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 Regular conversations prevent outdated plans from creating confusion or conflict.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?”
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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I helped a billionaire couple tell their kids they’d already received their inheritance. They didn’t take it well 
