Liquidity is usually discussed as a market question. How much cash should be held, how quickly can an asset be sold, what happens if the timing is wrong. Those questions matter. But behind them is a more basic question: who is allowed to decide that the family needs money, and how quickly?
A long-lived pool of capital can hold illiquid assets because it has a reason to wait. That reason is not a feeling. It is an agreement about distributions, reserves, and the events that would justify selling something early. When the agreement is vague, every request becomes a negotiation, and the portfolio starts to carry a governance cost that never appears in a statement.
The work is to separate three things: the spending policy, the reserve, and the emergency decision. The spending policy says what the family expects to distribute in a normal year. The reserve says how much cash is held outside the long-term portfolio. The emergency decision says who can act, for what, and how the family will be told afterward.
None of this predicts a market. It does something more useful. It keeps a short-term need from quietly turning into a permanent change in strategy. That is a governance outcome, not an investment one.
A liquidity policy is a promise about how the family will behave when it is under pressure. Write it before the pressure arrives.