A will opened for the first time after the funeral is a verdict with no right of reply, and Warren Buffett, who lets his children argue with his, keeps the better habit.
Warren Buffett’s best estate advice costs nothing and fits in one line. “When your children are mature, have them read your will before you sign it,” he wrote in Berkshire Hathaway’s Thanksgiving release of 25 November 2024, and he addressed it to parents of every size of fortune. He is right, and a family that keeps the will in a drawer until the funeral does not avoid the argument. It postpones the argument until the one person who could settle it is no longer there.
It is an odd thing to need telling. Most parents would not sell the house without mentioning it at Sunday lunch. Yet the document that decides who gets the house, the shares and the portrait over the stairs is often treated as a sealed envelope, opened by a solicitor in front of people who learn in one sitting what their mother or father thought of them.
Buffett wants the questions while he can answer
His reasoning is practical and simple: children should not be left asking “Why?” about a testamentary decision once the parent can no longer reply. He wants each child to understand the logic of the choices and the responsibilities that come with them. He also wants the parent to listen to any questions or suggestions and adopt the sensible ones.
He says he takes his own advice. All three of his children have raised questions or commentary over the years, and he has often adopted what they suggested. He adds that his father did the same with him, which makes it a family custom rather than a Berkshire innovation. He changes his will every couple of years, often only slightly, and keeps it simple. A billionaire with a simple will is rarer than a billionaire with a yacht.
The practice is a rolling conversation rather than a single reading.
His three children run the charitable trust
The obvious objection is that his case is unusual, and it is. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, in November 2024, reported that in 2023 Buffett named Susan, Howard and Peter as executors of his will and trustees of the charitable trust that will receive the bulk of his fortune. The children are not waiting for a windfall. They are waiting for a job, and a large one, since the trust will give away almost everything he has.
By our count the plan rests on three signatures, Susie’s, Howard’s and Peter’s, because the trust requires them to act together. In November 2024 he also named three successor trustees to step in should any of the children die.
The Thanksgiving letter of 10 November 2025 went further. “All three children now have the maturity, brains, energy and instincts to disburse a large fortune,” he wrote in that letter. He said he must step up his lifetime gifts to their foundations so that the family can dispose of what is essentially his whole estate. He then converted 1,800 Class A shares into 2.7 million Class B shares and gave them to four family foundations: The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late first wife, and The Sherwood Foundation, The Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation.
CNBC, on 25 November 2024, reported that he built his trust in the children’s ability through years of observation.
Silence buys a few calm years
The strongest case for secrecy deserves a fair hearing. It holds that a child who knows what is coming stops striving, that a fortune is private even within a family, and that a parent may change their mind and should not have to defend each change to an audience. A will kept quiet, on this view, keeps everyone working and everyone civil.
It fails on its own terms. Buffett’s advice applies to children who are mature, so the worry about a teenager going soft is beside the point. The figures in a will reach the children either way. Secrecy only decides whether the reasons arrive with them, and a child who learns the outcome without the reasoning tends to supply a reason of their own, usually the least flattering one available.
He and his late partner Charlie Munger watched families driven apart by the posthumous dictates of a will. Jealousies and perceived childhood slights were magnified, he wrote, and worst where sons had been favoured over daughters in money or in positions of importance. They also saw a few families where a will discussed in full before death drew everyone closer. Our reading is that secrecy breeds the shock, the shock breeds the grievance, and the grievance is where the lawyers come in. The parent who refused to explain was protecting a few calm years, and the children paid for them afterwards.
On privacy, the question is from whom. The people reading the will are the people it is about. The only other party with a stake in the document is the author, and the author is the one person who will not be there when it is opened.
Change is no argument for silence either. Buffett revises his will every couple of years and still invites comment on it. A parent who changes their mind can say so, and say why, which is more than a codicil discovered at the reading ever manages.
His own clause fails at ten children
Buffett is candid about the limits of his own design. He calls his unanimity clause no panacea and concedes it would be unworkable with nine or ten children or stepchildren. Three adults who have spent decades arguing with their father about his intentions can be asked to agree. A blended family of ten, scattered across marriages and grudges, probably cannot.
That honesty sharpens the case for openness. The clause is a piece of machinery suited to one family. The reading belongs to any family. A parent of ten may need a different structure, a professional trustee or a simpler division, but the children still deserve to hear the logic while its author can defend it. The larger and more complicated the family, the more likely someone feels slighted, and the more an early explanation is worth.
Howard, Susie and Peter will carry out a plan they have had years to question. Few heirs anywhere are so well briefed. Most will meet the document at the reading, in a room with siblings they may not have seen since the last funeral, and will have to guess at the reasons.
Show them the will before signing
The usual objection to Buffett’s advice is that it works for a man whose children are giving the money away. That gets the argument backwards. His children stand to inherit a duty, so they have little reason to resent the will. He shows it to them anyway, because a will is a set of judgements about people, and people take judgements better when they can answer back.
He has kept writing his Thanksgiving letters and says he means to carry on. Each one tells shareholders what his children already know. Most families could manage the same courtesy, at a kitchen table, with the draft unsigned and the author still listening.
Read it to them before you sign it.
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Cover photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
