What if we planned for flourishing, not just financial capital?
By Susan Weingartner
My parents with their grandchildren. Perfectly imperfect.
When I was a little girl, my father wasn't a wealth advisor. He was a stockbroker.
He spent his weekdays at the office and much of his time at home in his den. Most of what I knew about his work came through quarterly statements that, I swear, were written in a foreign language.
Once a year, we'd sit down and go through them together and invariably, I'd glaze over because I had no idea what I was actually looking at. It took me well into my adult years to finally understand a basic concept like the time value of money. And when I did, it was a total game changer.
While I had been exposed to wealth since childhood, that isn't the same as being prepared for it.
Over the course of my father's 33-year career, his firm merged a few times to become part of a multinational company, and the stockbroker became a wealth advisor. His evolution mirrored the industry's. What had once been largely about buying and selling securities became an increasingly comprehensive approach to managing wealth. Today, families have access to an extraordinary ecosystem of professionals helping them grow, protect, and transfer their financial capital.
With an estimated $124 trillion expected to change hands by 2048, I can't help but wonder:
For all the sophistication we've developed around preparing the capital, have we devoted nearly enough attention to preparing the people?
The three-legged stool
The world of wealth has long rested on three legs: wealth advisors, trust and estate attorneys, and CPAs. Together, these professionals help families navigate an increasingly complex financial world. Their work is essential, highly technical, and focused on the strategies and structures that manage and protect financial capital.
But wealth doesn't exist in isolation. It lives within families, within relationships, and within the hopes, fears, values, beliefs, and patterns that shape how people actually live.
None of that fits neatly into a spreadsheet or an estate plan.
Beyond the financial plan
Our industry has become exceptionally good at answering how. How do we grow wealth? How do we protect it? How do we transfer it efficiently? We spend far less time on why. What is this wealth actually for? What kind of lives, relationships, and legacy do we hope it supports?
I think most of us want to leave something meaningful behind. But we're busy. We're busy with the day-to-day living, work, kids' activities, travel, and everything else that fills our lives. And when we do find ourselves thinking about legacy, we often run up against patterns, beliefs, and expectations we've inherited from generations before us, without realizing how much those earlier generations still shape our decisions about wealth.
I've met families with sophisticated financial structures in place who are still worried about their kids. Worried that their children might not share their values. Worried that rather than bringing their family together, wealth might pull them apart. And in that worry, fear shows up. Fear that the kids might become entitled, dependent, or live lives that lack meaning and purpose. While there certainly may be validity in some of these concerns, I've discovered that when these emotions are left unexamined, they quietly shape the very plans we create.
Instead of designing for what we hope for, we design around what we fear. And the fear becomes structure.
From preserving wealth to flourishing
Years ago, while working in impact investing, I began noticing something that still stays with me. Women with significant financial resources didn't always feel seen or heard in decisions about their wealth. Next-generation wealth holders, despite extraordinary opportunities, were sometimes carrying guilt, shame, or uncertainty about what their wealth meant for their own lives.
So I began exploring these questions more intentionally, including leading investing circles for women focused on aligning their capital with their values. What interested me wasn't simply helping someone become a more confident investor. It was watching what happened when women began connecting their financial resources with what mattered most to them. The conversations became about much more than money and the women started to light up.
Then, in 2022, life brought these questions into sharp focus.
I affectionately refer to 2022 as my Year of Fire. It was the year I separated, divorced, lost my father after a six-week battle with pancreatic cancer, and lost my sweet cousin, who was like a sister to me, to glioblastoma. Sitting with my father and cousin in their final days were some of the most profound moments of my life. It was as if the world shifted from grayscale into full color.
What mattered most was sitting right in front of me. What filled those rooms wasn't assets, net worth, or investment returns. It was relationships, shared memories, love, and the legacy they would each leave behind. My father's integrity. My cousin's relentless positivity.
And that's when everything became more clear.
Legacy isn't simply what we leave behind. It's how we're living right now. It's how we show up in our relationships, the choices we make, the opportunities we create for others, and the conversations we're willing to have, or not have.
And as I began looking at the wealth advisory industry through this lens, I realized something. We have extraordinary professionals helping families manage their financial capital. But if we're not also asking how that wealth can help the people we love live meaningful, purposeful, connected lives, aren't we missing the entire point?
As Jay Hughes, one of the pioneers of family wealth thinking, reminds us, the very meaning of wealth is rooted in well-being.
Isn't it time we made flourishing central to the conversation?
Making the case for Legacy Advisory
Now, I know some extraordinary wealth advisors, attorneys, and CPAs who genuinely care about the families they serve. Many recognize how important these conversations are, and some are already doing aspects of this work. But there are real limitations. An estate attorney representing the parents has professional obligations that can limit how they engage with the children. Financial advisors may have more flexibility, but their expertise and the work they're engaged to do are generally focused on financial capital.
And these conversations aren't simply about money. They're about identity, relationships, expectations, purpose, and sometimes family dynamics that have been playing out for generations. Helping a family navigate all of that takes time, trust, and a different kind of process.
That's why I believe Legacy Advisory deserves its own seat at the table alongside wealth advisors, trust and estate attorneys, and CPAs. Think of it as the fourth leg of the stool. Financial advisors manage and grow capital. Legal and tax professionals create the structures that protect and transfer it. And Legacy Advisory focuses on the people who will live with those decisions. Their values, relationships, hopes, and the lives they want to live. It's about preparing the next generation for responsibility, navigating differences and transitions, and helping families make decisions that reflect what matters most to them.
I've seen firsthand what this work can make possible. I recently worked with a woman who was trying to get clear on what she wanted her family's legacy to look like. She had wonderful advisors and knew what mattered to her, but hadn't quite been able to put it all together. Through our work, she gained that clarity and took it back to her estate attorney and financial planning team.
What I loved was what happened next. She told me how quickly everything started moving once she was able to articulate what she actually wanted. Her advisors could take that clarity and put it into action.
That's the beauty of this work. It didn't replace her advisors. It made their work more effective. And I think that's an enormous opportunity, not just for families, but for the advisors who serve them.
Preparing the people
I've spent much of my career working with capital, raising it, investing it, and thinking about what it can make possible. And what I've come to recognize, through that work and through my own life, is that the real opportunity isn't simply helping families preserve what they've built. It's helping families get clear on what that wealth is for: for themselves, their children, and the generations that follow.
Sometimes that means helping a family have a conversation they've avoided for years. Sometimes it means helping a next-generation family member develop their own sense of identity, agency, and responsibility. And sometimes it begins with one person asking a question they haven't allowed themselves to consider:
What do I actually want this wealth, and this life, to make possible?
The goal isn't simply to prepare people to inherit wealth. It's to help them flourish with it.
A more complete approach to wealth
Families don't need fewer advisors, attorneys, or tax professionals. They need a more complete advisory ecosystem, one that recognizes that preparing capital and preparing people are different but deeply connected responsibilities.
A successful transfer of wealth isn't simply a matter of whether the assets arrive. It's what happens to the people, relationships, and lives touched by that transfer. The question isn't only whether the wealth will survive. It's whether the people will flourish alongside it.
I think back to those afternoons in my father's den, staring at financial statements I couldn't begin to understand. I had no idea that the world he was introducing me to would become so central to my own life's work.
My father spent 33 years helping families manage their wealth. In many ways, I've found myself continuing the work he began, from a different perspective: one shaped by the people I've met, the questions I've asked, and the profound experience of discovering what truly matters when life comes to an end.
We can prepare the most sophisticated financial plan in the world. But unless we also prepare the people who will live with it, we may miss the very thing that makes all that planning worthwhile.
Most families prepare the capital. I prepare the people.
If your family is ready to begin one of these conversations, Family Advisory is a private engagement designed to help families navigate questions of stewardship, responsibility, and preparing the next generation for what wealth asks of them.
Learn more about Family Advisory | Begin a Private Conversation
If you're an advisor in wealth management, estate planning, or tax, navigating these conversations alongside clients, I'd welcome that conversation too.
Susan Weingartner, CAIA
Founder, Weingartner Legacy Co.
A question to sit with…
If you could help the people you love truly flourish, what would you want your wealth to make possible?
It's a question worth exploring long before the wealth changes hands.
