My brother and I manage a $5 million trust. How do we solve our many disagreements?

My parents recently died and my brother and I are sorting out their estate. There’s a lot of tension around the details of their will and trust. We need someone to help us work through our feelings and disagreements so we can maintain a positive long-term sibling relationship. I imagine something that kind of feels like counseling/family therapy, but is specifically about navigating family wealth/assets.

For context, we are each inheriting $5 million in assets, including investments, cash and property. So there’s way more than enough to go around, but it’s the property details that are causing a lot of strife. Do you know who does this kind of thing for families who are struggling through the process of estate settlement? Doesn’t matter where they are located, we’ll do this on Zoom as my brother and I live in different states.

We have a good estate attorney, but he just repeats the facts; we need someone to help with the feelings.

Son & Brother

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Grief, money and sibling relationships are a potent cocktail.

Whether you hire a therapist or financial psychologist, a wealth manager, or even a enlist a trusted friend or relative, to help mediate and put your respective issues on the table, it should be someone who knows as much about sensitive communication and the stress of dealing with a parent’s estate as they do about finances.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of the problems that have arisen are below the radar. I feel confident that most, if not all, communication problems as they relate to money can be resolved as long as (a) both parties are reasonable and have a willingness to meet halfway in a respectful manner and (b) they listen to each other’s point of view.

A therapist or financial therapist brings the parties together and, from there, it’s a process of investigation, peeling away details by asking you questions like: What do you love about your brother? What drives you crazy about your brother? What makes you proud of each other? What do you want your brother to do differently?

Questions you should ask a potential mediator/therapist: How much do you charge? (These fees could vary dramatically, from $200 an hour to $800 an hour or more, depending on the professional.) How do you balance familial and financial issues? What is the biggest challenge in a situation like this? How long does the process take?

It’s a way of breaking down the events of the recent past — for example, “I wish he had consulted me before hiring a trustee,” and/or, “He takes five days to return my email and only then sends a one-word response” — and family patterns that have been ingrained over a lifetime (such as, “I feel like he never listens and bulldozes ahead”).

The Financial Therapy Association, American Counseling Association, Academy of Professional Family Mediators, Association for Family Resolution, Institute for Family Governance and American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy may all be able to help. Community Dispute Resolution Centers can also offer lower cost alternatives. A wealth manager or mediator may not provide emotional support.

Therapists often advise clients to tell their partner, sibling or friend how something made them feel — for instance, using language like, “I felt unimportant when you forged ahead with your plan to invest that money in a brokerage account without my approval,” rather than, “You were a real piece of work and acted with ego and disrespect.”

The former is a way of illustrating the impact of a person’s actions, while the latter is pouring fuel on the fire and fostering an environment of distrust and hurt feelings. Writing this email and, hopefully, having your brother attend a therapy or mediation together is the first, giant leap of faith to healing your relationship. Read more here.

You will likely have to put in place a process for communicating and making decisions on your parents’ $5 million estate. You could decide to split the money 50/50 and manage it separately, or simply decide to take a week to think about how you can find a compromise if you disagree about a major decision.

Jeremy Pollack, a social psychologist and conflict-resolution consultant, has written about sibling disputes over money. “Witnessing families split apart over money matters is extremely sad and yet all too common,” he writes. “I have found myself continuously asking: Why do families fight over inheritance?

“Isn’t the love of family paramount? Unfortunately, when money is at stake — especially when it is perceived as a lot of money by the parties involved — people get lost in their pain and anger,” he notes. “When the money gets threatened, they feel attacked on a very deep level, as though their very survival is being threatened.

“This fight-or-flight reaction seemingly supersedes any memory of their relationship, and they simply cannot talk themselves back to a rational space,” Pollack adds. “Now in some cases, perhaps it is true that the financial hit to one or more of the parties could be extremely impactful.”

Before you begin, you need to set ground rules, like no crosstalk or fingerpointing or bad language or namecalling etc. Choose a quiet time and place, rather than a bar with food and alcohol. Use “I” language (“I feel…” and not “You are…”). Ultimately, you need to know what you want out of the conversation — ideally, a shared goal.

In your case, the money appears to represent something else entirely: the battleground of your youth, or the reminder of a life that could have been lived differently, or even a vehicle that brings up raw fear about the next chapter of your lives. It’s not always about the money, even if it seems to be about money.

Ideally, you want someone who has a background in both finance and mental health and therapy. Tell your brother that you want to smooth the transition to managing and/or dividing your parents’ estate — “I want to make this easier for both of us” — and also protect your financial nest egg as well as your relationship.

I am reminded of this financial dispute between a reader, who wrote to me in 2019 about a chronic illness and how he and his wife were locked in a disagreement over a kitchen renovation. He felt the need to spend at least $50,000 making their ground floor more suitable for him as his illness progressed.

Of course, the kitchen and the money were avatars for their joint — but different — fears about the future, with one person facing early mortality, and another struggling with the idea of going on without her life partner and all the financial pressures that might bring. It may have been the first time they had reached such an impasse.

“Whatever is really going on here, it’s not only about the kitchen,” I told them. “It’s never just about the kitchen. Whenever I focus on some material issue that I need to change, I try — not always successfully — to remind myself that whatever it is I want to change or improve or purchase represents some other issue that I haven’t quite figured out yet.”

The letter writer, I recently discovered, passed away earlier this year. What I noticed most about the obituary was the photos of the couple together. Yes, they were young (in their 30s). Yes, they looked prosperous and, deceptively, as if they both had their entire lives ahead of them. They had all the hopes and dreams of newlyweds. But what struck me most was they looked like a team. And they looked happy.

Therapy, mediation or sitting down in a neutral environment with a list of issues that you want to resolve can have magical outcomes. They can reveal the fact that there are two sides to every dispute, and that the only thing you both need to do is take accountability for your own actions rather than point a finger of blame at each other.

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