The Greatest Gift: 9 Principles for the Transfer of Your Legacy Along with Your Wealth

The Greatest Gift is the ultimate guide to successful estate planning—without the drama!

For anyone who has worked their entire life to amass wealth, one of their biggest fears is that their kids will fight over their assets after they have passed. In The Greatest Gift, the authors lay out a plan to keep this from happening by providing families with the tools they need for the successful transfer of wealth, allowing heirs to carry on their family’s legacy.

Based upon Sean Maher’s extensive experience as a financial planner and interviews with families who navigated a peaceful inheritance, this helpful resource identifies 9 Principles for Successful Wealth Transfer. It reinforces those principles with stories of inheritances gone right and those gone wrong, incorporating insights and tools from coauthor Jill D. Maher’s field of work—psychology.

Implementing the nine principles allows future generations to build upon their family’s rich and lasting legacy rather than fight over assets and money—no matter the amount. As such, The Greatest Gift is for anyone who values preserving relational wealth as much as they value building financial wealth.

A useful guide for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or anyone who envisions their heirs thriving and living in harmony after they’re gone, it’s also for people who wish to be a catalyst for proactive conversations with their siblings, cousins, or anyone else who might share in an inheritance.

The Greatest Gift offers tools that are easy to implement to ensure families do not end up being the subject of a Dateline episode of an inheritance gone terribly wrong.

Sean Maher has been providing financial consulting to high-net-worth families for almost thirty years. As a principal at Valley Forge Financial Group, Inc., he regularly presents to industry groups on complex estate planning concepts. Sean has written articles for Trust & Estates, Journal of Financial Planning, and National Underwriter. He and his family live in Chester County, Pennsylvania

Jill D. Maher is a licensed psychological counselor and serves clients at the Peacemaker Center, a not-for-profit mental health counseling provider. After graduating from Cornell University, Jill went on to receive her Masters in Education from Cabrini University and was a full-time homemaker until their three children reached high school. Jill is a certified fitness instructor and has taught spin for twenty-five years. She resides in Chester County, Pennsylvania with her family.