The Great Wealth Transfer and the

Next Architects of Family Legacy

Nelly Xavier | Managing Director

Over the next two decades, an estimated $124 trillion will change hands in the United States. That is roughly four times U.S. GDP. It is the accumulated wealth of the Baby Boomer generation, built over a lifetime of extraordinary asset growth, now moving to spouses, children, and charities.

But the most consequential part of this story is not the size of the transfer. It is who receives it. Women are expected to control the majority of this wealth, with more than $100 trillion flowing into their hands over the coming decades. Many will experience this twice: first when a parent dies, then when a spouse does. It is likely that most will face the moment without a plan, without warning, and without an advisor helping them well ahead of the transfer.

At CW Advisors, we have built a practice around this reality. Our clients include women who have built businesses, women who have inherited wealth, women who are navigating widowhood, women who are starting over after divorce and women who are quietly managing the finances of an entire family while being treated as the secondary name on an account. We know what they need. We believe that how an advisor shows up for a family, long before a life event or crisis, is what determines whether they are still there after one.

Below is our perspective on what is at stake and what we believe good advisory practice looks like when it is proactive.

The Data Behind This Shift

The Great Wealth Transfer is not a future event. It is already underway. The following data frames what we are seeing and why it demands a response from every advisor and every family.

1. The Aging Baby Boomers and Wealth Transfer Triggers

  • Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) control more than $70 trillion in U.S. assets, representing over half of total household wealth.
  • As of 2026, the oldest Boomers are approaching 80. The youngest are 62. The entire cohort is now moving through the phase of life marked by retirement, long-term care, and estate settlement.
  • The wealth being transferred was built on extraordinary asset appreciation:
    • The S&P 500 rose more than 3,000% since 1980. U.S. home prices are up nearly 500% over the same period.
    • This is not typical generational wealth because the pool being transferred is historically unprecedented in size.

2. The Scale of the Transfer

  • Roughly $124 trillion is expected to pass between generations through 2048, with nearly $100 trillion coming from Baby Boomers alone. (Cerulli Associates, 2024)
  • $54 trillion will move through spousal transfers. $47 trillion through intergenerational inheritance. $18 trillion to charity. (Cerulli Associates, 2024)
  • More than half of the total, approximately $62 trillion, will come from high- and ultra-high net-worth households, which represent only 2% of all U.S. families.

3. Women at the Center

  • More than $100 trillion of the total transfer is expected to land in women’s hands, with 95% of spousal transfers going to women. (Cerulli Associates, 2024)
  • Women already control about one-third of retail financial assets in the U.S. and EU. By 2030, McKinsey projects that share rising to 40-45%, with women controlling more than $34 trillion in U.S. investable assets. (McKinsey & Company, 2025)
  • Between 2018 and 2023, global financial wealth grew by 43%. Wealth controlled by women grew by 51%. The gap is widening in women’s favor. (McKinsey & Company, 2025)
  • Women outlive their husbands by an average of more than 12 years. Over 28 million Boomer women will become the sole financial decision-maker in their household as they outlive their spouses. Each year, one million women join the 15 million widows already navigating this alone. The median age of widowhood is 60. (Cerulli; BlackRock; J.P. Morgan)

4. Women as Wealth Creators

The transfer story is only half the picture. Increasingly, our clients are women who have not simply received wealth, they have built it. That changes the nature of the planning work significantly.

  • There are now 14.5 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., generating $3.3 trillion in annual revenue and employing 12.9 million workers. (Synovus/NAWBO, 2025)
  • Women-owned businesses now represent 39% of all U.S. businesses, up from just 5% in 1975. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025)
  • In 2024, women launched 49% of all new U.S. businesses, a record high and a 69% increase over five years. (Inc./Gusto, 2025)
  • Between 2019 and 2024, women-owned businesses grew 43.5% faster than men-owned businesses, with employment rising nearly 20%. (Wells Fargo Impact Report, 2025)

For these clients, wealth was earned through years of reinvestment, risk, and sacrifice. Their planning needs reflect that: business valuation, liquidity planning, equity compensation, keyperson risk, and succession are live decisions, not theoretical ones. We work with clients to integrate their business and personal financial life as one picture, because that is what it actually is.

And yet: fewer than 10% of women business owners have a formal succession or exit plan. (Scotia Wealth Management, 2024) In our experience, the business is almost always the largest asset on the balance sheet and the least planned for. That is a gap we take seriously.

5. A Confidence and Preparedness Gap

The data on women’s wealth growth is striking. So is the data on how unprepared most women feel when a transfer event arrives. We see this firsthand.

  • 84% of women report lacking confidence in managing an inheritance or financial windfall, compared to 73% of men.
  • According to UBS’s Own Your Worth 2025 report: 80% of women who inherited from a parent faced a significant challenge during the process. 83% of widows said the same. More than half encountered a financial surprise, including unexpected tax bills, unclear asset locations, or family conflict. Nearly one-third had never had a single conversation with their parents about the transfer. 43% of women expecting a future inheritance have neverseen their parents’ will. (UBS Own Your Worth, 2025)
  • 70-80% of widows leave their financial advisor within a year of their husband’s death. The reason cited most often is not poor performance. It is that the advisor never built a relationship with her. (BlackRock; McKinsey & Company) 

 WHAT WE SEE IN PRACTICE

 Most advisors built their practices around one primary client per household. The Great Wealth Transfer is about to make that a very costly approach. At CW Advisors, we have always believed that every member of a family is our client.

Why the Traditional Advisory Model Falls Short

The traditional wealth management model was built on a straightforward premise: give clients access to superior investment strategies and deliver strong performance. For decades, that was a reasonable value proposition.

It is no longer sufficient. And when it comes to women clients, whether inheritors, business owners, or widows navigating a sudden transition, it was often the wrong conversation to begin with.

  • Investment access is no longer a differentiator. ETFs, direct indexing, and digital platforms have made institutional-quality investments available to nearly anyone. What clients need now is judgment, integration, and someone who understands their full picture. 
  • Performance-first misses what women are actually asking. Women navigating an inheritance or a business exit are not asking how to beat the S&P 500. They are asking: What does this estate actually look like? How are my investment decisions supporting my estate plan in a holistic manner.
  • The planning gap is where trust is lost and won. Integrated guidance across tax, estate, retirement, philanthropy, and next-generation education is the work that matters most at these moments. Not a product shelf.

McKinsey research shows the share of investors seeking holistic, comprehensive wealth management advice grew from 29% in 2018 to 52% in 2023. That shift is not driven by investment sophistication. It is driven by life complexity. (McKinsey & Company, 2025)

How We Work With Families

At CW Advisors, our approach to comprehensive wealth management was designed for exactly the kind of complexity the Great Wealth Transfer creates. We take on the role of a family’s single point of coordination, integrating every dimension of their financial life and making sure every member of the family is seen, heard, and prepared.

That means four things in practice:

1. Fiduciary Guidance

  • For clients navigating a liquidity event, an inheritance, or a business transition, the stakes are too high for anything less.
  • We operate as fiduciaries. Every recommendation we make is driven exclusively by what is right for the client and their family. There are no product incentives.

2. Comprehensive Wealth Management Across the Whole Picture

  • We integrate investment strategy, tax planning, estate structure, business succession, philanthropy, and cash flow management into a single, coordinated plan. We produce consolidated reporting across the entire family portfolio, public and private, so nothing is invisible and nothing is falling through the cracks.
  • For business-owner clients: we are involved before a sale, not just after the wire hits. Helping structure the exit, model the tax implications, and plan the next chapter is part of what we do.
  • For inheritors: we work to ensure that when a transfer event happens, there are no surprises. We know where the assets are. We have already helped design and reviewed the estate plan.

3. Next-Generation Education and Family Meetings

  • Confidence gaps do not close on their own. We invest in financial education for every member of the family we serve, not just the primary account holder. That means bringing daughters and heirs into conversations early, explaining how the estate plan works beforeit becomes relevant, and making sure no one faces a wealth transfer event without preparation.
  • We facilitate regular family meetings designed to align heirs around shared goals and values, create space for the conversations families often avoid, and reduce the risk of conflict when wealth eventually moves. According to Cerulli, 89% of high-net-worth advisory firms now identify family meetings as a best practice. In our experience, they are among the most valuable investments a family can make. (Cerulli Associates, 2024) 
  • Women are twice as likely as men to want their wealth to reflect their values and have impact. We build that into the plan from the start. (McKinsey & Company; Morgan Stanley)

4. Long-Term Partnership Built on Real Relationships

  • We do whatever it takes to understand what matters most to each family. That means showing up for the hard conversations, staying engaged through life transitions, and building relationships with every member of the family, not just the one who signed the initial paperwork.
  • The 70-80% of widows who leave their advisor do so because they did not feel known. Our job is to make sure that never describes a CW Advisors client. We know the family. We have met the spouse. We have talked to the kids. When a transition happens, we are already there.

OUR COMMITMENT

The Great Wealth Transfer will not reward the advisors who are only offering the best investment platform. It will reward the advisors who already know the family, who showed up before the crisis, and who made every member of the household feel like a client from day one. That is how we have always operated.

And it is exactly what this moment demands.

Sources

Cerulli Associates, “The Great Wealth Transfer: Capturing Money in Motion,” U.S. High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets 2024 (December 2024). | McKinsey & Company, “The New Face of Wealth: The Rise of the Female Investor” (May 2025). | McKinsey & Company, “The Looming Advisor Shortage in U.S. Wealth Management” (February 2025). | UBS, “Own Your Worth 2025” (May 2025). | BlackRock, “Women Investors as Heirs of Generational Wealth” (2025). | J.P. Morgan, “Wealth Planning Is a Women’s Issue” (2024). | Bank of America Private Bank, “2024 Study of Wealthy Americans.” | Synovus/NAWBO, “Women Entrepreneurs in the U.S.: 2025 Growth Trends and Outlook” (2025). | Wells Fargo, “2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report.” | U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Business Survey and Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics (November 2025). | Federal Reserve, Flow of Funds (2025).