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It’s best to maintain financial independence from your wider family. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t support your kin when they’re in need, or that you should build walls between you. But it’s best to separate your concerns, and live self-contained lives if you can.

The alternative is the scenario I have encountered repeatedly: younger siblings left destitute by the eldest brother, with spiralling debts, creditors chasing, bailiffs seizing assets. It’s not necessarily that they set out with bad intentions, greedily hoarding wealth. It’s more that when hard times hit, desperation and fear causes people to act irrationally.

Brothers who worked together in the good times, developing the business left to them by their father, quickly forget those genetic bonds when their way of life is threatened. In a recession or cost of living crisis, the pressures are multiplied.

It’s not just your business that is struggling, but all your customers and clients too. You are reliant on them paying their bills, but they are also reliant on theirs. Meanwhile, the other way up the chain, you have mounting bills to pay. It’s a snowball, out of your control.

Something’s going to break, and unfortunately most vulnerable are your relationships. Big brother, usually managing partner in the enterprise through the good times, now has to put himself, his wife and his children first. He has to protect the family home. He has standards to maintain.

Thus do pooled family assets become his property alone. Shared investments are cashed in to cover his debts. Side businesses are sold on. Assets are sold off. And soon enough there will be a court case, disputing shares of inheritance going back years. If he plays it right, the eldest brother will emerge financially independent.

But his siblings? Mostly they face financial ruin. Some fear prison. Some lose the family home. Others, with creditors still chasing, contemplate suicide as the only way out. It’s not that they owe a couple of hundred, which might easily be paid off by a charitable relative. Their debts are in the millions, and those they owe money to have debts of millions too.

The growing conflicts seeded by these strains affects the entire family. The stresses cause physical and mental illness amongst parents, spouses, children. Hypertension and heart conditions become commonplace. Depression and anxiety multiplies. Conflict grows and grows.

The widowed mother is forced to take sides in the dispute, and will feel pressured to stand with her eldest son fearing that she will be left alone in old age. But in doing so, she alienates her other children, distraught that she stood with the unjust party, and now she has an anguish that will probably never heal, her face just one big perpetual frown.

Here a conflict that will probably never cease or heal. Here, relationships throughly broken, beyond repair. There is no way out, except through humility and forgiveness. But that requires a faith and generosity of spirit which will have been severely tried by now. These the trials and tribulations of life.

Having witnessed such a scenario repeatedly, I’m so grateful that as a family we live independent lives, each of us responsible for our own affairs alone. Those who live in tight-knit extended families may consider this a selfish declaration, but it is a view borne of those multigenerational conflicts repeatedly witnessed all around me.

Better to be able to give willingly, in charity alone, being good to others with sound intentions, purely for the love of it. Wealth is a great trial. Certainly, man is in his love of wealth intense. “Every nation has its trial,” as the prophet is reported to have said, “and the trial of my nation is wealth.”