Past midnight. Lying in bed. Staring at the ceiling.
My dad is 60. My family has RM 13 million in assets — a portfolio built across property, unit trusts (a type of pooled investment fund where many investors’ money is combined and managed by a professional), and a trading business. Thirty years of my parents building something real and hard and lasting, while I was growing up, going to school, not paying attention.
And there is a will.
Written more than ten years ago. Before most of the assets existed in their current form. Before the properties accumulated. Before the business matured. Before my youngest sibling was even born. A document that names a family that no longer looks the same, covering assets that no longer represent what we actually have.
An outdated will is not the same as a current one. In many practical ways, it is almost as dangerous as having none at all.
No trust. No Power of Attorney (a legal document that lets a trusted person make financial or legal decisions on your behalf if you are not able to). No estate lawyer who knows the full picture. No document of any kind that reflects what actually exists today.
I am 24 years old and I had never let myself fully sit with that thought until that night. Most of the time it’s background noise — the kind of fear you acknowledge and then immediately file away because it’s too uncomfortable and too abstract and you don’t know what to do with it anyway. But that night, it landed.
And I felt completely, utterly unprepared.
I — The fears every heir feels and nobody says out loud
Let me name the four things that were actually running through my head that night. I’m naming them because I suspect they are yours too — and nobody talks about this clearly enough.
The first fear: Dad passes suddenly and the wealth is frozen.
Not “what happens to us emotionally.” That’s its own grief. I mean the practical, cold, logistical reality: if my dad dies with an outdated will, the courts still step in on anything not covered. The assets don’t flow cleanly. Properties built after the will was written — unclear who gets them. Bank accounts, unit trusts, business interests added since — none of it is captured. The family has to reconstruct intent through lawyers and hearings.
Thirty years of building. One morning. Everything in dispute.
The second fear: The bills don’t stop coming.
My youngest sibling is 14. She has school fees, tuition, the ordinary expenses of a life still being built. My mom has always worked with my dad in the business; she has never drawn a separate salary outside of it. My brother is building his own life. None of us has unlimited runway to absorb a sudden stop in family cash flow.
If the wealth is frozen in legal limbo — and the courts take years, not weeks — who pays for her education while we wait? Who covers the monthly costs of a household that has never had to operate on a budget? The rental income that flows in now doesn’t automatically flow to anyone once the legal process begins.
The third fear: I don’t know how to bring it up.
This one took me longer to admit. My dad built this. Every ringgit of it came from his decisions, his sacrifice, his years of work while I was a kid who didn’t understand money. There is something deeply awkward about being 24 and walking up to your 60-year-old father and saying “Dad, what happens to the money when you die?”
Even writing it feels wrong.
I know it isn’t. I know the conversation is necessary. But I had been avoiding it because I was afraid it comes across as disrespectful — as if I am already counting his money, already positioning myself, already treating his life as a financial planning problem. That is not how I feel. But I didn’t know how to make sure it didn’t sound that way.
So I’d said nothing.
The fourth fear: No one in the family actually knows how to manage it.
This one is the quiet one. The one underneath the others.
My family is wealthy by Malaysian standards. But wealth and financial literacy are not the same thing. My parents built this through property — through hustle and timing and hard work in a specific asset class in a specific era in Malaysia. That skill doesn’t automatically transfer to managing a diversified portfolio (a collection of investments spread across many different asset types, so that one bad investment does not destroy everything), navigating succession structures (the legal arrangements for how wealth is passed down to the next generation), or running what is essentially a small family office (a private setup that manages a wealthy family’s investments, property, and legal affairs professionally).
If my dad is gone and the wealth does pass to us — are we capable of not losing it? Do we know how to run the properties? Do we understand the unit trusts? Do we have the knowledge and the discipline and the systems to preserve this over one generation, let alone build on it?
Because the data on this is brutal. The “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” proverb exists in every culture — 中文有 “富不过三代”, Malay has “harta tidak kekal.” The research matches the folklore. Most family wealth disappears within three generations. Not because the heirs are bad people. Because no one chose to become competent.
These four fears — frozen assets, blocked family expenses, not knowing how to start the conversation, and not being sure we can manage what we inherit — are the things I was lying with at midnight.
And I had nobody to ask.
II — I was optimising the completely wrong variable
That same night, I opened Gemini on my laptop. I started asking it about ways to build wealth outside of a traditional career. I was thinking about my Product Manager job, thinking about leaving it, thinking about how to generate enough passive income to feel financially free by age 30.
I kept asking about returns. How to generate 20%, 30%, 50% annual returns. How to build a trading strategy that could actually change our financial situation. I was in that familiar mental loop — the one where you try to solve a wealth problem through effort and cleverness, by being smarter and working harder and finding the right system.
After a while, Gemini said something that stopped me completely.
It said: “Stop trying to make 200% on RM 10,000. Start thinking about 10% on RM 10,000,000.”
I stared at that sentence for a long time.
Let me do the maths out loud because it changed something in how I think.
200% return on RM 10,000 = RM 20,000. You doubled your money. You made RM 10,000.
10% return on RM 10,000,000 = RM 1,000,000. You made RM 1 million.
Same percentage effort. Same hours of research and execution and discipline. Completely different financial outcome — by a factor of one hundred.
I had been running on a mental model where the variable to optimise was rate of return. More alpha (the extra return above what the market naturally gives you). Better strategy. Higher percentage. That’s the framework of someone starting from zero. That’s fine — if you’re actually starting from zero.
But I am not starting from zero.
My family has RM 13 million in assets. I had been sitting next to that number my entire life, and treating my own financial problem as if it were independent of it. I had been thinking like someone who needed to build capital, when the real question — the question I had been trained not to ask — was: what capital do I already have access to that I’m completely ignoring?
I call this The Capital Base Law: you are optimising the wrong variable when your real leverage is not rate of return, but base.
Most young Malaysians from families like mine are playing the same wrong game. We’re trying to be smart. We’re building trading strategies, starting side hustles, optimising our salaries, grinding toward independence. All admirable. All real. And all fundamentally misframed if we never address what happens to the larger wealth structure sitting above us.
The question isn’t “how do I earn more?”
It’s “what have my parents already built — and do I have the knowledge, the legal structures, and the relationships to protect and grow it?”
That’s a completely different question. And it leads somewhere completely different.
I ran the same logic on my own career.
I was earning RM 5,980 a month as a Tech Product Manager. Good salary for a fresh graduate in Malaysia. Stable. Respectable.
Even if I tripled my salary over 10 years — RM 18k a month, which most people never reach — that’s RM 216k a year. A career’s worth of optimising the rate.
10% on our family’s portfolio is over 7-figure a year.
The math wasn’t even close.
III — What Malaysia’s law actually does to your family’s assets when the will is outdated
Most Malaysians don’t know this. I didn’t know it until I looked it up.
Malaysia operates under the Distribution Act 1958 for non-Muslim Malaysians dying intestate — that is, without a valid will covering all assets. For Muslim Malaysians, it’s governed by faraid, the Islamic inheritance framework. In both cases, assets not covered by a current, accurate document fall into a legal process that the family does not control.
Here is what that actually means, in plain language.
Any asset not named in a current will — or named in a will that no longer reflects the family structure — requires a grant of letters of administration (a court order giving someone the legal authority to deal with the estate) before it can be touched. That process takes a minimum of one to two years. In complex estates with multiple properties, business interests, and family members, it often takes longer.
During that period: bank accounts tied to those assets cannot be accessed. Properties cannot be sold or transferred. Business operations may be in legal uncertainty. Your family cannot touch any of it — regardless of how clearly everyone knows what the intention was.
A current, accurate will changes this entirely.
It means your parents decide who gets what, in what proportion, with what conditions — for everything they actually own today, not what they owned a decade ago. It means a trusted executor (the person named in a will to carry out its instructions) can act immediately. It means properties can be transferred, bank accounts can be accessed, and the family can continue operating without legal paralysis.
The document that would protect everything my parents built over 30 years is a few pages long. Updating it can be done in weeks. It costs a fraction of what is at stake. And most Malaysian families — including mine — have a version that no longer matches reality.
My dad’s 60. By any realistic measure of life expectancy, this is not a hypothetical. This is a real risk on a reasonably short time horizon. The law is not waiting for us to be ready. It applies the moment it becomes relevant.
This is not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to act.
IV — The conversation you’re afraid to have, and how to actually have it
Here’s the thing I had been working through: the conversation feels impossible to start because I’d been framing it wrong.
If I walk up to my dad and say, “Dad, what happens to all your assets when you die?” — that is, correctly, a jarring and uncomfortable thing to say to your father. It sounds like I am calculating. It sounds like I’m thinking about his death as a financial event.
That’s not what this is.
Here is the reframe: I am not asking for inheritance. I am asking for the responsibility to protect what they built.
It is not disrespectful to want to protect what your parents built. It is the most loving thing you can do.
I had that conversation with my dad.
I told him: “Dad, I’ve been learning about estate planning in Malaysia. I didn’t realise that without a current will covering everything we have now, the courts step in and things get complicated — and the family can’t access what it needs for years. I want to make sure everything you’ve worked for is protected. And I want to be the one who helps you do that.”
Then I told him something I had been sitting with for months: I want to spend the next ten years on this path. Not just as the kid who shows up when there’s a problem. As someone who genuinely understands the wealth — its structure, its risks, its potential — and helps build it forward.
He listened. He didn’t push back.
What I realised, after the conversation, is that most parents have already thought about this. They’ve worried about it. They just don’t know how to start it either — and they’ve been waiting for someone in the family to take it seriously enough to bring it up.
The blocker is never the parent. It’s the child’s fear of looking disrespectful.
That fear is not protecting anyone. It is just delaying a problem while time continues to pass.
The most respectful thing you can do for the family wealth your parents built is to ensure it survives them.
V — Earning the right, not just the access
The Gemini insight about The Capital Base Law was useful. But it immediately raised a harder question: am I actually capable of operating at that level?
Knowing that 10% on RM 10 million is RM 1 million doesn’t mean I know how to generate 10% on RM 10 million without destroying the principal. Knowing that proper estate structures exist doesn’t mean I know how to build and manage them. Knowing the problem is not the same as being equipped to solve it.
This is where I made a decision that I want to name clearly.
I chose to spend the next ten years building genuine competence before I attempt to fully operate the family wealth. Not because someone told me to. Because I looked honestly at what I don’t know — and it is a lot.
The CQF (Certificate in Quantitative Finance) I’m studying now is not just a credential. It’s systematic financial training — teaching me how to think about risk, returns, and portfolio construction (deciding what mix of investments to hold and in what proportions) in a way that’s quantitatively grounded, not intuition-based. The NUS (National University of Singapore) Master of Science in Financial Engineering (MFE) I’m starting in August is more of the same — except at an institutional level, with professors who manage real money and classmates who are working in real markets.
I am not studying because it looks impressive. I am studying because managing a RM 13 million family portfolio is a professional-grade responsibility, and I do not currently have professional-grade knowledge.
Access without capacity is how generational wealth disappears in one generation.
The “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” pattern doesn’t happen because heirs are lazy or malicious. It happens because wealth transfers before competence does. Someone inherits a fortune and makes decisions they’re not equipped to make — not out of greed, but out of ignorance. The money doesn’t vanish overnight; it leaks slowly through bad decisions, excessive lifestyle spending, misplaced trust, and no system for preservation.
The pattern breaks when someone in the family chooses to become competent — not just entitled.
That is the choice I am making. I have ten years before I expect to be in a position of real responsibility over the family wealth. Ten years to study, build, make mistakes with my own capital first, learn what I don’t know, find advisors worth trusting, and build a system that is institutional in quality even if it’s family in scale.
That is what a family office is, at its core: professional infrastructure applied to private capital. You don’t need a billion dollars to think like a family office. You need the right structure, the right knowledge, and someone who takes it seriously enough to build it.
I am choosing to be that person.
I keep coming back to one idea: from everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.
That’s not pressure I resent. It’s the clearest job description I’ve ever had.
Preserve it. Grow it responsibly. Bless others through it.
Closing
I wish someone told me about Malaysia’s estate laws before I stumbled onto them at midnight, mildly terrified.
I wish someone taught me how to receive dividends (regular income paid out from investments, like rent from a property or profit payments from a fund) without trading time for money — how passive income (money that keeps flowing in without you having to work for it each time) actually compounds when the asset base is large enough.
I wish someone showed me how to build toward a family office before you can afford one. How to think structurally about wealth when you’re 24 and the wealth isn’t technically yours yet.
I wish there was someone who had been in my shoes — young, Malaysian, grown up adjacent to significant family wealth, unsure of the right thing to do, scared to ask the wrong questions — and chose to show me the road they had already walked.
I haven’t found that person.
So I’m becoming him.
This is the letter I’m writing to the version of myself from three years ago.
If you’re 22 to 35, Malaysian, sitting adjacent to your family’s real assets, and have been avoiding the hard conversations — this is for you. Forward it to whoever in your family needs to read it first. You probably already know who that is.
The knowledge exists. The legal tools exist. The financial frameworks exist. The only thing that doesn’t automatically appear is the person willing to take responsibility early enough to matter.
That’s the job.
Start there.
— Jeremy