The Great Wealth Transfer: What Is Wealth For?

In financial circles, there's plenty of conversation about The Great Wealth Transfer. How much is changing hands. Who's inheriting it. Sometimes, how much of it women will eventually control, though usually only as a statistic. No one is really bothering with what happens when women control significantly more private wealth than men, or what women might want to do differently with it instead of simply managing it the way men always have.

Outside those circles, most people haven't even heard of The Great Wealth Transfer yet. Which makes me think we're missing a much bigger conversation.

(It's the conversation I'll be opening up at my Great Wealth Transfer Masterclass. More on that at the end.)

What if the Great Wealth Transfer changes more than who has the money? What if it changes what we believe money is FOR?

Years ago, on my old Goddess of Crypto podcast, a woman running a women's crypto group told me something that has stayed with me ever since. She talked about the difference between what men and women wanted when they started making money in crypto.

The men asked, "Wen Lambo?" In the crypto world, that's shorthand for "When will my crypto make me rich enough to buy a Lamborghini?" It became a running joke about getting fabulously wealthy, preferably overnight, and the flashy car you'd run out and buy the minute you did.

The women asked, "Wen family vacation? Wen college education?"

Now, before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, I'm not saying women don't want Lamborghinis, or that men don't love their kids. Everyone wanted to make money. What they wanted to do with it was strikingly different.

In my conversations with women about wealth, the question that comes up again and again is "How much is enough?" There's a reason the bumper sticker says He who dies with the most toys wins, and I'd bet good money a woman didn't write it. Often women aren't even asking for a number. They're asking when they'll finally feel safe, when they'll know there's enough to take care of themselves and the people they love and can stop worrying that everything they've built might disappear.

Perhaps the impulse to accumulate works differently when the goal is security. If the goal is always MORE, there's no finish line. When the goal is a life in which you and the people around you can flourish, the conversation changes. So might the world.

For centuries, much of our economic and political power has been organized around competition, conquest, control, and accumulation. We've built extraordinary things under that model, and we've done extraordinary damage. Look almost anywhere and it isn't hard to find evidence that society's main systems aren't working (education and healthcare, to name just two glaring examples). Yet the people who hold the greatest power often seem remarkably unwilling to share it, or even to consider that there might be another way.

Which brings me back to women and the Great Wealth Transfer. Women are about to gain a much greater say in what happens to an unprecedented amount of wealth, as owners, investors, business leaders, philanthropists, and decision-makers.

So what happens when the people making those decisions bring a different set of questions to the table? Alongside "How do we grow this?" comes "What are we growing it FOR?" Who benefits? Who is being left behind? What happens to the community and the planet? What kind of world are our children going to inherit?

I believe women often recognize the interconnectedness of life in ways our existing power structures have failed to honor. Men are perfectly capable of empathy. Little boys have those instincts too, until every generation of them is taught that tenderness is weakness and might equals right.

Some men have managed to see beyond it. Astronaut Ron Garan spent nearly six months in space and came home struck by the realization that we're living a lie, operating under the illusion that we're separate from one another and from our environment. Sometimes all it takes is seeing the whole picture to understand how absurd our divisions really are. Now imagine building our systems around that understanding from the start.

This brings me to matriarchy, and I want to be clear about what I mean. I'm not talking about keeping our current pyramid and putting women at the pointy top. Why would we preserve a system that's done so much damage just because women finally get a turn running it?

A matriarchy is a circle. The most vulnerable sit at the center of our concern, instead of scrambling at the bottom for whatever trickles down from the top. Men belong in that circle too. They'd be nurtured and valued, free to be strong without having to dominate and compassionate without having to apologize for it.

The real obstacle to a better world is the refusal to relinquish power, even when the way it's being exercised is demonstrably failing us, along with the stubborn insistence that things must be done the way they've always been done.

The Great Wealth Transfer gives us an extraordinary opportunity to challenge those assumptions, and to ask some important questions.

Do women actually want different things from wealth? If so, how might that change the decisions we make when we control more of it?

What would it mean to practice stewardship rather than philanthropy? Writing a check to repair damage after it's been done is a very different thing from building a system that doesn't create so much damage in the first place.

Can we redefine power without asking women to give theirs away? I have absolutely no interest in telling women that the reward for finally gaining financial sovereignty is a new obligation to sacrifice themselves for everyone else. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt company.

And the most practical question of all: are you ready to take your seat at that table? That seat is coming, prepared or not.

The Great Wealth Transfer could turn out to be far more consequential than the financial forecasts suggest. We have a real chance to rethink who holds wealth and what kind of future it makes possible.

What if the greatest thing women inherit is the chance to change what wealth means?

I see the same thing over and over in my work. Women with all the financial information in the world often still can't decide, since their nervous system is on high alert. Strategy only lands once she feels steady.

That's what my Great Wealth Transfer Masterclass is built around. We'll look at what this shift actually means for you, whether you're expecting an inheritance or building wealth of your own, and how to step into it feeling steady enough to make your own decisions with confidence.

→ Reserve your place for November 5

P.S. If you know a woman who's about to inherit, or who's built more than she ever expected to, forward this to her and save her a seat. Here's the link.