The New Currency of Wealth: Educating Heirs Before They Inherit
Australia’s wealthy families are shifting focus from building wealth to preparing the next generation to handle it.
3 min
For Australia’s high-net-wealth families, the question is no longer how to grow wealth—it’s how to ensure the next generation knows what to do with it.
“Most affluent parents aren’t staying up at night worried about the next investment opportunity,” says wealth adviser Antony Selby. “They’re worried their money will mess up their kids.”
In an era marked by skyrocketing intergenerational transfers of wealth, Selby has observed a dramatic shift in his clients’ priorities. Increasingly, they’re not just seeking financial strategies—they’re seeking guidance on how to prepare their children for the emotional, practical, and psychological burden of inheritance.
“It’s one of the most common requests I get: ‘Can you help educate our children about money?’” Selby says. “There’s a growing realisation among wealthy families that simply leaving money isn’t enough. If the recipients aren’t prepared, that wealth can quickly become a liability instead of a legacy.”
Selby, who has advised Australia’s affluent for decades, says the old model of wealth management—built around transactions and product sales—is obsolete. In its place, a new approach has emerged: one that blends traditional financial advice with legacy planning, values-based education, and even elements of family therapy.
“We’ve moved from preparing money for heirs, to preparing heirs for money,” he explains. “That’s a fundamental change.”
The timing couldn’t be more critical. With Baby Boomers now well into retirement and multi-generational estates becoming more common, the next wave of wealth recipients—many of them in their 20s and 30s—face an unprecedented challenge. Unlike their parents, who often built wealth through work, these heirs risk inheriting it without the context, responsibility, or resilience to manage it.
And that, Selby says, is the real risk.
“Wealth can distort perspective. It can create dependence. It can rob young people of direction, and of the emotional tools they need to live independently,” he says. “That’s why so many of my clients now see their role not just as benefactors, but as mentors.”
What does that mentorship look like? For Selby, it often involves structured conversations about money values and family purpose. It means involving children early in philanthropic decisions, educating them about investment basics, and creating environments where financial literacy is as important as academic success. In some cases, it includes working with external coaches, psychologists, and advisers to help adult children develop their own identity outside the family’s financial narrative.
“There’s no simple formula,” he admits. “But three things make a difference: being intentional about values, developing real-life skills, and giving heirs the right mix of independence and support.”
While popular culture paints the ultra-wealthy as laser-focused on returns and deal flow, Selby says the reality is more nuanced. “Behind closed doors, it’s not about chasing more wealth. It’s about risk management, family cohesion, and the question we hear again and again: ‘How do we make sure this wealth is a force for good?’”
He points to the old proverb, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” a warning that’s echoed across cultures. “It’s a reminder that financial inheritance must be matched with emotional and intellectual inheritance too.”
As the face of wealth management continues to change, Selby believes the industry must evolve alongside it—offering not just financial tools, but guidance through some of the most deeply personal challenges families will ever face.
“Money isn’t neutral,” he says. “It shapes families, for better or worse. The difference lies in how well we prepare the next generation to carry it.”
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
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