Sibylle Greindl
27 May 2026
The Great Wealth Transfer in Belgium: how to make an inheritance last?
The Great Wealth Transfer is in full swing: Belgian baby boomers are about to pass on assets on an unprecedented scale. How can today's heirs avoid repeating the mistakes that wiped out the great fortunes of the 19th century?
In 2025, residents of wealthy countries will collectively inherit around 6.000 billion dollars, roughly 10% of global GDP. In Belgium, this movement already has a name: the Great Wealth Transfer. Its peak is expected around 2040, as baby boomers pass on their assets, valued at 1.974 billion euros.
This wealth was built largely on the rise of Belgian property: residential real estate prices have more than doubled in real terms since the 1980s. It will pass to a generation with fewer children per family than the previous one, as the fertility rate has fallen from 2,6 children per woman in the 1960s to 1,6 today.
Every factor points to the sums involved being unprecedented for the heirs of Belgium's Great Wealth Transfer.
An unprecedented generation of heirs... or almost
These new heirs will face challenges that are nothing new. At the end of the 19th century, America counted 4.000 millionaires, as Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, recount in their book The Missing Billionaires. These fortunes were born from the American industrial revolution: railways, steel, oil, and finance. Within a few decades, these industries had produced concentrations of wealth comparable, in proportion, to those of today's Belgian baby boomers.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was one of those 19th-century ultra-wealthy individuals. When he died in 1877, he was the richest man in the world, leaving behind a fortune estimated at the equivalent of 105 billion dollars in today's money. Nearly a century later, in 1973, more than 80 of his descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University to celebrate the centenary of its founding by Cornelius Vanderbilt. The story goes that not one of the descendants was a millionaire at the time. A colossal fortune built up over two generations had vanished in three.
Three mistakes that erased everything
Neither crises, nor inflation, nor the two world wars of the 20th century swallowed up the Vanderbilt fortune and those of the other ultra-wealthy of the era. Poor investment decisions and an extravagant lifestyle quickly consumed the riches they had accumulated.
The first mistake was concentration: putting all their eggs in one basket. The Vanderbilts had built their fortune on transport, initially maritime and then by rail. With the rise of the automobile, road haulage, and aviation in the first half of the 20th century, the basket, eggs and all, came crashing down. Haghani and White show that these ultra-wealthy families tended to stake almost their entire fortune on a single idea. At the first reversal, the loss became irretrievable.
The second mistake was living beyond their means, however colossal those means may have been. The Vanderbilt heirs financed numerous grand estates, yachts, and racing stables by drawing on the capital, not the returns. Haghani and White sum up the challenge in a single figure: spending 2% of capital per year would have allowed all these families to maintain a luxurious lifestyle while preserving their fortune for future generations. Most heirs of the time far exceeded this threshold, without appreciating the consequences.
The third mistake was a lack of planning. Where Cornelius Vanderbilt simply transferred his wealth to his descendants, John Rockefeller (whose fortune was built on oil at the end of the 19th century) and his descendants structured their wealth in professionally managed trusts and put in place a family constitution that gave direction to heirs' spending. Those heirs are millionaires today.
Three principles for making an inheritance last today
The Great Wealth Transfer will distribute amounts very far removed from those of the Vanderbilt family and their contemporaries.
Yet the lessons that can be drawn from the past are timeless: diversify your assets, live within your means, and plan ahead. What has changed, however, are the tools available to the current generation to put these lessons into practice.
A century ago, diversifying assets meant investing directly in individual securities or properties, with each stake potentially representing a very different amount. In practice, a fortune was often highly concentrated, and at the slightest market disruption, bankruptcy followed.
Today, a single ETF potentially opens the door to 99% of the global stock market, regardless of the language, currency, or geography of the companies involved. No single company or sector can on its own wipe out a portfolio so broadly spread. No single position is capable of bringing the whole thing down.
Living within your means starts with knowing the extent of those means, and then setting a clear objective for how to use them: supporting your retirement, leaving something for the next generation, investing in a project close to your heart? Planning the management of your wealth then becomes possible.
Visualising your means and objectives is a first step towards anchoring your wealth in the future. The Easyvest simulator allows you to do exactly that:
Index investing: an approach that spans generations
Index investing makes it possible today to diversify a portfolio across the global economy in a single step, at very low cost: the tool Cornelius Vanderbilt never had.
Easyvest translates these principles of diversification, transparency, and balance into practice. Its portfolios are built on globally diversified ETFs, with fees among the lowest on the Belgian market.
At any time, you can see where you stand, and with the help of our Wealth Managers, establish the risk profile and the income that suits your long-term objectives.
Cornelius Vanderbilt and his contemporaries had neither the tools nor the knowledge to avoid the mistakes that erased their fortunes. Easyvest puts the tools, the knowledge, and the service at the disposal of today's heirs of the Great Wealth Transfer.