Inside Baby G’s First Deal: What Generational Wealth Actually Looks Like I Put My One Year Old On a Multi Million Dollar Deal. Here Is Why.
We closed on a large, class A apartment community in Jacksonville a few months back, a deal worth tens of millions of dollars with several hundred units, the kind of resort style property that takes a full room of lawyers and lenders and about a year of work to actually get to the closing table. That part of the story is not new to me. I have been part of a lot of these closings.
What was new is what happened after we got the keys.
My daughter Georgia was one year old at the time. She was there for it, mostly asleep in someone’s arms, completely unaware that anything was happening. And on paper, she became an owner of that building. Not a beneficiary somewhere down the line. Not a name on a list of people who might inherit something someday.
An actual owner, that day, at one years old, of a real, cash flowing asset.
I want to be specific about the mechanics, because they matter here. Most of the deals I do, I take a slice of the equity and put it inside the irrevocable child trust I set up for her, the same kind of structure I have written about before. This deal was different. This time her ownership sat outright, held through a custodial structure in her name rather than the trust, so there was no separate trust document standing between her and the asset. I wanted her to be the actual owner of record on at least one of these, not just the beneficiary of a structure holding something for her. Same idea financially. Different feeling entirely.
She is, as far as I know, the youngest owner in that entire complex. Every other unit owner in that building is an adult who wired money and signed documents they read and understood.
My daughter cannot read. She cannot sign anything. She just owns a piece of a several hundred unit apartment building in Jacksonville, and she is going to keep owning it while she grows up completely unaware, for a while, of what that actually means.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. Every deal I close, I am thinking about her future, not mine. That is not a line I say for the camera. It is genuinely how I evaluate a deal now. Does this asset make sense to hold for thirty years. Would I be proud to still own this when she is old enough to understand what I handed her. Deals that fail that test do not get her name attached to them anymore, no matter how good the numbers look on paper.
I did something similar with my nephew a little while later, my sister’s son, seven years old and had no idea it was coming. His mom did not even know. We put a share of another building into a trust for him on the spot, in front of everybody.
That is not charity. That is just how I think family wealth should actually move, while everyone involved is still alive to see it happen, instead of waiting on a will to sort it out someday.
People ask me all the time how you actually build generational wealth instead of just talking about it. Talking about it is easy. People do it at every dinner party in America, and most of what gets said is honestly just bullshit until somebody actually puts a name on paper. This is what it looks like when you do that. It is not a spreadsheet. It is not a hypothetical. It is a one year old who owns a piece of real estate and does not know it yet, and a plan already in motion for the day she finds out.
I will be straight with you, this only works if you actually do it and do it right.
It is easy to feel good about the idea of building something for your kids. It is a completely different thing to actually put their name on a closing document and mean it.