4 Ways To Prepare Children Now To Oversee Their Inheritance Later

Aug 12, 2020

Problem Statement and Assumptions

Assumption: families with above-average amounts of assets/wealth pass their wealth down many generations.
Data: 68% of people with $30m+ in wealth are self-made; 24% - inherited and self-created; 8.5% - solely inherited. [a bit of rounding up here]
Problem: 70% of wealth ends on the 2nd generation; 90% - on the 3rd generation.
Parents may plan to pass down their wealth, but heirs may not be able to handle it.
Heirs get overwhelmed and underprepared.

It’s understandable that parents don’t want to spoil their children or think kids are not ready yet.
Emotionally hard to let go of the grasp on the money —> starting the transition process too late.
Failure to prepare the heirs for the responsibilities of managing an inheritance is bad for both the heirs and the assets.

Superstitions aside, people hate planning for family affairs after death.
Only 32% of Americans have a will and even less so – an estate plan.
Important to audit the tools to identify the assets and the most tax-efficient ways of passing them to the heirs.
If children are young —> find a guardian and make a plan to gradually pass the inheritance to them not to overwhelm them with the money.

Openness and honesty [age-appropriate and context-suitable] in communication about parent’s finances.
Get children involved in allocating money to charity and other expenses to give sense of responsibility and stewardship.

To discourage children from becoming “trust fund babies” make the inheritance distributions staggered based on milestones.
Encourage ambition and desire to establish careers [family business or otherwise].
[MK: explain the contents above to the children, too, so that they can repeat this process]