$124 trillion is supposed to be coming your way. That is the number behind the Great Wealth Transfer headlines that keep circulating this year, and it carries the same undertone every time: something enormous is about to move, and your generation is getting a share of it.

The number is real. Cerulli Associates estimates that roughly $124 trillion will transfer in the United States through 2048, with about $105 trillion going to heirs and about $18 trillion to charity. (Cerulli rounds each figure on its own; they will not sum to the dollar.) What the headline does not carry is how little that number actually tells you about the share of it for your own family.

I saw how little firsthand, working with a family that ran a supply chain business they had held for years. I knew quite a bit about their finances, and I still could not have told you how much would eventually reach their children. Neither could they.

That stopped me. Because if I could not answer that question about one family whose situation I actually knew, what exactly was the $124 trillion number telling me about anyone else's family? Not very much.

The family I was working with had run the same supply chain business for many years. They had been thinking about what percentage of their wealth would eventually pass to their children. They had a percentage in mind.

My role wasn't to tell them what that percentage should be. I'm not a financial advisor, and that wasn't the decision I was there to make. I was helping them think through what the number actually depended on. The more we talked, the less fixed the number became.

The business was a large part of their net worth. A potential sale could turn a large illiquid asset into something very different. That could change what was actually available to their children when the time came.

Even after you account for the children, you still do not know the final number. How long will the wealth holders live? What will they spend? What care might they need? What will happen to the investments in the meantime? What will be gifted while they are alive? What will taxes look like? Will the estate documents change?

The family had started with a fairly fixed percentage in mind. What emerged from the conversation was something more flexible. Not because the planning had failed, but because the future had not happened yet.

That distinction seems obvious once you say it out loud. But I think the Great Wealth Transfer headlines encourage us to forget it. At the national level, you can estimate a transfer. At the family level, the amount is still moving.

Cerulli's $124 trillion estimate is useful. It tells us something enormous is happening across generations, money moving to heirs, money moving to charity, over more than two decades.

But one detail matters quite a bit: more than half of the total transfer, about $62 trillion, is expected to come from high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth households. Together, those households represent only about 2 percent of U.S. households.

The estimate holds up. It is aggregate, describing what may happen across millions of households, thousands of different decisions and more than two decades, folded into one number. Your family does not work that way.

That became even clearer when I looked at another estimate. Visa Business and Economic Insights calculated that about $36 trillion of baby-boomer wealth will transfer to Gen X and millennial households over the next 20 years. So which is it, $124 trillion or $36 trillion? Both can be right.

Visa starts with roughly $93 trillion of boomer assets, then makes a series of adjustments. It accounts for liabilities, excludes the wealthiest 1 percent of households, and considers retirement spending, taxes, fees and charitable giving. It ends at roughly $36 trillion expected to reach Gen X and millennial heirs.

Visa is answering a different question than Cerulli, not offering a corrected version of Cerulli's own number. Visa goes one step further and estimates that of the $36 trillion transferred, roughly $8 trillion will be spent while about $28 trillion will remain in savings, investments or property.

Again, a different question. Cerulli is estimating the scale of wealth changing hands. Visa is also interested in what that transfer may mean for consumer spending. Neither one is trying to tell you how much your son or daughter will receive.

I think that is where we can get ourselves into trouble with very large financial statistics. The number may be accurate. The mistake happens when we quietly change the question.

Key points

There is another problem with these numbers that I have seen from the other side. Someone I spoke with had an elderly family member nearing the end of life. Most of that family member's assets were tied up in real estate.

On paper, there was wealth. But the person who expected to inherit some of those assets worked in a completely unrelated field. They had nothing to do with real estate. They did not know how to operate the properties, how to evaluate them or what they were supposed to do once those assets became theirs.

So we talked it through, and I introduced them to someone who could help them think through how the properties might eventually be sold or transitioned into assets they actually wanted to own.

Nothing was wrong with the real estate. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that "inheriting wealth" sounded like one thing until the wealth had an address, tenants, decisions and management attached to it.

An asset can have substantial value without being particularly useful to the person receiving it in its current form. That is another thing a national transfer statistic cannot show.

Suppose two people each inherit assets worth the same amount. One receives liquid investments. The other receives several properties they do not know how to manage and do not particularly want to own. The balance sheets may begin at the same number. The experience of receiving that wealth is not remotely the same.

That does not mean one inheritance is better than the other. The properties may ultimately prove quite valuable. It means the dollar value of the transfer is only one piece of information. Form matters. Timing matters. Capability matters. Intent matters.

This is where I landed after looking again at the $124 trillion headline. There isn't one wealth-transfer number. There are at least three.

The first is the wealth that exists. That is the balance-sheet number. A farm counts. A business counts. Real estate counts. A brokerage account counts.

The second is the wealth that eventually transfers. That number depends on what happens before the transfer: spending, longevity, care, giving, taxes, investment results, asset sales and changes in intention. Even the family itself may not be able to know this number years in advance.

The third is what the recipient actually receives. Not merely its appraised value. What arrives, when it arrives, in what form, and whether the person receiving it knows what to do with it.

Those numbers can be very different. And that is why I no longer think the most interesting question about the Great Wealth Transfer is whether the national estimate should be $124 trillion or $36 trillion.

The more useful question is what happens between the first number and the last one. National research has to compress that middle. Families live inside it.

When I first looked at $124 trillion, the number seemed enormous. It still does. But now I keep coming back to the family I knew.

They were thoughtful. They cared about their children. They were actively thinking about what they wanted their wealth to do. And even they started with a percentage that eventually had to become more flexible.

That doesn't make the planning less useful. I think it makes the planning more honest.

So the next time you see the Great Wealth Transfer reduced to one giant number, consider asking three smaller questions:

The $124 trillion forecast cannot answer those questions. It was never meant to.

None of those three questions is really about the number. They are about whether anyone else in your family could answer them the way you just did, or whether the answer only lives in your head.

If it only lives in your head, that is usually where I come in. Not to tell you the number, but to help you think through what it actually depends on, the way I did with that family. If you already know what your three numbers are, reply and tell me. If you don't, reply and tell me that instead.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, send it to them. That is how most people find this letter.

This is not financial advice. This material is for educational purposes only and not financial, legal, or investment advice. Private investments may be risky. Do your own research and consult licensed professionals before acting on anything specific to your situation.

Until Monday.

Alina