Estate Planning | January 2025 Estate planning for blended families

Around 1 million Americans get remarried every year,^{Disclosure 1} with the majority of remarriages forming blended families.^{Disclosure 2} Blended families, which can be defined as those involving stepchildren, have unique challenges in navigating legal and financial obligations—and the relationship dynamics that can often accompany their situation—that they need to consider as they pursue their wealth goals.

Rarely in the world of wealth planning is this challenge greater than in the realm of estate planning. Finding the right balance for the emotional and financial considerations required to produce an equitable, balanced legacy adapted to the changing needs of your blended family can be complicated.

To help simplify it, we’ve gotten insights from Mikel Van Cleve, Truist Wealth digital senior strategist and Ph.D. student with published research focused on blended families, and Sarah Slattery, a family focused wealth strategist with Truist Wealth working to connect a family’s purpose with their financial goals. With decades of combined experience, they provide an overview of the first principles you’ll need to observe and the first steps you’ll need to take to put together an estate plan that respects the needs of every member of your family. 

Before you begin estate planning within your blended family, you may first need to decide how you’ll commingle finances in your new relationship. “With wealthier clients in a blended family scenario, even something as standard to estate planning as tabulating individual and combined net worth of spouses can become tricky,” says Van Cleve. “If one spouse had more money than the other at the start of the relationship, how will that affect dividing up assets among various children?”

“One of the most common methods we use for helping clients answer that question is the three-bucket approach,” says Van Cleve. “You have one bucket for your assets, your spouse has one bucket for theirs, and then there’s a middle bucket for commingling assets.”

The specifics of what assets and planning documents go into each of these buckets are going to vary case by case depending on the relationship structure of your blended family. But in general, the commingled bucket is ideal for joint goals and shared visions you have with your spouse at the start of your union and for separating out assets you want to pass down to any children you may have together. Your individual bucket may include a specific trust that provides for older children you may have from a previous marriage—helping avoid family disharmony by partitioning off asset distributions in a way that minimizes potential conflicts about which child is entitled to which asset.

Working with your Truist team—which can typically include your wealth advisor, wealth strategist, trust advisor, and investment manager—will help create a customized approach that reflects your family’s needs but also maintains a flexibility that extends beyond day-to-day money management to various aspects of inheritance. This isn’t just useful when it comes to the bequeathing of family heirlooms or vacation homes, either—it also helps ensure financial obligations preexisting your marriage aren’t passed along to your spouse or heirs in the event of your passing and helps address any potential questions about liquidity if one spouse is incapacitated or passes suddenly.

Whatever structure you end up giving to your blended family estate plan, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a process and—even more so than with a nuclear family—an evolving one at that.

“Changes in dynamics that affect planning tend to take place at a faster rate than in nuclear families,” says Slattery. “In addition to bumping up scheduled estate plan reviews from once every five years to once every two or three years, spouses need to adopt a perspective on their estate planning situation that’s as unique as their family.”

“Keeping the peace, fostering happiness, and ensuring no family member feels left out or unloved can sometimes seem like an impossibly tall order,” says Van Cleve. “But with patience, perspective, open communication, and professional support, that balance is much more achievable than it might seem at first—even with the added complexity that can come with a blended family scenario.”