I want to be clear upfront: this one is for the parents. I will be writing a separate piece for your kids directly, and I will tell you when to send it to them. But this one is the conversation I have with the generation doing the planning, not the generation inheriting the plan.
Most families wait too long to start this. And I do not mean too long in some abstract sense. I mean that the conversation about stewardship of wealth, about what the money is for and what it will take to manage it responsibly, usually does not happen until a health event forces it. A diagnosis, a hospitalization, a will that suddenly needs to be updated. That is not a good time to be having this conversation for the first time. The emotions are already high, the time pressure is real, and the people who need to hear it most are not in the right state of mind to actually absorb it.
What Readiness Actually Looks Like
When I think about what a well-prepared heir looks like, I am not primarily thinking about financial literacy in the technical sense, though that matters. I am thinking about emotional maturity with money, an understanding of the family’s values around wealth, and a willingness to engage with the plan rather than just benefit from it. Those things develop over time and through deliberate conversations, not through a single estate planning meeting where the kids sit in the corner and sign documents they do not fully understand.
A ready heir is curious. They ask questions. They have some interest in understanding what they are going to be responsible for, not just what they are going to receive. They can talk about money without it being either taboo or purely transactional. And they have shown some evidence in their own lives of the ability to delay gratification, to distinguish between what they want right now and what is actually good for them.
Red Flags Worth Paying Attention To
The red flags I watch for are entitlement without context, which is wanting the benefit of the wealth without any understanding of what it took to build it. Avoidance of financial conversations is another one. If every time the topic comes up your adult child changes the subject or gets visibly uncomfortable, that discomfort needs to be addressed before a transfer of wealth makes it worse. And then there is the pattern of spending that does not reflect any awareness of consequence. Those things are not character flaws, necessarily, but they are signals that more groundwork needs to be laid before anyone signs anything.
Something We Actually Do
I want to mention something we have built at Napier that I think speaks to this directly. We created a 12-month curriculum for client families, structured financial education designed specifically for the next generation. It started with younger family members, and honestly, some of them were arguably a little young for parts of it, but the response from clients was immediate and real. Parents wanted their kids to have a framework. They wanted someone other than themselves to be the authority in those conversations, because those conversations are genuinely hard to have within families.
The point is that this kind of preparation does not happen accidentally. You have to build it, and you have to start before you feel like you urgently need it. If you are not sure how to approach this conversation with your own kids, that is not unusual and it is also completely fixable. In the next piece in this series, I will be speaking directly to your adult children. Feel free to send it to them when it drops.
