Families and the Next Generation

Brent O’Mara works with business owners and multigenerational families, and the entries in this subject follow the second half of that sentence: what happens when money, responsibility and expectation move from one generation to the next, treated as general education from published research.

The scale of the movement is the headline figure. The Urban Institute reports a projected $124 trillion changing hands between now and 2048, the largest intergenerational transfer on record, and adds two facts that get less attention: older adults without children often redirect wealth to nieces, nephews, cousins and close friends, and money also flows upward, from adult children to aging parents.¹ Fortune traced the same $124 trillion estimate to a June 2025 report and explained why it had grown: a restatement for inflation, the rise in asset prices between 2020 and 2023, and the fact that older households held 61 percent of national wealth by 2023; much of the money passes first to widows before it reaches children.⁶ The estimate has a history of its own. CNBC reported a 2014 Boston College projection of $59 trillion passing to heirs, charities and taxes between 2007 and 2061, and noted the skeptics who found little evidence of an inheritance boom in the data.⁴

Inside families the flow runs both ways at once. Pew Research Center found that 75 percent of Americans consider it an adult child’s responsibility to help an aging parent in need, that about half say parents owe the same to a grown child, and that 15 percent of adults between 40 and 59 were supporting a parent and a child at the same time.² NPR’s Life Kit put the starting point earlier than any document: deciding what matters, interviewing the elders while they can still answer, and writing wishes down so they do not die with the person.³ For the youngest generation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes milestones and conversation starters matched to a child’s developmental stage.⁵ Inherited accounts, gifts and estate arrangements vary with each family’s circumstances, and settling them is work for qualified financial, legal and tax professionals.

The entries in this subject are The Great Wealth Transfer, Family Meetings and Family Governance, Inherited Retirement Accounts, Teaching Children About Money, Blended Families and Estate Plans, The Sandwich Generation, Grandparents and College Savings and Cash Reserves in a Financial Plan.