Having multiple children can be a blessing. Not only can your children be each other’s best friends and support system, but it can be rewarding to watch your children grow up and thrive.
Plus, as you get older, you may need to turn to your children for help with various aspects of your care. So it’s nice to have multiple children to share that role.
Having more than one child, however, can be a bit complicated when it comes to estate planning. You want to make sure you’re splitting your assets fairly among your children, and you want to make sure there are no hard feelings after you’re gone.
That’s why it is so important to proceed with caution when you’re talking about splitting assets among multiple children. Here are a few big mistakes you should make every effort to avoid in this type of situation.
1. Automatically making things equal
If you have multiple children, your natural inclination may be to try to divide your assets among them equally. For example, if you have a home you own, you may say that each of your two children gets a 50% share. But making things equal in an inheritance is not always the correct or fair thing to do, even though it might seem like the simplest way to go about things.
Imagine you have two grown children. One has three young kids while the other does not have children at all. The one with children is a stay-at-home parent married to an electrician earning $80,000 a year. The other grown child is a doctor married to someone who works in finance with a joint income of $400,000 a year, and they are choosing to be child-free.
In this situation, it’s pretty clear that one child of yours could use a financial lift more so than the other. So while you still may want to simply divide your assets equally between them, there are several factors to consider.
2. Forgetting about sentimental value
You may be inclined to divide your assets by financial value. But don’t overlook sentimental value.
If you leave one child all of your jewelry with a total value of $10,000 and you leave your second child furniture worth $10,000, they are technically getting the same amount of assets from a financial perspective. However, if the jewelry has sentimental value, and the furniture consists of new items you bought when you were older that your children don’t care about, that is not necessarily a fair division of assets. Make sure to consider what the items you own mean to your children before deciding who should inherit what.
3. Not having open conversations while you’re still alive
Sometimes, it can be difficult to know what your children are thinking in terms of an inheritance and expectation. It’s important to have a conversation with them about your wishes while you’re still alive rather than leave them to guess at the reasoning behind your decisions once you are no longer around.
Let’s go back to the situation above where one adult child is well-off financially and the other is barely scraping by. In that scenario, your doctor child with the large income might want their sibling to inherit a larger portion of the estate because they need it more. So it pays to talk things out with your children rather than just split things down the middle, or make the decision to not split things down the middle without saying anything.
4. Not telling your children where to find your will, or that a will exists
Finally, one of the biggest mistakes you can make when you’re trying to pass an inheritance along to children is to neglect to tell them that you have an estate plan and where to find it. In a recent LegalShield survey, 37% of grown children who know their parents have an estate plan don’t know where it is.
If your children can’t find your estate plan, it’s not helpful — especially if you have designated one of them to be the successor trustee or personal representative of your estate. It’s important to tell your children where they can find a copy of your documents.
At the Edwards Law Firm, we understand how family dynamics impact estate planning decisions. We can help you create an estate plan that meets the needs of your family and gives you the peace of mind you deserve to have. Contact our office today or give us a call at 904-672-7600 to discuss your estate planning needs.
- When Estate Planning Documents Say One Thing—and Mean Another - July 20, 2026
- Trustee vs. Personal Representative in Florida - July 17, 2026
- Still Fighting: The Estate Planning Legacy of Shannen Doherty - July 13, 2026
