Supporting the Next Generation as Grandparents
Family Wealth Planning
Welcoming a new child into the family is one of life’s most meaningful milestones. As your family grows, financial decisions extend beyond your own life and begin to shape future generations. For many of the families we work with, these moments surface when they become grandparents.
Here’s the question we often hear at these times:
How can we help in a way that actually makes a difference?
There’s no single right answer. Some grandparents choose to provide direct financial support. Others offer their time or simply a steady presence during a period that can feel overwhelming. What matters most is aligning your support with your broader financial plan and using it to genuinely help the next generation.
Your Role May Be Larger Than You Think
The first year of a child’s life introduces a new layer of financial complexity. Between childcare, health care and everyday essentials, costs can add up. Even high-income households often find the shift in cash flow surprising.
New parents may lack perspective on how these factors connect to the bigger picture. They’re making a series of first-time decisions. Often, they face time pressure and stress without a clear framework for how their financial decisions fit into their long-term plan.
As a grandparent, there are opportunities to have a meaningful impact here.
Sometimes support is financial. Helping fund childcare for a time, contributing to education savings or covering a specific expense. This may help relieve pressure during a demanding stretch of life. But other times, support is more human. For instance, starting conversations around budgeting, insurance coverage or saving priorities.
In both cases, your role is to help provide stability during a period of change.
Start With Your Own Plan
The desire to help is natural. But you should always start with your own financial position.
Supporting your children or grandchildren may be more effective when you coordinate it with your long-term goals. This means having clarity around the amount you can give, whether your support will be ongoing or a one-time boost, and how it fits within your overall estate and cash flow strategies.
For most families, this comes down to a few key decisions:
- Defined annual gifting amounts
- A specific purpose, such as education funding
- Time horizons for how long support will last
These decisions are intended to remove guesswork for you and help the next generation plan around what they will receive, rather than relying on assumptions.
Turning Support Into Structure
Combining financial help with clear expectations could be a path to providing effective support.
For example, some families consider education savings vehicles such as 529 plans. Helping cover childcare costs may open the door for new parents to continue retirement contributions or avoid taking on debt. Even a one-time gift can serve as a starting point for larger conversations about planning and priorities.
One challenge is that short-term expenses can quietly erode long-term progress. Families may let insurance and estate documents become outdated during this stage.
Focus on building a foundation that lasts.
A Resource You Can Share
For families navigating these early decisions, a clear starting point can be helpful.
That’s why we want to share our New Parent Checklist, which outlines key financial steps before and after a child arrives, from budgeting and insurance to education savings and administrative tasks.
You can share this resource with your children or loved ones as they prepare for this transition: Download a copy here.
This practical tool is designed to help them stay organized during a stressful stretch.
Where This Moment Fits in the Big Picture
Most families focus on the immediate costs—and for good reasons. But the habits families form now may last longer than the expenses themselves.
The arrival of a child is often the point where financial life expands from personal to generational. Your decisions in these early years can shape patterns that may persist for decades.
Your influence, whether direct or indirect, becomes part of that foundation.
For many of the families we work with, this is when multigenerational planning becomes real, and it’s something we focus on through our Wealth With Intention initiative.
Bringing It All Together
Supporting the next generation is about making thoughtful decisions aligned with your long-term wealth plan and values.
That may mean providing financial support. It may mean offering guidance. Often, it’s a blend of both.
If you’re thinking about how to support your children and grandchildren during this moment, your RWA advisory team can help you evaluate your options and align your decisions with your broader plan to help you create a lasting legacy.
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Fostering Financial Independence
Smoothing Wealth Transfer to the Next Generation
In part one of this series, we explored what you can do to help build financial literacy in the next generation—having conversations about values, encouraging early work experience and creating hands-on investing opportunities. On that foundation, the hope is that your children develop a genuine sense of financial identity, apart from what they stand to inherit.
That can be harder to build. And it requires thinking carefully about what you’re trying to impart and how to do it.
It’s perfectly reasonable to want to support your children throughout your lifetime, especially if you can afford it. We have worked with families with a wide variety of philosophies on the subject, and it’s our job to support your decisions as wealth managers and advisors. For the purposes of this article, we are assuming that, whatever level of support you’re comfortable offering, you want to help your heirs feel confident managing their finances independently, without an automatic safety net.
Financial Identity
Heirs who have never had to manage their own finances may end up uncertain or out of touch with their own capabilities. They may perform well by external measures—good jobs, responsible behavior—while privately wondering whether their opportunities were earned or simply available because of their family’s position. No trust document addresses that. They have to discover that on their own, but you can help.
Do your children believe they could support themselves if the family wealth weren’t part of the picture? Have you given them enough room to find out?
This question can make parents uncomfortable—and that discomfort is worth exploring. It might signal that financial support has been extended in ways that felt generous in the moment but may have narrowed the path to genuine independence. For many parents, it’s natural to want to help your kids—to spare them from a difficult choice or missing out on an opportunity that’s not quite in their budget. But this could also set up a cycle where assistance is assumed, hampering independence.
Support Versus Subsidy
For some families, there may be a meaningful distinction between targeted financial help and ongoing supplemental income. Helping an adult child with a down payment, a graduate degree or a professional credential is different from routinely filling gaps in their monthly budget. The former supports a specific goal at a specific moment. The latter can skew perceptions about what your children are actually earning and spending. It may mean they sidestep important financial lessons about affordability and budgeting for wants versus needs.
Can your children clearly distinguish what they’ve built from what they’ve been given? Would they be able to tell you, honestly, what their financial life looks like on its own terms?
When the answer is unclear—to them or to you—that’s a starting point.
What Independence Actually Looks Like
Financial well-being, in this context, doesn’t mean you stop offering help, and it doesn’t mean your children refuse to accept family wealth. It means developing the habits, judgment and self-knowledge to manage money responsibly before significant wealth arrives—so that when it does, heirs are expanding on skills already earned rather than feeling overwhelmed when stewardship is required.
When your children make financial decisions, are they making them based on their own values and goals—or on assumptions about what’s coming?
Structured conversations about how family wealth will eventually be accessed, including the conditions, timeline and expectations, give your children something concrete to plan around rather than a vague inheritance they’re either counting on or trying to ignore. Leaving those expectations unspoken creates uncertainty that tends to surface at the worst possible moment.
Where To Go From Here
The tools from part one—intentional gifting, early advisor relationships, structured philanthropy—serve the financial well-being goal as much as the literacy goal. A few additional steps worth considering:
- Have the numbers conversation at the right moment. When your children have established careers and demonstrated financial maturity, withholding specifics may do more harm than good. Your advisory team can help you think through the timing and framing of that conversation.
- Make support goal-specific. Attach financial help to clear purposes and timelines. This encourages your children to develop a realistic view of their own finances.
- Let them make recoverable mistakes. Small financial missteps made with modest gifted funds may provide valuable learning experiences. The goal is to keep mistakes manageable now and hopefully to avoid consequential ones resulting from ignorance or lack of preparation later.
- Define what financial well-being means in your family. Some families expect heirs to build entirely separate financial lives. Others see stewardship of shared wealth as the primary goal. Expectations should be stated, not assumed.
You can leave your children more than what’s in your will or your trust. You can gift them the framework they carry for understanding what wealth is for, what it cost to build and how to manage it for the next generation. The goal is to provide that framework thoughtfully and strategically during your lifetime.
It’s an invaluable piece of their inheritance—one that you build together.
8 Estate Planning Questions To Ask If You Have No Direct Heirs
Child-Free Retirement and Legacy Planning
Estate planning is often framed around passing wealth to the next generation. But for the growing number of couples and individuals without children, the considerations are different. Here are some of the key questions to pose, plus ideas on how you can approach answering them.
If I don’t have direct heirs, do I really need an estate plan?
If you would like to help guide how your assets are distributed, you should consider creating an estate plan. Passing away without an estate plan means your state’s intestacy laws—the rules that decide who inherits when there’s no will—take over. Those rules march down a predetermined line of relatives: a sibling, a niece or nephew, perhaps a cousin you’ve never met. If no relative can be found at all, the state itself can claim what you’ve built. For some people, that’s far less than ideal.
An estate plan is a chance for you, rather than statute, to decide where your life’s work goes.
Who should make decisions for me if I can’t? Who settles things when I’m gone?
This is a question that can keep child-free people up at night. Parents often assume an adult child will step in as executor, as trustee, or as the person who makes medical calls in a crisis. Without that built-in successor, every one of those roles has to be filled deliberately. They include an agent under your power of attorney (the person who can manage your finances if you can’t), a health care proxy (who speaks for your medical wishes), and an executor or trustee to carry out your plan after death.
The candidates usually fall into three groups. First, there are the people in your orbit—a younger sibling, a trusted niece or nephew you’ve grown close to, a dear friend. Second, there are professional fiduciaries, such as a corporate trustee at a trust company, that generally offer neutrality, experience and institutional stability. Third, you can find specialized firms that will serve as a health care agent or daily money manager for “solo agers” who want a dependable safety net.
The right answer often blends these—say, a trusted friend for health care decisions and a corporate trustee for the money. The practical filters to consider: Is the person willing, genuinely capable and close enough geographically to act when it counts?
What happens to my care as I age if there’s no one obvious to lean on?
This likely deserves at least as much attention as where your assets land. Adult children frequently become the informal backstop for aging parents—stepping in during a hospital stay, noticing when something’s off. Without that, the estate plan has to supply the answer: robust health care directives, a clearly empowered medical proxy, and a serious look at how future care will be paid for and managed.
Long-term care insurance, or hybrid policies that pair life insurance with a care benefit, can help take pressure off both your finances and whoever you’ve asked to advocate for you. Building this scaffolding early, while you’re well, is one of the kindest things you can do for your future self.
What can I do with my assets?
Being child-free may open your options. Broadly, wealth can flow to people you choose (extended family, godchildren, close friends or mentors), to causes you care about, or into structures that keep giving long after you’re gone. Many people discover they can be far more intentional: funding a niece’s education, seeding a friend’s business, or endowing the institutions that shaped you and your life.
What if I’d rather spend most of it while I’m here to enjoy it?
It’s a legitimate goal, and one we sometimes hear from clients without children. The idea is to convert your wealth into experiences and generosity during your lifetime rather than leaving a large balance behind. Instead of guarding a nest egg for heirs, the planning question becomes how to responsibly draw it down so the memories, travel and giving happen while you’re healthy enough to savor them.
The catch is that spending freely and not running out of money are in tension, so this approach requires some discipline. You may want to consider your safety net first: a funded plan for long-term care, a sensible cash cushion and a dependable stream of guaranteed lifetime income to cover the essentials. With your baseline needs covered by income you can’t outlive, you can more freely spend the rest. Decisions like when to claim Social Security factor into that foundation.
Once you have met your fundamental financial goals, the surplus is yours to enjoy with a clear conscience. It also helps to think of retirement in phases—the active “go-go” years when spending naturally runs higher, followed by quieter years later. This can mean front-loading the experiences that depend on health and energy while allocating for comfort and convenience later.
I’d like to do some good with my money. What does charitable giving look like?
This is a common goal for many of our clients, including those who are leaving assets to heirs. A giving strategy can be as simple or as ambitious as you like.
At the straightforward end, a donor-advised fund lets you set aside money for charity now, take the deduction and direct grants to causes over time—think of it as a charitable savings account you steer for years.
For those drawing from retirement accounts, a qualified charitable distribution lets you give directly from an IRA in a tax-efficient way if you are 70 ½ years of age or older; for the 2026 tax year, the limit is $111,000 per person (so up to $222,000 for a married couple giving from their own IRAs).
A charitable remainder trust goes a step further: It can pay you (or someone you choose) an income stream for life, then send what remains to charity, often while trimming your tax bill along the way.
Some people establish private foundations or scholarships—lasting expressions of their values. There’s real joy in starting some of this while you’re alive to see the impact.
How do I keep my retirement accounts from complicating all this?
Carefully, and with coordination—because retirement accounts generally pass by beneficiary designation, not by your will. That means an outdated form could override your estate plan.
A Roth conversion before required minimum distributions begin—currently age 73 for most people—may make sense. This can reduce lifetime taxes and leave a cleaner, simpler estate behind. Naming a charity or a properly drafted trust as the beneficiary of a retirement account may also serve your goals. The key is making sure every beneficiary designation and every document tells the same story.
How often should I revisit my plan?
Think of an estate plan as a living document, not a one-time event. Relationships evolve, the people you’ve named may move or age, your wealth grows, and tax law shifts under everyone’s feet. We recommend dusting off your plan every few years, or whenever life takes a real turn—a move, a loss or a new cause that captures your interest. The goal isn’t a perfect plan frozen in time; it’s one that adapts with you.
Planning without the usual defaults takes more thought, but it also offers more freedom to design a legacy that’s unmistakably yours. If these are questions you’ve been turning over, we’d welcome the conversation—reach out to your RWA team to start mapping what your plan could look like.
The information set forth in this communication is presented by RWA Wealth Partners, LLC (“RWA”). The contents are for informational and educational purposes only and are not intended as investment, legal or tax advice. Please consult with your investment, legal or tax advisor concerning any specific questions you may have. Past results are not indicative of future performance. The historical return of markets generally and of individual asset classes or individual securities may not be an accurate predictor of future returns of those markets, asset classes or individual securities. RWA does not guarantee the accuracy and completeness of any sourced data in this communication.
The information set forth in this communication is presented by RWA Wealth Partners, LLC (“RWA Wealth Partners”). The contents are for informational and educational purposes only and are not intended as investment, legal or tax advice. Please consult with your investment, legal or tax advisor concerning any specific questions you may have. Past results are not indicative of future performance. The historical return of markets generally and of individual asset classes or individual securities may not be an accurate predictor of future returns of those markets, asset classes or individual securities. RWA Wealth Partners does not guarantee the accuracy and completeness of any sourced data in this communication.
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