Are the children ready, and how would you know?
They are capable adults everywhere else in their lives. Inside the family wealth, nobody has defined their part. Preparing them is not paperwork. It is a set of conversations most families keep deferring.
Ready is built, not inherited.
The fear is usually one of two: that the children are not ready, or that preparing them will create entitlement. Done properly, preparation does the opposite. It replaces mystery with responsibility. Four things, in plain terms.
Information
They know what exists, where it sits and what it is for. Secrecy is not protection. It is deferred conflict.
Capability
They can read the family’s affairs well enough to ask a good question of a specialist, and to know when an answer is thin.
A defined part
Everyone knows which decisions are theirs, which are shared and which are not yet, so nobody is guessing at their own role.
Relationships that hold
The family can disagree about money and still be a family at dinner. This one is built slowly, and only through practice.
They learn what you model, not what you leave.
I grew up inside a family business. My parents never sat us down to “teach money”. They simply lived it in front of us, and that was the education.
Every family is already teaching money, whether or not it means to. What gets discussed openly and what gets whispered about; who gets asked and who gets told; whether a mistake is a lesson or a scandal. The children have been taking notes for decades. Preparation starts with noticing what the family has already taught.
One question does more work here than any structure: What money values do you hope to pass on, and how are you living them?
Nobody puts a date on it.
Succession is long-form procrastination. Everyone agrees the conversation matters; nobody owns the calendar invite. The children assume the parents will raise it. The parents are waiting for the right moment. Years pass.
The intervention is smaller than people expect: one conversation, with a date on it, designed so nobody is ambushed. Not the whole estate plan, just the first conversation. Part of my work is building that conversation so it goes well: who is in the room, what is on the table, what is explicitly not yet up for decision.
“The eldest runs her own company. The youngest is still finding his feet. The will treats them identically, and nobody has ever said the word ‘inheritance’ out loud at dinner.”
Begin before it is urgent.
The families who do this well start earlier than feels necessary, and are glad they did.
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