A Fair Inheritance Doesn’t Always Mean an Equal Inheritance

If you’ve seen Succession or Knives Out, you know inheritances can turn families into enemies.

Real life is usually less dramatic, but one source of conflict is unequal inheritances, where one heir receives more than others. The share of American parents over age 50 with wills and multiple children who divided their estates unequally increased from about 27% in 1995 to more than 36% in 2014, according to one study published in 2023. Researchers attributed the trend to changing family dynamics, including higher divorce rates, remarriages, cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing. Without clear communication, a decision to leave one heir more than another can lead to resentment, legal disputes and fractured relationships.

For advisors, that creates a delicate balancing act: honoring a client’s wishes while helping families understand the reasoning before disagreements escalate, said James Malatos, founder of Harbor View Private Wealth. He once had a case where a pair of clients left a family property to one child. However, the other children were not privy to that decision, and it took months of mediation to repair relationships that a single conversation years earlier could have preserved. “My rule now is simple: If a decision might surprise an heir, it should never surprise them for the first time in a lawyer’s office,” he told Advisor Upside.

Why’d They Get More?!

It’s the same question children ask on Christmas morning, only decades later and with much higher stakes. There are often legitimate reasons an inheritance isn’t split evenly. “Maybe one child has significant medical needs, another has spent years serving as a caregiver or one has already received substantial financial support during the parents’ lifetime,” said Andrew Fincher, a CFP with VLP Financial Advisors.

The bigger problem is that many families never discuss those decisions: 

• About 70% of parents have created a will or estate plan, according to a 2025 Fidelity study.
• Most, however, have not shared inheritance details with their children.

Hey, No Fair. Those conversations are better had sooner rather than later. Explaining why one heir will receive more can give family members time to process the decision and ask questions before emotions are compounded by grief. Once a client dies, there’s often little an advisor can do to repair the underlying hurt, said Mitchell Kraus, owner of Capital Intelligence Associates. “We can explain the documents, help administer the assets fairly and encourage communication, but the person best positioned to explain the decision is no longer there,” he told Advisor Upside. “A difficult conversation today can prevent an all-out family war later.”