A written masterclass, roughly ten minutes to read. General information, not legal or tax advice. Gifting and trust rules differ sharply by jurisdiction and change often.
Why phase it at all
The default plan is that everything transfers at once, on the worst day of the family’s life, to people who have never managed money at that scale. Phasing exists because that is a poor design.
- Recipients learn on smaller amounts, where a mistake is a lesson rather than a catastrophe.
- You are present to explain the reasoning, which no letter of wishes fully replaces.
- Many jurisdictions treat lifetime gifts more favourably than transfers on death, though rules vary and change.
- You see the outcome, and can adjust the later phases based on what you learn.
- It reduces the concentration of a single transfer, which is when disputes cluster.
Phase what you can afford to give
Never gift money you may need. Recovering a gift is difficult, sometimes impossible, and asking is corrosive. Model your own needs to age 100 before deciding what is surplus.
A four-phase structure
Phase one — education and small sums
Modest amounts with no strings, deliberately small enough that losing them is survivable. The purpose is to see how someone handles money, not to enrich them.
Phase two — matched and purposive gifts
Support tied to something specific: a deposit, a qualification, a business. Matching what they contribute themselves keeps ownership with them.
Phase three — structured capital
Larger amounts through a trust or similar, with defined access points. This is where governance starts to matter more than the amount.
Phase four — the remainder
Whatever passes under the will, into a family that has already had two decades of practice.
The ages are yours to choose
Nothing requires phases to align with birthdays. Tying access to life events — completing study, buying a first home, a set number of years running a business — usually works better than an age alone.
Family governance, lightly
Wealth that lasts three generations almost always has some governance behind it. It does not need to be elaborate; it needs to exist and be written down.
- A statement of purpose
- One page on what the money is for. It resolves more future arguments than any legal clause.
- A regular family meeting
- Annual, with an agenda. The first one is awkward and the fifth is routine.
- Defined roles
- Who decides, who is consulted, who administers. Ambiguity here is where families fracture.
- Financial education
- Deliberate, not assumed. Inheriting money teaches nobody how to manage it.
- A dispute process
- Agreed while everyone is on good terms, because that is the only time it can be agreed.
The conversation most families avoid
Secrecy about money is the norm and it is expensive. Heirs who first learn the shape of an estate at its reading make poor decisions quickly and resent each other slowly.
- 1Start with intentions rather than amounts. "This is what I want the money to do" is easier than a number.
- 2Be explicit about unequal treatment, if there is any, and say why. Discovering it later is far worse.
- 3Say where the documents are and who to call. This alone saves months.
- 4Tell them what you expect of them, if anything. Unstated expectations are always disappointed.
- 5Repeat it. One conversation is an event; several are an understanding.
Disputes are rarely about money
They are almost always about perceived fairness and about surprise. Both are addressed by talking, and neither by a better-drafted clause.
Common pitfalls
- Gifting the family home while continuing to live in it — widely disregarded for tax and creates ownership problems.
- Structures so complex the next generation cannot administer them without paying advisers indefinitely.
- Naming one child as executor and telling the others nothing.
- Assuming that tax rules current today will apply in twenty years. Build for flexibility.
- Phasing so slowly that the recipients are in their sixties before the capital arrives, when it no longer changes anything.
Documents you may also need
The Guide to Global Estate Planning
Passing wealth across generations and jurisdictions: the documents that matter, the taxes that surprise people, and the mistakes that are expensive to undo.
MasterclassRisk Management in Volatile Markets
What risk actually means, why volatility is a poor proxy for it, and the small number of things that reliably help when markets fall.
InsightsInsights Archive
Everything we publish, in one place: research, guides, masterclasses and the help centre — with an honest note on what an archive is and is not.
This document was last updated on 1 August 2026. We publish the current version here at all times; superseded versions are available on request.
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