After 11 years practicing law, I have learned that wealth and preparedness do not always arrive together. Some of the most financially successful families I have worked with own businesses, investment properties, substantial retirement accounts, brokerage portfolios, and other assets accumulated over decades. They have accountants. They have financial advisers. They understand investments and taxes. From the outside, their financial lives appear exceptionally well organized.
Then we look at what would actually happen if they died tomorrow.
That is often where the problems begin.
Wealth gives families options during life, but it can create considerable complexity after death. A family with a house, checking account, and vehicle may have a relatively straightforward estate to administer. Add three properties, ownership in a closely held company, investment accounts, retirement assets, private investments, valuable personal property, and accounts at several institutions, and the legal picture changes considerably.
Every asset introduces another ownership question. Every beneficiary designation needs to agree with the broader plan. Every business interest may come with its own operating agreement or transfer restrictions. Real estate may be owned individually, jointly, through an LLC, or through a trust.
Building wealth and organizing wealth for death are simply not the same job.
The numbers suggest that many wealthy Americans have not made that distinction. According to the 2025 First Citizens Bank Wealth Survey, 87% of high-net-worth Americans believed they were prepared to transfer wealth to future generations. Yet more than half reportedly lacked a formal estate plan, while more than one-third had no will.
Research involving Bank of America Private Bank clients revealed a similar disconnect. PLANADVISER reported that only 46% of wealthy respondents had the basic components of an estate plan in place.
I find that contradiction remarkable, although not particularly surprising after what I have seen in practice. A person can spend 30 or 40 years building an impressive financial life while leaving surprisingly little instruction about what should happen to it afterward.
For families with substantial assets, the consequences can be significant.
More Assets Usually Mean More Questions
Probate is the court-supervised process through which certain property is administered after death. In Michigan, whether an asset becomes part of a probate estate depends on more than its value. Ownership, beneficiary designations, trusts, and other transfer arrangements can determine what happens when the owner dies.
This is an important distinction because being wealthy does not automatically mean having a large probate estate.
A person could theoretically own substantial assets while having relatively little subject to probate because those assets were properly structured during life. Another person could have considerably less wealth but leave most of it exposed to probate because everything remained individually titled.
The difficulty with larger estates is the number of opportunities for something to be overlooked.
Consider a business owner who also owns a primary residence, two rental properties, several investment accounts, retirement assets, life insurance, and an interest in another company. The estate plan may look complete because a will and trust were signed several years ago.
But what happened afterward?
Was the newly purchased rental property ever transferred into the trust? Does the business agreement permit the owner’s interest to transfer as the estate plan anticipates? Are beneficiary designations still current? Did an old account remain outside the plan? Was a new investment opened and forgotten during the estate-planning review?
Beyond identifying what you own, your estate and business documents must work together to ensure operations continue without disruption. Your operating agreement should clearly specify succession plans for key roles, designate successor managers or operators, and address what happens if you become incapacitated, not just when you pass away. Partnerships require explicit succession language and buy-sell agreements that fund smooth ownership transitions. Without these mechanisms in place, business interruption, disputes among partners, or forced liquidation can devastate the enterprise your family has built.
These are not unusual mistakes. They are exactly the sort of problems that become visible when someone is no longer here to correct them.
Probate Can Also Become a Privacy Issue
Many successful families are understandably private about money.
They do not discuss the value of their investment accounts with neighbors. They do not publicly explain who owns what percentage of a family business. They may not even discuss every financial detail with their children.
Probate introduces a court proceeding into matters the family may have always handled privately.
The degree of public access depends on the particular records and circumstances involved, but probate generally offers less privacy than assets administered privately through a properly structured trust.
For a family with substantial wealth, that difference deserves consideration.
Estate administration can involve information about property, interested parties, creditors, valuations, disputes, and distributions. For business owners, executives, physicians, investors, and other families concerned about financial privacy, keeping appropriate assets outside probate may therefore serve a purpose beyond convenience.
Privacy itself can be part of the estate plan.
Wealth Makes Existing Family Problems More Expensive
I do not believe money suddenly creates dysfunctional families. More often, money gives existing disagreements something valuable to attach themselves to.
A parent dies owning a business worth several million dollars. One child has worked in that business for 15 years. Another child has never been involved but expects an equal inheritance. Should they receive equal ownership?
A family owns several properties. One beneficiary wants to keep them. Another wants everything sold immediately.
A father remarries later in life and has children from his first marriage. His surviving spouse believes one thing was promised. His children remember something different.
Then there are the objects that have very little financial importance but enormous emotional value. Jewelry, photographs, furniture, watches, firearms, artwork, and family heirlooms can generate arguments completely disproportionate to their monetary worth.
When the estate plan leaves room for interpretation, family members often fill that space with their own memories of what the deceased supposedly wanted.
That is when an estate dispute can stop being about administration and become personal.
Attorneys become involved. Property may require professional valuation. Accountants may be retained. Hearings can follow. Family members begin communicating through counsel instead of speaking directly to one another.
The financial cost matters, but sometimes the greater loss is a relationship that never recovers.
For that reason, sophisticated estate planning is not merely about deciding who gets the assets. It requires identifying where disagreements are likely to occur and removing as much uncertainty as reasonably possible before those disagreements begin.
Why Successful People Still Delay Estate Planning
People sometimes assume wealthy families neglect estate planning because they are careless. In my experience, the explanation is usually more complicated.
Financial success itself can create a false sense that everything has already been handled.
A successful business owner may regularly speak with a CPA, financial adviser, insurance professional, and business attorney. Investment accounts are professionally managed. Taxes are filed. Insurance policies are reviewed. Corporate records are maintained.
With that much professional infrastructure surrounding someone’s finances, it is easy to assume the estate must be organized too.
It may not be.
Financial planning and estate planning overlap, but they perform different jobs.
Complexity also encourages procrastination. Someone with significant wealth may need to consider business succession, multiple properties, children from an earlier marriage, charitable intentions, tax issues, trustee selection, beneficiary protections, and several different ownership structures.
That can feel like a project requiring dozens of decisions. So the person decides to deal with it next year. Then next year becomes five years.
Meanwhile, another property is purchased, another account is opened, grandchildren are born, the business becomes more valuable, beneficiaries change, and an estate plan that was incomplete to begin with becomes increasingly disconnected from the person’s actual financial life.
Eventually, there is no next year.
A Will Is Important, but It May Not Be Enough
One misunderstanding I encounter regularly is the assumption that having a will means avoiding probate.
Generally, it does not.
A will provides instructions concerning property governed by the will. It can identify beneficiaries, nominate a personal representative, address guardianship considerations when applicable, and resolve other important questions.
But the existence of a will does not automatically remove individually owned property from probate.
For a family whose primary concern is avoiding probate for appropriate assets, that distinction matters enormously.
A beautifully drafted will cannot change the title on a house. It cannot automatically correct an outdated beneficiary designation. It does not place an investment account into a trust simply because the trust is mentioned somewhere in the estate plan.
Estate planning has to work at the asset level.
A Living Trust Is Only as Good as Its Funding
A revocable living trust can solve some of these problems when it is properly designed and implemented.
During the creator’s lifetime, appropriate assets can be transferred into the trust while the creator generally retains substantial control. The trust can designate who will manage those assets if the creator becomes unable to do so and who will administer them after death.
Property properly held by the trust generally does not need to pass through probate merely to be distributed according to the trust’s instructions.
The important word is properly.
I have seen people spend considerable money creating trusts and then treat the signed document as though the work were finished. The trust goes into a binder, the binder goes into a cabinet, and life continues.
Meanwhile, assets remain outside it.
If a house is still titled individually, creating a trust does not magically make the house trust property. The same basic issue can arise with other assets depending on their ownership and transfer arrangements.
This is something we emphasize when working with families. Estate planning should not end when the documents are signed. The ownership structure surrounding those documents has to support what the plan is trying to accomplish.
That can mean reviewing deeds, financial accounts, beneficiary designations, business interests, and other significant assets to determine how each one would actually transfer.
Wealthy Families Need an Asset Map
When I review an estate, I am interested in more than whether someone has a will or trust.
I want to know what exists.
Where is the real estate? How is it titled? What investment accounts exist? What retirement plans are involved? Who are the beneficiaries? Are there business interests? Life insurance policies? Valuable personal property? Digital assets? Property outside the state? What is the family dynamic?
In other words, the family needs an asset map.
Once the assets are identified, the next question is straightforward: What happens to each one when the owner dies?
The answer should not be assumed.
One asset may pass through a trust. Another may transfer through a beneficiary designation. Another may be jointly owned. A business interest may be controlled by an operating or shareholder agreement. Another piece of property may still be subject to probate.
Looking at an estate this way often reveals problems that a stack of signed documents does not.
You might discover a beneficiary designation completed 20 years ago. You might find that a business succession plan conflicts with the trust. You might discover that a trust was created but never funded properly. You might find a property purchased years after the trust was established and never incorporated into the plan.
Those problems are much easier to address while the owner is alive.
