$54 trillion. That is how much a research firm called Cerulli Associates expects to pass from one spouse to the other through 2048.
It moves sideways first, inside the same generation. The children wait their turn, sometimes for a decade or more.
The first stop for much of that money is a kitchen table. One chair empty.
So this is your read today if you are married and past 60. One of you will probably run the whole household’s money for a while, alone.
Cerulli puts the full transfer at $124 trillion through 2048. About $105 trillion is headed to heirs and $18 trillion to charity.
Most of it comes from boomer households, 79% by the firm’s count. The schedule is the one this cohort is already living.
Three numbers from the same report show the order the money travels in, from the biggest pile down to the first stop.
$124 trillion
Total wealth Cerulli expects to change hands through 2048
$54 trillion
Passing first from one spouse to the other
$40 trillion
Of that, going to widowed women in the boomer and older generations
Women tend to outlive their husbands. They also tend to marry slightly older men. Put those together and the first heir in most marriages is a widow.
She inherits the accounts. The house. The passwords. Sometimes she inherits an adviser she has met twice.
That is the part the recaps skip. Order matters. The handoff to the children is years away. The handoff to her can happen on a Tuesday.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and when the money changes hands inside the family.
Cerulli’s own report holds the honest limit on all of this. These are projections built on today’s prices for stocks and homes. A bad decade for either shrinks them.
The money is also lopsided. Cerulli says more than half of the total, $62 trillion, comes from wealthy households that make up about 2% of all households.
Most families will pass along a house, a retirement account, and some savings. That is still a lot to hand someone who never had to manage it.
The arithmetic
Cerulli Associates, The Cerulli Report: U.S. High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets 2024, press release December 5, 2024: $124 trillion in wealth projected to transfer through 2048, $105 trillion to heirs and $18 trillion to charity; $54 trillion in transfers between spouses, nearly $40 trillion of it to widowed women in the baby boomer and older generations; developing relationships with clients’ spouses or children cited as a top long-term growth strategy for high-net-worth practices. 79% of the transfer from baby boomer households, and $62 trillion (more than half) from high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth households, about 2% of all households: Cerulli, as reported by Rethinking65 and Funds Society, December 2024. The observations that women tend to outlive their husbands and marry slightly older men describe well-known demographic patterns and are not figures. The married reader past 60 and the Tuesday are illustrations.
This week, put both names on the next meeting with whoever handles your money. Then make sure the one who does not usually go knows where everything lives. The first heir should never be the last to find the passwords.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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