What the Gen X Estate Planning Gap Is Really Telling Us

The number looks damning on paper.

According to the Trust & Will 2026 Estate Planning Report, 62% of Gen X Americans have no estate planning documents. This is the highest unprotected rate of any generation. The same report ranks financial advisors fourth in who people trust most for estate planning guidance, behind attorneys, spouses, and one other source entirely.

It would be easy to read that data and draw a simple conclusion: “Gen X isn't prioritizing this.” “They're behind.” “They're avoiding it.”

So I asked the Trust & Will Financial Advisor Contributor Panel what they actually see when they sit across from this generation. What does the data get wrong? And what do those client conversations reveal that a survey simply can't capture?

The answer, from every panelist, had nothing to do with apathy. It had everything to do with how the conversation gets framed.

Gen X Didn't Run Out Of Intention

Ryan Goldschmitt, founder and managing director of Geminus Wealth Partners, pushes back on the framing before anything else. "It is easy to look at that number and blame the generation," he said. "I do not see it that way."

What he sees instead is a cohort that has been squeezed from every direction. "These are people who survived the dotcom collapse and 2008, who are still carrying debt while caring for aging parents and raising kids. They did not run out of intention. They ran out of time and margin."

Matthew Ricks, CFP, founder of Haystack Financial Planning, made the same observation from a different angle. Gen X, he noted, is often the generation caring for aging parents while still raising or launching their own children. We know this generation as “the sandwich generation.” Matthew notes, "their priorities have shifted considerably. A lot of them forget about themselves."

That pressure is structural, not personal. And it doesn't show up in a statistic about who has a will.

The Emotional Weight Behind The Blank

Bob Chitrathorn, CFP®, CPFA®, Co-Founder & CFO of Simplified Wealth Management, is direct about what the data misses entirely: the emotional dimension.

"In conversations, I rarely hear, 'I don't care about estate planning,'" he said. "I hear, 'I haven't had the time to get this right.' That's a very different problem."

A survey can tell you whether someone has a will. It can't tell you why they've been putting off the conversation for three years or what it stirs up when they finally sit down to think about it. Estate planning asks people to confront things most would rather leave unexamined: family dynamics, difficult relationships, and their own mortality. That weight doesn't make it into a checkbox.

Bob sees the same dynamic in how the advisor ranking gets interpreted. The 2026 report places financial advisors fourth in who people trust most for estate planning guidance. They fall behind attorneys, spouses, and family members. It's a number that might sting, but Bob argues it's a measurement issue rather than a relationship issue. "Clients don't always categorize us as 'estate planning experts,' even though we're often the ones initiating the conversation, coordinating with attorneys, and translating complex decisions into real-life impact." The trust, he said, is already there. It just doesn't map cleanly onto a survey category.

The Formative Impression Problem

Charles Thomas III, CFP®, Founder of Intrepid Eagle Finance, offered a different lens entirely; one that reframes why Gen X may be skeptical of advisors in this space to begin with.

There's research suggesting that the music you listen to at 16 or 17 shapes your preferences for life. The same principle, he believes, applies to how people experience financial professionals early on. For Gen X, that first impression often looked the same: a commission-driven adviser focused on products, who touched estate planning perhaps once. "The most they were ever going to do to touch this topic is, 'You should get some beneficiaries updated.' That's it. That's their experience with it."

If that's the formative impression, financial advisors as product salespeople who don't touch estate planning, ranking them fourth isn't surprising. It's logical. Until that impression is challenged, it holds.

Matthew connected this to how trust is built differently with younger clients. His own client base skews toward families for whom he's the first financial professional they've ever worked with. "They don't have any baggage. They don't have prior experience. So they just expect this to be part of what I do." No reframing required. Just expectation.

What The Law Changed And What It Left Behind

Al Faber, CFP®, Founder of DIWY Financial Planning, points to a more structural explanation for the gap that rarely makes it into the public conversation. 

"The federal estate tax threshold has been raised significantly from previous generations," he said. That shift, he believes, has quietly convinced a lot of Gen X families that estate planning simply matters less than it used to. The stakes feel lower, so the urgency disappears.

The same dynamic plays out on the professional side. With higher thresholds and more self-directed tools available, estate planning for mass-affluent clients has become less profitable for attorneys. This means less outreach, less guidance, and fewer reasons for this generation to engage with the process at all.

The system has, in some ways, made it easier to opt out.

It's a Translation Problem

Ryan put the underlying issue plainly: "The documents they need are not complicated. A will, a power of attorney, a healthcare directive. Those are not wealth documents. They are control documents. And [Gen X] has earned the right to have that conversation on their own terms."

Bob frames the same idea through the lens of advisor practice. "When estate planning is positioned as a document, it gets delayed. When it's framed as protecting their kids, reducing future stress, and making sure their wishes are actually carried out, it moves."

That's the gap. Not awareness. Not apathy. The gap is between what estate planning “sounds like” and what it actually does for a family.

Advisors who work with Gen X know this. They've learned to lead not with paperwork, but with people. The kids, the parents, the partner, the scenario where everything matters and no one has legal authority to act. That conversation lands differently than a checklist. It always has.

"So if there's a gap," Bob said, "it's not awareness. It's translation. And that's where good advisors make the difference."

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