation. That sparked the next stage in my evolution.
Flapping: Learning New Things
We had written an equity lens statement to guide our philanthropy but hadn’t done so on the investment side. I asked for an equity inventory of our investment partnership and the CIO highlighted Illumen Capital and their spinoff Impact Experience, which invited investment professionals to walk through the history of how white capitalism extracted from black bodies. From that shared understanding they asked, “What can investment professionals do to create more equity in the finance realm?”
I opted to participate in an Impact Experience cohort, and the first feathers began to sprout on my wings.
The Impact Experience program and other realizations about how the wealth gap in the U.S. was created began to shift my money morality. Not being in the office every day and pursuing personal endeavors that brought me closer to my community decreased my interest in wealth preservation. I wanted to give more mindfully and deepen my understanding of the relationship between donors and nonprofits. This marked the beginning of the end for my wealth protection mindset.
As I engaged more deeply with nonprofits, I witnessed the purse-string relationship between donors and grantees, and the burdensome grant application and reporting expectations. I disliked site visits and the expectation that nonprofits would put on performances for donors. It felt wasteful and patronizing. So in 2021, with my mom in my heart (sadly, she had passed away in December 2020), I began attending several more cohort learning sessions, hosted by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, among others. Through these I discovered the value of relationships based on trust and observing what nonprofits were already doing, rather than demanding special reporting. I began rejecting the hoarding mentality and power imbalance inherent in traditional philanthropy. I also started to question the value of my family foundation as well as the family investment partnership.
One cohort led to another, and I was invited to become a fellow of the Just Economy Institute (JEI) in 2022‒23. During the fellowship, I realized how trapped I felt in my family office’s wealth preservation systems. This gave me the courage to announce my intention to leave my family partnerships. I thought it would be a relaxed process, but I couldn’t have predicted how difficult the protective structures would be to dismantle.
Flight: Exiting the Nest
The difficulties began when the family office staff resurrected an old exit policy requiring a withdrawal fee. It hadn’t been ratified in a decade, and I felt their action was extremely punitive and meant to dissuade me from leaving. I considered legal action, believing the policy was unjust and concerned about the reduction in funds I intended to redistribute.
But when I explained my dilemma to another JEI fellow, Ana, she said, “Get out of there for your own sanity; it’s not about the money!” Later, facilitator Akaya Windwood reminded me that my worth wasn’t tied to the amount I extracted, but to my willingness to leave and share my story. This shifted my perspective, validating my struggles and giving me a sense of purpose beyond protection of the money.
Until this point in my life, I experienced my net worth as a challenge to my self-worth. I hadn’t earned the money I inherited, and that made it hard for me to take ownership of it. Also, not needing to earn money created a challenge to my experience of esteemable acts. Even when I did achieve something, there was always the question of whether the money had made it easier. Akaya’s counsel gave me a way to see myself in a different relationship with money. She and others also helped me see that choosing to leave my family partnerships was the harder path, and this path was not made easier by the money; in fact, the money and the structures meant to protect it were what made it so difficult. I could actually see the esteem in this action!
Strengthening: The Escape from Wealth Protection Structures
My family office benefitted from economy of scale, combining the assets of three generations: my grandparents’, my mother’s, and mine. When I announced I wanted to exit, I underestimated the feelings attached to my threat to this economy. Operational costs that were being shared six ways would now be shared only five ways. And to compound the impact, the assets under management were reduced, resulting in less compensation for the office staff. As a result, I was considered selfish for leaving. The majority of my family members were upset that I had disrupted the status quo—more concerned for their financial situation than they were proud of me for taking the hard path of following my own values.
In addition to the emotional separation that resulted, there was the task of separating my shares of my family’s investment partnership and spending down my portion of my family’s foundation. The structure we used in our family office combined all the entities’ assets (personal or trust) into one stock portfolio and several other investment vehicles. Part of the separation was just complicated math, but some aspects required detailed negotiation. Realizing I couldn’t exit alone, I assembled a team—a philanthropic consultant, an investment advisor, two lawyers, and two accountants—to help me navigate the process.
The challenge of exiting increased when I decided to move the situs of my children’s and my trusts to Delaware. This change required court approval and therefore all beneficiaries needed legal representation—even those who were not yet or might never be born! I was required to hire a guardian ad litem to represent my unborn grandchildren’s legal rights and protect the current trustees from a potential future lawsuit in the event my potential future grandchildren didn’t agree with the change of trust situs. Seriously. I had to pay $150,000 for this person to show up in court three times for an hour—money I would much rather have distributed to my community. The situation freshly reminded me of how the system is designed to sequester wealth within a bloodline.
It took all of 2023 to fully exit, and in 2024, I felt dazed and confused, needing time to process my newfound freedom and grieve the cost to relationships. Joining the sixth cohort of the Impact Collective, a Boston-based program aimed at helping women align their wealth with their values and reduce the racial wealth gap, helped me process the transition. Gradually, I began to enjoy making decisions independently and embracing my agency—the growth reflected in my lengthening wing feathers.
Some of this freedom was hampered by the need to pay down debt incurred in leaving the partnerships. I also paid the capital gains taxes I had legally avoided for 25 years. I felt real feelings of fear and scarcity watching the graph of my net worth decline in a steep vertical line after making these payments. The reality that I still had more money than I needed soon crept in again, however, and the 30 percent reduction in my net worth actually boosted my self-worth. I felt I had settled my tab with society, no longer exploiting loopholes unavailable to most.
Growth: A New Consciousness
The experience of each of these milestones gave me the strength to question old family morals. My family has always been philanthropic—I was invited to sit on the family foundation board in my mid-20s. I did not enjoy the role, however. We were told “To whom much is given, much is expected.” I found it confusing that I was expected to feel ownership of money I hadn’t earned and then exercise agency in giving it away. It wasn’t until many years later that I would realize I was right the whole time.
To add to the confusion, I was raised to believe that talking about money was taboo. And that sharing my money was dangerous and would ruin relationships. After the risk I felt exiting the family wealth structures, I had confidence in taking greater risks and began sharing my inheritance with friends. It started in small ways—giving away my car, paying a friend’s rent—and these gestures gave more depth to our friendships. My mutual aid has grown to include paying off two friends’ debt, as well as giving considerable amounts to total strangers during the ICE occupation in Minnesota in 2025 and 2026. These acts have been the wind beneath my self-esteem wings. I finally feel whole.
It has become clear to me that the money I inherited, earned through systems set up to extract from many to benefit the few, isn’t mine to keep. I have been given the privilege to redistribute all that I don’t need. This realization sooths discomfort I have felt since I was a child, as soon as I could see that some of us had more than we needed and others not enough. I was taught to ignore those observations, and I was a good student. But now I believe my experiences as an inheritor and family office staff member uniquely position me to invite other wealth holders to make choices and manage their wealth in ways that reflect their values, not the dominant culture’s.
I believe the time is now to recognize that wealth hoarding is contributing to the harms in our society, including the racial wealth gap and other social justice imbalances. Participating in something greater than oneself is a powerful fuel of life satisfaction. Realizing I don’t need to work to protect my inherited wealth—that to share it is a privilege that improves my relationships with friends and my community—has increased my sense of satisfaction and happiness immeasurably. Anyone care to fly with me?