Breaking the Silence: Why Your Parents Won't Talk About Their Money (And How to Change Their Minds)
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Do you lie awake at night wondering what will happen when your parents die?
Have you and your siblings played guessing games to suss out how much your parents are worth?
Are you sure your parents are VERY rich, but you have no idea what that means in actual dollars?
I've got you covered.
This week in Heir Necessities I dive into that awkward money talk you've been avoiding with your folks. It's all about giving you the tools to break the ice and get the lowdown on your family's finances without starting World War III at the dinner table.
And I'm not just talking dollars and cents here – it's about getting the full picture of your family's legacy, values, and what might be coming your way down the road.
Let's face it, most of us never got a crash course in "How to Handle Your Family Fortune 101."
This podcast is your cheat sheet for navigating these tricky waters. Trust me, your future self will thank you for tuning in.
🗓️ Schedule a FREE 15-minute call to talk about whatever money questions are on your mind.
Transcript:
Welcome to Heir Necessities, the podcast that turns confusing financial lingo into real talk for millennial and gen Z inheritors. I'm your host, Katherine Fox. I'm a certified financial planner, a wealth manager and an inheritor, just like you.
In the next 15 minutes, we're gonna be talking about the money matters that keep you up at night. We're covering everything in the complex world of inheritance:
How to invest ethically, how to start money conversations with your parents, and even what to do when you're wealthier than everyone else you know.
I want you to stop managing your money by asking Google what to do, and let's get started demystifying your inheritance. On today's episode, we're talking about why your parents won't talk to you about their money.
Why your parents won’t talk to you about their money
To understand and frame this conversation, the first thing that we need to talk about is the messages that your parents are hearing from the people that they talk to. So this is your parents, a state planning attorney, their CPA, their financial advisor. And every single person that your parents are talking to is saying, you need to protect your money from your children. You need to put guardrails on this money. You want to make sure that your heirs can't go rogue. You want to make sure that you are protecting and
guarding every dollar that you leave to your children. And the primary thread that's weaving throughout all of these conversations is that you need to continue to maintain as much control over your wealth both now and in the future. This conversation is super damaging to families because instead of encouraging trust, encouraging conversations about the wealth transfer, encouraging conversations about family wealth and finances and passing that knowledge down across generations, what your parents is probably hearing is that everything can go wrong, you need to lock this money up and you need to protect it.
And so this is a big factor in terms of why they aren't talking to you about their wealth. Because every message that your parents are getting is a message of fear
You can't trust your children. If you give them too much money, they're going to be spoiled. If they know how much money you have, they're going to stop working. All of these things are predicated on the fact that when heirs learn that their families are wealthy, they're going to just throw up their hands and say, all right, well, I know mom and dad are going to give me money, so why do I need to even bother making my own wealth?
And this is true for some families. I'm not going to say that there aren't some inheritors who don't work or who haven't had to work because of family wealth. But the vast, vast majority of people and all of the clients that I work with do not fall into this camp. We're talking about people that are gainfully employed, that are paving their own way in life, and they still would like some visibility in terms of what the heck is going on in their parents' wealth.
How to approach money conversations with your parents
And that doesn't mean necessarily that they want a hard and fast number, but it does mean that they want to understand their parents' of life wishes, they want to understand their parents' estate plan, and they want to be able to plan for what might be coming to them. And this is not to be confused with treating your parents like a piggy bank or sort of counting down the days till they die because you're going to get this million, $10 million, however much money you're inheriting. What we're talking about is being able to
Plan for your future. Just like you know your parents are going to die. And you want to plan for the fact that your parents are going to die by talking to them again about their estate plan, about their end of life wishes, about what they want to have happen after they die. And just like you want to be having those conversations with your parents, you also want to have conversations with them about how their wealth is going to transfer. You want to know, is money coming to you in a trust? Who's the trustee going to be? How are they dividing assets between you and your siblings?
All of these things that can create huge issues down the road. And if you don't talk to your family now, then once your parents die, there's nothing you can do. Everything at that point has already been set in stone. But if you start having these conversations now, then you might actually be able to affect some change and be able to work through a constructive dialogue with your parents about how assets are gonna pass, what's gonna happen after they die, and what your inheritance might look like, even if you don't have a complete dollar value attached to that figure.
So that's what you want, and it's a totally reasonable thing. But let's go back to your parents and the messages that they're hearing. I've already talked about how they're focused on control, and the messages that they're getting from all of their advisors, both now and in the future, is about maintaining control. That's why wealthy parents amass so much wealth, and a lot of them don't give wealth away to their kids, even if their kids are struggling to buy a house to pay for college.
That you still have the parents generation that's hoarding wealth. And another piece of this whole puzzle is that your parents might not have evaluated your ability to handle these conversations since you were a child. And if you're struggling to figure out how to bring these conversations up with your parents, if you've tried and they just haven't been responsive, they haven't been willing to engage with you, I want you to remember that the last time that your parents decided to talk to you or not talk to you about family wealth, you are probably an actual child. And that's when they sort of set their mindset about what they would and wouldn't talk to you about.
Educating yourself about estate planning
And so if you want to make them see you as an adult and encourage them to see you as an adult who's willing to have these conversations, again, not because you're money grabbing, not because you're trying to pull money out of them, but because you're trying to plan ahead.
honor their wishes and honor their legacy after they're gone, then you need to come at your parents as an adult. And that means educating yourself, understanding what you're asking for, and understanding their objections to it.
let's walk through what this might actually look like in practice. You might have your parents saying, no, we don't wanna talk to you about the RRC plan, we're not comfortable with it. And if you think that they are saying that because either they're uncomfortable with it, they're uncomfortable with how you would react, they're uncomfortable with the amount of knowledge that you have then what I want you to do is to educate yourself.
Instead of saying generally, hey, I wanna talk to you about your estate plan, learn about the core principles of an estate plan for an ultra high net worth family. There are going to be trusts involved, both revocable and irrevocable trust. There's gonna be a will.
There may be some more advanced estate planning structures like irrevocable life insurance trusts, grantor trusts, generation skipping trusts. There could be quite a number of different trusts. There can be LLCs, there can be other business interests.
So I want you to do some reading. A great place to start is with the 20 terms inheritors need to know. You can grab it from my website at sonnybranchwell .com. And I want you to start reading up on the very basics of how the estate transfer process works. And when you have a basic understanding, I want you to go to your parents and say, hey, listen, I've been learning about this. I've been reading about wills and trusts. I've been reading about some of the ways that the estate transfer process can go wrong in wealthy families like ours, can we talk about your estate plan?
I really want to understand it because when you're gone, I want to know what's gonna happen. I want to know who I should be dealing with, what kind of structure I should expect, what sort of pitfalls I should be looking out for. And a great way to start is by asking your parents if they would be willing to set up a meeting between you and their estate planning attorney for their estate planning attorney to go over the basics of their estate plan.
This is a great way to start these conversations without your parents actually having to do any work and without having any numbers attached to anything because your parents estate planning attorney is gonna give you basically a flow chart that says, this is the estate up here, this is what happens when parent one dies, this is what happens when parent two dies, this is how assets all flow. And they don't have to have numbers or dollar values attached to any of it.
So it's a great way to bring your education into this picture with your parents and ask them, based on the learning you've done, to continue growing your knowledge. And that's going to be a really essential step as you work to make your parents see you as an adult and to understand that you aren't entering these conversations as a child, you are entering these conversations as an adult who wants to be a part of family.
The importance of family money conversations
Moving beyond your parents estate plan, it gets a little bit trickier because once you have the basics of their estate plan, you understand how assets are going to flow, who's going to inherit what assets and all of that. Now you're starting to get into conversations about money and all families handle money conversations differently.
You might be in a family that you know as you're listening to this right now that your parents are never going to tell you how much money they have. You can educate yourself, you can come at them as an adult, you can hire your own advisors, you can show you're mature. They are never going to give you a number, even a ballpark, because they are so invested in control, so afraid for whatever reason, you know you're never gonna get there.
And if that's where you're at, that's okay. It's the situation, it's the reality for a lot of inheritors, that they're just not gonna know what's coming. The best thing you can do is basically use context clues to try and figure out what kind of an amount it might be, and then to again, understand your parents' estate planning structure, how everything is gonna flow, and what you might be working through and working with as you move throughout the estate settlement and the inheritance process.
If you think your parents are open to money conversations, then the first step that I want you to take is just to bring up the idea of having money conversations with your parents. Not in a conversation where you are asking them about their money, but bring up the idea of asking them about their money. So say, hey, mom, dad, whoever you're dealing with, I know that we haven't talked about money.
I know we've talked about your estate plan, we haven't talked about any of the dollar values that are attached to that. I don't wanna talk about these things because I want you to die or I want your money, but it would be helpful for me to understand what kind of dollar values we might be dealing with when you die. Because right now I have no idea. And if there's gonna be a big surprise, either because it's much larger or much smaller than I thought,
I'd rather know that now so that we have a chance to talk through it and kind of plan and prepare rather than getting a surprise after you die and wondering why you didn't tell me about.
See where your parents go from there. They might just be willing to give you a ballpark. They might just be willing to say, you know, we're worth about $25 million and there you go. Or they might not be willing to talk about it at all.
Navigating the Inheritance Process and Planning for the Future
Or they might not be willing to talk about it. They might be willing to talk about it kind of bits and pieces on an account or an asset by asset basis rather than all at once. as you're going through this, again, depending on your relationship with your parents, an important question that I want you to ask them is why aren't you comfortable sharing this information with me? And I don't want you to ask this in an accusatory way. Like, why aren't you willing to do this? I want you to show genuine curiosity here.
I hear that you're really resistant to sharing this information with me and I know that it can be really hard to talk about money. I know we haven't ever had these conversations before. I want to understand why you feel it's important that I don't have this information. Why is it important to you that I don't know this? And hear what they say. I don't know what their response is going to be. I can think of a
Many different reasons just off the top of my head, but again, every family is different and every family is unique. And what you need to do is take the feedback that you get from your parents. Maybe it's, well, we're not comfortable talking about this. Maybe that's full stop. They wouldn't share it with anyone. It's not that it's you. They just literally can't say that number out loud.
Maybe they're afraid that if you know you'd stop working or you would give up your career because you have a vision of these millions of dollars that are just gonna land in your lap at some point in a later date. And whatever you hear from them, that's how you then need to approach these conversations in the future. So if they say, we're not comfortable talking about it with anyone, then ask them what steps they might be willing to take to get comfortable.
Do they need it modeled? Do you literally need to share about your money with them to just show what it looks like and make it kind of equal? Do they want to understand that you're committed to your career, that you're happy with your work, that you don't plan on building a life based on the inheritance that you're gonna get, that you're building based on your means, and that any inheritance would kind of be an additional, you know, happy and sad benefit?
The key point in all of these conversations is that when you are having these conversations with your parents, your parents are probably going to come into these conversations feeling adversarial because all of their professional advisors, their attorneys, their CPAs, their financial advisors have prepared these to be adversarial conversations, which to be totally honest is like well and truly fucked because this is a conversation about transferring generational wealth. And this is a conversation that shouldn't be happening within the family, but instead it's a conversation that's happening between your parents and their advisors.
So your goal is to bring this conversation within the family by showing that you're mature, that you're an adult, that you're interested in, that you're willing to have these conversations in a way that feels comfortable for your parents. The key point in all of this being that if you get upset, if you get frustrated, if you start lashing out, it's going to push your parents further towards their advisors because now what they had feared is coming true, that you're not mature enough to handle this, that it's going to cause family strife and all of that.
It's a little bit counterintuitive, but you basically need to be the parent in this situation and you need to parent your parents into an understanding of the safety in having these conversations with the family, the benefit of having these conversations with the family, and how it's gonna help both them and you as you move forward.
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. I hope this conversation was helpful to you. If you have any questions about starting these money conversations with your family, you can find all my information in the show notes below. You can contact me on Instagram via my website, schedule an intro call via Calendly. I'm always happy to chat about this or any other issues related to inheritance. I'll catch you next time.
Let’s take the next step together
Understanding how to talk to your parents about generational wealth is not easy. Inheritors can encounter a wide variety of different situations requiring knowledge and finesse to manage. If you need more help, you can reach out to Katherine Fox, CFP® and CAP®, a financial planner for inheritors to learn how Sunnybranch can help you understand and plan for your future inheritance, however your family situation looks.
