Household Finance: Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth.

Household Finance: Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth. San José de Costa Rica, October 17, 2022. How Billionaires Lose It All, https://youtu.be/PZfVuFTueGo

Hugues wrote in a book in 2010: Family Wealth: Keeping It in the Family--How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations. I would have loved my eight great-grandparents to have had that knowledge. Every day in Latin America and throughout the world, family wealth is diluted and even disappears.

That is why in families that wealth has been lost, it must be recovered again. What do you do to achieve this long-term goal? What I do is study permanently, I have been studying since I graduated for the first time in 1983 as a mechanical engineer.  

The Catalans do know how to maintain family wealth. My family's experience since 1420 is that the Can Vilagut estate (Masia) has passed from generation to generation in its entirety. Can Vilagut is a work of Molins de Rei (Baix Llobregat) included in the Inventory of the Architectural Heritage of Catalonia.

On July 4, 1368, Peter III (Peter the Ceremonious or the Dagger, also called Peter IV of Aragon and Peter III of Catalonia-Aragon) made a decree in favor of Berenguer Relat, who was already lord of the town of Molins de Rei, transforming the fortress of Ciuró into a fortified castle, including the town of Molins de Rei, the farms of Ramon-ça-Torre (Can Vilagut) and that of Bernat Bofill (Can Bofill). From here, this farmhouse appears continuously in the town of Molins de Rei.

Farmhouse with a rectangular plan covered on two sides that pours water onto the main facade and is enclosed by a patio. It consists of a ground floor and two floors. The ground floor has two barred windows and a stone-framed door in the middle, bearing the date 1867. The first floor has a balcony and two windows, and the second floor has an attic. In the middle of the facade, there is a sundial with the date 1768. On the west side of the farmhouse, there is another small farmhouse attached, which is the house of the farmers.

My great-grandfather Julio Vilagut, father of Julio, my grandfather, and godfather, made great wealth at the beginning of the 20th century, however, it did not pass on to the next generation because for some reason the company did not reinvent itself.

The great-grandfather first founded a theater company that burned down in Peru or Bolivia. He then dedicated himself to exploiting rubber from Brazil to England. The mistake was not reinvesting in another activity when the wealth of natural rubber ran out due to the British who stole the seeds of the rubber tree and planting them in Asia. Many fortunes were made by white gold, then gone.

Rafael Vilagut, ravilagut@ymail.com is a digital entrepreneur, author, researcher, educator, trainer, and teacher. He lives and works between Caracas (Venezuela), Barcelona, Madrid (Spain), and Central America (Costa Rica). LINK: https://linktr.ee/ravilagut