Are we starting to see the reality of the intergenerational wealth transfer play out already in wills?

Part 1 of 2.

Every year I get to geek out on the Legacy Giving Report from Smee & Ford and Legacy Futures. (I know I really should get out more!) It’s such a gift to the sector and key to understanding what’s going on in a field that holds so many mysteries. And this year’s report did not disappoint.

The headline figures are as reassuring as we’ve come to expect. £4.4bn total income, a record 17.4% of estates including a charitable gift and a strong long-term forecast. But I want to talk about a different number. The average number of charities named in a charitable will has fallen to 2.9 – from 3.4 in the dizzy days of 2018. The charity share of will which is how I have always thought of it – has contracted ~15% in seven years. I tend to use this KPI as a measure of genuine legacy consideration. By that measure, something has shifted. And the income line, still growing on the back of rising death rates, inflated estate values and cleared probate backlog, is not showing it yet.

Boomers and their wills are doing a lot of heavy lifting

To help understand why, let’s think of the actual supporters instead of the data. People leave gifts to charities because a cause has touched their lives in a way that feels meaningful – because the work the organisation does has moved them, changed something for them or reflected back a version of themselves they want to affirm. Impact is what create the emotional connection. It’s what opens the door to someone seeing themselves in the cause. But it’s identity that closes on the decision. The decision to include a charity in a will is ultimately about who this person is, and who they want to be remembered as having been.

But can they afford to be so altruistic these days?

The dynamic between supporter and charity hasn’t changed but the environment in which these decisions are made has definitely shifted. The wills of pre-war babies were relatively simple. Family provision was important but the competing claims on estates were fewer, the financial complexity was lower and, in many cases, the charitable gift represented a relatively uncomplicated expression of lifelong values.

The Boomer generation is more financially sophisticated, update their wills more frequently and approaches estate planning with a level of intentionality their parents rarely applied. They are also navigating competing pressures on their wealth: long-term care cost easily make a huge dent; lifetime gifting to children and grandchildren as the bank of mum and dad evolves to the bank of granny and grandpa as conversations move towards inheritance skipping a generation (luckily us Gen X’ers are resilient and have it all sorted….) And looming over it all are the pension reforms and IHT changes that will drag tens of thousands of additional estates into the new levels of complexity from 2027.

A Boomer’s will is being asked to do significantly more jobs that a pre-war baby will ever had to. And when a decision becomes more complex, when the stakes are higher and the competing claims are more numerous, behavioural evidence is consistent – people don’t expand their choices, they narrow them.

The messy middle is messy enough (see my Gifts In Wills Decision Map for more context). Under conditions of complexity and cognitive overload people concentrate their decisions on what feels most essential. In the context of a will, that almost certainly means family first and then the charity/charities that sit closest to their core identity – the ones where the relationship between impact and self-concept is strongest and most enduring.

The charity that makes the cut in that environment is not necessarily the one with the best awareness campaign. It’s the one that’s done the slower, harder work of becoming genuinely meaningful to the person making the decision. But that person doesn't make it alone.

In part two, I want to talk about the family in the room that most legacy programmes pretend isn't there.

If you're reading this and thinking about your own legacy programme, I'd love to be part of that conversation.