Strategic Guidance for Multi-Generational Families
Managing wealth across generations isn’t just about protecting assets—it’s about safeguarding your legacy. At Mercer Advisors, we collaborate with families like yours to craft tailored plans that help to ensure long-term financial continuity, foster family harmony, and facilitate transitions of both wealth and leadership as seamlessly as possible.
Table of Contents
Why Generational Wealth Planning Is Different ↓
Legacy Wealth Strategies for Complex Families ↓
Specialized Services for Generational Wealth ↓
Preparing Future Generations for Leadership ↓
Estate & Tax Considerations for Long-Term Stewardship ↓
Why Generational Wealth Planning Is Different
Generational wealth planning goes beyond finances. It’s about integrating wealth with family dynamics, governance, and values. It’s a long-term strategy that addresses:
- Comprehensive Planning: Combining trusts, complex portfolios, and philanthropic initiatives to work toward legacy goals.
- Family Alignment: Establishing governance frameworks to foster unity and maintain focus on shared priorities.
- Tax Efficiency and Privacy: Preserving wealth through tax minimization strategies while maintaining discretion.
- Flexibility: Adapting plans to the evolving needs of future generations.
Partner with Mercer Advisors to help safeguard your legacy, foster family harmony, and ensure a sustainable future for generations to come. Let us help simplify the complexities of wealth management so you can focus on what truly matters: your family’s enduring success.
Legacy Wealth Strategies for Complex Families
Creating an enduring strategy for generational wealth requires careful planning and collaboration. Some key approaches include:
- Dynasty Trusts and Family Limited Partnerships: These help to ensure asset protection and long-term sustainability while minimizing tax exposure.
- Charitable Giving Vehicles: We can help determine whether using donor-advised funds or family foundations will help you make a more meaningful impact—while leveraging tax benefits.
- Liquidity Management: Our goal is to help ensure you and your family have a plan for consistent cash flow to help maintain financial stability.
- Advisor Coordination: We understand you may have several advisors you’d like to continue working with. We’ll bring together your estate attorneys, CPAs, and family office executives—or use our in-house solutions—to help align all aspects of wealth preservation.
Specialized Services for Generational Wealth
- Crafting portfolios for multi-generational stability
- Facilitating governance frameworks for family unity
- Providing strategies to maximize discretion and privacy
- Addressing complex liquidity planning needs
- Optimizing estate and income tax strategies
- Integrating charitable giving into legacy plans
- Coordinating trusted advisors for comprehensive execution
- Involving younger generations to support long-term stewardship
Mercer Advisors is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice to clients. All estate planning document preparation and other legal advice is provided through select third parties unaffiliated to Mercer Advisors. Tax preparation and tax filing are a separate fee from our investment management and planning services.
Preparing Future Generations for Leadership
Successful legacy planning doesn’t end with financial strategies. It extends to nurturing leadership within the family. By equipping future leaders with knowledge and guidance, we help to secure a generational transition as seamlessly as possible.
Here’s how:
Education and Mentorship
Providing younger generations with financial literacy training to help ensure responsible stewardship.
Succession Planning
Developing clear plans for leadership transitions in family businesses or trusts.
Governance Frameworks
Defining roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes to help prevent conflict.
Encouraging Involvement Without Entitlement
Helping younger members find their place within the family’s legacy constructively.Estate & Tax Considerations
for Long-Term Stewardship
Estate and tax planning are pivotal in securing family wealth for future generations. These actions help minimize tax liabilities while seeking to preserve the wealth your family has built.
Key areas of focus include:
- Generation-Skipping Trusts: Passing assets directly to grandchildren, thereby minimizing taxation and helping to ensure long-term growth.
- Estate Tax Planning: Strategizing around tax thresholds to help protect valuable assets.
- Specialized Coordination: Collaborating with tax advisors to proactively address exposure and implement effective long-term strategies.
Solutions Tailored to Investors Like You
Managing generational wealth requires more than investment oversight—it calls for strategic coordination across estate, tax, and investment planning. These solutions help you protect what you’ve built, align your family’s financial strategy, and prepare the next generation with clarity and confidence.
Generational Wealth Planning Checklist
Preserving wealth across generations takes more than good intentions—it takes a clear, actionable plan. This checklist highlights foundational steps that help families create alignment, minimize risk, and build a strategy that helps to support both financial and legacy goals across multiple generations.
FAQs for Multi-Generational Families
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Ultra-high-net-worth families focus on aligning their wealth with core values to instill purpose and stewardship in future generations. Proactive, values-driven planning helps families overcome the common challenge of losing wealth within three generations.
Successful families emphasize education, purpose-driven conversations, and structured governance. A family wealth vision that details shared goals like innovation, philanthropy, or entrepreneurship helps align investment and giving decisions with your family’s core values. Open communication, such as family meetings discussing your wealth’s origin and purpose, also helps ensure heirs are prepared for leadership roles.
Ultimately, preserving generational wealth is about passing on wisdom, intention, and purpose—transforming wealth into a tool for lasting impact, identity, and unity across generations.
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Families can minimize estate taxes through strategic structures like dynasty trusts, generation-skipping trusts, and family limited partnerships. These tools help shield assets from direct taxation while ensuring long-term protection and sustainability.
Charitable giving vehicles, such as donor-advised funds or private foundations, also provide tax-efficient options for transferring wealth. Additionally, effective estate planning often includes leveraging exemptions, setting up gifting strategies, and coordinating with estate attorneys and tax advisors to optimize tax thresholds and manage liabilities.
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Preparing children to inherit responsibly involves fostering financial literacy, instilling shared family values, and encouraging purposeful stewardship. Structured mentorship and gradual involvement in wealth decisions help them transition into leadership, ensuring they view inheritance as a shared legacy, not just financial gain.
Begin by teaching heirs the principles of saving, investing, and philanthropy. Create open dialogues about the origins and intentions of family wealth, emphasizing its role as a tool for impact and responsibility. Establish governance frameworks that define roles, promote collaboration, and discourage entitlement. The most helpful hint is to simply involve children in financial decisions to nurture accountability.
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Advisors help ensure strategic alignment across all aspects of financial and legacy planning. Preserving wealth across generations is as much about intention as it is about finance. While sophisticated structures like dynasty trusts, GRATs, or SLATs are foundational for mitigating taxes and safeguarding assets, they represent just one part of the equation.
Family office planning extends beyond these tools to focus on creating a shared purpose, fostering family governance, and aligning wealth with core values. By blending intention with strategy, advisors to families with generational wealth help them not only transfer assets but cultivate the judgment, confidence, and purpose needed to evolve their legacy and help protect the wealth over time.
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Yes, if your family mission statement or wealth vision involves philanthropy. We’ve found that most families do prioritize charitable giving, as it fosters shared family values while providing tax benefits.
Tools like donor-advised funds, charitable trusts, and private foundations allow you to align your philanthropy with your values while creating lasting impact. These strategies also offer significant tax advantages, helping to reduce estate taxes and maximize the assets passed to heirs.
