J.P. Morgan survey finds millennial and Gen Z respondents report more emotional friction

A 2026 J.P. Morgan survey reported by Wealth Solutions Report found that a majority of millennial and Gen Z respondents cited emotional factors as a significant challenge in family discussions about wealth, against 38% of Gen X respondents and 29% of baby boomers. Set inside the report's subject, serving ultra-high-net-worth families through a wealth transfer, the numbers land where the work is hardest: on a process that has to pass through several parties whose interests and goals can collide.

The parties are heirs, businesses, foundations and trusts, and the report treats their diverging interests as the starting condition rather than the exception. Heirs sharpen it further, since they can belong to different generations and carry different communication styles and emotional sensitivities into the same conversation about the same money. Inheriting wealth, the report adds, is a process that tends to expose underlying family dynamics and life choices.

The survey measures how people describe the difficulty of a family conversation about wealth, not how their transfers ended, so it speaks to friction rather than to failure. Read narrowly, it still has something to say about what a family meeting is for. The report's explanation is plain: people often dislike talking about money, and that avoidance raises the risk of conflict over misunderstandings and unclear agendas.

Justin Bakewell, head of client strategy at Pitcairn, starts where the report says families stall. "Start by naming the tension out loud," he said. "Families often avoid it, and silence tends to let it grow."

The guidance that follows is less a script than a description of the advisor's role. Advisors should facilitate and illuminate, in the report's terms, enabling productive conversations and making the transfer as clear and transparent as possible to everyone involved. They help families reach their own decisions rather than refereeing. And when the difficulty outruns what an advisor can hold, the report points advisors to outside groups with more expertise in mediation and conflict resolution, naming attorneys and psychologists. The report is explicit that advisors should know what not to do as well as what to do; recognizing which situation is which is the part that resists a checklist.

Jason Oclaray, president of Angeles Family Office, describes the work as a fiduciary job with a psychological load attached. "The reality of wealth means that all families have competing interests at times, each tied up with emotional and psychological implications," he said. "The most valuable advisors act as fiduciaries, laying out options, identifying trade-offs, and facilitating sometimes-challenging discussions to arrive at the best outcome possible. Wealth means complexity, and our responsibility is to simplify as best we can."

He is equally direct about the ceiling. "Self-awareness and humility are crucial as advisors, especially when it comes to our limits and when to bring in other experts," Oclaray said. "That will be different for each advisor, client, and situation, which makes bringing in outside advice more of an art than a science." In practice that boundary is a judgment rather than a line item, which is why the report leaves room for attorneys and psychologists instead of prescribing a protocol.

The other instruction is easier to state than to execute. Advisors routinely encounter people and institutions with diverging goals for giving and receiving wealth, and keeping everyone informed and talking to one another is one of the challenges the report names. Trusts, businesses and foundations supply the structure a transfer runs through; the conversations determine whether the people behind those structures understand the plan and each other before the money moves.

What the report does not resolve is which of those parties the advisor answers to. It lists them as groups whose goals can conflict, which leaves the advisor convening a process for people who may not agree on what the process is for. A family with an operating business, a foundation and a trust in play offers several plausible claimants on the advisor's time and attention, and the report's answer is procedural: surface the tension, keep everyone talking, and bring in outside help when the disagreement exceeds the advisor's competence.

It is worth separating what the report asks of the advisor from what it asks of the family. The advisor's share is running the conversation, keeping the parties in contact and escalating when the dispute outgrows the room. The family's share is the part that cannot be delegated: deciding what the wealth is for and who is told what. A meeting that produces a decision the family did not make is not the outcome described here.

For advisors the practical question is who is in the room when the hard conversations happen, and who holds the pen afterward. The report does not say when the first of those conversations should take place, or whose job it is to call it. The one figure the survey supplies, a majority against 38% and 29%, suggests that family members of different generations come to the same table with very different experiences of it.