Wealth Succession Planning
Contents
Trevor L Taylor, a Miami private investor and the founder of Fortius Capital, lists investment thinking for life decisions among his speaking topics. Wealth succession planning applies that kind of thinking to one of the largest decisions a family faces: how money, businesses and authority pass from one generation to the next. It covers wills and trusts, but its harder parts are human. Who will lead, who will own, how the heirs will be prepared and how the family will keep talking once the founder steps back.
The scale of the transfer
The numbers are enormous. CNBC reported on a Cerulli Associates estimate that $124 trillion is projected to pass to family members and charity by 20481, with roughly $2.5 trillion a year already changing hands. Most of the largest handovers are still a decade or two away, which gives families time, and also tempts them to wait.
That scale explains why succession has become a central topic for the family office industry. Offices exist in large part to keep a family’s wealth intact across generations, and a badly managed handover is one of the quickest ways to undo decades of work.
The planning gap
Surveys keep finding that many wealthy families have no formal plan. The Wharton Global Family Alliance survey found that only a third of family offices had plans for ownership, management and control transitions2, and only a third of family stakeholders knew those plans existed.
The UBS report for 2025 found a somewhat higher figure, with just over half of family offices reporting wealth succession plans for family members3. Among those without a plan, a common reason was the belief that there was plenty of time to make one.
Communication before documents
Lawyers and accountants can draft documents quickly. The slower work is conversation. Fortune reported on research showing that parents and heirs are barely talking ahead of the transfer, and that nearly half of surveyed heirs said the previous generation conducted no structured wealth transfer at all4. One next generation leader told researchers that the tax and technical side had always been well covered while the human side was much less clear.
Wharton professor Raffi Amit, who leads the alliance behind the survey, described succession planning as a safeguard for a family’s legacy and harmony. The point is that a plan nobody understands protects very little. Families that hold regular meetings, share the broad outlines of their holdings with adult children and explain the values behind major decisions tend to find that later transitions go more calmly, because the heirs have already absorbed the reasoning instead of discovering it in a lawyer’s office.
What heirs want
The next generation does not always want what the founder built. CNBC reported that heirs surveyed for one global study favored diversified assets, private markets and cryptocurrencies over traditional holdings5, and that advisers saw family disputes as the biggest threat to preserving wealth.
Those differences belong in the plan from the start. Some families set aside a portion of capital that the younger generation manages under its own rules, with clear limits, so that new ideas can be tested without putting the core holdings at risk. Others invite heirs onto the investment committee as observers years before they gain a vote. Either approach turns disagreement about strategy into a structured conversation, and it gives the older generation a chance to see how the successors handle real decisions. A succession plan that assumes heirs will keep every holding unchanged is likely to fail on first contact with their own priorities.
When the asset is a company
For many families the main asset is an operating business. Fortune reported on Bank of America research projecting that in 2026 the share of businesses inherited among wealthy Americans would reach 23 percent, against 11 percent purchased6, reversing an earlier pattern in which more businesses were bought than inherited.
A business adds a layer that money alone does not. Someone has to run it. Harvard Business Review, drawing on work with more than 2,500 families, noted that 25 percent of failed transitions stem from the lack of a prepared heir7, and described the common tension between a younger generation eager to take control and a founder reluctant to let go.
Governance as structure
Families that plan well often turn informal habits into structure: a family council, a written constitution, an investment committee with outside members, and clear rules on who may work in the business. Offices can also reorganize to match the next phase. Bloomberg reported that a founder of the Swiss firm Partners Group was carving out an independent unit within the family office that had managed the founders’ fortunes8, an early sign of his succession planning.
Splitting a shared office, as the entry on single and multi family offices explains, is one common way branches of a family gain independence without breaking the whole. The same logic applies to trusts, holding companies and foundations. Each should have a named decision maker, a stated purpose and a process for replacing the people who run it. When those details are missing, the entity often ends up controlled by whoever happens to be closest at the moment of a death or illness, which is rarely what the founder intended.
Preparing the successor
Research on successors points to experience and authority. Knowledge at Wharton cited studies by Wendy Handler showing that the more fulfilled successors are in their careers and personal lives, the more positive their succession experience9, and that greater influence over the business tends to make the handover smoother.
A study of 100 next generation family business leaders and 350 of their colleagues found that a shared vision for the family business strongly affected how effective those leaders were10. Building that vision takes years of involvement, which is why the best plans start long before anyone retires.
Putting a plan in motion
A practical sequence follows from the research. Families first record who owns what and who decides what. They then explain the reasoning to the heirs, give successors real roles with growing authority, agree in advance how disagreements will be handled, and revisit the plan as circumstances change. Tools such as the premortem help a family imagine how a handover could go wrong before it happens.
None of this guarantees harmony. It does change the odds. A plan should be judged less by the elegance of its trusts than by a simple test: whether the next generation understands it, accepts it and is ready to run what it inherits.
