Summary: High-net-worth individuals and families need more than a will to protect their legacy. A truly comprehensive estate plan integrates tax strategy, legal structure, and wealth management to preserve and transfer assets efficiently. Learn how Aprio’s integrated team brings these elements together under one roof and provides a seamless estate planning approach that helps minimize taxes and reduces complexity for generations to come.
When it comes to protecting your wealth and securing your legacy, an estate plan is one of the most important investments you can make. But a will by itself rarely captures the full picture.
Like many high-net-worth individuals, you likely have complex assets, business interests, and philanthropic goals that need to be organized and coordinated. To be successful, your estate plan should bring together tax strategy, legal structure, and wealth management under one cohesive umbrella. High-net-worth estate planning requires precision, foresight, and a comprehensive approach that looks far beyond basic asset distribution.
If you lead a high-growth enterprise, manage a portfolio company, or serve as a key decision maker facing rapid expansion, your personal financial landscape is intricately tied to your professional endeavors. A sudden transition, an unexpected liquidity event, or a shift in the regulatory environment can dramatically impact your taxable estate. You need a wealth transfer strategy that reflects your values, supports your family, and carefully addresses your tax liabilities.
In this guide, we’ll start from square one and explain the importance of comprehensive estate planning, the building blocks of a solid strategy, the latest regulatory considerations, and the most common surprises to watch out for. Throughout, we frame these ideas as strategies to discuss with your estate attorney. Aprio’s Income Tax & Estate Planning team works alongside that attorney on the tax side of the plan.
Why a will is not enough for high-net-worth estate planning
While a will is an essential component of any standard estate plan, it only addresses a narrow set of questions: who inherits your assets and how. If you have a substantial and diverse portfolio of assets, you will need to address the detailed legal, tax, and wealth management considerations that accompany those questions. You must alsohelp ensure that the strategies powering these components work in concert.
The coordination piece of this puzzle is where many estate plans fall short. Without properly aligning your legal documents, financial plans, investment portfolios, and tax strategies, your advisors, heirs, and executors may misunderstand your intentions. As a result, your assets could be taxed inefficiently, and you could miss valuable opportunities to preserve wealth for future generations.
Consider the complexity of a modern executive or founder. You might hold equity in multiple private entities, manage real estate across different states, hold significant balances in retirement accounts, and direct capital through family limited partnerships. A simple will cannot dictate the complex governance of a private equity-backed venture, nor can it provide the tax-efficient architecture needed to transfer multi-state assets without triggering unnecessary state and local tax burdens.
Furthermore, basic wills often subject your estate to court-supervised probate processes. Probate is public, potentially time-consuming, and can tie up important assets precisely when your family or business needs liquidity. By relying solely on a will, you may inadvertently expose your family to a prolonged administrative burden, increased costs, and public scrutiny of your financial affairs.
The ultimate high net worth estate planning checklist
To build a legacy that endures, you need a structured, deliberate approach. While every person’s situation is distinct, you can expect all sophisticated estate plans to include a detailed combination of foundational documents and advanced wealth transfer vehicles.
Below is an estate planning checklist featuring explicit components that high-net-worth families should review with their advisory team and legal counsel.
1. Foundational legal documents
Wills: The baseline directive for asset distribution and the appointment of guardians for minor children.
Revocable living trusts: A critical tool that helps keep your assets out of probate, providing privacy and continuity of asset management if you become incapacitated.
Powers of attorney: Designations that grant a trusted individual the authority to manage your financial and legal affairs if you are unable to do so.
Advance healthcare directives: Medical powers of attorney and living wills that outline your preferences for medical care and designate someone to make healthcare decisions on your behalf.
2. Advanced wealth transfer vehicles
Irrevocable trusts: Structures designed to remove assets from your taxable estate, which helps reduce your overall estate tax liability.
Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs): An irrevocable trust where one spouse makes a gift for the benefit of the other spouse, utilizing the current estate tax exemption while maintaining indirect access to the funds.
Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs): Highly effective vehicles in certain interest rate environments that allow you to transfer the appreciation of assets to beneficiaries with little or no gift tax.
Irrevocable Life Insurance Trusts (ILITs): A specialized trust that holds life insurance policies, helping to keep the death benefit out of your taxable estate while providing liquidity to pay estate taxes.
3. Business succession and continuity planning
Buy-sell agreements: Essential contracts for business owners that dictate what happens to your share of the business upon death, disability, or retirement.
Family limited partnerships (FLPs) or family LLCs: Entity structures that allow you to pool family investments, retain management control, and transfer valuation-discounted shares to the next generation.
Key person insurance: Policies designed to provide the business with liquidity to weather the loss of a foundational leader.
4. Asset and investment coordination
Beneficiary designations: Routine reviews of payable-on-death and transfer-on-death designations on retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and bank accounts to confirm they align with your broader estate plan.
Digital asset planning: A secure inventory and access plan for digital currencies, intellectual property, and electronic records.
Monte Carlo scenario planning: Advanced financial modeling that enables you to weigh the risks and trade-offs of various financial decisions under different market conditions.
The right advisory team will take a holistic view of your plan and carefully orchestrate the components above. Your professionals should also evaluate your beneficiaries, your taxable and non-taxable estate, and your liquidity needs, and then offer strategic considerations to discuss with your estate attorney.
Navigating the estate tax exemption and regulatory complexity
For most high-net-worth individuals, estate planning is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process that evolves changes in wealth, family structure, and federal and state tax laws.
Tax law changes, in particular, dramatically impact estate planning strategies. One of the most critical elements of current planning involves the federal estate tax exemption. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the elevated exemption is now permanent.
For 2026, the federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15 million per person, up from $13.99 million in 2025, with annual inflation adjustments beginning in 2027. This means a married couple can shield up to $30 million from the federal estate and gift tax. The law also removed the scheduled sunset that would have cut the exemption to roughly $7 million, so you can plan around a stable, long-horizon figure rather than rushing to use a benefit before it disappears.
While this permanent threshold provides substantial clarity, families with estates approaching or exceeding these levels still face significant exposure. An integrated team of professionals must review your plan regularly and identify major areas of exposure to help you prepare appropriately. Annual exclusion gifts remain a steady tool alongside the lifetime exemption: in 2026, you can give up to $19,000 per recipient, or $38,000 for married couples who split gifts, without using any of your lifetime exemption.
Routine estate plan reviews become absolutely essential when you are anticipating a major liquidity event, such as the sale of a business or a significant public offering. For instance, if your current net worth is $10 million, but you expect to make a major exit that could push it to $50 million or $100 million, you could reap the benefits of early, proactive estate planning.
When you plan ahead of a liquidity event, you have the opportunity to transfer assets, such as privately held stock, while the valuation is still relatively low. Once the transaction closes and the assets convert to highly liquid, highly valued cash, the cost of transferring that wealth to the next generation increases exponentially. While we cannot predict the future, we can plan for it with structure, speed, and foresight.
You must also consider state-level regulations. Many states levy their own estate or inheritance taxes, often with exemption thresholds far below the federal level. If you own property in multiple jurisdictions or operate a multi-state business, your exposure to state and local taxes (SALT) requires precise modeling. Strategies that work beautifully at the federal level may trigger unintended consequences at the state level if not properly coordinated.
Advanced estate planning strategies for business owners
Founders, operating partners, and enterprise decision makers face distinct challenges when structuring their legacy. You are often balancing rapid corporate growth, tight deal timelines, board expectations, and the need for flawless financial reporting. Your personal estate planning strategies must align seamlessly with your corporate realities.
Structuring for a future exit
For private equity-backed leaders and founders scaling fast, the primary wealth driver is often concentrated in company equity. If you wait until a letter of intent is signed to begin your estate planning, you have likely waited too long.
A common strategy to discuss with your estate attorney is the implementation of an Intentionally Defective Grantor Trust (IDGT). This vehicle allows you to sell closely held business shares to the trust in exchange for a promissory note. The business continues to grow inside the trust, outside of your taxable estate. Since the trust is “defective” for income tax purposes, you continue to pay the income tax on the trust’s earnings, which allows the trust assets to grow tax-free for your beneficiaries.
Leveraging Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs)
If you hold assets poised for rapid appreciation, such as pre-IPO stock or equity in a high-growth portfolio company, a GRAT can be an exceptionally powerful tool. You transfer the high-growth assets into the trust and retain the right to receive an annuity payment for a set number of years. When the trust term ends, any appreciation above the IRS-assumed interest rate (the Section 7520 rate) passes to your beneficiaries free of gift tax. This strategy is particularly valuable when interest rates are manageable, and your assets are expected to significantly outperform that baseline hurdle rate.
Integrating philanthropy and charitable vehicles
Many successful entrepreneurs and corporate leaders view philanthropic giving as a central pillar of their legacy. Structuring your charitable intent efficiently requires more than simply writing a check.
Depending on your goals, you might explore:
Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs): These accounts offer an immediate income tax deduction while allowing you to recommend grants to your favorite charities over time. They are highly flexible and administratively simple. If you are weighing a fund against a foundation, our breakdown of donor-advised funds versus private foundations can help you decide.
Private Family Foundations: For families seeking profound control over their giving, a private foundation allows you to employ family members, run specific charitable programs, and create a highly visible legacy.
Charitable Remainder Trusts (CRTs): This trust provides you or your beneficiaries with an income stream for a term of years or for life. At the end of the term, the remaining assets pass to a designated charity. This can be an excellent strategy for diversifying highly appreciated concentrated stock positions without immediately triggering massive capital gains taxes.
All of these business-aligned strategies require careful synchronization between your corporate finance team, your personal wealth advisors, and your legal counsel.
Building a multigenerational wealth transfer plan
As my colleagues Simeon Wallis, Dave Fraser, and Erin O’Connor-Bell frequently note, passing wealth down across generations is one of the most complex challenges that families face. You have spent decades building your wealth to support your family and give back to the causes you care about. Creating a legacy is about much more than just asset transfer; it is a journey often fraught with complicated family dynamics.
To successfully manage the personal complexities that accompany legacy planning, you must develop a tax-efficient, value-centric plan that aligns with your intentions.
Protection comes first. Your wealth strategy should be built to help protect your assets before you turn to growing and transferring them. From there, multigenerational wealth transfer is the work of moving family assets in a way that reflects your values and accounts for the realities of every generation involved.
Establish a clear governance structure
Treat the wealth planning process like building a business. When you start a business from the ground up, you develop your corporate mission and vision first. The same approach applies to wealth planning. Define what your family stands for and what your family members hope to achieve with the accumulated wealth.
Next, develop a governance structure that drives how you and your advisory team will administer your wealth strategy. Without a clear structure, families often see their wealth dissipate by the third or fourth generation. With the assistance of an independent advisory team, who can help mediate challenging conversations, you can set up frameworks for decision-making, conflict resolution, and ongoing management. These frameworks might include a family council, a formal family charter, and regular family meetings that foster proactive communication.
Prepare the next generation
To create a lasting legacy, you need to prepare the next generation to manage wealth responsibly. Provide opportunities for younger family members to take on hands-on management roles, such as overseeing a portion of a family foundation. Introduce your heirs to your tax professionals, attorneys, investment managers, and financial planners early in the process so they build confidence in the advisors who will eventually guide them.
Develop specific “legacy buckets”
Many high-net-worth families choose to allocate their wealth into several distinct buckets to streamline the management process:
Family: Direct wealth and asset transfers to your children, grandchildren, and loved ones.
Legacy and Community: Wealth dedicated to charitable organizations or foundations geared toward supporting causes that reflect your family values.
Special Projects: Funding reserved for art, collectibles, real estate, or other interests specific to your family.
Business Transition: Capital and structural planning for the sale, succession, or ongoing management of a family-owned enterprise.
Each of these wealth buckets requires its own specific strategy, documentation, and oversight. You should work closely with your professional advisory team to determine the appropriate allocations and develop the necessary frameworks to support them.
Plan around common roadblocks
Depending on the size of your family and your relationships within it, you may run into hurdles around organization, communication, and emotional dynamics. A few challenges show up again and again, and each one has a practical response.
Organization — Many families lose track of what assets exist, where they are held, and who is entitled to them.
Complex family structures — Multiple marriages, children from different relationships, and assets spread across jurisdictions all add layers of difficulty to wealth transfer.
Intergenerational differences — Family members across generations often hold different values, risk tolerances, and financial goals, which can sometimes spark conflict.
The good news is that each of these hurdles responds to a few proven habits.
Early inclusion — Bring future generations into the conversation as early as you can. Annual or quarterly family meetings are a good forum for healthy communication. Our guide on how to navigate family conflict resolution and governance offers practical ways to keep these discussions productive.
Education — Create opportunities for your heirs to build financial literacy and confidence through real-world experience and mentorship. Philanthropic and community organizations can be a good training ground.
Written guidelines — Document your mission, values, goals, and expectations in a family charter, so there is less room for misunderstanding down the road.
Differences in risk tolerance are normal. In many families, the older generation leans conservative while younger heirs look for growth. Work with your advisory team and your heirs to align your portfolio and wealth management strategy with the objectives of each generation, and make sure every voice is heard.
Address family-specific financial complexities
Beyond the typical components, your family may carry specific challenges, milestones, or dynamics that your plan needs to account for. If you own a family business, your strategy should include a succession plan that spells out how ownership will transition, especially when some heirs work in the business, and others do not.
If you have family members with health or special needs, or relatives living in different states, you will face added financial, tax, and compliance factors. With thoughtful, proactive planning, you can address these personal issues well before the needs arise.
Common estate planning surprises and how to manage them
Even the most seasoned enterprise leaders can encounter unexpected hurdles during the estate planning process. Understanding these common surprises in advance helps you navigate the landscape with greater clarity.
The power of step-up in basis
For high-net-worth individuals, one of the most consequential estate planning surprises is the concept of step-up in basis. Step-up in basis is the adjustment of an asset’s value for tax purposes upon inheritance. When someone passes away, the basis of their assets gets stepped up to the current fair market value.
If you bought shares in a company decades ago for $100,000, and those shares are worth $5 million at the time of your passing, your heirs inherit the shares with a basis of $5 million. If they sell the shares the next day, they owe no capital gains tax on that $4.9 million of appreciation.
Balancing the desire to remove assets from your taxable estate against the desire to retain assets to capture the step-up in basis is one of the most nuanced calculations your tax and legal team must address.
The ROI of comprehensive planning
Another frequent surprise is the cost and corresponding value of sophisticated planning. It is true that an advanced estate plan can cost a substantial amount across legal, tax, and other professional fees. However, that upfront investment regularly saves families tens of millions of dollars in future taxes.
Framed this way, the return on investment of comprehensive planning is outstanding for high-net-worth individuals and families with significant estates. Treating estate planning as an investment rather than an expense changes the entire paradigm of wealth preservation.
Emotional and philosophical complexities
Aside from cost and tax basis considerations, many individuals are surprised by the profound emotional questions that surface during the process. How much wealth should the next generation inherit so they are empowered but not unmotivated? What do you want your legacy to truly represent? How do you treat heirs fairly if they have different levels of involvement in the family business?
The right estate planning team helps you navigate those questions and obtain answers with empathy, discretion, and clarity. Honest, open communication is critical. Facilitate in-depth discussions with your heirs about your family goals, financial picture, and investment strategies. Make sure that all voices are heard, and accept that your heirs may have a different risk tolerance threshold than you do.
The power of an integrated estate planning team
At its core, estate planning is not just a technical or financial process; it is deeply personal. When performed by the right professional team, estate planning helps ensure that the people and causes that matter most to you are cared for, and that your wealth serves a meaningful purpose beyond your lifetime.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Historically, if you wanted to create an estate plan, you had to designate multiple independent advisors to supervise the necessary activities: a CPA for your taxes, a lawyer for your estate planning documents, and a financial planner for your investments. When it came to managing your plan, each professional played a role, but theyrarely worked in tandem. For many high-net-worth individuals, this siloed traditional approach resulted in gaps, inefficiencies, and even costly mistakes.
To manage your estate plan effectively, you should not have to single-handedly coordinate with outside professionals, and you shouldn’t be subjected to increased costs and errors. Firms like Aprio house estate planning specialists under one roof, which means they can address issues early, make sure your documents and strategies are consistent, and help you make better, faster decisions.
By taking every aspect of your financial landscape into consideration, a unified team provides you with the contextual advice you need. We help you handle compliance, tax strategy, and transition initiatives at scale, offering relief from the operational pressure that often accompanies wealth transfer.
Final thoughts
The best time to start or revisit your estate plan is long before you actually need it. Whether your estate is valued in the millions or the tens of millions, a fully integrated plan is essential to protect your legacy, reduce risk, and support your family’s financial future across generations.
