I have been thinking a lot about the word wealth lately.
My daughter just had a baby—my very first grandchild—and suddenly I find myself thinking about generations in a whole new way.
His name is Marshall Ballard VI.
Yes, the sixth.
Six generations of boys carrying the same name. Six generations connected by a name, a family, a history and a story that started long before this little boy arrived.
And as I sat in the hospital with Remi’s mother-in-law and Remi’s dad and Remi’s brother watching this new little person being loved on from every direction, I started thinking about generational wealth.
For most of my life, when I heard the words generational wealth, I thought about money.
Assets passed down. Property. Investments. Businesses. Trust funds. Things that make life a little easier for the generation that comes next.
And I used to think, Well, my kids aren’t going to have that.
Not because they won’t have anything. But because they aren’t inheriting generations of financial wealth.
But sitting in that hospital room, I realized I had been thinking about wealth far too narrowly.
Maybe generational wealth isn’t just what you leave your children. Maybe it’s what you give them.
And maybe some of the most valuable things we pass down don’t have a dollar sign attached to them.
It’s family.
It’s knowing there are people who will show up.
It’s having grandparents who can’t wait to hold the baby.
It’s having a mother-in-law sitting beside you in the hospital.
It’s having a father who is there.
It’s having people who will rearrange their lives when you need them.
It’s knowing that when life gets messy, you don’t have to figure it all out alone.
Baby Marshall came three weeks early.
Remi and Marshall were in the middle of remodeling and moving into their new house, and to put it mildly, the timing wasn’t exactly according to plan.
The house wasn’t quite ready.
The baby was.
So both sides of the family jumped in.
People started figuring things out. Helping. Moving things. Making arrangements. Doing whatever needed to be done so that when this little boy came home, he would have a home to come home to.
And as I watched all of this happening, I thought:
This is generational wealth.
Not the kind that shows up on a balance sheet.
The kind that shows up when your daughter needs you.
The kind that shows up when your grandson arrives earlier than expected.
The kind that says, Don’t worry. We’ve got you.
I think there is something incredibly powerful about knowing you belong to something bigger than yourself.
To have people who came before you who loved you, and people who will come after you who you get to love.
To be the person pouring into the next generation while also being held by the generations that came before you.
That’s wealth.
And maybe our job isn’t just to leave our children money.
Maybe our job is to leave them people.
People who know them. People who support them. People who celebrate them. People who will answer the phone at 2 a.m. People who will bring dinner, hold the baby, help with the house, listen to the hard stuff and celebrate the good stuff.
People who make them feel like they are never alone.
Because money can create opportunities.
But love creates security.
And I think about Marshall VI and those five boys who came before him. He has inherited more than a name.
He has inherited a story.
And now we get to add another chapter.
Someday, I hope he understands that one of the greatest things he was born into wasn’t a house, a bank account or anything that can be measured.
It was a family that showed up.
A family that loved him before they even knew him.
A family that will pour into him, and hopefully, one day, he will pour that love into someone who comes after him.
Maybe that’s what generational wealth really is.
Not just what we leave behind, but what we pour forward.
And if that’s true, then I think I might be a lot wealthier than I ever realized.
XX,
MG