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Families

How do I set my kids up without setting them adrift?

Planning for a family means holding two timelines at once: funding education and protecting income now, while structuring what eventually transfers later. We help you fund what matters today without borrowing from your own retirement, keep beneficiaries current, and bring the next generation into the conversation early enough that it takes.

As a parent or grandparent, you’re not only pursuing your own aspirations, but guiding your children towards their own success.

This is where multi-generational planning starts. We help you fund what matters now, structure what transfers later, and bring the next generation into the conversation early enough that it sticks.

Parents outdoors with their children on a bright autumn afternoon

The decisions that actually matter now

  1. Education funding against retirement funding

    There are loans for college and none for retirement. That does not mean education comes second, but it does mean the trade-off should be explicit and modeled rather than settled by whichever bill arrives first.

  2. How education money is held

    A 529 grows tax-free for qualified education costs and, since SECURE 2.0, unused balances can be rolled to a Roth IRA for the beneficiary within specified limits and holding requirements. Whether that structure fits depends on how likely the money is to be needed for something else.

  3. What breaks if an income stops

    Coverage should be sized to the gap — the mortgage, the years of education still to fund, the income that would have to be replaced — not to a multiple someone quoted. For most families at this stage that is term insurance, and the sizing matters more than the product.

  4. Who is named on what

    Beneficiary designations override your will. Guardianship provisions only exist if someone drafted them. Both are quick to fix and easy to leave undone for a decade, and both decide what actually happens.

What working together looks like at this stage

Multi-generational planning is the part of this work Will cares most about, and it starts earlier than most people expect. Not because the transfer is imminent, but because the habits, the structures, and the conversations all take years to settle — and the families where it goes well are the ones that started before it was urgent.

Practically, that means a plan we build in eMoney covering both timelines, an estate structure we map and visualize in Wealth.com so you can see where things actually go rather than trusting a document you signed once, and a tax path that accounts for what your children will inherit and what it will cost them to receive it.

It also means we are happy to sit down with your adult children. Inheriting money without any context for it is how a generation of careful saving gets undone in a decade, and the fix is a conversation rather than a trust provision.

What we see go wrong

  • Beneficiary forms a decade out of date

    Named on the account, not in the will — an ex-spouse, a deceased parent, or nobody at all. This is the single most common defect we find, and it takes an afternoon to correct.

  • Education funded at the expense of retirement

    Parents routinely underfund their own retirement to avoid their children carrying loans, then become the financial obligation those children plan around twenty years later.

  • No estate documents at all

    Without a will, the state decides who raises your children and who receives your assets, on a schedule written for the average case rather than for yours.

  • The first money conversation happens too late

    If the first time your children hear how any of this works is at the reading of the will, the plan is doing its job legally and failing it in every other respect.

Families

Questions we get asked

  • There are loans for college and none for retirement, which is why the trade-off should be modeled explicitly rather than settled by whichever bill arrives first. Parents who underfund their own retirement often become the obligation their children plan around twenty years later.

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