Preparing to Pass Wealth to the Next Generation? Here’s What to Look for in a Financial Advisor

If you’re starting to think seriously about how your family’s wealth will pass to the next generation, whether that’s prompted by an aging parent, a milestone birthday, or simply wanting to get ahead of it before it becomes urgent, you’re asking the right question at the right time. Passing wealth to the next generation is rarely just a legal or financial transaction. It’s also a family conversation, and the families who navigate it well tend to be the ones who started that conversation early.

What changes when multi-generational planning starts

Many advisors point to a familiar pattern: a family builds wealth over one generation, and it dissipates within a generation or two after that. The reasons are rarely just financial. Heirs who weren’t involved in decisions before receiving an inheritance, family members who never had a shared understanding of a parent’s intentions, or wealth that arrives without any context for what it’s meant to accomplish, these tend to unravel a legacy more often than poor investment returns do.

That means the work isn’t just updating documents. It’s building family governance, the structure a family puts around its own decision-making, so that everyone involved understands not just what they’ll receive, but why. In practice, that can mean regular family meetings, a shared document outlining the family’s values and intentions, or simply an ongoing conversation that keeps everyone informed rather than surprised.

What to look for in an advisor for this specific work

A few things matter more here than in a typical advisor search:

• Experience facilitating family conversations, not just drafting documents. Estate documents transfer assets. They don’t transfer financial literacy or the reasoning behind a plan. An advisor who can help bring the next generation into the planning process, at an appropriate point, adds something a document alone can’t.
• A long-term relationship model, not a single transaction. Multi-generational planning plays out over years and often across changes in the family itself, marriages, new children, a parent’s health changing. An advisor built around one-time engagements often isn’t well suited to this.
• Coordination across investment, tax, and estate planning. A family’s governance structure affects how a portfolio should be positioned and how estate documents should be drafted, so these can’t be handled as separate, disconnected pieces.
• A fiduciary standard, the same as with any major financial decision, it’s worth knowing whether the advisor is legally required to act in the family’s best interest.

How Apriem approaches family governance and legacy planning

Apriem coordinates investment management, tax planning, and estate planning as one ongoing relationship, which matters here because a family’s governance and legacy goals touch all three. As an independent fiduciary, Apriem’s role in these conversations is to help a family build a plan that reflects what they actually want, not to push a predetermined structure. That often means staying involved across generations of the same family, working with adult children as they’re brought into the plan, not just the generation that built the wealth.

Questions worth asking before you commit

Whoever your family works with on this, these are worth asking directly:

• Has this advisor worked with families across more than one generation, or mostly with individual clients?
• Does the advisor help facilitate family conversations, or only handle the technical documents?
• How does the advisor coordinate with the family’s estate attorney and CPA as the plan evolves?
• Is the advisor a fiduciary at all times, or only in certain parts of the relationship?