I’m sorry I’ve been MIA for the last 6 weeks but I promise I didn’t disappear because I ran out of things to say…

(If there’s ever a day that I’m speechless, call 911 because I’m probably having a stroke)

We’ve been WORKING…

If you’re one of the dozens of people that has reached out asking to meet and I’ve told you “after September 15th”, this is why…

Today, we’re announcing Rolodex: the Inherited Property OS for Realtors.

Before I show you what Rolodex does, I want to tell you why I built it because this is so much bigger than launching “an app”.

I’m on a mission to change the way that America inherits property.

We’re building an army of legacy-minded Realtors so that when an attorney or heir is dealing with an inherited property, the only person they want touching it is an Heirloom Agent.

(And when they’re inheriting properties in multiple markets, the family gets the same experience no matter where the properties are).

A standard like that can’t live inside one person’s head.

It needs an operating system across markets.

That’s exactly why we built Rolodex.

Rolodex gives Realtors the systems, network and experts to protect family legacies when they are inheriting properties.

Here’s how:

Be present the moment an inherited property needs support

Til now, the only agents who buy probate lists are the prospecting bros and equity-destroying investors who harass families until they’re pressured into listing at a discount in the midst of grief.

Our approach is to focus on being a resource to the attorneys who are opening cases instead.

In most cases, you’d still have to import the list, organize it, decide where each case belongs, and remember the first action.

Rolodex streamlines this by integrating with the number one probate data platform in the US to pull in probate and attorney information directly into the system when a case is opened.

With ProbateData, you’ll be able to filter down to the zip code and price point of the properties you want to support and trigger automations automatically in Rolodex.

Say the right thing at the right time, every time

An heir, a probate attorney, a referral partner, and a past client should not receive the same generic drip campaign.

Most real estate marketing is entirely tone-deaf to a grieving family.

Real estate marketing cannot say “I’m so excited to list your dead mom’s house” to an heir.

That’s just DIABOLICAL.

(Yes, I know — most Realtors wouldn’t actually use those exact words but that’s what the family hears in the tonality of most drip campaigns)

Rolodex comes pre-loaded with nurture flows that educate and prepare families for the transition, answer the questions they didn’t even know to ask and show them how to navigate hard conversations without breaking the family apart.

Every single step is hyper-personalized for heirs and the only thing an agent needs to do is change one field to update which nurture flow the family is on.

That isn’t just because it feels good either:

That’s how we introduce automation without losing the personal touch.

AI that actually does work for you (and replaced 8 VAs for me!)

I have yet to meet a top producing real estate agent who loves updating their database.

… and yet, the biggest producers I know are OBSESSIVE about their databases.

I read a stat recently that showed the average professional spends 25% of their day in their inboxes.

(Or, if you end up ignoring your inbox, creates low-grade anxiety that you end up worrying if you missed something)

It’s no secret that inherited property requires emotional capacity to serve families well so feeling burnt out has a cost bigger than just an agent’s energy.

AskAI in Rolodex can update transactions, read contracts, create marketing campaigns, organize records, scan business cards, add people to the right campaigns, and handle the database work that used to drain me.

It does everything I used to pay 8 VAs for.

I want to tell it what needs to happen and trust that the instruction was carried out.

When you log in, it’ll come pre-loaded with my knowledge base and skills so you can start operating right away.

AskAI’s entire job is to close open tabs in your brain and do the admin work for you so you can stay present with the person in front of you.

Manage conversations in one place

When there are multiple people involved in a transaction and everyone has a different communication preference, you spend your day playing whack a mole between inboxes.

Rolodex brings calls, texts, emails, and social messages into one inbox.

Heirs shouldn’t have to repeat information because your communication is spread across five apps.

Right now, we support email, text, calls, Facebook messages (from your business page), Instagram DMs, TikTok DMs and WhatsApp.

LinkedIn is coming and soon, you’ll be able to handle social media comments in the inbox too!

Systems, a network and training

We built on top of GoHighLevel to give you an all-in-one platform that will eliminate the need for many of the tools you’re already using.

And, I’m going to hold your hand and walk you through implementing everything step-by-step.

That is why we’re releasing Rolodex with our Inherited Property Challenge.

But that’s just the start of it…

TAKE THE INHERITED PROPERTY CHALLENGE

You’ll set up the inbox, campaigns, automations, and workflows inside your actual business. The assignments and accountability are there so you don’t finish with a folder full of ideas and nothing running.

(You can find the rest of the agenda here.)

You’re also going to need a network and training to serve this space well.

Families are inheriting multiple properties around the country and we need a network to serve them

When a family inherits a property in Miami, a rental property in Phoenix, and land in North Carolina, they’re now navigating every single issue x3.

I already get these messages and that’s exactly why my urgency is so high to share Rolodex with other agents.

It KILLS me when I get these messages and don’t have someone to send them to.

Right now, every referral feels like a gamble and even the BEST Realtors struggle with inherited property because it’s a completely different type of transaction.

Rolodex gives us the foundation for a network of Heirloom Agents working from the same operating system, speaking the same language, and protecting the same things so that when a family inherits properties, they are getting consistency across the board.

Inherited property comes with challenges that traditional real estate transactions don’t have

Things like reverse mortgages, medicaid planning, step up basis, clean out logistics, deferred maintenance, heir conflict and a whole bunch of other issues surface in these transactions and most agents are completely blindsided by them.

That’s why the Inherited Property Challenge includes weekly guest experts covering:

• Conflict and attachment styles between heirs

• Probate cash advance financing for families who can’t come out of pocket for the clean out process

• How to interview and choose an estate coordinator for the clean-out process

• Renovation financing to market outdated properties without giving them away

You’ll learn from psychotherapist Jenn Hall, estate-transition pioneer Jennifer Pickett, renovation-loan expert Andy Wood, and a probate cash advance financing expert who will be confirmed very soon.

Rolodex is only step one in our larger vision

Our mission is still to change the way America inherits property.

(Canadian agents, I see you too! I’ve gotten SOOOO many messages from you guys. Everything in our system is customizable so the terminology might be a little different but the process is still the same and you can absolutely customize it).

Rolodex is the first layer because the fastest way to improve the family experience is to resource the Realtors already standing closest to the property.

Our next phase is expanding Rolodex to give access to Estate Coordinators so the belongings, clean-out, and preparation can be handled with a defined process and we can determine the value of the belongings in the property.

Phase 3 adds consumer, legal, and financial-facing layers that make the larger inheritance process easier to understand and coordinate.

Last year, I won a pitch competition presenting the consumer platform because I knew inherited property needed infrastructure.

Then I realized most heirs don’t want another platform they have to learn while they’re already managing an estate, a family, a job, and a house full of decisions.

Families want a capable and compassionate person who can own the property experience, explain the options, protect the value, and stay present without taking the decision away from them.

So that is where we’re beginning: better technology for the professional, a process installed inside the business, and connections across markets so the family’s experience doesn’t depend on a zip code.

It’s about presence, not tech.

If you walk away from this being impressed by a few Rolodex features, I’ve failed to do my job here.

Our immediate goal with the Inherited Property Challenge is to train up legacy-minded Realtors to be prepared for the massive influx of boomer-owned real estate we’re going to see flooding the market.

This is so much bigger than a CRM or listing a few properties.

Agents are going to need tools and resources so that they can be present for their clients as they go through the hardest transition of their lives.

If you’re a Realtor ready to build an inherited property practice that meets the Heirloom standard, join us in the Inherited Property Challenge.

TAKE THE INHERITED PROPERTY CHALLENGE

The early bird bonuses expire on 9/6 and the challenge begins on Monday, September 14th at 1pm EST.

In part one of this series, we talked about how inherited properties get marketed like they’re on clearance and then we wonder why they sell at a discount:

When I took my first inherited property listing, the husband was the primary caretaker of his wife with Alzheimers.

She couldn’t take care of herself and he passed away in his sleep.

I got a phone call from a friend who explained the situation and that the son was flying in from another state later that day.

I met him at the property and here’s what happened next:

⚠️ Quick heads up: the audio above gives the whole backstory on the rest of this article. Make sure you listen.

I started to notice the entire inheritance industry telling families to “just do an estate sale”.

Exhibits A, B and C:

Everyone conveniently forgets that estate sales only handle what can actually be sold.

Not to mention, estate sales need to be marketed and attract buyers.

You still have to make a bajillion decisions about what stuff each heir is going to keep, what donation companies will do pickups and still have to wait on the junk removal guys to dispose of whatever’s left.

So here’s the map:

The 10 steps after inheriting a home

1. Who’s in charge?

Before you touch a single thing, decide who actually makes the decisions, because when everyone is in charge, everything takes longer and costs more

2. Structure.

Lock down access, stabilize the utilities and the bills, and document the condition — not to rush anyone, but to protect a home while the family is scattered and exhausted.

3. Inventory.

Everyone wants to start by purging because purging feels like relief, but inventory is the quiet step that prevents the fights and saves you weeks down the line.

4. Sort — what goes where.

This isn’t really about “stuff”; it’s the step where the family sits with the handful of things that actually carry the person, and it deserves room to breathe.

5. Sell what you can.

Figure out what has real value and how to move it, whether that’s an estate sale, an auction, or a liquidation — this is where “just do an estate sale” finally shows up, but as one option rather than the whole plan.

6. Donation.

This is the step that saves families from death by a thousand weekends, because if you skip it you’ll end up paying to store and haul things you were always going to give away — and giving feels good, and it comes with real tax benefits.

7. Disposal.

This is the part nobody talks about and exactly where the money quietly leaks, because the broken furniture, the damaged items, and the true trash all need a real plan instead of a “we’ll deal with it later.”

8. Pre-inspection.

If the home is going to sell, inspect and prep it before it lists, so that you’re not blindsided in the negotiation that always comes.

9. Hire the handyman.

A little goes a long way here, so handle the small things that would otherwise hand a buyer fear or leverage before they turn into bargaining chips.

10. Deep cleaning.

Cleaning comes last on purpose, because it’s the final story you tell the market, and after the dust and the repairs the home should simply feel cared for, cleared, and ready for someone new.

You can’t skip steps in the process…

In my experience, families who don’t follow this process in order end up spending tons of extra time and money — or even worse, they quit halfway through and want to sell the property as-is.

We’re going to dig deeply into how inherited properties are priced next week but I’ll give you a little spoiler…

The small cost of properly curating and prep the property for the market ends up costing the family many times that at closing, which means the prep was never really the expense.

Skipping it was.

And I already know the next question, because I hear it every single time: how am I supposed to pay for all of that up front, before the house has even sold?

There’s an answer for that too and we’ll cover that next week.

Where to go from here

If you’re reading this and going, “there’s no way I can do all of this”, please consider taking Cathy’s advice:

In this article, I broke down our new marketing plan for inherited properties:

If you or your client is inheriting property, you can schedule a discovery call on my calendar right here. There’s absolutely no pressure or obligation and I’m here to help you figure out the best path forward.

Or, if you’re an agent who wants to work with inherited property, you can grab my entire system here.

Indulge me for a second — close your eyes and I want you to imagine that you’re inheriting a property…

✔️ Your entire family’s emotions are running high so you’re doing everything you can to keep the peace

✔️ You’re trying to keep up at work, manage the kids and do it all without going insane

✔️ Your Zoom meeting with your attorney ended in homework and you know you’re supposed to call the CPA

✔️ You’re being harassed by investors and prospecting bros who want to list the property (your data became public when probate opened)

✔️ At night, you’re rubbing your temples because you’re stressed to your absolute max and on top of everything, this property is demanding more time and money from you.

So you finally reach out to your Realtor and the conversation goes something like this:

*This is a simulated conversation but it’s very common.

Let me tell you what happens next:

Strike 1: The property is listed as-is at a discount

Strike 2: Decision fatigue kicks in so the family doesn’t fully clear out the property and it shows terribly

Strike 3: It gets stale on the market so the Realtor slaps a ‘motivated seller’ on it and attracts lowball offers from investors.

Don’t believe me? I have receipts.

These are straight off the MLS:

This happens across every market and every price point.

And there you have it friends —

Let me be clear: none of this happens because families don’t care or because agents are lazy.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to cover all three of these strikes.

Today, we’re going to start off with #3.

The thing is…

The real estate industry has no model for marketing inherited properties.

When a buyer is shopping for a property, they’re swiping through listings at warp speed.

A property has two seconds to catch their attention.

If there are 10 properties for the same list price and mom’s house is the one that is dated, it’s getting swiped past.

Traditional real estate marketing tells us to depersonalize the home and sanitize it of its soul — but that’s the best asset inherited property has.

Storytelling is going to lead the new era of inherited property marketing

The best real estate marketing videos I’ve seen recently are either:

1. Modern home tours, or

2. Agents doing funny things in properties

Those work on traditional transactions, but…

(You might as well just tell them which rock the spare key is under 🗝️)

… and a funny skit video in an inherited home feels like desecrating the family’s legacy.

So, what’s a girl to do?

We’re going to tell the story of the home instead of marketing the house.

Meet our new story-driven marketing plan

I’m not going to lie — figuring out how to make an outdated property with deferred maintenance issues stand out online has been a challenge but I’ve finally cracked the code.

I’ve spent years building that and we’re upgrading our entire marketing plan to use short films to get our listings way more exposure in front of our audience.

We have five storytelling pillars that we’re going to start working through:

1. Make the property drip with nostalgia

I’ve had seller after seller say they want a buyer who’s going to love the house as much as their family did.

Buyers need to feel the story to care.

Nostalgia is trending and we’re going to FULLY leverage that.

The goal of this pillar is to make the buyer fall in love with the history of the property and feel like they were part of the memories that lived inside the walls.

Here are a few of the nostalgia reels that we’re pulling inspiration from:

2. We need to get in front of the thrifting crowd.

Creators are calling this the thrifting golden age because so many families are inheriting homes.

If we’re doing an estate sale, this would draw buyers to the estate sale while also bringing exposure to the property.

I never thought to use the clean out process of our listings as content but after going down the thrifting and organizing rabbit holes, this will be a core part of our strategy going forward.

I’m very conscious of how sensitive this is for some families so I’d never highlight this part without their permission but it would get buyers invested in the story of the property.

Think of it like putting together a mini-series and the messy middle is exactly what makes buyers invested.

In the next article, I’m going to go deeper into our approach to the curation process of inherited property and I think you’ll see what I mean.

3. Help the buyer visualize what’s possible

By this point, if the buyer is following along in our reels, they’re fully invested in the story.

Then, they have to see themselves in the property.

I’ve been playing with AI to see how we can reimagine our listings and here are some of the reels that have inspired me:

I love the idea of showing a buyer what this could look like but I don’t want it to feel soooo AI.

As the technology gets better, I think we’ll be able to do some really cool, really dynamic things here.

I also came across this one that I am obsessed with and I think does an incredible job of making the buyer viscerally feel what it would be like to build a life within the home:

I’m loving how organic this style feels and am playing with how we could do this with a virtual renovation instead of full renovation:

BUT, There’s a huge problem with virtual renovations that I never hear talked about…

A confused mind always says no.

When we sold Isaac’s property in Bal Harbour, I had The One Building Co come in, measure everything, pick finishes, quote out the renovation and do virtual renderings.

It looked like this before:

We marketed the unit like it was new construction and showed the buyer that a similar, updated unit had sold two buildings over for $2M+.

Here’s how we presented it:

(That kitchen wall with the missing cabinet faces is the island in the concept photos!)

Our list price at $1.3M plus $300k renovation made the all-in cost of $1.6M feel like a literal steal.

4. We’re reimagining open houses for inherited properties.

I always tell my clients that my two primary jobs when I’m working with them are to protect their equity and to manage their emotions during the most stressful transaction of their lives.

Sometimes it means telling them things they DON’T want to hear.

Can I give you the same treatment and be really honest?

If the property isn’t sexy, open houses are pointless.

I was reading the Annual Profile of Buyers and Sellers that NAR (National Association of Realtors) puts out every year…

But there’s another number that stood out to me even more:

Most buyers are coming from less than 20 miles away.

That means the buyer likely ALREADY lives in the area.

Not to mention, 59% of buyers say that the neighborhood is important and 47% say that being close to family and friends is a priority.

I’ve been thinking about how to reimagine an open house for a dated property.

This appeals to the people who are already thinking about family, legacy and by getting them into the neighborhood, we’re catering to both of these at the same time.

We’d run a local Facebook ad like this to get exposure.

*That video wouldn’t embed so please click the link — it’s worth it.

One of my girlfriends from The Daily Drip hosted a workshop where another friend shared her takeaways and doing a recap video like this would be perfect for this concept:

5. Lastly, we have to give everyone closure

Since we’ve invited the internet to follow along in the journey, it’s only right to give them closure.

I came across this video scrolling through Instagram.

This reel inspired this entire marketing plan.

It changed the entire way I thought about telling the story of an inherited property.

And I’d also love to do a reel of the key hand off to the new buyer.

Where we’re going from here

In addition to finding the right buyer, this entire mini-series would give the family a documented story to go back to after they’ve let go of the property.

It perfectly aligns with our five-step Estate Transition Framework and I have never been so inspired and so excited to market a listing before.

If you know of someone who is inheriting property and wants their family’s story to be honored like this, I would love to have a conversation with them.

Or, if you’re an agent who wants to work with families who are inheriting property, you can grab my whole system here.

This is the third piece in the Patriarch Series, where we explore the role fathers play in family legacy.

Firstly, I have to say — WOW.

I am floored by all of the texts, DMs, calls and love you’ve sent me from last week’s article and how many of you have shared your own stories with me.

If you haven’t read it, you can check it out right here:

Every time I write a piece that makes me want to vomit before hitting “send”, I always know that it’s going to land because it’s real.

This week, we’re going deeper.

By the end of this article, you’re either going to think that I’m clinically insane and need to be admitted to the psych ward — or it’s going to change your life.

It’s a toss up which way this goes and I’ve made peace either way 💁‍♀️

Let’s begin:

I don’t think the worst part of losing someone is the funeral or even missing them.

I mean yea, those suck but that’s not the worst part.

Losing someone will send you into a spiral about the meaning of life, what happens to us after we die, the existence of God, whether reality is even real and whether you ever actually knew yourself at all.

It kinda feels like this:

There are two common ways I’ve seen it handled:

1. Stuff it deep down and pretend it never happened.

2. Be initiated into your dark night of the soul.

You can probably guess which one it was for me.

The darkest night

Every culture in history has a version of the dark night of the soul.

There are essentially three stages of it:

• Ego death and loss of meaning

• Existential emptiness

• Surrender, acceptance and rebirth

Basically, you reckon with who you really are, are forced to explore the darkest corners of your soul and battle every one of your demons at the same time.

There is nothing cute about the dark night of the soul.

On the outside, you’re forced to function in real life while feeling like the laws of physics were rewritten inside of you.

And, if that isn’t bad enough, there’s no timeline, guidebook or help to walk you through it.

When you’re in it, you’re so busy trying to survive that you can’t even zoom out to see what’s happening.

And most people will never talk about it for fear of being put in a straight jacket.

In the midst of feeling like God had abandoned me, I found this video that changed EVERYTHING for me:

@thetraficantesIf any of my videos goes viral, let it be this one because WOW 😭😭😭 IN THE FIRE. “if it’s left a MOMENT to long, it gets damaged” LET THAT SINK IN. God is so good. So so good and It blows my mind that he’d do all of this for ME. #christian #christiantok #christianlifestye #jesusisking #godisgoodallthetime

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In your dark night, trying to fight it just makes it last longer.

You eventually realize you have to surrender to it and let it change you.

After surrendering, I met a version of God that didn’t feel like a man sitting on a throne up in the clouds.

I met the version of Him who had been with me all along — just waiting for me to invite him in.

When I did, he grabbed me by the hand and led me to the light.

I came out the other side a completely different person.

For me, entering my dark night didn’t happen as a specific moment — it was a series of events that felt like my whole life was crumbling at the same time.

So, I want to share with you the tool that changed everything for me.

E-motions are energy-in-motion 🤯

In the midst of my dark night, I was sitting on my therapists couch and I apologized for crying.

She asked why I was apologizing and I was dumbfounded. I don’t know.

She told me that e-motions are energy-in-motion and my head legit exploded like the emoji 🤯

When I felt anything that was too much, I’d keep building, hitting my goals and moving so I didn’t have time to feel it.

I even joked that my best work came during heartbreak.

(She told me that was a trauma response 🙄)

In my dark night, I couldn’t even do that.

I was sleeping terribly, had no energy, felt dissociated, my shoulder always hurt and I was getting migraines but hey, I was fine.

My bloodwork was normal and my diet was clean.

I tried ev-er-y-thing to start sleeping again.

I went to the chiropractor, acupuncture, massage and pretty much anything else that would help my shoulder.

… and one day I was chatting with someone during a networking lunch and started rubbing my shoulder mid-conversation because it was bothering me.

He looked at me and asked when my heart broke.

Excuse me, what?

He explained how he’d learned that when we’re grieving or sad, our shoulders round which creates tension in our chest and stretches the muscles in the back of your shoulder — and how holding that posture over time feels like physical pain but it’s because our emotions put our body into a protective posture since we never moved the energy.

I was skeptical but nothing else was helping so I continued…

What about my neck?

He asked what conversations I’d been avoiding and told me about the book The Body Keeps The Score.

Turns out, lots of recent studies show that even repressed rage leads to autoimmune diseases.

My brain was exploding.

Processing my emotions was like having a super neat filing system in my body but the emotions were still being stored like volts of electricity.

I became obsessed.

My body was experiencing emotions that my mind had straight up rejected and my body was wearing the cost.

I did the only thing a normal, rational, overachiever who feels like they’re not in control would do…

I made a chart.

My rejected emotions were loudly trying to get my attention so I started consulting them like a board of advisors.

Little by little, I found this deep inner trusting that became unshakable.

Now, I feel every emotion more deeply than I ever have but I don’t run from them.

I heard someone say once:

And my brain chemistry changed forever.

So let me give you my chart:

(If you’re on mobile and need to zoom in or just want to save it, here it is in Notion).

I started sharing this with my girlfriends.

I did Taco Tuesday with one of my girlfriends this week and she raved about how much this helped her.

Yours will probably look different than mine — so please, make it your own.

(By the way, I go way deeper into each of these emotions and how they show up during grief in chapter 4 of my book, The Legacy Year).

Let’s break it down:

Fear

Tony Robbins says overachievers don’t feel fear, we call it “stress”.

Fear shows up for me in the moment that I struggle to take a deep breath.

It’s that suffocating feeling and the only safe thing used to be to get away.

I become an overthinking champion when my fear is activated.

Fear’s only job is to scan for danger and it’s asking one question — Am I safe?

Before I went on this journey, fear wasn’t an emotion I let myself have.

I’d tell myself I wasn’t scared despite the fact that my body had already decided it.

In the clients I work with, I recognize it in the way they can’t stay still.

They’ll ask the same question 14 different ways, research endlessly, check in every 6 seconds, get jumpy about timelines (wanting to move super fast and then ghost me) or deliver monologues to release the anxiety.

Instead of judging them, I’d just start asking — “what feels unsafe?”

If they rushed to answer, I’d tell them to pause for a second, take a deep breath and listen to what their body was telling them.

Once they could identify the root fear, it stopped having control over them.

Anger

Anger was the emotion I was most uncomfortable with until I learned what it was trying to tell me.

Anger’s job is to defend your boundaries and it asks — what boundary was crossed?

I struggled to recognize it in my body because it didn’t look like the anger I was used to seeing.

My anger used to show up as a complete shutdown that looked like stubbornness from the outside but it was actually a full nervous system freeze where I was trying to regulate myself because my body wouldn’t let me react.

I am almost impossible to reach when I’m shut down and I need space and time to regulate.

Now, I know that I’m angry the moment I feel my jaws clench, my eyes get really intense and I feel like a bull ready to charge at the red flag.

It’s my ready-for-battle posture.

I immediately look for what boundary has been crossed and address it in the moment.

In my clients, I see anger show up in the way they jump to conclusions, can’t hear what’s actually being said because they’ve already decided or go into a shut down like I do. It shows up in the passive aggressive comments to each other and sometimes, even when they mock each other.

Sadness

After my dad passed, I cried Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I didn’t cry on Wednesday and I was so proud of it. I got back to work the following Monday.

I didn’t have time to feel sad — but everything I did felt impossibly difficult.

If you asked me then, I was still fine.

It was like my body weighed three million pounds and I was trying to move through honey.

That was a threat to my identity as an achiever so my nervous system would push through it — and it would only lead to sabotaging the connections around me.

Last summer, I was building a sandcastle with my nephew and sister in California and the waves kept washing it away

(This was our sandcastle that kept getting washed away)

I realized that’s kinda how sadness feels.

Something exists and sadness comes and washes it clean to make space for something new.

I think that’s why taking the longest shower in history or floating in an ocean are so comforting when I’m sad.

Sadness’ job is to help us process an ending — and it asks us to let go.

For a lot of my clients, avoiding sadness isn’t about feeling weak, it’s also about not being ready to let go.

I understand that letting go feels like betrayal and as long as you hold onto it, it’s not really gone.

In my clients, sadness can also look like anger and it isn’t until they know they’re safe and not being judged that they can express their actual sadness — and most of the time, they just need a hug and someone to be patient with them.

Shame

I’d never given much thought to the concept of shame beyond Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.

… and the way the church makes a lot of people feel.

I realized that my perspective on shame had been externalized to focus on reactions rather than how I felt.

Shame shows us where we’re disconnected from our highest self and it asks us to reflect on, “what does [insert whatever the trigger was] say about me?”

I realized shame was like a mirror telling me where I wasn’t being consistent with the highest form of myself.

In my body, it shows up as wanting to hide, struggling to make eye contact, feeling disconnected from myself and sometimes the need to justify or explain.

In my clients, shame shows up in the comments like…

“I should be handling this better…”

“I know we should’ve done our estate planning…”

“Mom would be rolling over in her grave if she saw how the house looks right now…”

“Everyone else seems to be handling this fine…”

Sometimes it looks like them not wanting to ask questions because they don’t want to seem stupid or avoiding rocking the boat.

For some, shame makes them avoid things, keep secrets, feel guilty for wanting something or self-abandon to feel like they belong to the family unit.

Disgust

Disgust is the emotion that makes you HAVE TO get away from it — or burn it down.

That can look like recoil, pulling your face back, your throat closing like it’s refusing to swallow something and the impulse is sudden and total.

Disgust’s job is to clarify what’s not aligned and what doesn’t belong.

For me, disgust shows up in two ways:

Firstly, I have a thing about wet stuff.

I hate touching wet dishes, mop water and if a counter or something is wet, I get grossed out and have to wash my hands a bajillion times to feel clean.

(Some of you are probably going to point out that this is a sensory thing and one day I’ll probably write an article about how neurodivergence becomes an inheritance too but stick with me here).

I had to learn this the hard way with leading people where I’d state my standard and they’d hear me but because I wasn’t communicating it as a boundary, they’d brush it off until one day, the “burn it down” instinct kicks in and I’d have to fire them.

They’d be surprised and ask why I hadn’t brought it up before (even though I had) — but because I wasn’t firm in my boundary, they didn’t take it seriously.

I see this in my clients when they’re dealing with their siblings and there’s a value misalignment or moral dilemma, like what’s fair or right.

When they can’t see the other side’s perspective, there’s a general feeling of disgust on all sides.

Peace

Peace isn’t just about happiness.

It’s a baseline where I feel settled, present and not activated.

When I’m at peace, sitting in silence is… peaceful.

My body isn’t bracing, defending or scanning.

It’s not that everything is perfect or suddenly makes sense — it’s where you can stand rooted and accept the ebbs and flows of whatever comes without immediately having to react to it.

To clarify, this is closer to integration than it is acceptance.

Acceptance is mentally agreeing while integration happens in the body.

When we’re at peace, our bodies aren’t asking any of the questions from the earlier emotions — it’s just present.

It’s a baseline state — not a permanent goal.

Things will come up and one of the emotions will activate, you’ll consult with it (as your board of advisors) and the goal is to get back to your baseline.

To be clear — I still don’t do any of this perfectly (and neither will you).

I stopped treating my emotions like background noise to tune out and started listening to them like the actual board of advisors they are.

Oh — and just an FYI, if there’s a dark side, it’s that being this tuned into yourself will make you notice every micro-expression in other people and you’ll get overstimulated faster.

But it’s still worth it.

How to use this

This was the third piece of the Patriarch Series.

I ended with this because going through my own dark night of the soul and then learning how to be gentle with myself was what gave me the ability to forgive my father and hold space for his humanity too.

As I said in the beginning — grief is often an initiation to your dark night of the soul and that’s why the hill I will die on is that inherited property isn’t just about the property.

So if there’s one thing I can leave you with, let it be this —

It’s okay to feel any of these and when we treat them as information rather than a threat, I think you’ll find that your emotions are the most beautiful teachers you’ll ever meet.

… and they’ve been trying to teach you all along.

You didn’t need to buy another course, read another self help book, listen another podcast or ask 482002847 people for advice.

When I work with a client, I will often say, “if it’s not a full body yes, then it’s no.”

A lot of them come back and tell me that the chart I just shared with you and the full body yes concept was life changing for them.

I wish for you the same.

It’s your turn now.

Btw, last week, I also did an audio version to go along with the article. Let me know if you’d like me to continue with that!

This is the second piece of the Patriarch Series leading up to Father’s Day where we’re exploring relationship dynamics with fathers and the roles they play in legacy.

🎧 Want to listen instead?

I read the article for you (plus, there’s a few extra little gems in here):

A new client I was speaking to recently was very uncomfortable in our first conversation.

After a little digging, she finally told me that I wouldn’t understand because she didn’t have a good relationship with her father like I did.

You see, she reads my Substack (welcome!) and she’d watched my SPARK talk:

*If you’re listening to the audio version, this is the video that I am referring to.

I did my father’s eulogy and have stood on stages and talked about my father like he was a great man (and he was*) — but that has never been the whole story.

But I let people believe it was.

What I don’t share is that I built Heirloom because I learned through personal experience how complex grief is when your relationship was complicated.

But I realized by never sharing the parts of my story that are still tender scars is robbing the people who desperately need to feel seen of the moment to feel… seen.

(Note: as I’m rereading and editing this article, I’m literally asking myself at every line — is this a scar? Or a wound? Will I feel a vulnerability hangover after sharing this?)

My complicated relationship with my father

Let’s start off with this —

My father (Joe) isn’t my biological father.

He met my mom when I was an infant and adopted me as a kid.

I’m biracial. My mom is Minnesota white (by way of Croatia and Finland) and Thomas, my biological father who I’ve never met, is black.

I have two younger sisters who are his (Joe’s) biological children and for as long as I can remember, I’ve always gotten judging stares from people and the awkward “were you adopted” question when I introduce my sisters because we’re different skin colors.

From this point forward, when I talk about my dad, I’m talking about Joe but save this in your back pocket for later.

My dad was hardworking but he also struggled with addiction.

My mom did an incredible job keeping it from us for the most part — but I’m the oldest and you know that kids always know.

When he was intoxicated, my parents would fight and I’d distract my sisters so they didn’t have to see it.

They finally divorced when I was nine and he came to Florida for rehab.

He got clean and started putting his life back together — but he ran through women like water.

As I said in my SPARK talk, he was a charmer that knew how to work people and they loved him for it but he was also never present for us.

In a recent article about what legacy minded women look for in a relationship, I talked about dreamers and actualizers.

My dad was a shadow actualizer for most of my life:

He broke promises, kept his word to everyone except us and never apologized.

I’m the eldest daughter and man oh man is that true.

He’d give us halfhearted apologies and nothing would change so eventually, I stopped accepting them and I stopped answering his calls.

This is precisely why they say men end up having to heal with their eldest daughters everything they never addressed with women.

I found this reel that describes it perfectly:

Thankfully, my mom didn’t want us to rely on men for our identity so she raised three powerhouse daughters — and we often joke that she may have overdone it.

The moment everything changed

You know those people who suck the oxygen out of the room because their energy is so dark and so heavy?

Yea, that was my dad’s wife.

From the moment I met her, I felt it.

He married her three months after meeting her and at their wedding, her brother said to her, “this is a beautiful family, don’t f- it up”.

They had twin girls when I was 20.

Little by little, his wife made enemies of every person in our family — she was even disrespectful to Mimma (my grandmother).

I stopped speaking to my dad all together.

A few years later, I saw him for the first time in a literal century at my younger sister’s college graduation dinner when the twins were four.

I was playing with one of them and she looked up at me with the most innocent and confused face, and said:

“My mommy told me not to talk to you because you’re black.”

I lost it.

At first, my father told me I was being dramatic.

I’d experienced racism and discrimination before but never in my own family.

I was ready to drive back to Fort Lauderdale from Gainesville that night but my mom and sister ganged up on my dad, and Mimma basically held me hostage and forced my dad to apologize.

That was the first time in my entire life he stopped defending himself or making excuses.

He apologized for everything and took accountability — and then he followed it with changed action.

(You might be thinking that she is the one who owed an apology but at this point, everyone knew she was a lost cause).

He didn’t try to justify or make excuses.

And THAT became the foundation we started building a relationship.

After that, he promised to stop guilt tripping me for disliking his wife and agreed that I never had to go to his house if she was there.

We started having lunch together on Fridays.

For the first three months or so, it was SO beyond awkward that I genuinely cannot even begin to explain.

We didn’t know how to interact with each other but we kept meeting.

There were so many “sooooo, the weather has been crazy….” conversations.

But little by little, we found things to talk about.

This was a man who’d been a womanizer his whole life learning how to have a healthy relationship with women through his eldest daughter.

I learned a lot from him about growing a business, understanding men, leading people and most importantly, I learned to appreciate the role that a man could play in my life.

Before this, I was an overly independent, hardcore dismissive avoidant. I didn’t need anyone.

Between healing my relationship with my father, having a literal come-to-Jesus and lots of therapy, my DA tendencies stopped having a chokehold on me.

We were both healing in real time.

To make it worse — the last Friday, I was halfway to his office when he called to tell me he had to leave to bring his wife to the airport.

I gave him an attitude in our last conversation because that was supposed to be our day.

Since she was gone for the weekend, we decided the family was going to have dinner at his house on Sunday.

Instead of dinner, we found his body.

So when clients tell me that I wouldn’t understand complicated relationships, I do. Deeply.

When I talk about inherited wounds and how the identity we inherit is our legacy, that’s not fluffy. I’ve lived it.

I was lucky because I got to heal my relationship with my father in the last 16 months of his life but many of the clients I work with don’t get that privilege.

I’m sharing all of this because I see families collapse in real time because everyone thinks that just because you grew up that your first heartbreak (your parents) just magically goes away.

Don’t get me wrong — healing doesn’t happen by simply dwelling on the past, but understanding the root cause of our wounds does give you a path to healing it.

What happens when these wounds don’t heal

A man in his 40’s (let’s call him Rob) told me recently that after his father passed away a few years ago, his older brother said he was angry because Rob didn’t have a job back then.

Rob* goes, “I was 12 then!”

I do this work for a living so I’m surrounded by these conversations all the time and I’m even seeing my own family heal as a result.

And then there’s the families who NEVER talk about emotions…

It festers under the surface.

Those unrecognized and unspoken emotions subconsciously dictate our behavior and it shows up looking like greed, anger and pretty much everything except sadness or grief.

It happens over and over and over and over and over and over again — and that’s why I write about family dynamics.

If you strip it all back, the conflict comes from who was loved more, who was the favorite, who was heard, who was invisible, who was protected, who carried the weight and who got to be the child.

When we understand where these patterns came from, we can stop mistaking it for our personality or our identity.

We keep treating these as relationship problems, mental health problems, addiction problems, or even criminal justice problems.

In so so so many of these families, it’s a fatherlessness problem.

A father whose physical or emotional absence destabilized the entire foundation of the family unit.

And until we name that pattern, we can’t interrupt it.

That said, in preparation for Father’s Day, I’d like to speak to the absent fathers for a second:

Estranged fathers, come here.

I truly hold so much grace and compassion for men in modern America and in some ways, I understand the fatherlessness epidemic that we’re in.

But, please — as a daughter and a woman, allow me to speak some life into you.

About 1/4 kids in America grow up with an absent father. Maybe you were one of them.

For most of us, our mothers and grandmothers were present so women within a family have generations of shoulders to stand on.

I’ve never met my biological father and there’s a part of me that feels like I don’t know parts of myself because of it — but thankfully, I’m a woman and my mom has been my rock.

I can only imagine that being a man without having a father’s shoulders to stand on has to feel like building an identity on sand.

I feel you.

But here’s what your children want to know:

You say you’d die for your kids — but will you live for them?

So many fathers are away from their children because they can’t provide in the way they think they should as a man or because they aren’t perfect or because *insert whatever your reason is here*.

In fact, 86% of men still define manhood as being a provider.

In an economy where that path is no longer guaranteed, men who cannot meet that standard are 16.3 times more likely to contemplate suicide. (Equimundo, 2025)

I’m not saying men shouldn’t strive to provide for their families. You should.

But your purpose in your home is so much more than that.

Your presence shows your children how to take accountability, how to be brave and independent, how to have boundaries, you reinforce your children’s self-worth and your voice becomes their inner voice.

When you are absent from your family because you don’t feel like you’re doing enough of one of these, you’re robbing your family of the rest of the those.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that your children need more from you than for you to just be there.

Are you focused on your intentions or your impact?

When I wasn’t speaking to my father, it was because he let me down a million times and it felt like he never took responsibility for anything.

Someone in your life may have told you that you aren’t taking responsibility for something despite the fact that you explained the situation so let me explain it this way…

If I’m driving on the highway minding my own business and have to swerve because there’s something in the road and slam into the car next to me, I didn’t intend for the accident to happen even though it did.

Most times, your intentions are never in question but the impact is still present.

You give away so much of your power by focusing on your intentions without acknowledging your impact.

Trying to de-escalate the situation with charm, humor, avoiding it completely doesn’t negate the impact and only builds resentment.

Notice how there is no blame, excuses or reasons.

There’s a good chance that when you do this, your nervous system is going to want to minimize the impact to avoid shame or make your ego feel better.

If you do that, you’re going to hit a wall that you won’t be able to break through and it will actually do more harm than good.

I promise you that if you apologized like that, it will be received differently.

BUT, if you’re going to do that — you better actually follow it up with the changed action you promised.

I got to heal my relationship with my father before he died and I am forever grateful for that but we only had 16 months together.

Do you know how much time you have left?

There’s a whole different version of your life sitting on the other side of the genuine apology that your pride is stealing from you.

It’s not too late. Go make the call.

This is part II of III in the Patriarch Series.

If you haven’t already gotten your Father’s Day gifts, make sure you order them here:

PS. If this gave you language for something you have been carrying, pass it to someone who needs the words.

I’ve been in Minnesota all weekend with my grandparents.

My grandfather grew up with nothing. I mean nothing.

The life that my grandparents have built is inspiring and I continue to learn from them.

He’s in his late seventies and in better health than most people half his age.

Watching him this weekend, I kept thinking about how little fanfare men like him ever receive for what they’ve built.

My grandmother was the visionary of her family and my grandfather was the stability and anchor. They worked together to build a beautiful life.

While writing this, I started asking dads what the best Father’s Day gift they’d ever received was.

Then I thought about the comments I heard about the Mother’s Day piece I did a few weeks ago.

Someone stopped me at the Tower Club recently to tell me that she got her mom StoryWorth and that her mom loved it.

Someone else sent me a DM and told me her mom broke down in tears when she did the picnic I recommended.

As I sat down to write this one, it was a little different because I don’t have my dad here anymore.

I still think about the fact that his last birthday I had to leave his party early for a showing (the buyer never ended up buying) so I want to make sure I get this right for you — and that you don’t skimp out.

So here it is…

The launch of the Patriarch Series, and the only Father’s Day guide you’ll need for at least the next seven years.

Here’s what I want you to do right now —

Before you read any further: put a recurring reminder in your calendar for the first week of June, every year, and link it back to this article so you can come back and make sure you get those gifts ordered.

First Edition Leather-Bound Books

I romanticize the era when men had studies, libraries and whiskey rooms.

It feels like those were the spaces where real thinking and strategizing about building an empire happened.

Easton Press specializes in leather-bound editions of classics, history, literature, and philosophy — with series including Signed First Editions personally signed by the author, the 100 Greatest Books Ever Written, Books That Changed the World, and the Library of the Presidents.

Each book is bound in fine leather, accented with 22-karat gold detailing, and printed on archival-quality paper — these are literal heirlooms built to be passed down.

My dad collected these.

He wasn’t a huge reader but he loved having them and it was one of the few things he collected.

He loved the leather spines, the fancy lettering and the weight of a shelf that said this family values knowledge.

And, in a world that’s going increasingly digital, analog is more attractive than ever.

If your dad has a shelf that’s missing this, start it for him. If he already has one, add to it. You’re not giving him a book. You’re giving him something to leave behind.

Easton Press →

Historic Newspapers

Does your dad have a favorite team, musician or historical era?

Historic Newspapers carries books covering all of the newspaper headlines for legendary games, historic victories and a bunch more.

They have everything from military history to the Beatles and every sports team you can think of.

This will be his new coffee table book in his office or man cave. It’s the kind of thing people ask about when they walk in.

Use code 4DAD for free shipping.

Historic Newspapers →

Vintage Collectibles With a Story

I’m not referring to a generic big box retailer.

Finding Nostalgia pairs an ever-changing selection of vintage sports collectibles with professional appraisal services — items range from a 1970s game-worn jersey to a 1902 college trophy football, and every piece carries a story. 

This is for the dad who would appreciate knowing exactly where something came from and what it meant.

Finding Nostalgia →

Build his vinyl record library

When I go out, it’s usually to a speakeasy where I’m drinking an espresso martini (with baileys of course) or what I call a girly old fashioned (which is just a little sweeter than the norm).

To compliment that whole experience, there’s NOTHING like the sound of vinyl music carrying the vibe.

This is a great opportunity to start building his vinyl library.

(There were a bunch of vinyl subscriptions that I researched but a bunch of Redditors said you’re just better off getting the albums you actually want).

If you want to take it up a notch, I also got this book as a gift in a Secret Santa a few years ago and have loved it. It matches vinyl with cocktails.

It’ll give him a reason to sit down, put something on, and actually be still for a minute.

This is perfect for the dad who still believes music was better back in the day.

Vinyl →

Customizable Family Crest

This one just might be my favorite…

Family names should mean something.

I can’t think of a better way to honor that than to have a family crest hanging somewhere in the house.

For mother’s day, I shared the legacy portraits of the family and this feels like the perfect compliment.

A custom family crest transforms your family name into a timeless symbol.

There were a few different versions I found on Etsy but the backlit vibe of this one was the winner for me.

Etsy has artists who will build one from scratch — incorporating your surname history, a family motto, symbols that actually mean something to your specific lineage. You can get it as a framed print, engraved in leather, laser cut in wood, or embossed as a wax seal stamp.

What better way to have a visual reminder of your family’s legacy.

Custom Family Crest →

Spa Day (yes, really)

I know that some men are religious about taking care of themselves… but there are also a lot of men who don’t do anything for themselves.

A facial, mani/pedi and massage can go a longggggg way in restoring burnout.

If he’s the type who you think would reject a spa day — that might actually be the BEST time to get it for him.

Invest in the Thing He Never Made Time For

When I asked my grandfather what the best gift he’s bought himself lately was, he lit up when he started talking about his metal detector (I’m so serious).

I would have never in a million years guessed that but what I’m realizing is how much getting back to the childlike versions of ourselves and re-meeting the parts of ourselves that we’ve repressed brings us back to life.

I know this is father’s day but I have to share a super quick mother’s day story:

My mom has always loveddddd creating art.

Since I was a kid, she could draw, loved to paint, went through a scrapbooking and cake decorating era but she hasn’t done any of that for years.

She’d casually mentioned her love of creating art over the years and I could tell that she’d been so busy that she’d forgotten to live.

Last year for christmas, I got her an easel and all the fixings for her to have a painting setup.

A year and a half went by and she never sat down at it.

I realized it was because she didn’t know where to start — so this year for Mother’s Day, I got her art classes at an art studio that teaches to the classic Italian art style and she has been every week since.

She’s been sending photos of her art work to the group chat and hasn’t stopped talking about creating since.

Yesterday, she told me that she’s starting to look at the world through the lens of what she could draw.

Hobbies literally rewire us.

I don’t know what your dad is into.

Chances are, he’s gotten so busy that he forgot about the parts of himself that would light up his whole world.

That thing.

That’s the thing to invest in — whether it’s a class or whatever, I can almost guarantee that making him feel seen this way will be sure to take him to tears.

Father’s Day is June 21st (go order your gifts!)

Go put that recurring reminder in your calendar to order your gift and link to this article.

You never know how many Father’s Days you have left with him. I’d give anything to get to celebrate one more.

I came across a story recently that made me realize we’ve crossed into a dystopian timeline.

A title company scheduled a Zoom call to verify the identity of someone selling unoccupied land in Hallandale Beach, FL (that’s around the corner from me).

During the call, the title agents found themselves speaking to an AI avatar of someone who had been listed as a missing person in another state for years.

The fraudsters used AI to create a deepfake video.

The avatar mimicked the missing person’s voice, posture, gestures.

THANKFULLY, they realized it was AI and stopped it — but that was back in September 2024.

Just take a quick look at HeyGen’s Avatar V which is an insane upgrade from the Avatar IV they released last year:

Sure, they take precautions to make sure you’re only creating deepfakes of yourself but the technology is out there.

Just look at this one…

This creator realized someone was selling deepfakes of her:

It’s hard to even tell they’re AI.

So the big, hairy, scary question is whether a title company or notary would be able to tell that it was a deepfake avatar now?

I’m not just being paranoid…

Deed theft complaints in New York have increased 240% from 2023 to 2025.

In Palm Beach, the increase was 4,500% over three years.

Nearly 47% of real estate transactions in Q1 2025 showed indicators of wire or title fraud and it was the highest level ever recorded.

I’m going to say the thing that’s probably going to ruffle some feathers:

Yep. All of us.

That includes the courts, title companies, clerks offices, estate planning attorneys, real estate agents and the title insurers.

That includes me too, btw.

More on that in a second…

The Window of Opportunity (For Fraudsters)

Whenever I talk about this, people always ask how fraudsters are doing it so let me catch you up:

Fraudsters seem to be targeting vacant land and vacant property most.

They’re also targeting homes with paid off mortgages that are vacant or have vulnerable seniors living in them because there isn’t a mortgage company watching over it.

That means a family can spend 30 years paying off a mortgage and then lose it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it:

For low and middle income families, that percentage is a lot higher.

For many families, that home might be the entire inheritance and the whole legacy gone in a single fraudulent filing.

It’s a crime.

But more than that…

Then there’s the deepfakes to authenticate signatures, notary stamps and identity verifications.

They file the paperwork with the court and by the time anyone realizes what happened, the home is already gone.

THEN, the family has to go fight for their home back inside the same broken system that let it happen in the first place.

The entire legacy transfer industry needs a COMPLETE overhaul

I sit on the Board at the Tower Club in Downtown Fort Lauderdale with the Broward County Clerk of Courts and I’ve sat in rooms with probate judges who are so overloaded that they’re touching 100+ cases per day.

Everyone is overloaded right now.

The clerk’s office is processing information as quickly as they possibly can but the current system isn’t built for the era that we’re going into.

Before the AI era, the current ways of verifying our identities worked because fraud happened at human pace so humans could slow it down.

If enough people complain, the legislature will pick it up and implement new laws and standards.

That whole process is going to take YEARSSSSS.

Inevitably, the solution is going to involve some sort of AI.

I’m all for AI. I use it every day.

BUT, something about fixing it with the same thing that’s causing the issue feels more like lipstick on a pig than an actual fix.

What the System Should Actually Look Like

To actually fix it, the entire system is going to need a complete overhaul from top to bottom, inside and out.

I don’t have all the answers but I’m fairly confident that EVERYONE would have to change:

1. Title and the courts need to stop being reactive.

I saw an article awhile back that talked about how the average real estate transaction involves 27 people to get it done.

Yes, TWENTY-SEVEN.

The system has barely evolved since the beginning of mankind.

(Ok, maybe not that long but you get the point...)

The current process is slow and clunky.

Everyone right now is basically saying it’s someone else’s job to fix it.

For a while I thought the answer was blockchain — something I’d brushed off for years as tech hype.

And I’m starting to realize that it will only be part of the answer.

To be honest, I still don’t understand blockchain well enough to explain it simply but from what I gather is that it’s harder to tamper with and would likely reduce some fraud.

At least that’s what the advocates are saying.

But my endless curiosity kept taking me deeper…

I realized Blockchain wouldn’t have stopped the deepfake on the video call we talked about earlier.

The real fix would need both a way to handle more documents faster (like the Blockchain) AND some sort of fancy biometric verification or digital IDs that can confirm a live human actually is who they say they are.

(Please join me in a collective groan as we lament the idea of some database having our fingerprints and eyeball scans)

But I’ve come to understand that in order to combat fraud, we are going to HAVE TO adopt new ways of verifying people are who they say they are.

Once the legislature decides to take this on, I’m guessing we’re going to see the same strict security that we saw in airports post-9/11.

2. Estate planning attorneys need to stop thinking and speaking like attorneys.

I just pulled the list in my CRM and in the last 18 months, I’ve met with over 50 attorneys.

I’ve been to a handful of industry events where I meet estate planning attorneys by the dozens. I have another 300 on my email list and I’m connected to a whole bunch on LinkedIn.

(My network is so deep that I even see the Facebook and LinkedIn ads that are targeted to estate planning attorneys)

Lots and lots and lots of attorneys are pivoting to estate planning after burning out on litigation.

I get it. Truly.

You guys deserve to have a life and shouldn’t have to slave away at a big law firm that requires you to sacrifice your left arm and first born child to have a great career.

BUT —

Please hear me…

You guys are completely missing it:

The law degree is amazing. I’m so proud of you.

But do you know how terrifying it is for a family to come to you?

By sitting down with you, the family has to contemplate questions that humans have been debating for millennia.

Questions like:

• What’s a life worth?

• What’s the meaning of life?

• What is my legacy?

• What happens to me after I die?

And then you throw legal jargon at them like “governance”, “intestate” and “fiduciary” and they nod their heads with blank stares like they understand.

They walk away with a pretty binder and you pat them on the head like they did a good job.

They feel like they did a good job but they don’t actually understand how any of it works or what any of it means.

The entire process is overwhelming so it’s not surprising that only 1/3 Americans do their estate plan.

Which leads me to:

I’ve heard from so many estate planning attorneys complain about non-motivated clients who disappear as soon as they hear the price.

Can I just say “the thing”?

You’re asking them to contemplate existential questions while ALSO creating friction.

No wonder they’re not running to you.

Title companies often ask families how they want to hold title without the family realizing the implications of their decision and they don’t know any better (nor should they have to).

And you can’t tell me this concept doesn’t make sense —

I was at a panel a few weeks ago where all of the probate judges across the tri-county talked about how determining homestead is one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with probate.

If you guys actually solve the problem at the root (and what I’m proposing would be a massive start), properties would be better protected because fraudsters would have a harder time verifying who should actually be signing at closing.

How does the old saying go?

During a 30-day closing period, those last 10-14 days are slow while we’re waiting on the clear to close.

The family is ANXIOUS and they want to know they made the right choice.

Doing their estate plan at this time makes sense because it’s like insurance for their family’s legacy.

They are already closing on the biggest asset they’ll probably ever own and you SHOULD be there at that moment.

So please, go partner with title companies and help me make this the norm.

3. Real estate agents need to step completely into a whole new identity.

Homeownership is the American dream.

We are the ones who make it happen and we are there for the family’s coronation — the moment when a new family legacy is created and when it transfers between generations.

… And then we send mailers about interest rates and open houses.

Estate planning attorneys and wealth managers focus on assets as legacy but they’re missing so much of what legacy truly is.

A 20-year study of 3,200 families found that 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% lose it by the third.

Stat after stat shows that wealth is more likely to stay in families who share memories, stories, traditions and rituals.

Guess where all of those things happen?

At home.

We got lost in shiny objects and lead sources, and we’ve lost sight of what is actually at stake.

Everyone has been trying to solve the wealth preservation problem from the financial and legal side when all of the data shows that what preserves legacies is what happens inside the homes we help families buy and sell.

THAT is what we are here to do.

The families sitting across from us are not just buying and selling property.

Families are building their legacy and the real estate industry needs to be stewards and protectors of that legacy.

It’s time we started acting like it.

If you’re an agent and want to know how I’m making my business more human while everyone else is going crazy with AI, this video walks you through it.

What we can do right now

I understand that much of what we’re dealing with is uncharted territory.

That’s true… and we also don’t have time to be victims of the machine.

Here are three things we can do right now:

1. Many county property appraisers offices are introducing property fraud alerts. Make sure you and your clients turn them on.

2. Start the estate planning conversation before the client brings it up and help them understand what’s at stake.

3. If this article resonates at all, please send it to someone else. Change is only going to come if we all work together.

Until these things are fixed, families are having to do a lot more work to protect their legacies and we, the legacy transfer industry, need to guide them through it.

What Happens If We Do Nothing

If none of this gets fixed and we just let the next fifteen years of the Great Wealth Transfer play out the way the last three have — I believe that wealth will be lost in devastating amounts and families will stop believing in homeownership because they will never have the security of knowing their home is truly theirs.

Things are about to change whether we want it to or not.

Stay vigilant, friends.

Deed fraud isn’t just taking family assets.

I refuse to accept that.

At Heirloom, we’re building a company that helps families break the stats and carry their legacies into the fourth generation.

P.S. — I would love to hear your thoughts. Whether you agree or disagree, I’m not pretending I know it all. I wish I had a crystal ball but I want to know what you guys are thinking. Let me know in the comments. I read and reply to all of them.

Leave a comment

I was at an event with eighteen other women a few weeks ago and one of the ladies asked about my book tour.

Our conversation turned into a group discussion of seven (in a room of 18!!!) of us who’d lost a parent.

One of the women mentioned she still has her inheritance sitting in an account and doesn’t even want to look at it because it means her mom is really gone.

Someone else jumped in with strategies, what her mom would have wanted and how to put it to work.

I asked the third woman if both of her parents were still alive.

She said yes and I knew in that moment that nothing I said would make her understand.

Losing a parent changes you regardless of how old you are when it happens.

I’m blessed that my mom is still with me.

But almost exactly a year after I lost my dad, I got the 3am phone call that my grandmother was in the hospital.

One by one, cousins and family trickled in through the night. We made a Dunkin run and came back with like 15 coffees and dozens of donuts and bagels.

She never regained consciousness and passed away a few days later.

The doctors say she died of a brain bleed but we all know that she really died of a broken heart.

The conversation I had with my dad the day before he died was about her. She was showing signs of dementia.

Watch out for her, he said. She’s not always going to be with us.

After he died, she declined fast.

Her body turned fragile and she was constantly spaced out. Her baby boy was gone and she couldn’t bear to stay in this world without him.

Losing her was a teeny bit easier than losing my dad because in some ways, it felt like she chose not to be here — but her absence left a hole in our family that it took me years to find words for.

She was the glue of our family.

She made sure family members made up when they argued and she was the one who cooked, hosted and kept everyone coming back.

No one could cook like my Mimma.

It took me years to understand what she was actually doing because most of it was invisible and intangible.

We don’t know what we have until it’s gone

If your grieving process was anything like mine, at first, it felt like having my heart ripped out of my chest.

It was physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting.

As time went by, it stopped feeling like grief.

I once heard the analogy that anxiety is like a strainer — everything runs right through it but depression is different.

Depression is like putting a heavy lid on a simmering pot that nothing (including steam) escapes and it just boils under the surface.

On the outside, everything seems fine but there’s a raging storm underneath that has nowhere to go.

I never thought of myself as depressed until I heard it explained that way and I realized that I’d been in the high-functioning depression part of the five stages of grief without even realizing it.

The holidays felt different but no one could really explain why.

We stopped joking and laughing together and getting together felt pointless.

Disagreements either turned into explosions or fizzled into resentment because we lost our mediator.

If it wasn’t for my mom who stepped in as the new matriarch of the family, birthdays would have stopped being celebrated and we would’ve never recovered any of these.

My mom spent years sitting with Mimma and watching her cook so she could write down the closest thing to recipes we have of hers (all the measurements are approximate of course because you already know Mimma never measured anything).

We’ve been taught to move through grief quickly.

After the funeral, we’re expected to go back to work, be strong and to keep it together. So we do.

We outrun it for 364 days a year — until the second Sunday in May, when the world puts flowers and brunch everywhere and suddenly there’s nowhere left to hide.

Today is that day.

And because we’ve never sat still long enough to name what we actually lost, the grief comes out sideways. It shows up as anger, avoidance, depression, denial, shame or something else entirely.

It might sound like, why don’t we do this this anymore? Why does nobody call? Why did we stop getting together?

But if we’re brave enough to trust ourselves enough not to fall apart when we admit it — what’s under all of it is just missing her and the grief of the life we had when she was here.

A new way to look at a family tree

I have a visual I return to often.

Think of a family tree.

Not like a family tree chart, I mean like an actual tree.

When we’re born, we’re like a little baby leaf.

Then we start our own families and become a branch with our own leaves growing from us.

If we’re lucky enough, we then get to become the trunk of our tree with multiple branches growing in every direction from us. That’s when we become grandparents and great grandparents.

And then one day, we’re gone and we become the roots beneath the ground.

The roots seem invisible but they’re the infrastructure that keeps the tree alive.

In my years of working with families navigating inherited property, I’ve seen the same pattern over and over and over and over and over and over again…

Families fall apart when we lose connection to our roots. The people who held up the soul of the family, told us who we were and made us feel like we belong.

That’s what happens when we lose the matriarch of the family.

And that’s not something you can logically explain to someone who hasn’t been through it before.

It’s like losing the literal soul of the family.

It feels existential and it’s entirely abstract.

What to do with today

Mother’s Day (and I’ll say this again on Father’s Day) doesn’t have to be a day you just survive.

You can reclaim it as your own.

This isn’t about replacing her or pretending like she wasn’t here.

Whether she gave you thirty years of traditions to continue, or she left before you had enough time, or the relationship was never what it should have been — you get to decide what your family feels like going forward.

Today is the day you can visit that.

Here are 5 ways to reclaim Mother’s Day on your own terms:

1. Don’t Run When It Hurts

Firstly, you can’t be any of the things that follow if you haven’t done this one first.

Grief that goes unprocessed doesn’t disappear — it shows up in your relationships, your patience and the way you show up for the people who need you.

It’s not logical and trying to expect it to be is why it keeps haunting you.

It’s perfectly normal to have a visceral reaction in your body when someone gets too close or for your body to shut down around things that remind you of her because it’s your body’s way of avoiding the pain of loss again.

But if you’re not careful, that trauma response will become part of your identity and it’ll get confused with your personality.

You have to give yourself a safe place to sit with it and feel it.

Get help if you need to — a therapist, a grief group, a trusted person who can hold it with you. Avoiding the grief that is still being held in your body is the thing that will cost you everything.

There’s a great book called The Body Keeps The Score that shares how emotions get stored in our bodies and I highly recommend it.

2. Choose What You Carry

The matriarch of the family operates like the moral compass of the family.

She kept the family aligned without anyone ever having to name it and when she’s gone, the family’s moral compass can lose it’s calibration.

That’s why family members say things like “she would be rolling over in her grave if she knew….”

That’s because she was the one who kept everyone aligned.

When our loved ones become our roots, we get to choose which parts of them we get to carry forward.

You don’t have to preserve everything.

You just have to be intentional about what continues on.

In my book, The Legacy Year, I call this curating her legacy.

3. Hold the Memory

Sometimes, we avoid thinking about it for so long that by the time we revisit it, the first emotion that comes up is shame.

It can happen when they’ve been gone for a long time, when we’ve been too happy or when the memories are starting to get fuzzy.

That’s normal too — so you don’t have to hide from it.

Today, take some time to document the things you do want to remember. Document it as well as you can.

You don’t have to remember everything — but if you don’t document her memory, what she’s taught you will fade with you too.

4. Revive the Traditions

Pick a tradition that she used to carry and bring it back.

Invite your loved ones to join in — and even if they dismiss it at first, I promise you once they’re in it, they’re going to realize how much they needed it too.

It doesn’t have to be anything huge. In fact, some of the best traditions are the smallest things because they’re the small moment of presence that brings everyone back and it can be implemented anywhere.

Bringing these things back is where family starts saying “it feels like it did before” again.

It doesn’t have to feel heavy.

It doesn’t have to sound like “she used to do this so we have to bring it back”.

It can sound like “this used to be so special to me and I’d love for us to do this again.”

Your family needs it more than they know and nobody has the language to ask for it back. You do.

5. Be the Peace

If she was like most matriarchs, she was the one who made sure people made up.

She was the one who called when things went quiet too long. She cared about the family being whole more than she cared about being right.

That role didn’t get buried with her. It’s just been sitting empty and waiting for someone to step up and take the seat.

One of the greatest ways you can honor her legacy is by bringing people together again.

You don’t have to fix everything.

You just have to want the family whole more than you want to be right.

That’s it. That’s the whole job.

You are the trunk of your family tree now.

Nobody is asking you to fill her shoes, cook her recipes from memory, or hold the whole family together alone.

You can just choose to be the person who makes sure what she built doesn’t disappear.

She is within you — and no one can carry her forward like you can.

Despite how you survived, she’d still love you. She would still be proud of you and you would still be hers.

The only thing missing is you giving yourself permission.

I’m calling over you today that you do the hardest and bravest thing you possibly can. That you give yourself permission to feel everything that hasn’t felt safe to revisit.

You’re stronger now.

Don’t logic your way through it.

If we don’t let them move through our bodies, they get trapped and show up as chronic pain, patterns that lead to self-sabotage and health issues.

It’s ok that you haven’t grieved her properly. You were surviving and you didn’t have a safe container to feel it.

You have a community now.

Where to go from here

If you’re sitting in this today, I wrote The Legacy Year for this moment.

For the moment where you start thinking about the legacy you inherited and what you want to leave behind.

I wrote it because it was the book I wish I had when I lost my dad and grandma and I hope you’ll find peace in it too.

Can you tell me about her? What’s one tradition, ritual, or silly little thing she did that your family needs back? Will you let me know in the comments?

Last week we opened the Matriarch Series by going deep — into the wounds, the patterns, the things our mothers carried that they never asked to carry.

If that piece felt heavy, today is about the exhale.

Because after we deal with what our mothers gave us and we remember that she’s human too, the next question is: what are we doing to make sure her story doesn’t disappear?

Stories, memories and traditions are legacy too.

With Mother’s Day right around the corner (next Sunday, folks!), these seven gifts are the answer.

These are way better than a spa day or flowers. They’re the kind of gifts that say I see you, I want to remember you, and I am not waiting until it’s too late.

Let’s dive in.

1. StoryWorth

My father died at 51. There are so many things I wish I could have asked him if I’d just had more time.

I started a new tradition in my family to make sure we never lose our family stories again. When someone turns 50, I have them do a StoryWorth book. My mom and my grandparents have all done theirs and every decade, they’ll all do it again.

We’re building a library of the stories, lessons and wisdom from our family while they’re still here.

StoryWorth will send her one question a week — about her childhood, her choices, the moments that shaped her — and she writes back. At the end of the year, those answers become a bound book.

StoryWorth →

2. Legacybox

Somewhere in her house, there is a box full of tapes that nobody has watched in twenty (or more) years.

I dug reallllllll deep to see if I could find ours and I know they’re somewhere but I came up empty… so here’s a throwback picture of my sisters and I when we were kids

Whether those videos are on VHS, Hi8, camcorder cassettes — every mom has one.

Legacybox converts all of it to digital, ships you a thumb drive, and sends everything back. You just need to find the box before it’s too late.

Legacybox →

3. Photo Books

A photo book from Artifact Uprising is not the kind you make online in twenty minutes and forget about. It is weighted, cloth-covered and printed on paper that feels like it was meant to last. This feels like a coffee table book that gets passed around at family gatherings.

Think about doing one for each family vacation or a milestone birthday. That way you always have the memories on display.

This is definitely for the mom who has the pictures but has never done anything with them, this is the nudge worth giving. Whatever you do, just make sure you pick photos she’s in too.

Artifact Uprising →

4. AncestryDNA

She always said her grandmother came from somewhere specific — a town, a region, a story that got thinner with every generation. AncestryDNA gives that story back some texture.

The kit is simple: a swab, a return envelope, a few weeks of waiting. What comes back is a map of where she actually comes from, connections to relatives she didn’t know existed, and the beginning of a conversation the whole family can be part of.

I personally have a bit of conflict with this one because a lot of DNA companies are selling their data (for example — 23 And Me was recently acquired by Blackrock and can’t possibly have good plans for that), but if you really want to know where your family is from, this is a great option.

AncestryDNA →

5. A Legacy Portrait

Every matriarch deserves to hang on the wall like she’s the queen of the castle.

Pop Art You takes a photo of your family and renders it as a regal, painted canvas portrait — the kind that looks like it belongs in a manor house, not a smartphone camera roll.

They have different styles to choose from like Renaissance and Viking themed…

…or even Mafia themed!

There is something unexpectedly moving about seeing your family rendered as though you have always mattered.

That is exactly the feeling a good Mother’s Day gift should leave behind.

Pop Art You →

6. A Designer Picnic

A few years ago, I organized a picnic like this for my mom on the beach (we live in South Florida) and she still talks about it as her favorite Mother’s Day gift ever.

While this one isn’t tangible like the rest, she’ll be talking about it forever which still feels like a legacy gift.

There are companies that do this but you don’t actually need one to do it for you. I put together an Amazon storefront for this. If you’re local to South Florida, my favorite place for picnic food is The Cheese Course.

They make gourmet soups, salads and sandwiches. Order a sandwich platter, cookies and charcuterie cheeses from their catering team and don’t forget to grab a bottle of wine.

Oh and if you want to guarantee that she’ll cry, make sure each of her kids write her a letter about why she’s the best mom ever. I included it on the Amazon link above.

7. High Tea

Like the picnic above, a Matriarch is never going to turn down high tea.

There is something about a formal table, real china, and someone else doing the pouring that makes a woman feel seen. High tea is giving Bridgerton at it’s finest.

It is the kind of afternoon that invites actual conversation — the kind you don’t have at dinner, at brunches, or between errands.

Find a hotel or tearoom near you that does it properly, make the reservation, and show up dressed for it. Don’t forget the tea hats!

Did you know that for most of human history, families were actually matriarchal?

The shift away from that is more recent than you think and the consequences are written all over modern family dysfunction.

Next week’s piece traces that history and what it means for the families we’re building right now. I think after you read it, you’ll look at the moms in your life completely differently.

Don’t forget to order your gifts — Mother’s Day is May 10th and “it’s still shipping” is not the vibe at Sunday brunch.

This piece is part of our Matriarch Series and is a contribution from our Heirloom Community.

I’ve burned out twice. Not the kind of tired you fix with a good night’s sleep or a long weekend.

The kind that hollows you out slowly and then all at once — where you wake up one morning and realize you’ve been surviving for so long you forgot what it feels like to actually live, let alone feel like you’re thriving.

I had big goals to achieve, and I had to work hard to make it happen.

More hours, longer nights, less sleep… just for a little bit.

The second time, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore, because everything in my life was falling apart.

At my worst, I was exhausted from the second I woke up to the second my head hit the pillow but then I couldn’t sleep.

I felt mentally foggy and slow and it took me longer to process and respond to everything.

You know that feeling when you have 943 tabs open on your computer and you’re so overwhelmed that you can’t even decide where to start?

That’s how my brain felt.

It was like a persistent, gnawing anxiety that covered every inch of my body because I was behind on every task, but I couldn’t get myself to move.

I was procrastinating everything.

At first I thought I was being lazy but I realized I wasn’t.

I just had nothing left to give.

Everything was collapsing — work, my relationships, my income goals and business aspirations.

It was almost like the ambition and achievement that I’d come to identify with belonged to a different version of me and I wasn’t sure I could even find my way back to that version.

As someone who always prided myself on my work ethic and accomplishments, the shame I felt with being burnt out and struggling pulled me even lower.

I thought I needed more discipline to keep pushing through.

And I realized I couldn’t build, steward, or grow anything meaningful from there.

My parents are alive and well (thank God).

I haven’t walked through an estate transition personally yet but I’ve watched enough, studied enough, and lived enough of this pattern in my own body to understand something:

Here’s what we tell exhausted heirs:

✓ Get up earlier

✓ Build a better morning routine

✓ Be more disciplined

✓ Eat cleaner

✓ Work out harder

✓ Set boundaries (but also do more)

✓ Take a week to grieve and then get back to work

✓Rest — but make sure it’s productive rest

We hand her a longer to-do list and call it self-care.

And she tries to do it all.

She always does, and that’s the whole problem.

Meet the Default Daughter

80% of wealth is going to be inherited by women during the Great Wealth Transfer.

The woman (often the eldest daughter) who automatically becomes the caretaker, organizer, manager and emotional anchor of the family — doesn’t burn out because she’s undisciplined.

She burns out because she’s been running at full capacity for so long, for so many people, that her body finally sends the bill.

It’s like we’re asking her to roadtrip across the country on just fumes.

She’s the one who takes the call when dad has a health scare.

She organizes the bills, files, and important documents of the family.

She keeps track of birthdays, anniversaries, and special events, and is sure to remind everyone they’re coming up.

She manages her own career, her household, her kids, and beginning to absorb the weight of aging parents.

… and she’s figuring out the systems as she goes, she’s doing it without a team and most of the time, without acknowledgement.

She can see what’s coming because she watched her parents struggle through it with their parents.

Despite their own experience, they shut down about estate planning, the mention of a will brings on the huffing and awkward shuffling, and a quick deflection of “we’ll figure it out when the time comes”.

She knows there are financial accounts she doesn’t have access to, important paperwork hidden somewhere, and a house holding 50 years of a life she’ll eventually be responsible for.

She doesn’t want to push because she doesn’t want to think about them being gone either.

She can feel the lingering weight of what she’s about to inherit and the low-grade anxiety about it is putting immeasurable pressure on her.

The way families are structured today treats her exhaustion as a personal discipline problem when it’s actually a systematic and structural one.

Nobody accounts for her burnout in the estate plan.

In the work we’ve done at Heirloom, we’ve learned that the average family will spend more than 200 hours and $20-30k on the prep and clean out of the home she’s inherited.

It’s illogical to ask a burnt out woman to make $400k+ decisions about whether to sell, renovate, or keep an inherited property — and then to manage the logistics while she’s trying to deal with her own grief.

I’ve come to believe this is one of the primary reasons generational wealth disappears.

Why families lose wealth during legacy transfers

The second time I burned out, I realized I couldn’t work my way out of it.

I had to start listening to what my body was trying to tell me.

When I slowed down long enough to listen, I was shocked to hear what it had been trying to tell me…

The burnout wasn’t happening in my mind or even my body.

Burnout was happening in my nervous system.

When our bodies have been in a sustained state of stress, even the low-grade, invisible kind that comes from carrying too much for too long, it goes into survival mode.

It’s literally what our bodies are designed to do under stress.

The solution isn’t more discipline layered on top of a dysregulated nervous system.

When I started focusing on regulating my nervous system instead of performing, I started to feel the difference.

It happened so slowly that I almost didn’t even notice at first.

Little by little, I got my clarity back, my energy returned and I felt like I could focus again.

And then I looked at the women we’re building Heirloom for and I started seeing it everywhere.

Burnout isn’t a footnote in the Great Wealth Transfer story.

Depleted human capital is one of the primary reasons wealth disappears between generations.

It’s not bad investments or down markets.

Legacy conversations need to start talking about intangible inheritance

I keep seeing posts on social media of people having opinions about whether they’d put their loved ones in care facilities.

Those who have never dealt with it before say things like ‘I’d never put my parents in a facility’ but my family has been through it.

I’ve lost three of my grandparents and watched how my parents and family navigated it.

On my dad’s side, my grandfather had diabetes and limited mobility for years which came with a slow decline that required more and more care from those around him.

Then, my grandmother developed dementia.

As her condition worsened, my parents and my dad’s siblings all stepped in to help manage her care.

It was a lot — on each of them individually and on the family as a whole — and eventually they had to face one of the hardest decisions a family can make together: that her needs had grown beyond what they could provide at home.

They didn’t have a playbook for that conversation, they simply had to navigate it the best they could… and it was hard.

On my mom’s side, I lost my grandpa in middle school when he had a bypass surgery.

My grandma followed years later after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Both of those losses came fast My mom and her siblings were trying to figure out all the next steps and how to handle things.

I was young so I don’t remember documents or the assets.

But as I’ve reflected on this, I’ve realized how much wasn’t passed down.

There were so many stories nobody thought to record, traditions that I never got to be part of, and lots we can’t recover because nobody felt the urgency at the time and now it’s too late.

That’s what’s driving me now.

I don’t want to wait until I’m in the throes of managing grief and transition to figure out our family’s legacy.

I want our stories remembered, our traditions protected, our family held together through whatever comes next.

So I’m starting the awkward and maybe sometimes difficult conversations and putting the plan in motion because I’ve seen what happens when nobody does that work ahead of time.

Alexa and I did a podcast episode talking about how I’m starting these conversations with my family here:

I wanted to share this because I know I’m not the only one in this phase.

The Default Daughter is a matriarch-in-the-making

Here is what I want you to hear, whether you’re like me or maybe in the depths of inheritance: you are not failing at this.

The Default Daughter doesn’t step forward by accident.

She understands that a home holds more than square footage, that an estate is more than assets, that a family needs someone willing to hold the center when everything feels like it’s falling apart.

If that’s you, I want you to know this:

You’ll probably never get formally recognized for it —

This is your coronation.

This is you being called forward to become the new matriarch of your family.

But, you can’t steward what you can’t sustain.

The women who successfully protect and transfer generational wealth are not the ones who push through their depletion the hardest.

They’re the ones who take their capacity seriously.

We understand that our nervous systems, our clarity, our energy are not luxuries.

I’ve realized that taking the time to regulate my nervous system isn’t a retreat from my responsibilities.

It’s how we show up for our families in an impactful way.

So let me leave you with this:

This is permission to build the infrastructure that matches your responsibility and permission to be one of the people you take care of.

If you recognized yourself anywhere in this, you’re in the right place. This is where we talk about the whole woman navigating legacy: her health, her relationships, and the wealth she’s working to protect. Subscribe below to join the conversation.

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You’re not alone

If you’re a matriarch-in-the-making, please drop a comment below and let us know where you’re from.

Most of us are doing this alone and it’ll be helpful to meet others who are in the same boat.

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In just a few weeks, your feed is going to be full of brunch photos and flower arrangements for Mother’s Day.

(I know, I know — it’s already May. Please don’t remind me.)

This isn’t that.

Today kicks off our Matriarch Series and we’re going to go where most people won’t.

This series is going to dig into the stuff that we inherit from our mothers that doesn’t show up in the will but follows every single one of us for the rest of our lives.

And of course, the Patriarch Series is going to come in prep for Father’s Day. They always say fathers get forgotten but I see you!

Speaking of forgotten things…

You’ve heard of daddy issues but nobody really talks about mother wounds — and I think that’s exactly the problem.

In my work with families navigating inherited property, I kept noticing that most of the conflict between heirs had nothing to do with real estate.

The pattern was always the same.

They were fighting about furniture because they didn’t realize the argument was actually about who was loved more.

I started seeing it everywhere after that. In friendships, in the building of empires, in parents raising children who would one day sit around their own tables with the same unresolved questions.

Once I had the language for it I couldn’t stop seeing it. And once you see it, you won’t either.

The mother wound at it’s absolute worst.

To name what your mother could not give you feels like ingratitude at best and betrayal at worst, so most of us don’t.

The wound runs like a virus in the background — sabotaging relationships, driving ambition, triggering shame — and we call it personality instead of inheritance.

This isn’t a small problem.

Last month CNN exposed a website called Motherless.com with 62 million visits in February alone where men were discussing how to drug and assault their own wives while they slept.

They even used a hashtag called #eyecheck to confirm their wives were unconscious.

Yes, it’s exactly as bad as it sounds.

The name of the site is Motherless.

A community organized around destruction, named for the absence of a mother.

What those men are doing to their wives is a crime. Full stop.

I am absolutely not blaming mothers for what these men are doing.

But, if we want to understand how a man gets there — how any person learns to see another human being as something to take from rather than someone to love — we have to be willing to follow that thread all the way back.

In a healthy family system, fathers provide structure and mothers provide the emotional and moral compass.

When that system works, children grow up with a model for what love looks like, what safety feels like and what it means to be in relationship with another person.

But when dad is absent (physically, emotionally or both), mom doesn’t get to just be the compass anymore.

She becomes everything. She has to provide the structure and the safety. She has to be the provider and the nurturer. She’s also the disciplinarian and the soft place to land — usually while carrying wounds of her own that she never had the space to look at.

(We’re going to dig into the systemic reasons so many fathers are absent in the Patriarch Series. Stay with me.)

And then there are the mothers we lost.

Mother wounds don’t only come from a difficult relationship.

Losing your mother rips a hole in you that never fully closes and a mother wound shows up in its place — running the show from underneath everything you build.

Children who grow up inside any of these dynamics absorb all of it — the exhaustion, the gaps, the love that was real but stretched too thin to reach everywhere it needed to go.

Our wounds become our core operating truths.

They find expression in the relationships we build, the way we love and in the way we fail the people closest to us. In the most extreme cases, in the way we harm them.

This is what it costs all of us when we refuse to look.

6 Types of Mother Wounds

Awhile back, I was having a conversation with my mom about the different types of neurodivergence and she was like “I get what you’re saying but I just don’t like that everything has to be a label.”

My mom is an advisor to tech companies so I basically said, “if you never labeled your expenses so you could see your P&L, how would you make good decisions?”

In that moment, she understood that labels aren’t about boxing people in.

They’re about giving us language precise enough to actually work with.

That’s exactly what we’re doing here.

Psychologist Alice Miller spent decades studying why the most gifted, most driven, most accomplished people so often came from the most painful childhoods.

The kids who learned to perform to be loved, to caretake to feel safe, to disappear to keep the peace — they didn’t leave those adaptations behind when they grew up. They built with them.

Miller called it the drama of the gifted child.

Our survival becomes our family’s legacy and until we take a closer look at it, it keeps getting passed down.

These six wounds are not categories to diagnose your mother or make her a villain.

Try to see them as patterns to recognize in yourself — the things you inherited from her survival.

When we understand their origins we stop mistaking her survival strategy for our personalities.

Let’s dive in:

Wound 1: Hyper-Independence

What you learned: needing people is dangerous

Oprah Winfrey built a media empire predicated entirely on being witnessed.

For decades the most powerful woman in television asked the same question in a thousand different forms — do you see me? Do I matter? Is my story worth telling?

She built a platform so vast that being seen became inevitable, for herself and for millions of others.

Her mother Vernita was present in name but she was absent in the ways that mattered most.

Oprah has spoken about this with remarkable grace but the architecture of everything she built tells the story of what she was originally looking for.

When the person who was supposed to be your first safe place isn’t consistently present, you don’t just feel alone — you decide, somewhere deep and wordless, that needing people is a liability.

So you stop needing people.

Your mother was likely in survival mode and her presence was the first thing to go so you become extraordinarily capable and extraordinarily self-contained.

You handle everything, ask for nothing and you get very good at not letting anyone close enough to disappoint you.

That means you also never let anyone close enough to actually know you.

The loneliness isn’t from a lack of people. It’s from a wall you built so well you forgot it was there.

Wound 2: Compulsive Caretaking

What you learned: your value lives in your usefulness

Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) was eleven when his father left Brooklyn and didn’t look back.

His mom worked multiple jobs to take care of her family and somewhere in watching her do all of that, an eleven year old boy made a decision without knowing he was making it.

He became the man of the house.

That is how parentification works…

It recruits the most capable child in the family, steals their childhood and makes them grow up too fast.

Some parentified children become the emotional regulator of their family — attuned to every shift in their parent’s mood, managing their feelings before they can spiral, making themselves small or useful or invisible depending on what the room requires.

Others step into the provider and protector role — becoming “the man of the house” and the one who makes sure everything holds together so mom doesn’t fall apart. Some end up being both.

Jay-Z’s 4:44 album reckons with what all of that cost him.

He talks about the emotional walls, the difficulty being present in his own marriage, the man who could build an empire and still struggle to be known by the people closest to him.

This wound is specific. It’s not just that you’re independent — it’s that your entire sense of worth became fused with what you do for other people.

When you’re not needed, you don’t know who you are.

Rest doesn’t feel earned and receiving feels uncomfortable because somewhere along the way you decided that love flows one direction and you’re the one doing the giving.

When you’ve spent your whole life pouring into everyone around you, relationships don’t feel like a place to get your cup filled. They feel like another responsibility and another person whose needs you’ll inevitably have to manage.

You may also keep people at a distance because you’re already exhausted and the story that runs in the background for you is that when people come into your life, it’s going to add to your plate.

You also likely struggle to figure out what you actually feel because you were never asked and receiving love doesn’t feel safe so you pull away right when someone gets close enough to actually see you, wondering why every relationship eventually feels one-sided when the truth is you never learned how to let it be any other way.

Wound 3: Identity Erosion

What you learned: be whoever the room needs you to be

Mariah Carey has spent her entire career being the most.

She had the most powerful voice, the most dramatic entrance and the most carefully controlled image.

Her memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey is one of the most honest documents of a childhood spent inside a family system that organized itself around a mother’s needs rather than a child’s.

Mariah existed as an extension of her mother’s world rather than as a person with a separate interior life.

Since she couldn’t take up space at home, she needed to take up space in the world.

This wound is different from the others because it’s not about protecting yourself from people or earning your place through service. It’s about never having developed a stable self to begin with.

When the adults around you needed you to be something specific — the good one, the quiet one, the one who reflects well on the family, the one who manages everyone’s feelings — you got very good at reading the room and becoming whatever it required.

The problem is that you did it so many times, for so long, that you lost track of what was actually you underneath all of it.

You may constantly seek external validation because deep down, you’re chronically uncertain about who you actually are when no one is watching.

Wound 4: Performance-Based Worth

What you learned: what you do matters more than who you are

Beyoncé didn’t become the most meticulous performer of her generation by accident.

She kept control over every frame of every visual, held years of silence and even invented an alter ego.

Sasha Fierce was created because the real Beyoncé (the quiet girl who was only fully herself at home) wasn’t enough for the stage.

Tina Knowles has spoken openly about her own mother suppressing her dream of being a singer. That unlived life became the standard her daughters were asked to carry.

The perfectionistic wound doesn’t look like cruelty. It looks like high standards and a parent who wanted more for their child than they had for themselves.

Here’s what makes this wound different from the others…

In the performance-based worth wound, you know who you are but you just don’t believe it’s enough.

So you produce, achieve and outperform everyone in the room and then you go home and quietly wonder if it was enough — but it never is.

There’s a baseline feeling of inadequacy that doesn’t go away no matter how much you stack on top of it because the achievement was never actually the point.

Your nervous system was trying to earn love.

The finish line keeps moving because no achievement was ever going to fix the original problem. You were trying to finally be enough.

Wound 5: Internalized Shame

What you learned: diminish yourself before anyone else can

Eminem spent two decades making his mother into a villain.

The public war between a son and the woman who raised him became some of the most viscerally honest music ever recorded.

He weaponized it and for years that rage was the engine of everything he built.

Then in 2013 he released Headlights.

The son who had spent twenty years screaming offered something nobody saw coming.

He’d done the work to understand that she was doing the best she could with what she had.

It wasn’t enough and he forgave her anyway.

His rage was never really about her. It was about what her voice had become inside of him.

Shame makes you become your own harshest critic.

It’s not about high standards but instead because you learned to beat people to the punch.

If you say it about yourself first, it hurts less when someone else does.

Look no further than the final rap battle in 8 Mile when Eminem literally destroys his opponent by calling out everyyyyy single thing that he could possibly say about him first.

**Heads up before you watch: LANGUAGE WARNING**

So you shrink before you’re asked to, apologize before anyone is upset, you qualify every win, use self-deprecating humor, dismiss every compliment and work twice as hard as everyone else while quietly believing you still don’t deserve to be in the room.

It’s not that you walk around feeling ashamed.

Instead, you walk around feeling like something is slightly wrong with you that you can’t quite name.

Like you’re always one mistake away from being found out and like the good things in your life are temporary but the bad things are confirmation of something you already suspected about yourself.

Those who leave us with this wound almost always lived inside their own merciless internal standard. She was not crueler to you than she was to herself. Someone handed her that voice first — and she never learned to quiet it either.

Wound 6: Self-Abandonment

What you learned: your needs aren’t a priority

Britney Spears didn’t lose her autonomy overnight.

It happened gradually, across a childhood and a career that were never fully separated from the family system around her.

The line between Britney as a person and Britney as a product was never clearly drawn.

Her memoir The Woman in Me is a primary source document of what this wound produces at its most extreme — a woman who spent decades not knowing where she ended and the machinery around her began.

Remember when Britney shaved her head and went on a full on bender?

That’s what happens when your nervous system desperately needs to have control of your own life back and doesn’t have another outlet.

She had to fight a legal battle for the right to make her own decisions and she is still, publicly and bravely, learning what it means to belong to herself.

This wound is different from compulsive caretaking. Jay-Z over-gives because his worth lives in his usefulness.

Instead, this wound is about sovereignty.

When you grow up in an environment where your needs are consistently treated as secondary, inconvenient or irrelevant, you don’t just learn to give more than you receive. You learn that you don’t have the right to stop giving.

Your boundaries aren’t just ignored — they were never allowed to form in the first place and because no one ever modeled that your needs mattered, you never developed the internal permission to protect them.

So you say yes when you mean no.

You shrink to keep the peace and you give past the point of depletion and call it love because that’s the only version of love you ever saw.

When someone finally does respect your limits you don’t feel relieved — you feel guilty, like you’ve done something wrong by having a limit at all.

The pattern shows up in relationships where you lose yourself completely, in work where you take on more than your share and resent it silently and in families where you are the one who keeps giving long after everyone else has stopped asking nicely.

You walk through life feeling like love requires you disappear inside of it — and you may end up expecting the same of others.

Where To Go From Here

Before we wrap, I want to name something.

You probably recognized yourself in more than one of these wounds.

That’s not a coincidence and it’s not a sign that you’re more broken than everyone else.

Most of us carry combinations — the hyper-independent compulsive caretaker, the performance-driven shame spiral, the self-abandoning identity erosion.

These wounds don’t arrive one at a time.

They arrive as a package, wrapped in the particular survival story of the family that raised you.

So what do you do with this?

Start by naming which ones felt most true. This isn’t about diagnosing yourself or to build a case against your mother — but interrupting a pattern that you’re not clear about is impossible. The language is the first tool.

Here’s what I know from sitting with families navigating inherited property:

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy protecting our assets because it’s tangible and what we can measure.

We think that legacy is about the house, the assets, the property in the house…

But our wounds?

Those survives for generations — operating invisibly, dressed up as personality and passed forward as legacy — until someone in the family line decides to look at it directly and make a different choice.

That’s what my book The Legacy Year is about.

It deep dives into the intangible inheritances that we mistake for identity — and what it actually takes to decide what gets buried with your generation and what gets carried forward with intention.

If this article gave you language for something you’ve been carrying, The Legacy Year will give you a map for deciding what moves forward in your family’s future.

Stick around for the Matriarch Series

Over the coming weeks, we are going deeper into matriarchy and the role mothers play in our family legacies.

Next week, we’re going to cover some mother’s day gift ideas that will become part of her legacy.

The week after that we’re going to talk about matriarchal societies and how they are different than patriarchal societies.

This series is for anyone who has ever sat in a room and felt the weight of everything that wasn’t being said. Join us:

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If this piece gave you language for something you have been carrying — restack it. Someone in your community is sitting with this right now and does not know why. Give them the words.

I’ve been saying for as long as I can remember that family dynamics are where legacies live and die but I’ve never been able to find enough social proof to back it up until I was scrolling through Threads one day and came across this post.

The comments lit up with over 1,400 people weighing in.

When I tell you I went through all of them — I went through allllll of them and I realized this wasn’t a conversation about retirement savings at all.

It was a confession booth.

People shared things in that comment section that most of them have probably never said out loud.

Before we jump in, I regularly post questions like this across platforms, so follow me on Threads or Facebook if you want to participate and then I recap everything here, so make sure you’re subscribed:

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Before we get into the patterns — I was surprised to see how popular this perspective was:

With 2,600 likes, this was one of the most popular perspectives.

I think it resonated with so many because it named something everyone in the thread already knew: the question was never really about what the children are going to do.

It was always about what the parents set in motion… and that’s what I’ve been saying all along:

There’s a simple answer here that we’ll get to later on in this article but first, let’s talk about what families actually said:

The 5 most common responses:

1. Uno reverse

The underlying theme of this group was that their parents had left them to figure out life themselves and now when the tables have turned, they’re going to leave their parents to do the same:

Reading these comments, it’s easy to assume that these are just ungrateful kids who hate their parents.

But after spending years working arm in arm with families as they go through the inheritance process, I’ve gotten to see the inside of how complex a lot of these relationships actually are.

The language this group is using is often exactly what their parents used on them — about financial responsibility, about adult problems, about not being entitled to family help.

2. Ask your favorite

A wholeeee bunch of replies had nothing to do with money at all — it was all about who the favorite child was.

These aren’t patterns that started in retirement.

They are built over decades while everyone pretends they don’t exist. The retirement crisis is just shining a spotlight on the wounds that families haven’t healed.

The favoritism that was practiced when these children were young is now being given back — in the form of who answers the phone, who manages the care, and even the quality of care that gets selected.

3. I’m already doing it and I’m exhausted

There’s a group that’s already doing it and the overall tone from them is that it’s exhausting.

Rightfully so — caretaking is exhausting under the best circumstances.

When you're also working, raising kids, and doing it without help from siblings who should be sharing the load — it breaks people.

About 1 in 4 Americans is currently caught in what’s being called “the sandwich generation” where they're caring for a parent while still raising or supporting their own children.

We discuss retirement savings and caretaking as if they’re financial problems but this group isn’t describing a financial experience.

They’re talking about the emotional weight of caretaking.

4. Figure it out yourself

A lot of replies indicated that they were no-contact with their parents.

I got curious about how common no contact with family members actually was and I was surprised to see that about 1 in 4 people in America are no contact with a family member — and many of them are parents.

It seems most common in younger adults in their early 20s and last an average of 4.5 years but those aren’t small numbers.

5. The small majority has a plan

The smallest group had plans for scenarios like this — but I really want you to notice how different the tone is here.

This group mentions logistics but they also talk about their parents with a level of reverence that the rest of the groups didn’t.

There’s proactivity and planning from this group and a desire to make sure their parents are taken care of.

I also couldn’t help but notice how many of them talked about what their parents have done for them, how they’ve sacrificed and how hard they worked for their families.

I don’t think these are families that necessarily have more money but rather, they work together as a family.

When comparing this group against the others, I’m realizing how clearly the mirror effect shows up here.

The parents who loved their children and were present seem to get that love back. The ones who told their kids to figure it out are getting that back too.

6. Honorable Mention: The Ones Choosing Grace on Empty

This last group does not fit neatly anywhere, and I think that is exactly why they matter.

She didn’t elaborate and I don’t think she needed to. That one sentence contains a whole internal war that I think a lot of people feel.

There’s so much under the surface that can never be simply categorized as just right or wrong.

Your turn…

Before we debrief, I’m curious:

Which one applies to your family?

(Don’t worry, it’s anonymous)

This article isn’t meant to bash parents or to become a war between Boomers and Millennials. There’s enough of that.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of love for parents like this one:

But most of the comment section was heavy.

And I think that’s the whole point…

Families who don’t communicate about hard things end up running on assumptions.

The inheritance industry does a great job of trying to offer frameworks and tools for families like this:

But most never address the underlying family dynamics that cause most of the chaos during legacy transfers in the first place.

And then there’s a whole separate question all together:

Should children even be responsible for their parents in the first place?

For millions of families, children are the only plan.

If you want to take it a step further, there’s another perspective entirely:

I don’t think this is being negative or being fully checked out.

I think this is what exhaustion sounds like when the relational and the financial math don’t add up and the future feels too uncertain to plan toward anyway.

That comment is the cost of having this conversation too late.

The easy answer just isn’t reality.

Someone is going to read all of this and say:

They should have just done their retirement planning and gotten long-term care insurance.

They’d be right that it matters — but here’s the reality: only 55% of Boomers feel prepared for retirement, 7.2 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s with that number projected to nearly double by 2050, and dementia care costs alone are between $3,000-$10,000/month.

Every family should have a plan.

But here is what a plan doesn’t fix:

When the crisis arrives and there’s no long-term care coverage, siblings go to war over who becomes the caretaker, who’s supposed to pay, who has always sacrificed more and who has always gotten away with less.

When they can’t agree — or when they have to figure out how to come up with the money to care for their parents — they turn to the one asset most families do have…

The house.

The family home becomes the default long-term care plan for millions of families who never made any other plan.

It gets sold in the middle of a health crisis, under time pressure, without sibling agreement, and with grief underneath every practical decision.

I documented exactly this dynamic when 550+ heirs shared how they handle inheriting property with siblings right here:

Only 1/3 families have an estate plan to begin with but even more of them are avoiding healing the tears in relationships.

That is where legacy breaks.

If your family has inherited a property, I’ve trained real estate agents all over the country to protect your family’s legacy and compassionately serve you.

Schedule a discovery call to understand your options right here.

If You’re New Here

My name is Alexa. I lost my dad in 2018 and spent 2.5 years navigating probate while building a career helping other families navigate the same transition. I created Heirloom because inheritance, legacy, and succession should not feel like a trap you fall into unprepared.

If you know that one day your family is going to go through inheritance and you want to make sure your family stays together, you’re exactly who I write for.

Every week explores different perspectives into what families are actually navigating during the Great Wealth Transfer — the dynamics, the decisions, the things nobody tells you until it is too late.

Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming.

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If this landed for you, please share it or restack it. Someone in your network is one family conversation away from a crisis they are not prepared for. This might be exactly what they need to read first.

Most 25 year olds don’t spend their time battling it out in probate court or thinking about legacy.

That was my reality when my dad had a stress-induced heart attack that led to 2.5 years of probate and lost us the family business.

It sent me deep into the world of inherited property, estate transitions and the research became my book, The Legacy Year — where I became OBSESSED with the family dynasties that transferred wealth, influence and identity across generations like the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Astors and dozens more.

Since then, I’ve worked side-by-side with families navigating the legacy transfer process. I got a first hand look at the memories that triggered both nostalgia and trauma, the families who stuck together and the things they fought over.

And what I consistently found surprised me…

I realized the two most important legacy decisions we will ever make are the person we choose as our life partner and the career we choose.

I started looking at relationships through the lens of my book and it reframed everything for me.

The Woman Behind the Most Powerful Name in American History

Before I get into the 6 things that legacy minded women look for, let me introduce you to a woman most people have never heard of.

Her name was Laura Celestia Spelman. Most people called her Cettie.

You know her husband — John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest men in American history.

Cettie is the reason the Rockefeller name still means something more than money.

She gave her valedictory address titled “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe” — a declaration of a woman who believed in her own right to think, lead and pursue culture independently.

John was in the audience and he would spend the next two years courting her before she said yes.

While John built the empire, Cettie built everything the empire stood on.

She centered her life around her home, her family and her church. She taught Sunday school classes to young children and led them until they left for college or for work and then would start over with a new group.

Despite living in a mansion, she raised her children with stern discipline and few luxuries.

The younger ones wore their older siblings’ hand-me-downs and all the children earned their allowances by doing chores.

This was a woman who understood that legacy is built by character, not comfort.

She and John began contributing to an Atlanta seminary for African American women that eventually became Spelman College. That school still stands today, still educating black women and carrying her name — more than a century after she died.

John built the business and most of us remember him.

But, Cettie was the soul, the faith, the community, the legacy and the conscience.

She made sure the name lasted — not just as a symbol of wealth but as a symbol of something worth inheriting.

THAT is what a legacy minded woman does.

She leads in the intangibles and the world feels it for generations.

Here are the six questions every legacy minded woman should ask herself before committing to a man:

1. Does my brain turn off in his presence?

Legacy minded women lead in the world.

We are constantly thinking, planning and doing.

They say that the highest form of love is consideration.

Knowing that he’s already thought of me and factored me into his decisions allows me to exhale.

If he’s physically present but energetically absent, he’ll be making decisions based on old data. That’s like making business decisions on a 6 month old P&L.

Presence is one of the hardest things for any of us to develop, which means that if he can be present, it’s a very clear sign that he’s done the inner work.

2. Does my body trust him?

Trust isn’t something we decide.

It’s something our body feels at a somatic level.

A lot of women think they trust a man but their nervous system says the exact opposite — there’s a low-grade hum of surveillance, the urge to check his phone and the feeling that if she doesn’t follow up, something will slip.

In my experience, that rarely comes from past trauma alone.

It usually comes from dozens of small breakdowns in trust that trained her nervous system to understand that she can’t let go of control.

For a legacy minded woman, viscerally trusting a man means instead of being hypervigilant, his mother or his manager, we get to focus our energy on more productive things.

And trust goes deeper than behavior.

We have to trust how a man makes decisions.

His values, faith, priorities and integrity need to be aligned — not performed.

We notice the music he listens to, who he looks up to, how he spends his time and who his friends are. All of those are external mirrors that tell us who he actually is.

The man who knows exactly who he is, who he isn’t and what he won’t compromise on is the man we can follow.

3. Does my life get better, easier and less stressful with him in it?

I believe most men fall into one of two categories: dreamers and actualizers.

The dreamer is well-intentioned, charming and emotionally available — but he doesn’t produce.

When he meets a legacy minded woman, it almost always collapses the same way.

1. She starts feeling anxious because she can’t trust that he’s “got it”

2. She steps into “I’ll just do it” or “coaching” mode

3. He starts to resent her. His contempt is subconsciously designed to make her shrink so he can contain her.

John Gottman, one of the most well-respected relationship researchers, talks about contempt as one of the four horsemen that leads to the demise of a relationship.

The actualizer makes things happen.

There’s often insane chemistry because the polarity is real — he feels like a man.

When he’s done his inner work, he’s a provider in the highest form. He thrives when his woman is taken care of and she pours right back into him.

But there’s also a shadow side of that.

If his ambition comes from a wounded place, it’s often driven by a need to prove that he’s worthy, he’s terrified of being seen and he can be emotionally unavailable.

In that case, he’ll provide materially and disappear emotionally.

This type believes that as long as he produces, it should be enough and his woman ends up financially provided for but emotionally bankrupt.

What legacy minded women are actually looking for is integration.

A man who has healed enough to provide AND has the capacity to be emotionally available.

It’s rare, but it exists.

4. Can I take up space without feeling like I’m too much?

Chemistry ≠ Compatibility ≠ Capacity

You can have all the chemistry in the world, but if your values aren’t aligned, chemistry will just lead to the most toxic connection of your life.

I’ve heard it said before that a man’s deepest fear is that he’s not enough and that a woman’s deepest fear is that she’s too much.

You can be compatible with someone who simply doesn’t have the capacity to handle all of you which feeds right into both of those fears.

That means a legacy minded woman would end up shrinking which feels like a slow death by suffocation and it would reinforce his fear of not being enough.

That isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s dangerous.

Last week, Nancy Metayer Bowen, the vice mayor of Coral Springs, was murdered by her husband in her own bed. She was 38 years old and a rising star.

He allegedly told his uncle that he did it because “he couldn’t take it anymore”.

Women who take up space and are with a man who lacks capacity trigger a deeply rooted identity crisis filled with rage, resentment and envy.

She becomes a literal threat to his sense of self.

The best way I can explain it is this:

If his capacity is the size of a water bottle but she’s a whole ocean, she’s going to drown him and his survival instinct will kick in.

If his capacity is the size of an ocean but she only has the life and energy of a few cups of water, he ends up dry as the Sahara desert and bored out of his mind.

A legacy minded woman needs to know that she can be a full ocean and he won’t drown.

5. Will I outgrow him?

I’ve asked a lot of elderly women with long, happy marriages what their secret was.

One of them told me: “Darling, the man you marry today is the man he’ll be in 50 years. If you can’t live with him now, you’ll never be happy.”

She was one of several who said some version of that.

That means a man’s commitment to his growth is everything.

I’ve come to believe that how a man pursues a woman he actually wants is how he pursues his goals.

If she gives him a little pushback and he folds, he’ll fold in the pursuit of everything else too.

The man who courts his woman — makes his intentions known, follows through and earns it — shows you that he works for what he wants.

That’s why they say behind every great man is a great woman.

After all, how we do anything is how we do everything.

6. Does he need a muse or a manager?

Legacy minded women are visionaries.

We see what’s possible before anyone else in the room can so we cannot build a legacy with a man who is threatened by the size of what we see.

There’s a difference between a man who needs a manager and a man who needs a muse.

Elena Cardone didn’t build Grant Cardone’s empire.

She told him to go become a billionaire because she saw the vision and held the standard until he did.

Here’s them talking about it:

@grantcardoneI Got Mad When My Wife Told Me To Become A Billionaire @Elena Cardone @Omar Elattar

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Have you ever noticed how many high-performing men say they need to talk to their wives first?

People who don’t see the value of marriage think that’s because he needs permission but I’ve worked alongside enough happily married people to know that what he actually craves for is her perspective.

Those men have learned that she sees what they can’t and holds what they won’t.

That husband knows that together, they are greater than the sum of their individual parts.

She leads in the unseen and he leads in the seen. Neither one of them can reach their full potential without their equal opposite.

A legacy minded woman doesn’t want to run a man’s life.

She wants to expand it.

What It All Comes Down To

Someone is going to read this and ask what happens if I (or any other legacy minded woman) never find that man.

Here’s what I know:

The right man won’t be perfect.

There are things we can only learn in relationship and things that only get triggered in proximity to another person but the standard itself is not negotiable.

I’ve been in the rooms of families at the end of their legacies and at the beginning of them.

I’ve seen what’s left when the wrong decisions were made and I’ve seen what’s possible when a woman like Cettie Rockefeller chooses well and pours herself into something larger than herself.

The families I’ve studied don’t accidentally build legacies.

That’s what The Legacy Year is really about.

Not just what you leave behind — but the decisions you make right now that determine what there is to leave.

So in the end, here’s what it comes down to:

I’m a legacy minded woman and a man is either going to court me to be his wife or we’re going to part ways without hard feelings.

Either way, my new favorite phrase is this:

He’s either my husband or he’s in my husband’s way.

I noticed an audience member nodding along during one of my recently speaking engagements…

It was the kind of nodding that isn’t just being polite. It was the kind that I could tell what I was saying landed in his soul.

He pulled me aside after and told me he invested in companies for a living and his family had just gone through the process of selling his childhood home.

Everything I described had happened down to a T:

• They fought over what to do with the house

• And then fought over what to do with the stuff in the house

• Cleaning out the property took 200+ hours between them

• When they decided to sell it, they ended up selling at a discount

• His sibling relationships are fractured and some of them aren’t speaking

And then he said the thing that has stuck with me since:

This man evaluates risk for a living.

He sits in rooms where people try to sell him things every day. He isn’t easily rattled or easily fooled and he still couldn’t tell who was safe.

And that is the other side of inherited property that I haven’t talked enough about.

The industry created a new problem that no one planned for.

When probate opens, it becomes a public record and it becomes a lead source for agents who operate like ambulance chasers.

They scrape data from lead lists and start cold calling like they’re in the Boiler Room movie 🥴.

The funeral is barely over and agents are harassing you about putting the house on the market.

Then there’s the investors who try to rush families into a decision as quickly as possible.

Don’t get me wrong…

There are some cases (even if they’re rare) where investors who can close quickly with all cash are absolutely necessary — but I genuinely believe there’s a special place in hell for investors who pressure grieving families to give up 30-50% of the property value so they can flip it for a profit.

Meanwhile, your heart was just ripped out of your chest, you’re exhausted from entertaining everyone else for the funeral and you’re just starting to touch the edges of your own grief.

Your attorney and wealth manager are rattling off a bunch of terms that you feel like you’re supposed to know…

And the only place you can go that still feels normal is your loved one’s home.

I’ve had so many clients tell me that the house is the only place they can go that still smells like them.

Families end up in the most vulnerable place they’ve ever been and have to make decisions while grieving — and ambulance chasers capitalize on exactly that moment.

Unfortunately, the ambulance chaser agent is only one of three types of agents who will pursue an inherited property listing.

The second one is harder to see coming because she doesn’t set off any alarms at all.

Your friend probably isn’t the right agent to list your inherited property either.

Your friend that’s warm, familiar and everyone loves?

She’s probably an incredible agent under normal circumstances — after all, she wouldn’t still be successful in one of the most competitive industries out there.

She built an entire career on happy transactions — couples upsizing, families moving into their first home, everyone collaborative and excited and on the same page about what comes next.

BUT…

(And there’s a hugeeee but)

She’s probably never been in a room where three siblings haven’t spoken in two years and the house is full of sixty years of someone’s life and nobody agrees on what to do first.

So when you call her, she says yes.

OF COURSE she says yes — she genuinely wants to help.

And then you ask her what to do about the clean out, the repairs, the furniture, the decisions about what stays and what goes and she says the thing that feels helpful but really isn’t.

Something like:

“I’m here for you. Once it’s cleaned out and ready for photos, I’ll take care of everything.”

This agent is well-meaning.

Families spend $20-30k and 200+ hours to clean out and prep a property for the market, so “call me when it’s ready for photos” isn’t enough.

And just like that, your family becomes the general contractor for its own grief.

She’s not a bad agent — she just doesn’t have a process for the part that mattered most.

I know this because I spent years sitting across from the attorneys and wealth managers who were trying to refer these families somewhere — and kept coming up empty.

Heirloom created a new type of agent — and here’s what we do differently:

1. We don’t call it “probate”.

I get asked by the real estate industry all the time why I don’t just refer to inherited property as “probate” like everyone else.

In my experience, referring only to “probate” shows a lack of knowledge and care.

Families are dealing with tons of different scenarios — senior transitions, cognitive decline (like Alzheimers and dementia), ladybird deeds, trust administration and guardianship.

Probate has become popular because it’s a lead source the ambulance chasers can go after but it’s incomplete.

After working with dozens of professionals who refer us, they aren’t just passing along a name when they refer us. They are extending their own reputation and they need a partner whose process reflects the same standard of care they hold.

I realized that the real estate industry wasn’t just missing training, we were also missing the systems for inherited property and almost no one in the industry was building for it.

2. The clean out and prep phase is where the emotional and logistical labor lives.

Before a property can be listed, a family has to decide what to do with everything inside it.

It might seem like that’s a logistics issue but it’s actually a grief problem dressed as a logistics problem.

The families who get left with “call me when it’s ready” spend months paralyzed by a task they didn’t know how to start.

CIPEs know that this is the work.

We train our agents to build the network to support this transition and how to hold the family through the process instead of waiting at the finish line.

Not to mention, I quite literally wrote the book to help families through this.

3. The onboarding process has to feel less overwhelming, not more.

Standard agent onboarding was built for a client who is ready, motivated, and emotionally available.

Families who are inheriting property are none of those things at the start.

Our intake process has to account for grief timelines, disagreements between decision-makers, court proceedings, advisors and the reality that some families cannot move forward until they feel safe enough to do so.

If the first interaction feels like a transaction, the family either shuts down or disappears.

4. We understand that “dated” does not mean discounted.

The friendly agent looks at a house full of decades-old furniture and prices it accordingly.

CIPEs look at the same house and see what it can become with the right preparation, the right staging approach, and the right buyer.

That’s almost $400k in extra value that we were able to secure for the family.

Statistically, families leave up to 30% of the property’s value on the table because their agent didn’t know how to squeeze more value out of it.

When you consider that 50% of America’s net worth is in property equity, leaving money on the table during the sale of an inherited property is sabotaging a family’s legacy.

5. The referral relationship is the real credential.

The ambulance chaser doesn’t need attorney referrals because she found the family herself.

The friendly agent typically comes across inherited property by past client referrals but doesn’t have systems to support the heaviest part of the transition.

CIPEs build their practice by being the professional that professionals trust.

When an estate attorney or wealth manager sends a family to a CIPE, they are putting their client relationship on the line.

That only happens once if an agent’s process doesn’t hold up.

Most agents lose the opportunity because they don’t have the systems or training to handle the complexity of this.

What families and professionals should expect of their agent

You are not asking for too much when you want a professional who has actually done this before.

You are allowed to keep looking for an agent until the answer feels like a relationship, not a cold call.

The agent who calls the moment probate opens might have found you through court records, instead of a referral. The agent who says “call me when it’s ready” is asking you to do the hardest part alone.

Neither one is the standard you deserve.

One last thing…

Two questions — one for each side of this conversation.

If you are a family navigating an inherited property right now: when the calls started coming in, what did your gut tell you about who was actually there to help?

If you are a professional in this space: what is one part of your process you know was built for the wrong client?

Drop it in the comments. I suspect the answers from both sides will point to the same gap.

Leave a comment

PS — If this named something you have been trying to explain to someone, send it to them. The family who is about to go through this. The agent who is one client relationship away from understanding why their process keeps breaking down. This is the conversation that changes things when the right person finds it.

My father died in 2018 without an estate plan.

After 2.5 years of probate and paperwork, I realized a lot of the professionals in the inheritance space meant well but were trained for something entirely different than what my family needed.

Then I realized this was happening for real estate agents, attorneys, wealth managers, CPAs and organizers who serve heirs.

They explained things once and moved on while I ended up feeling like a burden every time I asked questions.

They didn’t mean to — they were just on deadlines and had the next client to get to.

There were also the professionals who thought they were doing it right by staying in constant contact.

They checked in, sent us dozens of emails with updates and asked to do lots of “quick calls” to keep things moving.

I understand the instinct completely because from the outside, that looks like attentiveness and it feels like care.

But when you’re drowning in grief and can barely get yourself ready for the day, having to put your game face on for a “quick call” is just one more performance when you’re already running on empty.

Every call asking you to show up composed and informed is a call asking you to be someone you do not have the capacity to be right now — or asking you to make another decision.

Those professionals were great at their jobs but they were trained to process transactions when we needed protection.

The inheritance industry was built for compliance, not for grief.

I’ve taught over 1,100 agents how to systemize their real estate businesses, have worked with dozens of heirs who were inheriting property and have been through the process myself.

That means I’ve had a front row seat to how attorneys, agents, wealth managers and CPAs handle their clients.

When most professionals sign on a new client, some have a calendar link and an intake form. Many just wing it.

In the real estate space specifically, it looks like a “when can I come by” and then asking the heirs a million questions while they’re sitting in the house that’s bringing up every single emotion while trying to keep it together.

What families actually need is safety.

The house isn’t a transaction to them. It’s the place their mom used to make them pancakes and the place their father’s last project never got finished.

It’s full of memory and responsibility and inheritance in every sense of the word, and even when heirs can put on their brave face during their attorney and wealth management calls…

They fall apart over the home.

That leads to delayed decisions, overwhelm and complete shut downs that slow down the process, create conflict and increase carrying costs for the estate.

All of those eat into the family’s net worth and destroy their legacy.

When I first got into real estate back in 2013, I shadowed an established agent who taught me something that’s become a guiding light today:

The system that transformed my client experience

During COVID, the real estate market was insane and there were days I was signing three or more clients in a single day.

I needed a system to handle the sheer mental load, so I built one.

Shortly after, I realized the system wasn’t just helping me move faster.

It was alleviating pressure for the families too.

They were calmer, more prepared and they were showing up to consults with the right questions instead of the panicked ones. We were getting them closed faster and they were happier.

That was when I started to realize that systemizing my business didn’t remove the personal touch.

I started noticing that the best professionals who I worked with were also systemized — and they were also the most composed.

It was their systems that invisibly ran in the background of their business that gave them peace. Those were also the professionals I trusted to send my referrals to.

They had done the work of deciding what their clients needed to know, and when, and in what order, so that by the time anyone sat down together the family was never starting from zero.

Then, I started noticing the professionals that hadn’t systemized.

They were constantly frazzled and their clients were overwhelmed, stressed out and fighting.

That was when I realized it was never about the perfect script or the best marketing.

It was about how we make our clients feel in the onboarding process that makes all the difference.

What My Frisky 80-Year-Old Client Taught Me About Systemizing My Business

I had a client early in my career who told me her house was updated so I ran all of my comparables based on an updated property and brought a printed packet.

She was in her 80s.

When I got to the property, she had shag carpet on her walls, the furniture was bolted to the floor, she had a mirror on her bedroom ceiling (yes, you read that right!) and the kitchen was updated… in 1990.

Technically, she wasn’t wrong.

Her logic was that she was the original owner and she had updated it… The fact that the upgrade was in 1990 was an irrelevant detail.

Needless to say, my comparables were all wrong.

Now I walkthrough the property first to get an idea of what we’re dealing with and then I send my new client the link to our 3-step onboarding funnel.

I shared a bit about this a few years ago on a video that got 64k views on YouTube:

The offer we talked about here is no longer active but the strategy hasn’t changed.

The 3-Step Funnel That Transformed My Client Experience

The onboarding process is the most under-built part of the professional relationship and it is precisely where family legacies evaporate.

Taking clients through this process eliminated three of their biggest fears before we ever sat down together.

It started as a sketch on my iPad and has changed everything:

The process is so simple because it has three simple pages and each one answers one specific question:

Page 1: Can I trust you?

The first step demonstrates proof of results. This page makes it easy for them to schedule a consultation and see the results we’ve gotten. This is the page that heirs and professionals alike will view to determine if they can trust you.

Page 2: Do you care about me?

As soon as they hit submit, they’re redirected to the second step of the funnel which collects all of the information we need to know about the property in one shot.

We collect everything from association information to insurance claim history.

This gives them time to collect whatever information they’ll need and they can do it at their own pace.

This made the biggest difference because we didn’t have to follow up with the client afterwards to collect a bunch of information and they had peace of mind knowing they gave us everything.

Page 3: Can you help me?

The last step walks them through exactly what to expect from the experience.

That way, when we actually sit down together, we get to focus on the relationship and the specifics of their unique situation rather than the dreaded sales pitch.

The clarity of this funnel lowers their anxiety, sets expectations up front, gives heirs confidence to show up and builds a relationship faster.

This is what it looks like when families feel protected instead of processed.

Here’s Your Next Step

You deserve professionals who have built a process that considers the emotional weight of what you’re dealing with before you walk in the door.

That standard exists.

You are allowed to expect it, and you are allowed to keep looking until you find it.

Heirloom has agents in 20 partners around the US who are trained in our process and you can schedule a discovery call here:

Schedule A Discovery Call

PS. If this landed for you, restack it. There is someone in your world who needs it right now, either a family in the middle of this or a professional who is one client relationship away from understanding exactly what this article is about.

The real estate industry is in for one of the biggest shifts we’ve ever seen — and the professionals who are paying attention are already positioning themselves on the right side of it.

I’m not talking about interest rates or commission lawsuits, though those matter too.

I’m talking about something so fundamentally different that it will shape the next decade. It’s a convergence of a demographic change, technological disruption and a fundamental mismatch between how the industry operates and who it’s about to serve.

Every professional in this space is going to feel it — the attorneys, the wealth managers, the CPAs, the organizers but this one article is for the real estate agents who are either going to figure this out or get left behind.

I so deeply believe in this that I bet my entire 13-year real estate career on it.

This article is everything I wish someone had told me when I decided to go all in on inherited property… and no, this isn’t just about “picking a niche”.

This is so, so much bigger.

How I Got Here

After my dad unexpectedly passed, I started walking my real estate clients by the hand from the closing table to the estate planning attorney’s table.

Then inherited property referrals started coming in — and that’s when I realized that what I thought was unique to my family was actually a pattern playing out in almost every family I encountered.

I’d been reading Built to Sell, Zero to One, Traction.

I was paying close attention to which clients my team loved working with most and what work felt like it actually mattered.

At the time we were already on the path to specializing — we were working with divorce, probate and distressed property. I already understood how much value there was in serving families through transition. I just hadn’t gone all in yet.

I started to see that my team loved working with our heirs and that we were making an impact on family legacies.

The pivot didn’t start with a business strategy. It came from grief — my own, and then our clients’.

I started sitting down with estate attorneys and asking about their biggest challenges. I shared my story, not a pitch. They understood immediately why this work was significant in a way a commission conversation never could have communicated.

I started doing lunch and learns, speaking and building relationships that became referral partnerships.

This was such a massive issue so speaking wasn’t enough.

I wrote The Legacy Year and sold out of copies on the first night to help families navigate the impossible conversations that happen during the inheritance process.

I certified agents in our Estate Transition Framework and I’ve been building an ecosystem of vendors and coordinators around the inherited property transition.

The referrals followed in a way they never had before in my career. Not just in my market — but people started asking if we could support families all over the country.

Eventually I had to step out of production entirely to build Heirloom as a platform so we could serve families all around the country because the requests just didn’t stop.

I’m not sharing this to brag or to impress you.

I’m sharing it because I need you to see that the industry is starving for inherited property to be handled with soul.

I won’t sit here and pretend I have all of the answers. I’m learning new things every day but I think I’ve figured out a few things and I’m just not the one to gatekeep.

Let’s get into it.

Why I Burned The Boats And Decided To Go All In On Inherited Property

The highest-value properties in my market started changing hands in a way I hadn’t seen before — and I started paying attention to why.

Boomers own a disproportionate share of the high-end, long-held real estate in America. They are paid off, deeply appreciated and sitting inside estates that are beginning to transfer.

These are the listings that raise your average sales price and I realized they were coming to the market whether we were ready for them or not.

Over the next 15 years, one in four homes coming to market will be an estate sale or senior transition.

When I first read that number I didn’t fully understand what it meant for my business but what I’ve come to understand is that while most of the market I was watching contracted and got more competitive, inherited property kept growing.

This space doesn’t follow the same economic rules and grief doesn’t need to wait for interest rates to change.

Then I started seeing what Zillow was doing…

They acquired ShowingTime, Dotloop and FollowUpBoss.

Those were 3 tools that sit inside my business every single day collecting transaction data, our showing activity and our client conversations.

I genuinely don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Zillow has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to grow their bottom line — and it has already identified agent commissions as its next frontier.

They already tried once with their iBuyer program (remember?). Yes, the program failed but do you honestly think they’re going to give up on that?

Watching those acquisitions, I don’t think the strategy has changed. I think they got more sophisticated about how they’re going to execute it.

The data being collected through those tools is exactly what you’d need to train an AI to replace a general real estate agent.

70% of agents last year didn’t close a single transaction.

I kept thinking about what that number actually means when you follow it forward — and I kept coming back to the same conclusion.

The general agent who works every neighborhood, every price point, every client type is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. We’re up against technology, consolidation, commission lawsuits and a contracting market.

Are we’re surprised that agents are struggling so much?

The industry keeps saying “just keep going” but I don’t think it’s that simple.

I believe specialization is what protects us because there are things you simply cannot automate.

You can’t train an AI to hold a grieving family together. You can’t replace the relationship between an agent who has lived through loss and a client who is living through it right now.

That expertise, built deliberately over time with the right relationships around it, is defensible in a way that a general practice isn’t anymore.

When I Learned About The Heirs of The Great Wealth Transfer, I Realized The Old Playbook Will Fail Her.

By 2030, women are projected to control approximately two-thirds of all private wealth in the United States.

95% of surviving spouses who inherit wealth are women.

They’re the primary caretakers in most families and an entire generation is being raised in households where a woman is already the sole financial decision-maker.

When I started paying attention to this, I realized the industry had been solving for the wrong person entirely.

The entire infrastructure of probate real estate — the prospecting, the cold outreach, the courthouse mailing lists, the transactional pitch — was designed around how men make decisions.

In the article linked below, I did a deep dive into how women make decisions differently and why the current system fails her:

The old probate prospecting model doesn’t just underperform in this space.

From what I’ve seen, it’s traumatic for her.

What I’ve found actually works is the warm referral — from the estate attorney, the wealth manager, the CPA who has been advising her family through the hardest year of their lives.

When that referral comes from someone she already trusts, the trust transfers.

She doesn’t need to wonder if you understand what she’s going through. She already knows you do, because someone she respects told her she could trust you.

That’s an entirely different kind of client relationship — and it comes from an entirely different kind of practice.

What I Wish Someone Told Me Before Specializing In Inherited Property

1. I wish someone told me that prospecting was actually the slowest way to sign more inherited property clients

The thing I didn’t understand when I started was that this wasn’t sphere marketing or prospecting.

It wasn’t paid ads, cold outreach or “working a list”.

Finding clients in this space is a whole different ballgame than anything most agents have ever done — and once I understood that, everything I was doing started to make more sense.

The families navigating inherited property are not browsing Zillow looking for an agent.

They’re overwhelmed, in grief and looking for someone their attorney or wealth manager trusts enough to recommend.

That referral is the entry point which means the practice you’re actually building is a referral relationship practice — with the professionals, not the families directly.

When I was just another agent, I noticed that an attorney had to sell me to a family that probably already had a relationship with someone and the attorney themselves had to justify why they should refer me over the 20 other agents they knew.

At the time, my only differentiator was my commission rate.

I’d be having a great conversation with an attorney and the second I mentioned I was a real estate agent, I’d watch their body language shift and their eyes glaze over.

When I became the specialist and had an actual value proposition that they cared about — when I could speak the language, when I had the ecosystem, when I had sat with enough families in this exact moment that attorneys trusted me with their most vulnerable clients — I stopped competing.

I became the natural extension of their practice.

An attorney or wealth manager who trusts you doesn’t send you one client.

They send you every client they have who needs what you do, multiple times a year and that’s completely different math than anything I was doing before.

What I’ve found keeps that relationship warm between referrals is content.

It keeps you top of mind when the next family walks in and consistently reminds them without you having to say it directly, that you understand this space at a level most agents never will.

2. I wish someone told me that probate was only the beginning.

Remember at the beginning of this article when I said “I used to specialize in divorce, probate and distressed property”?

At first, I thought probate was the whole pie but it’s not and I genuinely wish I’d understood that earlier.

Probate is a legitimate source of listings but it’s one channel in a much larger ecosystem, and from where I sit, it’s the most emotionally tone-deaf way to enter a space that requires genuine humanity.

If you’ve ever lost a parent or loved one, you know what it feels like to get that cold call or that postcard.

You’re stretched to your absolute limit already and someone is marketing to your grief.

There’s trust administration, senior transitions, Alzheimer’s and dementia — all of which are facing the same kind of grief — and almost no one is showing up for families there with any consistency or depth.

The attorneys and wealth managers who work across all of these aren’t going to take you seriously as a specialist if you can only speak to probate.

You end up in the “another agent” category and that’s not where the referral relationship lives.

3. I wish someone had told me that selling the house was only one piece of what I was being hired to do.

This is the thing that changed everything for me.

Attorneys and wealth managers aren’t calling you to sell a house.

They’re calling you because they have a grieving client who needs someone to take the entire situation off their plate — and they need to feel confident that the experience will reflect well on them.

In the clients we’ve worked with, cleaning out and prepping a property for the market takes up to 240 hours, costs between $20-30k and the family has to juggle ~ 8 vendors to get it ready.

What that actually looks like is the estate sale company needs to be coordinated before the property can even be staged. The organizer has to help the family sort through decades of belongings that nobody has touched since the funeral. The handyman addressing the deferred maintenance that built up over years. And communication at every single step needs to keep everyone informed and the timeline moving.

Most agents I’ve watched work with this space hand the family a list of names and tell them to call when the property is ready for photos.

What I built instead was the ecosystem itself.

The relationships with the vendors, the coordination process and the communication cadence that meant the attorney never has to wonder what’s happening with their client’s property.

That’s what families hire for, why the attorney continues to refer and I’ve found it creates a kind of loyalty that a transactional referral simply doesn’t.

4. I wish someone had told me that my average sales price was about to go up — just not the way I expected.

I didn’t expect this one but the highest-value, longest-held real estate in my market started coming through this channel.

These are the properties that move your actual numbers. Taking $1M+ listings was realistic because families had built so much equity over time.

Most of them need work before they can be listed at their true value and the agents who have the ecosystem in place — the vendors, the prep process, the staging capacity and a process for virtual renovations — are the ones who can close the gap between what a property looks like when you walk in and what it sells for when you close.

I’ve watched that preparation be the difference between a sale that honors the family’s legacy and one that treats it like a fire sale.

5. I wish someone had told me that this would give me an exit strategy for my business.

I remember hearing once that “realtors don’t retire, we just expire” and that put me face-to-face with wondering if that was really going to be my life.

I started paying attention to the doctors and attorneys that got to sell their businesses — and there were many.

It got me thinking…

How many realtors do you know that have successfully sold their businesses?

I couldn’t think of a single one.

That’s because agents build their businesses based on personal relationships without systems, repeatable client acquisition or staff that can fulfill the transaction.

A specialized, systematized practice is a different asset entirely. When you have documented processes, a referral network built around professional relationships rather than personal ones and a recognizable presence in a defined space, the business starts to have value that exists beyond you.

That’s something you can sell or hand to someone else to run.

I think about that a lot when I’m building Heirloom — not just income, but something that will outlast me.

The income math changes too. The median real estate agent earns around $60k a year — and I’d argue that’s largely a generalist problem.

One quality attorney relationship in this space can refer you multiple times a year, and each of those referrals comes pre-qualified, pre-trusting and attached to a Boomer-owned property that has appreciated for decades.

That changes your average sales price, your average commission and the value of your business all at once.

That’s an increase income and in generational wealth from the business itself.

Who I Think This Is Actually For

I just pulled my numbers in Stripe and I’ve officially crossed over 1,100 agents who have gone through my programs. I think I’ve trained enough at this point to have a sense of who thrives in this space and who doesn’t.

If you’re in this business purely for the transaction or to raise your price point, inherited property is going to burn you out.

The timelines are longer, the family dynamics are complicated in ways that don’t resolve cleanly and the emotional weight doesn’t go away with experience. You just get better at holding it.

HOWEVER —

If you became an agent because you actually care about people — if you’ve been through loss yourself and you know what it feels like to need someone steady and trustworthy in the room, I think this space will feel like the work you were always supposed to be doing.

If that sounds like you, you probably already have most of what it takes:

You already know how to build relationships, you already have the intuition to serve, you already care for the people you work with.

What most agents I’ve talked to don’t have yet is the positioning that makes the right professionals recognize them and the approach to stay top of mind between referrals, that gets them invited to speak in offices and builds the kind of presence that makes a wealth manager feel confident putting their most vulnerable clients in their hands.

That gap is smaller than it looks but it does need to be closed intentionally.

What Are You Seeing on the Ground?

Are you already working with inherited property clients? What’s the biggest gap you’re running into — the referral relationships, the family dynamics, the prep and coordination process, or something else entirely? Drop it in the comments. I want to know what you’re experiencing in your market.

PS. Forward this to the agent in your network who needs to hear this before the shift happens without them.

There’s a version of this conversation that sounds like fear-mongering. This isn’t it.

After almost a decade working directly inside estate transitions, what I do believe is that the professionals closest to this space are often too close to the forest to see the trees.

Families navigating inheritance right now are making decisions completely differently than any generation before them and once you see the patterns, you won’t be able to unsee it.

Let’s talk about it.

A note before we begin: if you're currently navigating an inheritance, this article will show you exactly what's happening in the market around you, why the system feels so broken, and what to look for in the professionals you choose to trust.

If you're an attorney, agent, wealth manager, CPA or organizer who serves families through inheritance — keep reading. What's coming is going to change everything about how you work.

I Spent 2.5 Years Inside a Broken System. Here’s What I Learned.

My journey with inheritance started when my dad unexpectedly passed away in 2018.

He owned a very successful business doing countertop installations at scale. He was 51 and died of a heart attack. He never got around to doing his estate plan and he had two 5-year-old twins so his wife inherited 70% of his estate.

We spent 2.5 years in probate. It was expensive, exhausting and honestly, humiliating. For a long time, I was so incredibly angry.

That was supposed to be our family’s business.

With time, I came to understand that she was newly widowed, had 5-year-olds to look after and she’d inherited a business that she had no clue how to run. She was in survival mode.

You’re probably sitting here like, “Alexa, that’s why he should have had an estate plan” — and you’re right. He should have.

Truthfully, I had so much shame around how my family handled inheritance. I thought there was something wrong with us.

I was so wrong.

A Decade In Estate Transitions Taught Me That Inheritance Is A Nervous System Event.

After my dad passed, I started bringing my real estate clients by the hand from the closing table to the estate planning attorney’s table.

Then the inherited property referrals started coming in — and that’s when I realized that what I thought was unique to my family was actually a pattern most families live.

I’d follow up with clients years later and hear the same things: they hadn’t spoken to their siblings since and the money was already gone.

They weren’t being reckless — they thought they were being responsible by paying off debt, putting some money away, maybe doing a renovation.

… And then it was gone.

That’s devastating because about 50% of America’s wealth is in property equity.

The property is where the wealth lives and I was watching it disappear in families that had done everything right.

I started comparing notes with the attorneys, wealth managers and CPAs I was working alongside.

Their clients were experiencing the same thing.

Wealth wasn’t surviving the transition regardless of which professionals were in the room or how carefully the estate had been structured.

It was a pattern I couldn’t unsee.

And if it’s a pattern at the family level, what happens when we multiply it by the largest wealth transfer in human history?

I went looking for an answer and I ended up somewhere I didn’t expect.

Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It.

“Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.”

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund and one of the most respected nonpartisan economists on the planet.

He looked at 400 years of economic history and asked: is there a pattern?

There absolutely is.

Think of it like Monopoly. Everyone builds, borrows and accumulates until the debt becomes impossible to carry and the board resets.

Dalio says this happens two ways.

There’s a small recession every 7-10 years — uncomfortable but survivable. And then there’s a big reset every 75-100 years when the whole board flips and the system doesn’t just slow down, it restructures.

We’re inside one of those moments right now.

During COVID, governments printed more money than ever before which led to exploding asset values across the board.

The gap between what things cost and what people actually earn became wider than it had ever been.

Recession → Inflation → Rising Interest Rates → Widening Wealth Gap → Political Tension

Things are playing out exactly as he predicted.

Here’s the part nobody in this industry is connecting to inheritance.

For 80 years the US dollar has been the world’s reserve currency — think of it like being the bank in Monopoly.

Every country needs dollars to buy oil, trade goods and settle debts.

Because of that, foreign investors from South America, Europe, Asia and Canada have parked their wealth in American real estate for decades so American property has been one of the safest places on earth to store money.

That’s changing.

A growing coalition of countries is actively building trade systems that bypass the dollar entirely. When confidence in the dollar weakens, foreign capital slows down and the markets most dependent on foreign buyers feel it first (ahem, I’m talking to all of us that live in South Florida).

So here’s what we’re actually looking at right now:

• A buyer’s market where inventory is already rising and properties are sitting longer

• Reduced foreign investment that has historically stabilized property values

• A generation of families outliving their retirements and making decisions under impossible pressure

1 in 4

Homes coming to market over the next 15 years will be an estate sale or senior transition

These properties often need work and are hitting a market where buyers have options and choose condition over sentimentality every single time.

When enough of them land in the same neighborhood at once, they pull comparable values down for everyone.

This isn’t just a real estate problem. It’s a wealth problem.

Every professional in this space — the attorney managing the timeline, the wealth manager advising on the asset, the CPA navigating the tax implications, the organizer preparing the property — is about to feel this in their practice whether they’re ready for it or not.

For most families the wealth transfer isn’t $84 trillion. It’s one house worth around $500,000 — the single largest financial decision that family will ever make, arriving in the middle of grief with no roadmap and no one in the room who understands the full weight of what they’re carrying.

That’s what’s hiding inside the $84 trillion number everyone keeps celebrating.

Today’s Heir Was Never Who This Industry Was Built For.

By 2030, women are projected to control approximately two-thirds of all private wealth in the United States.

Women outlive men, they’re the primary caretakers in most families, and fatherless homes are at historic highs — meaning an entire generation is already being raised by women who are the sole financial decision-makers.

95%

Of surviving spouses who inherit wealth are women

The heir standing in the middle of a turbulent market, navigating the single largest financial decision of her family’s life, is almost certainly a woman.

And she makes decisions in a way this industry was never built for.

The entire infrastructure of wealth management, estate planning, and real estate was designed around how men make decisions.

Men are typically transactional. They consult an expert, get an answer and move forward. A man inherits a property and asks: what’s it worth and how fast can we close? He wants the most qualified person in the room to give him a recommendation and he wants to act on it.

She doesn’t work that way — and she shouldn’t have to.

Women make decisions by consensus. She’s going to consult her siblings, her children, her attorney, her financial advisor, possibly a grief counselor, the agent her neighbor recommended.

If you miss it, you might think she’s indecisive but she’s not.

She is being exactly as thorough as the moment requires because she understands intuitively that this decision has to survive the family long after the transaction is over.

She comes to this process looking for a team.

What she finds instead is six professionals who have never met, each handing her a different form in a different portal and none of them with any idea what the others have told her.

She ends up being the general contractor for her own grief.

This is the heir our industry is failing. And this is exactly who is about to inherit everything.

The Industry Has Only Been Solving 25% Of The Problem.

Only about 1 in 3 families has an estate plan.

That means the majority of the $84 trillion transferring over the next two decades won’t move through a carefully drafted trust or a coordinated wealth strategy.

It will move through grief, conflict, probate court, and whatever decisions a family can hold together long enough to make.

But here’s what’s worse: the families who do have plans are still losing their wealth.

70%

Of family wealth is gone by the second generation

90%

Is gone by the third

Most professionals use that statistic as a sales tool — a reason to buy more planning, set up the trust, fund the account but even when that happens, the wealth still disappears.

Which means the problem was never the plan.

The industry built its entire infrastructure around one assumption: that inheritance is a financial event. If we get the documents right and transfer the assets cleanly, the job is done.

That assumption is wrong and it has been wrong for decades.

When a family goes through inheritance, they don’t receive one thing. They receive four.

Assets — the accounts, the property, the portfolio. The only inheritance the industry has a process for.

Belongings — every object inside that home that carries memory, meaning, and emotional weight. The jewelry. The furniture. The box of photographs nobody labeled. The things that can’t be appraised but tear families apart faster than any asset ever could.

Memories — the stories, the history, the recipes, the undocumented legacy of a family. The things that only existed inside one person’s mind. Trust documents can’t recover these. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Identity — and this is the one nobody in this industry has been willing to talk about.

Inheritance isn’t just about what gets passed down. It’s about who you become in the process.

Attachment styles get triggered, old wounds resurface and someone has to step in to lead — which creates power dynamics no one helped the family navigate.

This is one of the most disorienting experiences a human being can go through and it happens while she’s expected to act like the general contractor of the estate.

There was a time when families marked this moment.

It created continuity and gave the family a moment to grieve one chapter and begin the next together.

Now the heir often finds out what she’s receiving at the reading of a will (if there even is one) — surrounded by professionals who each need something from her before she’s had a single moment to understand what just happened to her identity.

Professionals aren’t trained for this and the system isn’t built to handle it.

The industry has built an entire infrastructure around the transfer of assets and almost nothing for the other three. And the other three are exactly what determines whether the wealth survives.

The Rockefellers didn’t just transfer assets — they transferred identity, values, and a shared sense of purpose across generations. They held family meetings, created governance structures and treated the legacy as something that had to be actively carried. Their wealth is still intact seven generations later.

Now take everything we just covered and put it in the same room at the same time:

• A market under pressure from every direction.

• The largest property transfer in history is about to hit a buyer’s market that isn’t ready for it.

• A female heir navigating the single largest financial decision of her family’s life — in grief, under pressure, making decisions by consensus in a system built for transactions.

• She’s carrying four inheritances while the industry hands her a process for one. Doing all of it without a team, without infrastructure, and without a single professional who understands the full weight of what just landed on her.

That is the Great Wealth Transfer and it is coming whether the industry is ready or not.

There Are Three Reasons This Is Going To Go Badly For Most Professionals.

The System Is Already Breaking Down.

Two thirds of families don’t have estate plans which means most heirs will spend months (or years like my family did) waiting on probate court before they can make a single decision.

The courts were already backlogged before the wealth transfer began.

As 1 in 4 properties hits the market over the next 15 years, that backlog is only going to get worse.

For a family already getting five different answers from five different professionals, adding months of court delays isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a compounding crisis that will erode her sanity and cost the family tens of thousands in holding costs.

The responsibility for holding it all together falls entirely on her.

The professionals who don’t understand how to move her through this efficiently are the ones she will stop calling.

Every Professional Is Working In A Silo.

Every professional involved in an inheritance transition is operating in complete isolation — different intake forms, portals and processes. There isn’t shared communication and most don’t talk to each other.

I’ve talked to professionals across every discipline in this space and every single one said the same thing: the biggest obstacle to doing a great job for their clients was the complete lack of communication with everyone else involved.

For a woman who makes decisions by consensus and who needs clarity from everyone before she can move forward, this isn’t just inefficient. It is a system failure happening in slow motion.

She Already Found Her Answers Without You.

At 11pm when the grief hits and the questions won’t stop, she is not booking a consult.

She is asking AI the questions she doesn’t yet know how to ask a stranger.

She’s figuring out the process, deciding what questions to ask, and forming opinions about which professionals understand her situation — all before she reaches out to a single one of them.

By the time she’s ready to talk to a human she has already decided who feels trustworthy and who doesn’t.

The professionals she chooses aren’t the ones with the best credentials. They’re the ones whose content found her at 11pm before she was ready to reach out and the ones who feel familiar before the first call.

Most professionals in this space have no strategy for reaching her while she’s prepping and by the time they do, she’s already chosen someone else.

You’re Probably Already Prepping For Some Of This

If you’ve read this far, you’re not the professional who’s going to get blindsided.

You already understand that inheritance is more than a transaction. You’re building relationships, getting referrals and showing up differently than most people in your field.

But doing some of this isn’t the same as being positioned for what’s actually coming.

They’re operating as part of a coordinated ecosystem instead of another silo, reaching her before she’s ready to call, and they’re the familiar face she finds before she’s ready to trust anyone.

They’ve built the team she came looking for before she ever walked in the door.

The inheritance industry is being rebuilt right now and there’s a very short window for the professionals who decide they want to be on the right side of it.

What Are You Seeing on the Ground?

Are you already working with inherited property clients? What’s the biggest gap you’re running into — the silos, the courts, the tech, the content, or something else entirely? Drop it in the comments. I want to know what you’re experiencing in your market.

PS. Forward this to the one professional in your network who you think is about to get left behind if they don’t start paying attention to what’s actually coming. They’ll thank you for it.

When my grandparents passed, my dad and my uncle were the beneficiaries and executors of the trust.

They made the decision to sell the house. It was straightforward and the proceeds were divided among the siblings.

I remember wondering after — if one of them had wanted to keep it, how would we have even done that?

As a mortgage lender and Heirloom Certified Inherited Property Expert (CIPE) it planted something in me.

I realized how many families don’t know what’s possible before they make a permanent decision.

My family may have sold it but I’ve now worked with dozens of families in this exact situation and helped them keep the family home.

The Attorney Said They'd Never Get a Loan. She Was Wrong.

One of my clients inherited her grandmother’s home.

She and her brother were named beneficiaries. The house was worth around $1.2 million and it needed work.

A lot of work.

The attorney involved told them they would never qualify for financing because the home wouldn’t appraise in its condition.

The attorney told them to do the simple thing: just sell it.

What most people miss is that not every solution requires a traditional appraisal-heavy refinance.

In this case, because the property was free and clear (no mortgage), we were able to structure a home equity line of credit (HELOC). That meant there was no traditional appraisal requirement so the funding was fast and we were able to get it done in days rather than months.

The $1.2M value was divided among five heirs.

My client and her brother simply needed to buy out each of the other three heirs’ $240,000 share.

Instead of having to sell the home filled with their childhood memories, the siblings used the equity to compensate the other heirs.

Now the granddaughter and her brother live in that home as primary residents and co-borrowers.

It was much easier than they thought it was going to be. The biggest thing was knowing this option was available to them.

Sandra's Family Had a Reverse Mortgage. Their Agent Said Sell But We Found Another Way.

Another client — let’s call her Sandra — and her mom were dreading having to list her grandmother’s home for sale.

Her grandmother had a reverse mortgage and their real estate agent didn’t understand how reverse mortgages worked.

The assumption was: it has to be sold at market value once the appraisal is completed.

And she’s not completely wrong — in many reverse mortgage situations, the loan becomes due upon death, BUT that does not automatically mean it has to be sold.

Sandra and her mom were devastated by the idea of having to sell. It was their family home and they wanted to live there.

We talked through what that actually meant.

We worked together to structure a refinance into a new loan that allowed them to satisfy the reverse mortgage while keeping the home.

They didn’t have to sell.

They just needed to know what resources were available to them and they needed professionals who knew how to get it done.

And here’s what I see over and over again:

Families are making irreversible decisions based on incomplete information.

“Fine. Just Buy Me Out.” — What That Actually Takes

Buying out a sibling isn’t just about math.

Families are grieving their loved ones, the memories in that home, trying to balance what’s fair and feeling old family dynamics resurfacing.

I’ve seen it a thousand times —

• One sibling feels entitled because they lived the closest and were the primary caretaker

• The second one lashes out because they were never heard

• The third is looking forward to getting their cash out

• And the last one is desperate to hold onto their family’s legacy

And in the middle of that, someone says:

“Fine. Just buy me out.”

But buying someone out requires several steps:

1. Qualifying for financing

2. Understanding the property’s real value

3. Structuring the payout properly

4. Thinking long-term about affordability

Unfortunately, I’ve seen families stretch themselves too thin trying to hold onto a house because it feels like holding onto the loved one they lost. It ends up destroying the family’s wealth and the relationships.

When families slow down, get advice from the right professionals and structure it properly, they’re able to preserve the property, their wealth and their family relationships.

Most Families Don’t Know These Options Exist — Until It’s Too Late

If a property has strong equity and is free and clear, there are flexible lending options that don’t require jumping through every traditional hoop.

If someone wants to convert it to a rental instead of selling, there are financing paths for that too.

If quick liquidity is needed to facilitate a buyout, there are solutions that can be funded in days, not months.

But none of that matters if no one tells you it exists.

And that’s where I believe working with the right professionals, like myself, can help.

Selling Shouldn’t Be the Only Option You’re Offered

Sometimes selling is absolutely the right choice.

My own family did and it worked for us in that situation.

But sometimes the right structure allows a family member to keep the home without financially drowning.

Most of the time, families simply need someone who understands both the emotional and financial sides of inheritance to guide them through it.

“Just buy them out” sounds easy — and it can be, as long as it’s structured properly.

When done correctly, it doesn’t just protect equity.

It protects family legacies.

This article is an expert contribution by Rachelle Lopez.

She is an Heirloom Certified Real Estate Agent and Mortgage Lender just outside of Los Angeles, CA.

She specializes in helping families navigate complex property decisions during life transitions, including inheritance and estate-related scenarios. With experience on both the lending and real estate sides, Rachelle focuses on educating families on their options before irreversible decisions are made.

Her work is rooted in clarity, empathy, and long-term financial sustainability, particularly for multi-generational and family-held properties.

Rachelle is also a Marine mom and wife to a veteran and first responder, which shapes her deep understanding of sudden life changes and the importance of thoughtful planning during emotionally charged moments.

Her mom has boxes of photo albums where she can’t identify 90% of the faces anymore—her own parents never told those stories, never shared what their childhood was like. Now it’s too late to ask.

Her grandmother with dementia still dances. Still chooses joy. Even as the memories fade, that spirit—that’s what remains.

When Angelica started trying to talk to her parents about inheritance, she wasn’t asking “Did you do your estate planning?” or “What’s in your will?”

Instead, she started asking different questions:

• What traditions do you want us to keep alive?

• What stories do you want us to remember?

• What matters most to you that we might not know about?

And her parents actually answered.

In this episode, Alexa and Angelica share the origin story of Heirloom—but more importantly, they share what happened when they realized inheritance conversations don’t have to be about death and documents. They can be about life, memory, and what you want to protect while everyone’s still here.

Alexa learned about inheritance the hard way after her father died in 2018—2.5 years of probate, family conflict, and realizing no one had prepared her for any of it. Angelica learned by watching her extended family go through it, seeing relationships fracture over belongings that weren’t even valuable, just sentimental.

They both realized the same thing: families don’t fight over the stuff itself. The stuff is just the stage where deeper pain plays out—grief that has nowhere to go, questions that were never asked, conversations that never happened.

So they started having those conversations now. Before the crisis. Before the loss. And they discovered that when you focus on the intangible things—the stories, the values, the identity of your family—the tangible stuff becomes so much less fraught.

This episode is for the eldest daughters, the family organizers, the ones who know these conversations need to happen but have been putting them off because you don’t want to upset anyone. It’s about what changes when you stop asking your parents about their plans for dying and start asking them about what they want to keep alive.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Heirloom for weekly insights to help you lead your family through inheritance.

Subscribe now

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Dearest Gentle Reader,

After posing last week’s question, I found myself reading the responses with the same fascination one might reserve for a well-attended ball.

A particular remark stood out above the rest:

One suspects she is correct.

Having just finished the latest half-season of Bridgerton, I couldn’t help but notice how often our most beloved dramas borrow from very real family dynamics.

Fiction, after all, rarely strays far from what families have already lived.

I pose questions every Monday (Threads, Reddit and Facebook) and I recap them here. Share an interesting inheritance story for a chance to be invited onto the Heirloom Stories podcast.

Subscribe now

Across the ton, one observed familiar patterns emerging with remarkable consistency:

1. Many assumed a will was present

The very first thing I noticed was how many people automatically assumed there was a will.

Several comments referenced “the will” when only about 1/3 of Americans have one and we should see that as a warning in itself.

I’m speaking from experience here…

When I lost my father in 2018, he hadn’t put a will together (or if he did, it disappeared 😒) and it took my family 2.5 years to go through the process.

I share more on that experience here:

2. “Just Sell It”

Hands down, selling the property was the most popular comment.

Selling it wasn’t because anyone wants to let go of their childhood home, but because they’ve seen what happens when siblings stay financially tied.

A lot of people basically said: “If you want to still speak to each other in five years, sell the house.”

What didn’t get mentioned here was the process of cleaning out and prepping the property for the market.

Most of the heirs that I’ve worked with will spend somewhere between $10-30k and around 200-300 hours in the clean out and prep process.

That’s exhausting as it is but when grief, overwhelm and sibling tension hijack our nervous systems, it’s no wonder why families struggle during inheritance.

The Museum Effect often takes over and it paralyzes heirs. Everything feels special and it feels like betrayal to get rid of anything.

In chapter 8 of The Legacy Year, I outline a four-step framework for families to curate their parents’ legacy and decide what to keep, sell, donate and dispose of.

3. Buy Out Your Siblings

On paper, the simple answer is for the siblings who want to keep the property to buy out the sibling who wants to sell it.

It was also pointed out that the sibling who wants to keep the house often can’t.

Tension during this process isn’t usually about the property itself — it’s about what the property represents.

The property often fills a power vacuum that gets opened when we lose a parent.

Think of a power vacuum like a car that can’t stop moving.

Let’s say the driver of the car suddenly disappears but the car is still moving — the empty seat is the vacuum.

If we all want to arrive safely, someone (or something) has to hop into that driver seat to make sure we all get there.

What gets into the seat is filling the vacuum.

Sometimes a person steps in to fill the vacuum.

If there isn’t a person to do it, sometimes it’s a thing — like *a property* (surprise, surprise) or a belonging.

Sometimes it’s a behavior — avoidance, anger, control, addiction, etc.

This typically isn’t about money, power or control.

It’s about continuity, stability and safety. When the person who kept the family together is gone and that vacuum isn’t intentionally filled, heirs often describe that “free falling” feeling.

The property becomes the thing that grounds us and that’s why it becomes so difficult to let go.

Whatever you want to call it — most of this happens at a subconscious, somatic or nervous system level — and heirs don’t have language to explain why they feel like they HAVE TO hold onto it which only adds to the tension between siblings.

If you want to learn more about the four power vacuums that get opened during inheritance, I cover it all in detail in chapter 2 of The Legacy Year.

4. Renting It Out Sounds Good In Theory

Some people suggested renting the property to give the sibling who wants to buy it time to save for a down payment.

Some heirs have been through it and warned against it.

The truth is that being a landlord is tough as it is — but being a landlord while you’re grieving and dealing with sibling tension is infinitely harder.

5. If siblings can’t agree…

A handful of people jumped in with legal process and how to get things moving.

It’s no secret that you’ll need to have a great team around you while your family navigates inheritance and these comments did a great job of pointing families in the right direction.

The dozens of professionals that I’ve worked alongside genuinely want their clients to succeed and they often wish their clients came to them sooner.

Don’t be afraid to ask for guidance.

There are so many more options available to families who prep ahead of time that disappear once the loss has happened.

6. Families struggle to agree on what “fair” means

This one showed up in what wasn’t said.

I noticed that everuone’s definition of “fair” looked different:

Some people focused on equal shares, others focused on who took care of the parents and others focused on who lived closest, gave up the most or was the oldest.

It’s natural for us to feel like our version of fair is obvious. As you can see, we all see “fair” differently.

7. “Decide later” does more harm than it does good.

I’ve seen scenario after scenario where parents thought they were doing the right thing by giving multiple children equal decision making rights and letting them decide later.

Some say things like “best two out of three” or “they all have to agree”.

… But what families fail to consider is that the logical family member we know and love likely isn’t going to be the same person we deal with while we’re all grieving.

In many cases, heirs get “frozen” in their decision making, which only compounds the conflict, confusion, expenses and regret.

8. Notes from the back of the class

Do you remember the kids in the back of the class who always made everyone laugh?

We have a few of them and it felt selfish not to share — feel free to laugh but definitely don’t take their advice:

The Big Takeaway

In the end, if we don’t navigate inheritance carefully, this is the reality our families have to look forward to:

This week’s question wasn’t really a real estate question.

It was about family systems, grief, money and communication.

What actually tears families apart isn’t what’s written in a will. It’s because of the conversations we never have.

Inheritance DOES NOT have to be “the great destroyer of families” — but it WILL BE if we don’t lead our families through it and have hard conversations beforehand.

Before we wrap up, I’ll leave you with this:

What’s Next

If we haven’t met before, my name is Alexa.

I lost my dad in 2018 and spent 2.5 years in probate.

After years of working with families who were inheriting property, I noticed the same patterns across most families. I write this newsletter to help families understand the process earlier and to give the professionals who serve these families a voice.

That’s exactly why my cofounder and I built Heirloom and why I wrote The Legacy Year.

Each month, I take one of these questions from social media and do a deep dive breakdown of it.

• Week 1: Question Recap (Like the one you just finished reading)

• Week 2: Heirloom Stories — Interview one of the respondents about what this experience was like in their family so that our audience can learn from them.

• Week 3: Field Notes — One of our experts shares the best practices for handling this situation

• Week 4: Implementation Guide — After analyzing hundreds of comments, stories and reflections from our professionals, we compile our implementation guide to help families navigate this exact scenario.

Which camp do you fall into? Let me know in the comments: