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:
- Because Jose is older than Natalia, he’s likely to die first. If they don’t deal with this before he dies, they’re leaving a mess for Natalia, and the children might lean on her to change her will after Jose is gone.
- If the children are surprised by this estate plan, there’s a chance they’ll sue. The provisions involving Jose’s assistant are especially likely to cause the children to consult a lawyer.
- Discussing your plan with your children isn’t the same as debating it—you’re not giving them a vote. The goal should be to inform them, reduce surprise, limit conflict, head off litigation, and help the grandchildren prepare for their role in the new foundation.
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.
The Topic So Many of Us Avoid
I see evidence of our reluctance to deal with death planning in other areas of my professional life. I’m a faculty member at Harvard Business School, and most of the MBA students I teach are in their late twenties. Each fall I teach a class on family enterprises that touches on estate planning, and during the first meeting I ask a simple question: “How many of you have a will?” Around five percent of the students raise their hands. Then I ask a follow-up question: “How many of you have children?” About 20 percent raise their hands. That always blows my mind. If you have a child but don’t have a will with guardianship provisions, you’re allowing the state to decide who will raise your children if you and your spouse die. Students who get into HBS are hyper-responsible rule-followers, and it’s telling that so many of them have skipped over estate planning—which I consider an integral part of being an adult.
According to Gallup, in 2020 just 46 percent of Americans had a will in place. The numbers were higher for older, more affluent, and white people, with just 28 percent of nonwhite adults and 20 percent of people under thirty reporting they have an estate plan in place. I sometimes meet young married couples who have a prenuptial agreement but no wills. As I tell them, “So you have a plan in case you divorce, which you hope won’t happen, but you don’t have a plan for what happens when you die, which is guaranteed to happen?” That combination is irrational, but it’s not unusual when you mix the topics of money and death.
Even realists who recognize their mortality tend to avoid talking about it because death is a downer. Additionally, many of us don’t like talking about money under any circumstance—in many families, the subject is taboo—and estate planning invariably involves money. Finally, there’s a fundamental misconception that estate planning is an expensive process that’s necessary only for older and wealthier people. This view is completely wrong. If you own anything of value or have taken on debt, you should have a will. If you have pets, you need a will to spell out who becomes responsible. Ideally, young people should get a simple will as soon as they reach the age of eighteen. Many states have made it nearly automatic for people to register to vote or become organ donors when they get their driver’s license, and in a perfect world, creating a simple will would become part of the process too.
I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t help people construct the legal documents that are the end result of estate planning. Instead, I urge them to communicate more openly about the process. Here are the general points I make in my teaching and advisory work on this:
- Silence shifts burdens onto survivors. When people avoid talking about death, they leave loved ones to make decisions under stress—often without guidance, context, or clarity about intentions. Introduce a conversation about it this way: “I don’t want you to have to guess what I wanted.”
- Estate planning involves communication, values, and emotions. Documents matter, but conversations about relationships, priorities, and trade-offs are what allow others to act with confidence after someone is gone.
- Talk early, revisit often, and be willing to go slowly or repeat yourself. Life events—marriage, divorce, illness, business changes—alter what people want. Regular conversations prevent outdated plans from creating confusion or conflict. (My husband and I revisit our estate plan every five years, if not more frequently.) And remember that some people find conversations about finances to be confusing, so try to keep it simple and repeat key points until they’re understood.
- Frame these discussions as acts of care, not negativity. Talking about death and inheritance is a way of protecting relationships, preserving dignity, and reducing uncertainty for those who will live with the consequences.
Helping One Family Have This Conversation
I put that advice into practice when Jose, Natalia, and I met with their four adult children in 2025 to bring their estate plan out into the open. We met over two days, for a total of sixteen hours, at the family’s home. Going into the meeting, I’d expected the children to react negatively to the revelation that they would inherit no additional money—and they did. In fact, their emotional reactions dominated the meetings. Natalia and her daughters cried. The sons each periodically walked out to cool off. We’d planned a group dinner at the end of the first day, but the sons refused to attend.
The children were incensed that their parents made such important decisions without their input. They were hurt by the sharp constraints the parents put on how involved the children could be in the new foundation (reserving the bigger roles for younger grandchildren). They suspected Jose’s assistant had manipulated him into giving her such an influential role. They decried their parents as “sneaky” for having carried this secret around for years. Even the provision that left the family’s homes to the children struck them as manipulative; in their view, by forcing them to share the homes, the parents were trying to coerce the children to spend time together after their death.
Jose and Natalia left the meeting with mixed emotions. They were disappointed in the children’s reactions—in particular, that they seemed unappreciative of the $25 million gift each had already received. They were disappointed that instead of accepting the news, the children focused on revisiting the decisions, repeatedly asking, “Is this really final?”
At the same time, both Jose and Natalia felt an overwhelming sense of relief to have their estate plan finally out in the open. If Jose dies before Natalia, she will no longer be left to explain these choices by herself. Now that the family understands that most of the assets will go to a foundation that will largely be controlled by the grandchildren, everyone involved can begin training the young people for their new roles.
Like many of the situations I face with complex estates, this one doesn’t contain a “happily ever after,” but it does qualify as “better than it was before.” And I have hope that the family will heal because everyone is still alive to discuss the decisions that the parents have made.
Why This Matters Beyond One Family
How families handle this affects more than the people named in the will. Cerulli Associates estimates that $124 trillion will change hands in the U.S. through 2048, and much of it sits inside family businesses that employ people and support their communities. In the new Wells Fargo study, among a subset of respondents whose families own businesses, two-thirds of business owners’ adult children expected the company to pass to them or their siblings, but fewer than one in five owners actually planned to do that. Most expected to sell the business or wind it down instead of passing it on to their families. That’s a 48-point gap between what parents are planning and what their children are counting on, and in many families, nobody has said it out loud. When that kind of surprise comes out after a death, it can lead to lawsuits and rushed sales, and employees end up paying for a conversation that never happened. That’s why I’d like to see more parents start these conversations while they can still explain their choices, and more children feel free to ask one simple question: “What is my responsibility?”
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