One plan across three generations

The standard advisory relationship is built around one household. It produces a plan for the people who signed the agreement, and it treats the generation above and the generation below as external facts — a possible inheritance on one side, a possible obligation on the other. For a family carrying real decisions in all three places at once, that framing quietly does damage, because the three sets of decisions are not independent.

A gift to an adult child changes the estate calculation. A parent's long-term care costs change what is available to gift. A trust funded in one generation determines what the next one can do with it, often decades later and long after the person who set it up can explain the reasoning. Handled separately, these are three reasonable plans that together produce an outcome nobody chose.

Coordinating them is less about a more sophisticated model than about getting the family into one conversation. That is uncomfortable in a way spreadsheets are not, which is why most plans skip it. It is also the part that determines whether the structures hold up when the person who built them is no longer the one making decisions.

In practice this means we frequently work with people who are not the client in the conventional sense: an adult child in their thirties, in their own meeting; an eighty-eight-year-old parent whose advisory relationship predates the current family situation by four decades. Neither conversation bills separately. Both change the plan.