Half of plan holders still worry: sell the family meeting.

Just over half of the savers who told Fidelity Investments they had completed a financial plan also told the firm they still feel anxious about the future—51%, Financial Planning reported, against 37% who said they contemplate their futures with contentment. The survey, “The Transition Ready Family,” polled just over 650 investors aged 55 and older with net worths between $500,000 and $10 million, and the distance between those two numbers is where the practice opportunity sits.

Read together, the two figures say the deliverable and the feeling have come apart: planning for retirement, healthcare and the transfer of wealth brings peace of mind only to a point, and the point arrives well short of complete. A job that ends with a signed document leaves the client's worry running.

The poll also cuts against the usual sales logic: among respondents worth $5 million or more, 41% reported they did not have financial peace of mind. The households with the least reason to worry about running out of money were among the least settled about the future, which is either a paradox or a sign that the question clients are actually asking has nothing to do with running out of money.

Dan Klug, an advisor at Edward Jones in Chesterfield, Missouri, told Financial Planning he sees the same thing, somewhat counterintuitively: one of the biggest sources of stress in his clients' lives can be the possession of wealth itself. For a household holding more than its neighbors held, or more than its parents held when it was growing up, the open question becomes what to do with all of it. Handing the money over early risks making life too easy for the children; holding it back risks leaving them exposed to a hardship nobody saw coming, and neither is a rate-of-return question.

The step most practices skip comes before the plan: finding out what the client really wants, and really fears, in conversation, before the first projection gets built. His illustration is portable to the next client meeting. He described clients who have taken generations of their family on really nice vacations, because the conversations surfaced that what mattered to them was not the financial legacy they would leave behind but the experiences the family had together. The plan had been drafted around an estate, and the priority that actually drove the household surfaced in a conversation rather than in the file.

Fidelity's suggested remedy runs along the same line—discuss the plans frequently and openly—and the survey results pointed to a payoff from that discussion, though the coverage does not say how large it is. The logic of the 41% figure suggests the payoff grows with how many people are in the room when the conversation happens.

The confidence problem and the retention problem sit in the same chair: Financial Planning, which reported the survey findings, pairs the piece with related coverage of advisors losing next-gen clients and of wealthy clients who do not trust their heirs with the money. Fidelity's anxious 55-year-olds are likely the result of a conversation that did not happen while the family was intact and the client was still the one convening it.

Retention is the stake, and so is growth: this publication has argued that Edward Jones's $5,000 digital pilot is a wager on who holds the relationship when the children inherit, and the children in the room here are the next generation of clients. An advisor they met at 30 is likelier to be the one they call at 45 than a name on a statement, and Fidelity's numbers say the least expensive route into that cohort runs through the parents' calendar.

The technology argument gets sharper in Fidelity's own 2026 outlook, which makes the case that automation earns its keep when it buys back hours for client conversations, and this survey supplies the content for those hours. A firm that spends them producing a thicker plan document gets a better document and the same 51%.

The mechanics are unglamorous: a standing family meeting on the calendar rather than a phone call when something changes, an agenda written for the heirs rather than the account holder, and a written record of the client's stated priorities so that a plan review doubles as a values review. It should carry a fee, because a meeting that costs the client nothing is the meeting that gets rescheduled first.

Fidelity's respondents gave a specific answer to a broad question: of the people who had finished the work, just over half still felt the worry. The practices that move that number will be the ones with the client's children in the room while the client is still the one calling the meeting.