The one succession planning conversation most advisors have never had at home.
There is an advisor who spent twenty-three years walking clients through the most consequential financial decisions of their lives before sitting down for the same conversation with his own wife.
That is not an exaggeration. He ran plans for other people that walked them through mortality, incapacity, succession, and legacy in complete detail. He asked couples the pointed questions that most of them had never asked each other. He did all of that professionally, sometimes daily.
And he had never once sat down with his own wife and asked her what she understood about their practice, what she believed would happen to it if he could not run it tomorrow, and what she thought the plan was for the money it produced.
He noticed the gap late. Later than he should have.
There is a specific kind of blindness that develops in advisors over a career. We become so fluent in the language of financial planning that we assume the people closest to us are fluent in it too. We forget that the words we use every day, and the frameworks we take for granted, are not the words our spouses hear us say. Our spouses hear something else. They hear us being busy. They hear us being tired. They hear the pieces of our work that come home in our tone at dinner.
They do not usually hear the actual plan.
The advisor found out how much his wife did not know one evening at their kitchen table. It was not a scheduled conversation. She had asked a small question about a recent decision he had made in the practice, and his answer, offered casually, opened a set of follow-up questions that made him realize she had a fundamentally different picture of their situation than he did.
Not because she was uninformed. Because he had never sat down and informed her.
The specifics do not matter for this piece. What matters is that they spent the next several evenings, over about a week, walking through everything. What the practice was. What it was worth. What would happen if he could not run it. Who his successor would be. How their own household finances worked. What she would need to know if she was suddenly the one making decisions.
She had questions he had not anticipated. Not because they were hard questions. Because they were basic ones, and he had never framed them for her before.
That story is not unusual. Most advisors, if pressed, will admit that the conversation they have not fully had is the one with their own spouse. Not because the marriage is weak. Because the professional habit of separating work life from home life gradually builds a gap that is easy to overlook until it is late.
Two things about closing that gap.
The first is that it does not require a formal planning session. No slides. No document. Just a couple of evenings, in whatever room the two of you sit in when you talk, and a willingness to explain, in plain terms, what your work is and what it means for the two of you.
The second is that the conversation will surface things you did not expect. Your spouse probably has questions and preferences you have never asked about. They probably have a picture of your work that is partly right and partly incomplete. They probably have opinions about what should happen to the practice if you were no longer able to run it, and those opinions may be different from yours. All of that is useful. All of it is what you would want to know.
Advisors who have had this conversation tend to say the same thing. They wish they had done it years earlier. Not because anything urgent surfaced. Because the confidence that comes from having done it, on both sides, is worth more than they expected.
If you are an advisor with a spouse, and you have not sat down for this conversation, one suggestion:
The gap between what you know about your own practice and what your spouse knows is almost certainly wider than you think. Closing it is a Saturday afternoon of work. It is one of the least expensive planning conversations you will ever have, and one of the most valuable.