Ethical Wills Gain Attention as Families Rethink What They Pass Down
A father's essay on rewriting his ethical will after losing his daughter highlights a growing conversation about transferring values, not just wealth, to the next generation.
As an estimated $84 trillion is expected to change hands in the United States by 2045 in the largest generational wealth transfer in history, one father's account of rewriting his ethical will after the death of his daughter is drawing attention to a question that estate planning rarely addresses: how families pass down values, judgment, and hard-won perspective alongside financial assets.
The essay, published as a commentary piece, describes how the author first learned about ethical wills from Susan Turnbull, a pioneer in the field, and wrote an initial draft in 2007. At the time, he viewed the document as a kind of insurance policy — a way to chronicle the experiences and lessons that had shaped his life so that his wife Jill and their children, Greg, Cara, and Jake, would have them if something happened to him unexpectedly. Finishing that first version brought what he described as an enormous sense of peace.
That understanding changed after Cara died. Rewriting the document, the author writes, is when he understood what an ethical will was actually for. It was not a backup plan. It was, in his words, the only place resilience, gratitude, and presence could be passed down in his own words, rather than secondhand through someone else's account of who he was or through fading memories. Cara, he writes, brought joy, love, and perspective to the family, and her life continues to shape how he thinks about what matters most.
An ethical will is not a legal document and does not replace a traditional estate plan. It complements one by capturing the human side of a family legacy — family history, formative experiences, mistakes made, influential people, and lessons about business, relationships, family, community, and life that took decades to acquire. The author argues that families spend years working with attorneys, advisors, and tax professionals to plan how wealth will pass to the next generation, investing enormous resources in transferring financial assets while investing almost nothing in transferring the values and experiences that gave that wealth its purpose.
That imbalance, he suggests, matters more given the scale of the coming wealth transfer. Preparing to move assets receives extraordinary attention, but he believes families have a responsibility to think just as carefully about whether they are passing along the judgment, perspective, and knowledge that helped create and steward that wealth. Those qualities, he writes, deserve a succession plan too — and may be the most valuable asset passed to the next generation.
The author also describes how writing the document revealed how many of the values he considered his own had been handed down to him. His grandparents taught him about family, hard work, and making the most of available opportunities. His mother taught him curiosity, education, and pushing beyond what was comfortable. His father, the original entrepreneur in the family, taught him hard work, generosity, communication, resourcefulness, and the importance of relationships. Jill taught him resilience, presence, and living a joyful life, while mentors, teachers, colleagues, and friends added countless other lessons.
He compares these accumulated lessons to compounding financial assets, arguing that life experiences compound as well, shaping how people make decisions, raise children, build businesses, navigate difficult moments, and understand their responsibilities to others. Telling children that integrity matters or that relationships are important carries more meaning, he writes, when they understand how those lessons were learned, when they were tested, and how they served.
For anyone considering writing an ethical will, the author advises against making the exercise too complicated. Start with your own story, he suggests: who shaped you, which experiences changed you, what mistakes taught you something worth preserving, and what matters most to you. The objective is not to write a rulebook for someone else's life. Children must make their own choices and create lives of their own making. The intention is simply to give them something they can return to as they encounter their own moments of truth.
An estate plan, he concludes, can explain what you are leaving behind and how it should be transferred. An ethical will can help explain why. His hope is that many years from now, something he writes today will help his children understand where they came from, remember the values that shaped their family, and decide for themselves where they want to go.
