How about when they’re 18?

That’s what my husband and I did. One Friday night a year ago, we sat down with our two daughters—Zoe, then 18, and Maya, then 20—to go over all the details of our assets, our long-term care plans and our wills.

By sharing all this with children barely out of high school, I’m guessing we are outliers. Although 89 percent of high-net-worth boomers surveyed by RBC Wealth Management in 2024 said it was important to tell heirs about their inheritances, fewer than 40 percent had done it.

Having such talks can be painful, explains Tim Prosch, author of the AARP book The Other Talk: A Guide to Talking With Your Adult Children About the Rest of Your Life. That’s especially true, he writes, “when you come to the part about the various stages of your deterioration … and, of course, that last sentence: The End.”

But I think waiting is a mistake. It can leave children confused, frustrated and even resentful if they have to handle their parents’ finances without the information they need.

I had strong motivation for not waiting. My dad died at 61 of a heart attack. That’s when I learned he didn’t have a will—something that shocked me, since he was an attorney, he was on his second marriage and he had children from his first.

My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 65. As she began to decline cognitively, I had to dig through her files, intercept her mail and play detective to get the information I needed to manage her money.

Also, my husband and I had recently updated our estate planning documents, naming our daughters as our alternate executors for our estates, our health care surrogates and our agents under power of attorney. We didn’t want to saddle our kids with these responsibilities without explaining what the roles entailed.

Finally, just days before sitting our kids down to talk, I learned that a high school classmate’s wife had died in her sleep. She was only 52.

I was 51. My husband was 50.

As I see it, these conversations can’t wait until parents reach some arbitrary definition of “old.”

Advisers agree. “The conversation usually should start when the adult children are in their 20s, because accidents may happen to the parents even though the parents may only be in their 40s or 50s,” says Daniel Lash, a partner at VLP Financial Advisors in Vienna, Virginia.

We began by telling our daughters what to do if my husband and I die at the same time, since then they would be our coexecutors. We told them the value of our life insurance policies, the process for collecting death benefits and how much we have in our financial accounts, of which they are beneficiaries.

We said our wills state that everything will be divided evenly among them and their 13-year-old brother, Alexander. (We’ve shared general information with him about our money but not the details we told his sisters.) We also explained how the person designated as Alexander’s guardian would manage the money he inherits.

Then we told our daughters what they would need to know about our finances if we were unable to manage them on our own because of cognitive decline or another health issue. We listed all the monthly bills we pay and all the accounts we have. We told them that we have enough savings to cover the cost of long-term care and that we don’t expect them to provide hands-on care for us.

We explained that as our alternate health care surrogates and agents under power of attorney, they will be able to make medical and financial decisions for my husband or me if one of us is no longer around to take care of the other.

We showed them where our estate planning documents are located, along with our car titles, house’s deed, passports, marriage certificate and birth certificates.

And we put all this information in writing for Maya and Zoe. Including their questions, our conversation lasted more than two hours.

I have some tips for having The Talk with your children, based on my work managing my mother’s finances, and on numerous interviews I’ve conducted, mostly for the book I wrote inspired by that experience.

Consider rehearsing what you plan to tell your children and anticipating what questions they might have, suggests John Cooper, senior private client adviser with Greenwood Capital in Greenwood, South Carolina. Don’t blindside them; let them know you want to have a family money talk.

If you’re uncomfortable revealing as much as my husband and I did, you could start out small—say, by telling your kids what financial accounts you have without disclosing dollar amounts. “Some information is better than no information,” says Marguerita Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The more information you share, though, the better prepared your children will be in case of your death or an emergency. It would be extremely helpful for you to create a list of your assets, accounts, monthly bills, insurance policies, medical information, locations of estate planning documents and contact information for any financial and legal professionals you work with. You can also use this occasion to talk about the roles you expect your children to play in your care and finances as you age, why you made certain estate planning decisions and what your final wishes are.

Thanks to our professions, my husband and I felt comfortable tackling this on our own: He’s an economics professor, and I’m a financial journalist. Our kids have been subjected to discussions about money for years. But if disclosing all this would be tricky for your family, consider working with a financial or legal professional who can serve as a moderator.

You might discover that family money talks aren’t so difficult. After my family’s talk, I asked my daughters whether our conversation had been depressing. No, they said, the opposite was true. “There’s not going to be a better time for a conversation like this,” Zoe told me. “It makes me happy that you care enough about your lives, and our lives, to do this.”