Wealth & Legacy: The Art of Passing It On

Renée Sylvestre-Williams September 10, 2025

Wealth, at the highest level, is not just about the amount of money and assets you own. It’s about the intangibles such as legacy, the plan for the family to continue as multi-generational stewards. That’s why Canadians are looking beyond how to make money, they’re looking at how to pass it on and what that means for their family and their reputation. This becomes increasingly important because we are in the middle of the one trillion- dollar transfer from Baby Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials, the biggest one in history.

Passing It On

Estate planning is key to avoiding being a shirt-sleeve-to-shirt-sleeve-in-three-generations family. Once you’ve built a strong foundation, the next step is to ensure the smooth transfer of cash, assets, property and investments to the next generation.

Every family is unique when it comes to their needs but some of the common ways to transfer wealth are trusts, inheritance, gifts and insurance., which can be defined in your estate plan.

One of the best reasons to have an estate plan is to preserve your wealth. This means being tax efficient and preventing financial mismanagement. By documenting your plans and wishes, you minimize family disputes — because money makes people do weird things.

The New Philanthropy

Despite economic turmoil, Canadian philanthropic families plan on maintaining or increasing their level of charitable giving according to a 2025 report from Canadian Family Offices (CFO). Healthcare and religious organizations continue to receive the majority of charitable funds according to a 2019 Imagine Canada report. That’s followed by the environment and education. What’s interesting is that Gen X and younger generations are more focused on the environment, homelessness and poverty.

What’s also changing is how wealthy younger Canadians are donating to charity. Foundations remain popular, along with donor-advised funds and donations of shares, cash, or other assets such as art collections. Impact investing and venture philanthropy have also grown in popularity.

An area seeing strong interest is impact investing, which uses investments to simultaneously create beneficial social and environment effects, and deliver financial gains. Environmental, social, and governance investing is one form of impact investing. One example is investing in companies that promote health, environmental or food sustainability in the agricultural sector.

Venture philanthropy is similar but unlike impact investing, financial gains aren’t a necessary part of the process. Families donate money to a project or illness and have a hands-on approach to investor oversight and engagement. If the project has the potential for commercialization, the donor benefits from sales or IP ownership but venture philanthropy does come with the risk of failure and no financial gains.

Building a Family Office

These offices are set up when the first generation want to build a legacy for their children and grandchildren. They’re also useful to help manage the more complicated family’s assets. You can have your own family office, with trusted expert professionals to advise or manage your wealth or you can be part of a larger family office that manages multiple families.

Family offices provide traditional services like tax and estate planning, philanthropic management, business advisory services, investment and portfolio management, finance and lifestyle management. They can also provide other services around art advisory, personal, property and social media security, and insurance advice. When setting up a family office, it’s always a good idea to define your goals and the resources you need to achieve them before you go on a hiring spree or start interviewing FOs.

For example, you and your family members may have amazing legal or financial management experience but setting up a family office does two things: bring in complimentary experience that will help you maintain, grow and pass on values and wealth; and that all-important third-party, impartial professional who can offer alternative decisions that support the business and the family.

Beyond Accumulation

If you’re considering legacy planning, philanthropy and setting up a family office, you’ve moved beyond just making money. You’re now looking at stewardship and the passing on of intangibles like values. The art of passing it on isn’t just about the cash, the stocks, real estate and the art collection, which are all very nice, but more on what it means as a high net worth family to leave a positive legacy.

Feature image courtesy of Philip Steury / Adobe Stock