Family Wealth · 6 min read
Is Your Family Ready for What You Leave Them?
The documents are the manageable part of passing on wealth. In a twenty-year study of 3,250 families, roughly seven in ten transitions failed — and the causes were communication, preparation, and purpose rather than tax or legal structure. Readiness means the people who will inherit know a plan exists, understand its reasoning, and have heard what the money is for. That conversation is easiest to have years before anything transfers.
What one long study found
Roy Williams and Vic Preisser spent two decades studying what happens to family wealth after it changes hands, publishing their findings in Preparing Heirs. Across 3,250 families, roughly seven in ten transitions failed, meaning the assets were substantially lost or the family fractured in the process. (Williams Group)
The more useful part of the work is the breakdown of why. The authors attribute about 60% of failures to a breakdown of trust and communication within the family, about 25% to heirs who were unprepared to handle what they received, and the remaining 15% to the absence of any shared sense of what the money was for. Tax and legal structure do not appear as a leading cause.
The study is not peer-reviewed academic work, and its definition of failure is broad. We cite it because it is the most substantial body of evidence on the question and because its central finding matches what practitioners see: the plans that come apart rarely come apart at the paperwork.
Seven in ten. The share of family wealth transitions in the study that did not survive the generation receiving them — with none of the three leading causes being tax.
Why the documents are not usually the failure point
A competent estate plan does its job. It moves assets to named people, it can reduce or defer tax, and it can hold property in trust for as long as a family wishes. Those are real accomplishments and they are worth getting right.
What a document cannot do is prepare a person. It cannot explain why one child received a business interest and another received liquid assets. It cannot teach someone who has never managed a portfolio how to think about one. It cannot resolve a disagreement between siblings that has been quietly accumulating for thirty years. The instrument executes a decision; it does not build the capacity to live with it.
This is why families are often surprised. They measure their readiness by whether the documents are signed and current, which is a genuine measure of something — just not of the thing most likely to determine the outcome.
What ready actually looks like
Readiness is not financial sophistication, and it does not require disclosing every number. In practice it tends to mean a few concrete things.
The people who will inherit know that a plan exists and roughly how it is shaped. They understand the reasoning behind decisions that might otherwise read as favoritism. Someone in the next generation has handled a real financial responsibility before inheriting one. The family has said out loud what the money is meant to support — education, a business, a place, a charitable commitment — so that the inheritance arrives with a purpose attached rather than as an unexplained sum.
Families that have done this work tend to describe the conversation as the difficult part and the paperwork as routine. Families that have not tend to describe the reverse.
Starting earlier than feels necessary
The common instinct is to wait: until the children are more settled, until the numbers are final, until a diagnosis forces it. Waiting is understandable and it is usually the wrong call, because the conversation is far easier to have when nothing is urgent and everyone involved can ask questions without a clock running.
The first conversation does not need to disclose a balance sheet. It can begin with intent — what the wealth is for, what the family hopes it makes possible, who would need to step in and when. Numbers can follow later, in stages, as readiness grows. What matters is that the plan stops being a document nobody has read.
How this may apply to your plan
If your estate documents are current but the people named in them have never seen or discussed the plan, that gap is worth closing while it is still comfortable to do so. The work is coordination rather than paperwork: aligning the documents, the tax picture, and the family’s understanding so that all three point in the same direction.
Sources and further reading
Next steps
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The views and opinions expressed here are those of The Financial Sciences Company as of the publish date and are provided for informational and educational purposes only. They are not personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. The Financial Sciences Company, LLC is a registered investment adviser. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Additional information is available in our Form ADV at adviserinfo.sec.gov.
General educational information, current as of 2026. Figures and rules change. For guidance specific to your situation, speak with a qualified professional.