Years of financial planning can leave behind stacks of legal documents, including trusts, beneficiary forms, and powers of attorney.
A September 2026 research report from Fidelity Investments revealed that completing all of those steps still leaves most affluent Americans feeling unprepared for what comes next.
The research identified one overlooked factor that consistently separated the most confident families from those who completed identical paperwork but still felt uneasy.
Addressing it required no additional legal filings, no revisions to existing documents, and no fees paid to any attorney or adviser.
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Only 37% of older adults feel confident about their plans
The Fidelity research surveyed 654 married or partnered Americans ages 55 and older with at least $500,000 in net worth and at least one adult child.
Only 37% of respondents reported high peace of mind about their overall estate and financial planning, a surprisingly low figure for a group that had already drafted wills, established trusts, or designated beneficiaries.
Wealth alone did not improve confidence levels, and the study indicated that the most affluent households felt no less anxious about their planning than those with smaller portfolios.
More than 4 in 10 respondents with a net worth of over $5 million reported only moderate or low peace of mind about their estate plans.
The respondents who reported strong confidence shared one common trait that held true regardless of net worth, portfolio size, or the complexity of their legal documents.
Fidelity described those families as having high “transition readiness,” a measure that combines completed plans, shared conversations, and clearly defined family roles.
The study found that those families were four times more likely to report high confidence and five times more likely to feel assured about their estate planning.
Julie Virta, Senior Wealth Adviser at Vanguard and a certified financial planner, warned that that families who delay sharing their plans often underestimate the damage that silence inflicts on the people meant to benefit from those plans.
<strong>Most parents or grandparents expect to share their plans ‘someday,’ but that day can come later than they intend, or later than their heirs need… Silence doesn’t protect loved ones. It can leave doubt, resentment, and fractured relationships long after assets transfer,</strong>
Estate documents record what was decided without preparing the people named in them for the responsibilities, timing, and reasoning behind those decisions.
The families who closed that gap did so by communicating their plans directly, and the shift in confidence they experienced became one of the study’s clearest findings.
Why most families avoid the conversations that matter most
The study’s most revealing data involves what families are not doing with the plans they create. About one-third of parents said they had never had an open conversation about future planning with their adult children.
Among those who had avoided such discussions, the most common reason was simply not knowing how to start the conversation.
Other parents said they believed they had already discussed enough, while some preferred to wait until later in life to share planning details.
These avoidance patterns persisted across income levels and appeared even among families that had completed every standard planning document available to them.
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The research also exposed a wide gap between what parents assumed and what they had actually prepared their children to handle.
Nearly two-thirds of parents believed their adult children could take responsibility for the family’s finances, yet only 21% had communicated their completed estate plans to those same children, according to the study.
Parents who shared finished plans with their families were over three times as likely to report high confidence in their planning, the study confirmed.
Decades of research reinforce Fidelity’s conclusion on trust and communication
Fidelity’s findings align with a body of research that has tracked wealth transfer outcomes for decades.
A 20-year study of 3,250 affluent families conducted by Roy Williams, founder of The Williams Group, and his co-researcher Vic Preisser, found that 70% of wealth transfers fail by the second generation and 90% fail by the third.
Communication and trust breakdowns drove 60% of all failed transitions, while inadequately prepared heirs accounted for another 25%, according to the study.
Tax, legal, and all other non-family causes combined accounted for just 15% of failures, upending the common assumption that tax planning and portfolio management are what determine whether family wealth survives across generations.
Both the Fidelity data and the Williams Group research describe the same pattern repeating across generations, income levels, and degrees of financial sophistication.
The conversations, role definitions, and shared understanding that determine whether estate plans survive a real transition consistently receive the least attention from the families drafting them.
How to build the conversations that protect generational wealth
For families preparing for any kind of wealth transition, the evidence from both the Fidelity study and the Williams Group’s multi-decade research points to a specific sequence of actions.
Fidelity recommended starting with one specific conversation: asking each family member how confident they feel about the existing plan and what concerns they want to raise before those concerns become friction points.
The study also urged families to clarify early who will manage finances, provide care, and handle health or legal decisions going forward. Assumptions about those roles often differ between generations and tend to surface as conflict during real transitions.
The Williams Group’s research adds urgency for any reader who has completed the documents but has not yet discussed them with the people named in them.
Fidelity recommends working with a licensed financial advisor to facilitate these conversations alongside technical planning for beneficiary designations and tax-efficient transfer strategies.
Related: Fidelity finds 4 in 5 parents skip key estate plan step
