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This column by program speaker Emily Green originally appeared on Ellevest Insights
It’s no secret that money is deeply personal. When you factor in money across generations, it becomes a family affair. Generational wealth (and the planning around it) is often talked about conceptually, but too rarely with the candor, thoughtfulness, and tact that it needs.
And it’s an important topic to address. Over the coming years, the United States will witness one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history. By 2030, American women are expected to control much of the financial assets coming down from the Boomer generation.
But both endowing and receiving wealth can get complex. Families need to navigate through their preferences about types of investments, a broader strategy or philanthropic purpose, or even a particular investment advisor. Those things, carefully chosen by one generation, might not feel right to the next. And it’s these differences in preferences that tend to create fault lines across generations — where intention and execution often get muddled.
As a financial advisor on Ellevest’s Private Wealth Management team, my responsibility is to serve as a bridge between generations. With this kind of planning comes a tremendous opportunity to understand each other and collaborate.
Why is generational wealth so complex?
Some of the complexity can lie in the form of the wealth itself. If it’s mostly passed on as cash, a beneficiary has a clean slate to create their own legacy … but that’s not how things are usually done. Typically, when wealth changes hands, it’s in the form of what created the wealth, such as a business or an investment in a company — really, anything but cash.
Here’s a scenario to consider: A young woman graduates college and begins a career in sustainable engineering — a long-time passion of hers. She learns that her grandparents have endowed a stock portfolio to her. But to her surprise, the stocks are businesses that don’t exactly jibe with her idea of sustainability. Her immediate intuition is to sell out of everything in the portfolio so she can begin fresh with her own, values-aligned investing.
She tells her family of her decision, which triggers frustration and panic. They interpret her desire to sell as being ungrateful, and they worry about the tax implications of selling out of holdings without a plan. The family asks their financial advisor to help manage the situation. The advisor makes the case for not indiscriminately selling out of the portfolio. But he fails to deliver an action plan for diversifying the portfolio into more sustainable investments over time. The family finds itself at a stalemate, and everyone’s frustrated.
Strategies for navigating the fault line
Understand the market, past and present. Today’s financial landscape is very different than it was even one or two generations ago. When I look back to my grandparents’ prime earnings years in the 1960s, energy companies were highly valuable, in addition to the likes of IBM, General Motors, Kodak,\ and General Electric.
In 1990, consumer staples like food and household products represented the largest part of the S&P 500 at 14% of the index, while technology represented only 6.3%. Now, information technology companies alone represent more than 29% of the S&P 500, and the household names are Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia and Alphabet (aka Google).
Why the history lesson? Whether you’re endowing or receiving generational wealth, it’s important to understand the backdrop: when and how wealth was created, and how that differs from today’s environment. Knowing which companies were seen as the “right choices” then (and how that’s changed) helps everyone see into the decision-making process. That understanding can spur empathy — a great communication tool.
Lead with data
The experience of the young engineer and her family boiled down to failed communication — the intentions on each side just weren’t clear enough. It’s easy to point to communication as the solution to all intergenerational issues, but it’s harder to actually talk effectively. Family meetings alone won’t get you there. In reality, discussing wealth across generations is like having a conversation in different languages. And sometimes, these issues can bring up a lot of emotion, which can make communication harder.
In these situations, the Ellevest team likes to use data as a starting point for sharing different visions and purposes around wealth. Leveraging data helps to take a lot of the emotion out of the conversation; it also levels the playing field — because numbers are numbers. Data helps a lot to make each person’s preferences more tangible and valid.
In the case of the young engineer, we would advise her to use data to show why her investment portfolio is at odds with her passion and profession. Maybe she can share information about the amount of hazardous waste her share of these companies is producing, or their metric ton ownership of carbon emissions.
In the case of the elder generations, we’d work with the family’s tax advisors to find data about the tax implications of selling out of these stocks without a plan. We’d also work with the tax advisors and the engineer to develop an annual tax budget that she could use to transition to a more sustainable portfolio over time.
Align investments with philanthropic giving
One way for generations to collaborate around wealth is by aligning investments with their values around giving. Capital is a powerful force, and when we invest, we participate in a powerful recycling of that capital.
But if we’re not intentional about our investments — if we don’t know or don’t understand what we own — we risk misusing that power if our investment capital conflicts with the human, social and philanthropic capital we provide to society.
This is an important consideration for philanthropic-focused families. Far too often, I’ll look at a family foundation’s investment portfolio and see company holdings that are at direct odds with the family’s broader giving strategy.
Talking about that family focus on giving, and working together to make this alignment a priority, anchors generations across a shared set of values. It can also catalyze younger generations to be not only beneficiaries of wealth, but stewards of it.
Use your advisor as the bridge
Your financial advisor should be the bridge between your family’s generational gaps. In my opinion, this is where the advisor to the engineer’s family fell short. He had been a trusted advisor to the elder generations for decades, but he wasn’t taking the next generation’s preferences seriously.
Even when it comes from good intentions, the inability to collaborate with both generations can lead to frustration across the entire family.
The wealth advisory industry is also set to change dramatically in the coming years. Over the next decade, 37% of financial advisors plan to retire. Families should use this time to develop a relationship with an advisor who can strike a balance across generational needs and can act as that bridge.
That means looking for someone with a background in investing who can collaborate with estate planning advisers, who is technologically savvy and able to communicate in many ways and on many platforms, and who knows about impact investing.
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