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I helped a billionaire couple tell their kids they’d already received their inheritance. They didn’t take it well
On October 20, Wells Fargo released a study of affluent families that every parent with an estate plan should read.
Based on a survey of 800 Baby Boomers and 800 Gen X or Millennial children, the researchers found that 61% of adult children said inheritance had already caused problems in their families, from hurt feelings and arguments over fairness to estrangement and legal disputes. Only 29% of older parents said the same. Among the adult children, 49% believed inheritance conversations have the potential to trigger family conflict—which is one reason so many people avoid having them.
My book, Unspeakable, came out the same day as the survey, and that data provided an illustration of the book’s core idea in the book: Many families are avoiding conversations because they’re afraid of discomfort, even if this avoidance can cause harm. Estate planning is just one of the topics I cover in Unspeakable, but as I’ve traveled to give talks and answer questions about the book, it’s one that’s coming up most frequently.
In my work advising family businesses, I see this avoidance in various forms. In many cases, older parents hire my firm to help them inform their children about their estate plans. This is complicated work, but I find it fulfilling because I believe that in most cases, relationships become better when financial secrets are brought out into the open.
To help illustrate this, let me tell you about my work with a couple I’ll call Jose and Natalia.
Born and raised in Latin America, Jose was educated as an accountant and worked for investment banks before founding a wildly successful private equity firm. The couple, who now live in San Francisco and are in their eighties, have built substantial wealth. Their assets total over $1 billion.
They have four children in their fifties, all well-educated and financially independent. Years ago the parents gave each child a significant gift—about $25 million each. The family had never discussed the provisions of Jose and Natalia’s will, but the children have always assumed they would inherit most of the estate when the parents die.
Here’s the secret: They won’t. The children will be given lifetime use of the family’s home, which are to be placed in a trust with maintenance funds. But everything else will be used to fund a charitable foundation devoted to mental health and education programs, run by an outside adviser. Decisions will be guided by their eleven grandchildren, now in their twenties—who had no idea they’ll inherit this responsibility. Additionally, Jose has chosen his longtime executive assistant to vote his company shares going forward and has left her a substantial bequest—about $10 million at his death and $1 million a year thereafter.
Although very few families have this kind of wealth, many take the same secretive approach to estate planning. Children are afraid to ask about wills because they don’t want to appear greedy. Parents are reluctant to talk about them because they’re afraid the children will be disappointed. Neither party wants to initiate a conversation that’s bound to feel morbid.
Yet these conversations are becoming more urgent as older generations prepare to pass on enormous amounts of wealth. UBS’s 2025 Global Wealth Report estimates that more than $83 trillion will change hands worldwide over the next 20 to 25 years, passing between spouses and down to children. A 2025 Fidelity survey of U.S. parents age 55 and older with at least $500,000 in investable assets found that 70 percent had a will or estate plan, but 68 percent hadn’t shared inheritance details with their children. The silence risks leaving heirs unprepared for the responsibilities they’ll inherit with those assets—and the lack of transparency can also imperil relationships.
Jose was torn about how open to be with his family about estate planning. “I know at least one of my children will have a real problem with [my plan], and I don’t feel like dealing with the conflict,” Jose told me. (To protect client confidentiality, in addition to using pseudonyms, I’ve changed several other identifying biographical details in describing his family.) Over many months I tried to convince them to have a more open and candid conversation with their children about their plans. Here’s a condensed version of the points I made:
Even as I made these arguments, I was sympathetic to their viewpoint. In my own family, we haven’t always been direct about what we wish to happen when we die. When my grandparents died, we knew they wanted to be cremated, but we’d never discussed what they hoped we’d do with the ashes—so their remains sat in a closet in my home for seven years. (We eventually scattered their ashes in the places we thought each of them would’ve picked.) When my father died, I had no clue what was in his estate plan or where he wanted to be buried. His secrecy added stress on top of the grief I felt, and it’s part of the reason why, in both my work and my personal life, I urge people to communicate openly about their final wishes.
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