How to talk to your adult children about their inheritance

Older Americans really don’t like talking to their adult children about inheritances, a new study suggests.

About two-thirds — 68% — of parents age 55 or older with at least $500,000 in investable assets haven’t told their grown children what they’ll inherit or if they’ll inherit anything at all, according to Fidelity Investments’ 2025 Family and Finance Study. Roughly a third, 35%, don’t want their children to know how much they’ll get.

Reluctance to divulge estate plans is common, financial advisors say. Reasons can include concerns about demotivating their kids or starting conflict, or even just an unease with discussing money in general, said certified financial planner Mitchell Kraus, founder and principal of Capital Intelligence Associates in Santa Monica, California.

“But avoiding the conversation usually creates bigger problems later,” Kraus said. 

The Fidelity study involved parents ages 55 and older with at least $500,000 in investable assets and whose children are ages 25 to 54, as well as a matched sample of adults ages 25 to 54 who have a living parent age 55 or older with at least $500,000 in investable assets.

The bulk of those adult children — 95% — say they’re ready to manage inherited wealth, Fidelity found, even though 25% of their parents disagree.

There’s an estimated $124 trillion that baby boomers — those born from 1946 to 1964 — and older generations will pass on between 2024 and 2048 as part of the so-called great wealth transfer, according to research from Cerulli Associates. Of that amount, $105 trillion is expected to go to heirs, and the remainder to charity. More than half of that $124 trillion is expected to come from people with at least $5 million in investable assets, according to Cerulli.

Financial advisors typically recommend discussing your estate plans with your adult children — even if you only offer a broad overview.

“We generally recommend they at least tell their kids how the assets are going to be divided,” said CFP K.C. Smith, managing associate at Henssler Financial in Kennesaw, Georgia, which ranked No. 46 on CNBC’s Financial Advisor 100 list this year.

“You can share some basic information about the structure of your estate plan, but you can keep the exact numbers undisclosed if you think it would be problematic,” Smith said.

An estate plan isn’t only for the rich. In basic terms, it should include not just a will that dictates where you want your assets to go, but also who gets powers of attorney for financial decisions if you are unable to handle them on your own, as well as a living will, which specifies your wishes for end-of-life health care.

There is a particular situation when it may be best not to discuss plans with an adult child, said certified financial planner David Kozlowski, president of Verus Financial Partners in Richmond, Virginia, which ranked No. 8 on the CNBC Financial Advisor 100 list this year.

It’s “when they are still enabling their adult child,” Kozlowski said.

If the goal is financial independence, “discussing inheritance with children that retirees are still supporting will lead to more dependence on their parents, not less, in our experience,” he said.

Additionally, it may be harder to want to share information about unevenly passing on your assets — i.e., one sibling getting more or less than the others. However, financial advisors generally recommend getting the conversation out of the way to avoid conflict after you’re gone.

“When parents explain the thinking behind their decisions, adult children almost always respond better, even if the plan isn’t perfectly equal,” Kraus said. “It gives them context and prevents that classic moment down the line when someone asks, ‘Why did Mom do this?’ at a time when no one can answer.”

There also may be another reason to avoid talking about exact numbers, Smith said. “Just because there are ‘X’ dollars today, it doesn’t mean it’s going to look like that at death,” he said.

Circumstances will change, Smith said, and it’s impossible to know how dramatically. “If something happens that we had not projected, then the [inherited] amount could be substantially different,” Smith said.

However, if the inheritance is likely to affect the child’s estate or tax planning unexpectedly, it may be worth giving them a better idea of what’s coming their way.

It’s also a good idea to include some other key estate planning information with your adult children, such as who do they call if something happens to you, where is the will or trust document stored — “things like that so they aren’t scrambling when they obviously are going to be grieving and doing an estate settlement, which can be complicated,” Smith said.