Roughly $83 trillion in assets are expected to be passed on over the next 20 to 25 years, with a “large chunk” being transferred within the next 10 years, UBS said in its new report.
Nearly a fifth of the world’s assets are currently held by people over the age of 75, according to the UBS Global Wealth Report 2024. Of the $83.5 trillion being transferred, UBS says over 10% is expected to be transferred to the next generation by women.
UBS refers to the upcoming asset shift as “the great horizontal wealth transfer” because wealth is frequently initially passed on within the same generation between spouses. The study found that spouses typically hold onto inherited wealth for an average of four years before passing it on.
Wealthy families in the U.S. face significant implications from the upcoming presidential election and changes to the federal estate tax. Unless new legislation is signed, the current federal estate tax exemption of $13.61 million per person is expected to be cut in half at the end of 2025 upon the expiration of Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed in 2017.