Why Families Choose Legacy Planning
Most families do not spend decades building wealth so that the next generation can look at a number on a statement and move on. They want that wealth to mean something. They want it to open doors, strengthen relationships, and carry forward the values that helped build it in the first place. That is the real difference between planning for an inheritance and planning for a legacy.
Matthew Tullis has spent four decades advising successful individuals and families on wealth, investing, and the harder work of passing that wealth to the next generation. Over those years, he has noticed the same theme come up again and again in conversations with parents and grandparents. They rarely say their goal is to leave behind the largest possible dollar amount. What they actually talk about is family: how to help their children become capable and independent, how to give grandchildren opportunities they would not have had otherwise, and how to keep the family close even after the money changes hands.
That shift in thinking, from a number on a page to a purpose behind it, is a big part of why more families are choosing legacy planning over a purely legal approach to their estate. It is not that a will or a trust stops mattering. It is that those documents were never meant to answer the harder questions a family eventually has to face about money, capability, and what comes next.
Legacy planning asks a different question
Traditional estate planning plays an important role. A will or trust establishes who receives what, when they receive it, and the legal structure for getting assets from one generation to the next. Those documents matter, and most families need them in some form.
Legacy planning, though, starts from a different question. Instead of asking who gets what, it asks what happens after the assets arrive. Have the people receiving this wealth been prepared for it? Do they understand how to make sound financial decisions? What happens when siblings have different goals, personalities, or levels of financial experience? And maybe the biggest question of all: what is this wealth actually for?
A legal document is not built to answer any of that. It can move a bank account or a piece of property from one name to another, but it cannot teach a twenty-five-year-old how to evaluate an investment, recover from a financial misstep, or think through what to do with an unexpected amount of money. It cannot sit two siblings down and help them agree on how a family business gets divided, or explain why one grandchild received help with a down payment while another did not. That is where legacy planning picks up the work that a will or trust leaves off.
The odds are not in most families' favor
The numbers back this up. Most family wealth is gone by the third generation when there is no plan in place beyond the legal paperwork. Roughly seven out of ten wealthy families do not have a real wealth transfer plan, and by 2045, an estimated $104 trillion is expected to pass from one generation to the next in the United States. That is an enormous amount of capital changing hands, often without much preparation on either side of the transfer.
The pattern rarely comes down to bad intentions. It usually comes down to missing structure: no shared financial education, no agreed-upon rules for how family money gets used, and no real conversation about what the wealth is supposed to accomplish before it lands in someone's account. A trust can dictate exactly how much money goes to each heir and on what schedule, but it cannot make sure that heir knows how to manage it once it arrives. Without that preparation, an inheritance tends to get spent, divided by disagreement, or lost to poor decisions long before it has the chance to help a third or fourth generation.
Families that want a different outcome tend to start addressing those gaps while the person who built the wealth is still around to help shape it. A thoughtful legacy plan is typically designed to support a family for thirty years or more, which is a very different timeline than the one-time signing of a will.
A family bank instead of a single event
One of the ideas behind legacy planning is to stop treating wealth transfer as a single event that happens when someone dies, and instead build a living family system, sometimes called a family bank.
Rather than distributing all of the money at once, a family bank can help a grandchild graduate without student debt, help a family member buy a first home, fund a new business, or support causes the family cares about, all while a structure stays in place to guide those decisions. Each time the family uses the capital this way, it is also a chance to teach the next generation how to make sound financial decisions, how to create value, how to manage capital responsibly, and how to recover if something does not go as planned.
Think about what normally happens when a family member needs money for a down payment or a business loan. They go to a bank, borrow the funds, and pay them back with interest over the life of the loan. That interest, often tens of thousands of dollars by the time the loan is paid off, leaves the family for good and goes to an institution with no connection to that family at all. A family bank changes where that money goes. The loan still comes with real terms, a set interest rate, and a repayment schedule, but the payments go back into the family's own structure instead of walking out the door. That capital can then fund the next opportunity for someone else in the family, and the cycle continues from there.
The wealth is not simply handed down and forgotten. It has a job to do, and that job is defined by what the family actually wants its legacy to be.
At Regents Legacy, this idea centers on setting up an actual legal and financial structure: a private family bank that can govern, lend, and grow wealth across generations. Licensed legal and tax professionals help set up the entities, the bank and investment accounts, and the initial funding and asset transfer strategy. From there, family members can borrow from their own family bank much the way they would borrow from a traditional lender, except the interest paid on those loans stays inside the family instead of going to an outside institution.
Governance, education, and an ongoing partnership
A family bank does not replace an estate attorney, and it is not a trust or a will sitting on its own. It is a structure that sits alongside traditional estate planning and handles the parts that a legal document was never designed to cover.
That work starts with mapping a family's goals, structure, and readiness before anything gets built, along with a review of the existing estate plan to see what gaps need to be filled. From there, the legal and financial pieces get put in place: the entities, the lending framework, and the documentation needed to move capital across generations. Then comes the part a one-time legal document cannot offer: an ongoing partnership that keeps the plan and the family aligned for years, sometimes decades, as circumstances change and new generations come of age.
Support at this stage typically scales with how involved a family wants their advisors to be. Some families mainly need the books kept and the required tax filings handled each year. Others want help processing family loans as they come up, or want a dedicated way to keep family documents, photos, and history alongside the financial structure itself. There is no single right level of involvement. The point is that the relationship does not end once the paperwork is signed.
Part of that ongoing work involves helping families build governance around how the money gets used and who is involved in deciding. That might take the form of a family charter, a family council, or simply a regular family meeting where financial decisions get discussed openly instead of assumed. Those conversations tend to build the kind of trust and openness that keeps a family aligned long after the initial legal work is finished.
What families are really trying to leave behind
Ask most parents or grandparents what they want to leave their family, and very few will say a dollar amount. They will talk about independence, opportunity, closeness, and the ability for future generations to understand where the family's wealth actually came from: the work, the sacrifice, the judgment, and the values that created it.
That is ultimately what legacy planning is trying to protect. The most valuable thing a family can pass down is not the money itself. It is what the next generation is prepared to do with it. A legal document can move assets from one person to another, but it cannot teach a grandchild how to think about money, how to handle a difficult year, or how to recognize an opportunity worth taking. Only people can do that, and it tends to work best when it starts well before anyone actually needs the money.
There is also something to be said for what this approach does for the family itself, not just the wealth. Money that arrives with no explanation and no shared history behind it can just as easily divide a family as help it. Money that comes with context, with an understanding of how it was built and why, tends to bring people together instead. A legacy plan gives a family a reason to have those conversations while everyone is still around the table, rather than leaving heirs to piece the story together after the fact.
Starting the conversation
Families do not need to have every detail figured out before they start thinking about a legacy plan. The starting point is usually a conversation: what does the family actually want this wealth to make possible for the people who come after them, and what would it take to get there?
For families with between $400,000 and $5 million to protect and pass on, Regents Legacy offers a free fifteen-minute call to talk through whether a family bank fits. There is no pressure and no pitch attached to that conversation, just a chance to ask questions and see whether the structure makes sense for a particular family's situation.
Matthew Tullis also wrote a book on the subject, The Legacy Bank, described as a beginner's guide to building a financial dynasty. It works through many of the same ideas: why most family banking books quietly build toward a life insurance pitch, the common mistakes families make with inherited wealth, and how to structure a bank that gets family members involved without creating conflict along the way. A complimentary copy is available for anyone who wants to start thinking through what a legacy, rather than just an inheritance, could look like for their own family.
The real question is not what you are going to leave behind. It is what you want that inheritance to make possible for the people who are still here after you are gone.