There's a version of this business where you spend 30 years building a relationship with a client, manage their wealth carefully, plan their estate with precision, and then watch everything you built walk out the door the moment they pass away. Their children don't know you. They have their own advisors, their own opinions, their own instincts. And no matter how sound your strategy was, the relationship wasn't deep enough to survive the transition.
That outcome is entirely preventable. But preventing it requires a different orientation - one that starts not with the transfer of wealth, but with the purpose of it.
At Great Point Wealth Advisors, we manage our clients' portfolios according to what's known as an endowment model. The idea is straightforward: a client's current spending is designed to be sustainable in perpetuity. The principal doesn't get drawn down - it stays steady, ideally grows modestly each year, and eventually passes to the next generation largely intact. What that means in practice is that from the very beginning of the planning relationship, we're already thinking about where this wealth is going.
That changes the conversation in meaningful ways. It forces us to understand the client's full picture - not just their current income needs, but their values, their intentions, and ultimately, who comes next. Lots of times the beneficiaries are children. Sometimes it's charity. But in either case, the planning for what happens to that principal can't be an afterthought. It has to be baked into the work from the start.
And so the conversations about the next generation aren't reactive. They don't begin at the reading of a will. They begin years, sometimes decades, earlier - while there's still time to do meaningful planning and while the relationships that will matter most can be built on solid ground.
One thing I've come to appreciate deeply is how much the age and readiness of the beneficiary matters. There's no universal playbook. A 28-year-old coming into a meaningful inheritance faces a completely different set of challenges than a 58-year-old who has spent their career building their own financial life and suddenly finds themselves in line for something substantial.
On the younger end, we're having conversations about the basics - how compounding works, what a portfolio is designed to do, how our investment process might connect to what they're trying to build in their own lives. We'll sometimes sit down with a client's adult child in their 20s or 30s just to go through their 401(k), explain how we think about risk, or help them understand the decisions their parents are making. It's not about giving them a roadmap to an inheritance. It's about making them feel included and building the kind of foundation that makes harder conversations easier later.
On the older end, the work looks different. When the beneficiaries are in their 50s or 60s - which, honestly, is the most common scenario for many of our clients - we're having a different conversation. Most of our clients aren't looking to make things easy street for their adult children. But if someone is going to come into a significant amount of wealth, they deserve to know that. They should have the opportunity to make their plans accordingly. There's nothing more disorienting than turning 70 and receiving a large inheritance when you spent the previous two decades making decisions that would have looked entirely different had you known what was coming.
The other thing I feel strongly about is the way we introduce ourselves to the next generation - and specifically, the setting in which we do it. The first time you sit down with a client's children cannot be at a moment of grief or crisis. If the first substantive conversation happens because their parent has died or been moved to assisted living, you're starting from scratch at the worst possible moment.
What we try to do instead is build the relationship in advance, in comfortable settings, where the stakes are low enough that people can actually absorb what's being discussed. We follow the client's lead on how deep they want to go. Some families are very open - they want the kids in the room early and often. Others prefer a more gradual introduction. Either way, our job is to make that process as easy as possible.
I'll be direct: one of the most satisfying things I do in this business is help clients give away as much as they legally can while they're still alive. There are real tools available to accomplish this - annual gifting, grantor retained annuity trusts, and a range of other strategies that operate entirely within IRS guidelines. There's a lot of confusion among clients about how gifting actually works. Many believe that giving more than the annual exclusion amount triggers immediate taxes for the recipient. It doesn't. It simply reduces the lifetime exemption - and understanding that distinction unlocks a lot of planning possibilities.
With current exemptions sitting near $30 million per couple at the federal level, there's a meaningful window right now to make substantial gifts before the political and legislative environment potentially shifts. That window won't always be open. Advisors who are paying attention to that and helping clients act on it are delivering real, measurable value - the kind that shows up not in a quarterly statement, but in what a family actually keeps.
That's the work that gives me the most pleasure. And it's the work that clients remember.
Peter V. Disch is Founder and Managing Member of Great Point Wealth Advisors with offices in Boston and Hingham, MA.
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