Insight Archives - Eclipse Private Wealth Management

By Joel R. Freedman, CFP®, CPWA®

For families looking to pass down significant wealth, the goal isn’t simply to transfer over assets; it’s to ensure that values, vision, and prosperity endure for generations.

However, statistics paint a sobering picture: 35% of Americans do not plan on discussing wealth transfer with their families.¹Unfortunately, a lack of transparency often results in confusion, conflict, and missed opportunities.

Successful generational wealth transfer, on the other hand, entails clearly communicating your intentions and equipping your heirs with the necessary tools to preserve and grow your family legacy.

Education: Instill Financial Literacy & Confidence

Empowering your heirs to embrace financial literacy is essential to preserving generational wealth. Accordingly, it’s critical to start this education early and ensure it evolves over time.

For example, you might include your young children in family budgeting, encourage teenage grandchildren to contribute to their 529 plans, and involve young adult heirs in estate and tax planning.

As you include your loved ones in financial discussions and responsibilities, it’s important to recognize the potential for philosophical disconnect. While your ethos may center on the values of hard work, disciplined saving, and traditional investing, your heirs may lean more towards impact investing or alternative investments.

By understanding and aligning your different perspectives, you can minimize conflict and increase the likelihood that the following will resonate:

Financial Literacy Programs
Younger generations who spend time on TikTok may encounter poor financial advice from unqualified influencers. By providing formal education on topics such as budgeting, investing, taxes, and estate planning—through online educational platforms, financial literacy apps, or sessions with experts—you can help ensure they are well-informed.

Family Meetings
Regular family meetings can foster open communication about wealth, its purpose, and the responsibilities it entails. These meetings provide a forum for discussing family goals, values, and future plans. Ensure that your heirs understand the origin of your family’s wealth—whether it came from entrepreneurship, strong investment acumen, or previous generations.

Mentorship
Direct involvement in wealth management can help prepare heirs for the responsibility of handling large estates. By providing opportunities for younger generations to help choose investments, manage charitable donations, or get involved in the family business, you can help build their confidence and encourage stewardship rather than entitlement.

Governance: Build a Culture of Communication & Accountability

Education lays the foundation, but governance is what holds the house together. Families that thrive across generations often treat wealth management like running a company, with shared goals, rules, and responsibilities.

Family governance promotes accountability and transparency, fosters inter-generational communication, facilitates family harmony, preserves family traditions, and sustains wealth across generations.

A great starting point is to establish a family constitution that codifies your values, expectations, and vision, including guiding principles for philanthropic giving, investing, education, leadership, ownership, and succession.

Depending on your family’s unique situation, your family governance framework may assume various forms, including:

Family Councils
Similar to a Board of Directors, a council is comprised of select family members elected to manage your affairs and represent the best interests of all parties. Council members may make decisions regarding liquidity, family employment, or conflict resolution.

Family Assemblies
This involves gathering all family members annually, semi-annually, or quarterly (under the guidance of the family council, if applicable) to discuss leadership development, review legal or taxation issues, and pinpoint opportunities to enhance family unity or philanthropic impact.

Family Business Advisory Boards
Qualified advisory board members can offer objective advice based on their expertise, help identify unique business opportunities and provide outside perspectives on strategy and decision-making.

Structure: Employ Tax-Efficient Wealth Transfer Strategies

Estate and tax planning are crucial for preserving your wealth for future generations. The good news is that there are various strategies you can implement to help minimize the value of your taxable estate and mitigate the eventual tax burden on your heirs. If you plan to pass on significant wealth, here are three options to consider:

1. Gift money directly during your lifetime.
The current lifetime estate and gift tax exemption is $13.99 million for individuals and $27.98 million for couples.² With regular gifting that stays within the annual exclusion limit—$19,000 per person in 2025²—you can support your loved ones financially, help the next generation achieve goals such as earning a degree or buying a home, and avoid triggering gift taxes.

2. Support charities your family is passionate about.
Another way to remove assets from your taxable estate is to make donations to qualified charitable organizations. If eligible, these contributions result in a tax deduction of up to 60% of your adjusted gross income (AGI) in the tax year you donate, but you must itemize deductions on your return.³ Donating appreciated stocks and securities, implementing Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs), and establishing Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) are additional strategies to help mitigate estate taxes.⁴

3. Set up irrevocable trusts.
When you transfer assets or funds into an irrevocable trust, you can legally remove them from your taxable estate while you’re alive and distribute them to your heirs when you pass. For example, generation-skipping trusts enable you to bypass your children (and the estate taxes that would incur if they received an inheritance directly) and distribute assets directly to your grandchildren.⁵Additionally, irrevocable trusts can help:

Remove appreciable assets from your estate while providing beneficiaries with a step-up basis in value
Protect your family’s assets from potential creditors and lawsuits
Prevent heirs from misusing their inheritances by setting conditions for wealth distribution
Hold a life insurance policy, while removing the death proceeds from your estate
Gift a principal residence to your loved ones in a tax-efficient manner
Retain income from assets gifted to your estate ⁶

Collaborate With Experienced Professionals

Preparing the next generation for wealth stewardship involves not only the mechanics of wealth transfer but also fostering the knowledge, mindset, and values needed to manage it successfully.

Eclipse can help reduce stress, align the right solutions, and coordinate with your estate attorneys and tax professionals to ensure an integrated plan for wealth transfer.

Let’s set up your heirs for success.

Sources

¹https://www.edwardjones.com/us-en/why-edward-jones/news-media/press-releases/great-wealth-transfer-research
²https://www.ml.com/articles/estate-gift-tax-exemption-sunset.html
³https://www.irs.gov/publications/p526#:~:
⁴https://www.oppenheimer.com/news-media/2025/insights/articles/january/legacy-planning-a-key-component-of-financial-wellness.aspx
⁵https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/generation-skippingtrust.asp
⁶ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/irrevocabletrust.asp#:~:

By Joel R. Freedman, CFP®, CPWA® and Alex Freedman

Women today are increasingly breaking boundaries in business, taking control of their financial futures, and leveraging their wealth to create meaningful social change.

While challenges remain, the financial landscape is evolving to reflect the unique needs, values, and visions of women, particularly those who continue to rise as investors, entrepreneurs, and leaders.

This article examines essential strategies to help women build wealth and embrace philanthropic pursuits with greater confidence and success.

Bridging the Wealth Gap: Financial Strategies for Women

Historically, women have faced significant barriers to building wealth, including the gender pay gap, lower lifetime earnings, and longer life expectancies—all of which pose challenges when saving for retirement. Additionally, the average woman-owned business generates only 50% of the average annual sales of those owned by men.¹

On a brighter note, American women are projected to control $30 trillion in assets by 2030, offering an opportunity to help mitigate these financial disparities.² In addition, in 2024, there were 14.5 million women-owned businesses (39.2% of all U.S. firms) that collectively generated $3.3 trillion in revenue.³

Here are three strategies to help women eliminate the wealth gap sooner rather than later:

1. Shift Your Mindset

The greater the levels of financial literacy, the more successful women can be in investing, managing their money, and growing their wealth.

That starts with women shifting their mindset and flipping the script on cultural roadblocks that can impede them from taking full control of their financial lives.

For example, while there are more women in leadership positions than ever before, too many women in the workplace continue to fear that being proactive about negotiating contracts or asking for raises will be seen as aggressive or selfish.

In addition, research suggests that past financial trauma can lead to underinvesting and emotional behaviors that can negatively impact decisions and wealth-building, even among financially savvy women.⁴

Whether you’ve experienced financial struggles or not, it’s crucial to recognize that fostering a mindset geared towards building wealth, investing without fear, and creating a legacy should be celebrated, not criticized.

Partnering with a financial advisor like Eclipse Private Wealth Management can help. It’s no surprise that 86% of women agree that having their investments managed by a professional makes life less stressful and 77% believe they’d be more confident about their financial future if they had a financial advisor.⁵

2. Invest in Your Financial Future

The longer your money is invested, the more opportunities you have to take advantage of the power of compounding to exponentially grow your wealth. In addition, a Fidelity study indicates that women investors outperformed male counterparts by 40 basis points (0.4%) based on annualized returns of five million customers over a ten-year period.⁶

As women tend to have a longer life expectancy than men, that means the potential for even greater long-term outcomes for those who start early, plan holistically, invest for the long-term, and make consistent decisions across financial life. For example, establishing an emergency fund, creating a tailored plan and investment portfolio, mitigating taxes, and maximizing contributions to tax-advantaged retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs.

Confidence is key, and although women still have a confidence gap compared to men, Fidelity studies show that 7 in 10 women currently own investments in the stock market⁷ and 71% of women felt more confident after they set up a financial plan.⁸

3. Prioritize Estate and Legacy Planning

Estate planning is a critical step for women who want to safeguard their wealth, transfer their assets to future generations, and strengthen their legacies. Without a clear plan—one that includes a will, powers of attorney (POAs), and trusts—your loved ones may deal with unnecessary stress, legal disputes, and unintended tax repercussions.

Here are some key estate planning considerations for female entrepreneurs and leaders:

Succession planning is crucial for women who own businesses and want to maintain continuity while mitigating disruptions or conflicts. A thorough plan should identify potential successors, outline training and development programs, and create a framework for transferring ownership after you retire or pass away.
Trusts are essential estate planning tools that can help bypass probate, protect privacy, shield assets from creditors or lawsuits, ensure the controlled distribution of your wealth to heirs, reduce the tax impact of transferring highly appreciated assets, and enable you to create a charitable legacy.
Ownership structures like limited liability companies (LLCs), S corporations, and family limited partnerships (FLPs) can help protect your personal assets from business-related liabilities, avoid double taxation, and facilitate the transfer of your business interests to family members while minimizing gift and estate taxes.

Eclipse Private Wealth Management can coordinate with your attorneys, accountants, and other advisors to ensure an integrated and compliant estate plan that helps protect, manage, and distribute your wealth to your loved ones and charitable beneficiaries.

Women & Philanthropy: Transforming Charitable Giving

Women are expected to benefit significantly from inheritances passed down by their Boomer parents and spouses during the “Great Wealth Transfer” in the coming decade — with Millennial and Gen X women increasingly pursuing purpose-driven investments.⁹

In addition, women are increasingly investing their money in businesses, organizations, or funds that reflect their values—and supporting charitable giving in areas like education, healthcare, and economic empowerment.¹⁰

Women are also taking an active role in creating charitable foundations, partnering with other philanthropists, and investing in projects that champion social or environmental causes. In other words, women are leveraging their wealth, not only for financial gain but for the betterment of underprivileged communities and society as a whole.

Here are a few ways female investors can get started:

Invest in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds, or bonds that choose companies based on values like environmental stewardship, human rights, or corporate governance—and avoid investing in companies whose practices, services, or products you do not support.
Invest venture capital in women and minority-owned businesses or buy shares of funds with clear social missions.
Invest in donor-advised funds (DAFs), which are investment accounts that enable you to make an irrevocable contribution to a qualified public charity, receive an immediate tax deduction, and recommend grants over time.

Embrace the Pursuit of the Exceptional

As women continue to take control of their financial lives, overcome historical challenges, and use their wealth and influence to help foster positive change, the value of a trusted financial advisor can be essential to greater confidence and long-term outcomes.

Eclipse can help. We are an independent advisory firm that deeply understands the complexities of wealth and the challenges women face — and we’re committed to simplifying the process, alleviating stress, and aligning the right solutions to help you protect and grow your family’s wealth.

Let’s shape a brighter future together.