Fitzpatricks Advice Partners has been helping Australians build, protect and transition wealth since 1994. A team of dedicated advisers, united by a shared philosophy.
Fitzpatricks Advice Partners has been helping Australians build, protect and transition wealth since 1994. A team of dedicated advisers, united by a shared philosophy.
Fitzpatricks Advice Partners has been helping Australians build, protect and transition wealth since 1994. A team of dedicated advisers, united by a shared philosophy.
Most families prepare their wealth for the next generation. Fewer prepare the next generation for the wealth.
And they work with advisers who know their family well enough to ask the difficult questions, not just the expected ones. That is the centre of intergenerational wealth management done well.
Over the next two decades, more than $3.5 trillion will transfer between Australian generations. For families with significant wealth, the decisions being made now, including the structures, the conversations and the preparation, will shape how that transfer unfolds for decades. At Fitzpatricks Advice Partners, this is the work we focus on: the financial architecture and the human one.
Managing wealth across generations starts with questions that go beyond the structures and the numbers.
What does this wealth mean to the different people it will touch? Does your child understand why the plan is structured the way it is, and are they ready for what comes with it? What has never been said in your family that probably needs to be?
Our advisers know how to guide discussions about the human dimensions of wealth, the topics families often find difficult to raise themselves. What does fairness actually mean in your family, and has anyone ever said it out loud? What assumptions are your children carrying about what they may inherit, and are they accurate? When has money caused tension in your family before, and how was it resolved? These are not comfortable questions. But they may be the reason plans hold together when tested.
Preparing the next generation is a journey, not a briefing. It is about building financial literacy progressively, bringing children into the conversation at the right points, and making sure they understand the intent behind what they will one day steward, not just the mechanics of it. Many of our clients tell us their children know us. They have met with us, asked us questions, called us when they were buying their first home. That continuity of relationship is not a nice-to-have.
Your Lead Adviser at Fitzpatricks Advice Partners is that person. They work alongside solicitors, accountants, investment managers and superannuation specialists as a single ongoing relationship, not a case-by-case referral.
The relationship begins not with your estate plan or your existing trust structures, but with a discussion about what you want your wealth to mean for the people who come after you. Starting from that destination and working backwards is how the Lead Adviser relationship is structured.
Intergenerational wealth management is the discipline of planning, structuring and managing family wealth so that it can be passed on with intent, not just transferred. It is related to but distinct from wealth structuring and family governance, which covers the legal and trust arrangements that hold wealth across generations. Intergenerational wealth management covers the decades before and after those arrangements are put in place, focused on transfer with intent.
When done well, it brings together the structures that hold family wealth, the tax implications of transfer, the readiness of the next generation, and the family conversations that need to happen long before the plan is ever tested.
Research consistently highlights that successful wealth transfer depends on far more than legal structures and tax planning. Family communication, shared purpose, governance and preparing future generations all play an important role in preserving wealth and family harmony.
The families who hold wealth across generations have treated wealth transfer as a process, not a single event. They have made sure to focus as much on shared understanding as they do on the plan itself.
Family wealth often sits across multiple structures: discretionary (family) trusts, self-managed super funds (SMSFs), testamentary trusts, company structures and sometimes operating businesses. Together, they form a complex system that needs to be understood and regularly reviewed.
Trusts that made sense when children were young may need to be revisited as those children become adults with their own families. SMSF succession and estate planning arrangements need to align with how superannuation death benefits will flow. Testamentary trusts, when structured well, provide meaningful tax and asset protection benefits for the next generation. For families who need a comprehensive review of these structures, our wealth structuring and family governance service covers this work in detail.
Capital gains tax (CGT), superannuation death benefits and stamp duty can each take significant amounts out of family wealth if structures are not set up well in advance. While we do not provide tax advice, we work alongside your tax adviser so decisions about estate planning for families and wealth transfer are made with full visibility of the tax position, not separately from it. The families who manage wealth transfer well are the ones where the tax thinking and the wealth thinking happen in the same conversation.
Most families prepare the assets and leave the people to figure it out. There is a significant distance between knowing wealth exists and being able to act responsibly within the structures that hold it. Adult children may have a general sense of the family trust, the company, the SMSF but understand neither the decisions they are entitled to make inside those structures, nor the obligations that come with them.
At Fitzpatricks Advice Partners, we work with families to close that gap before it matters: structured conversations that build context across generations, clarity about who decides what, and agreed ways to make decisions when the family is under pressure. For some families, this extends to a family charter, a statement of intent the next generation can refer to. For the right family, this work creates clarity long before important decisions need to be made.
Australia is in the middle of one of the largest intergenerational wealth transfers in its history. More than $3.5 trillion is estimated to move between generations over the next 20 years. The Baby Boomer generation built much of Australia’s private business wealth. It is now beginning to sell it, hand it to the next generation, or transfer it to management.
CGT on assets transferred during life or at death. Superannuation death benefits taxed differently depending on who inherits. Stamp duty on property transfers between family members. Each can be managed well with planning and managed poorly without it.
This may be relevant if you are:
If your situation is more straightforward, there may be a better starting point. Where this service is the right fit, the relationship is long term and built around how your family operates.
Every family’s situation is different. The conversation starts with what you hold, who it is intended to benefit, what concerns you, and what has or has not been planned for already.
There is no obligation and no pressure to decide quickly. Talk to a Lead Adviser when the time feels right.