Why I built Regents Legacy

Hi, I’m Matt Tullis, founder of Regents Legacy.

For four decades, I have worked with successful individuals and families as they have built wealth, invested for the future, and prepared to pass assets from one generation to the next.

During that time, I have seen families do an incredible job of building wealth. I’ve seen businesses grow, investments succeed, and parents and grandparents create opportunities they hoped would benefit their families for decades to come.

I’ve also watched that wealth disappear within a single generation.

But the financial loss was not always the hardest part to see. What stayed with me was what could happen to the family in the process.

That experience is why I built Regents Legacy.

I kept seeing the same problem

The families I worked with were often doing many of the things we traditionally think of as responsible planning. 

They had investments. They owned businesses. They had trusts and estate plans. They had spent years working with advisors to build and protect what they had created.

But there was another question that often had not received nearly as much attention:

Was the next generation actually prepared for the wealth they were going to receive?

That is a very different problem to solve.

Transferring assets can be addressed through financial and estate planning. But transferring the knowledge, discipline, judgment, habits, and values that helped create those assets requires something more.

You can leave someone money. That does not necessarily prepare them to manage it.

You can create a trust. That does not automatically teach someone why the wealth was built, what responsibilities come with it, or how you hope it will be used.

After seeing this gap again and again, I became convinced that families needed a way to think about wealth transfer differently.

The idea behind the Legacy Bank

At the center of Regents Legacy is a concept I call the Legacy Bank.

A Legacy Bank is a family financial system built around both the wealth itself and the people who will eventually be responsible for it.

Rather than treating inheritance as a single event that happens when assets transfer, the Legacy Bank is intended to create a structure for how a family manages wealth, prepares future generations, communicates about money, and makes decisions over time.

That can include the financial structures used to protect and transfer assets, but it also includes the human side of the equation: family education, conversations between generations, shared values, responsibilities, and opportunities for younger family members to develop judgment before they are asked to manage significant wealth.

For me, the most important shift is the question families begin asking.

Instead of only asking, “What will my children inherit?” we can also ask, “What kind of people am I preparing them to become?”

That question changes the way you think about legacy.

Regents Legacy was built around what families actually care about

After decades of working with parents and grandparents, I’ve found that very few of them are interested in simply leaving behind the largest possible pile of money.

They want their lives and the work they put into building that wealth to mean something.

They want their families to stay connected rather than letting money become a source of conflict.

They want their children and grandchildren to understand the values that guided them.

They want to transfer wealth thoughtfully and efficiently.

And, for many, they want to create something that can continue beyond one or two generations.

Regents Legacy was built to help families bring those goals together.

The work is not only about documents or financial structures. It is about helping families clarify what they want their wealth to accomplish, preparing the people who will eventually inherit responsibility for it, and creating a system that can support the family long after the initial planning is complete.

Why I wrote Legacy Bank

I wrote Legacy Bank: A Beginner’s Guide to Building a Financial Dynasty because I wanted families to have a practical place to begin thinking through these ideas.

The book explains the Legacy Bank concept in more detail and gives you a framework for thinking about your own family, your wealth, and what you ultimately want that wealth to make possible.

You can get a free copy of Legacy Bank if you’d like to explore the idea on your own first. 

But a book can only take the conversation so far.

Every family is different. The people are different. The assets are different. The relationships, concerns, goals, and opportunities are different.

If you are starting to think seriously about what happens to your wealth after you are gone, I would encourage you to think beyond the transfer itself.

What do you want your family to carry forward?

What do you want the next generation to understand?

And what can you begin doing now to prepare them?

If you are asking those questions, let’s start a conversation.

Because the real measure of wealth is not simply how much you leave behind. It is what that wealth makes possible for the generations that come after you.