The Great Wealth Transfer Is Coming — But Are We Digitally Ready?
The Great Wealth Transfer Is Coming — But Are We Digitally Ready?
By Tiffany Johnson | In collaboration with digital tools for cultural archiving
We’re living in a moment historians will one day study: trillions of dollars are about to change hands across generations. Financial experts and tech giants like Microsoft are calling it “The Great Wealth Transfer” — an estimated $68 to $84 trillion being passed down from Baby Boomers to Millennials and Gen Z in the coming decades.
But let’s pause and ask a deeper question:
What exactly is being transferred? And who gets to keep it?
As a Black digital curator, storyteller, and community wellness advocate, I see this not just as an economic shift — but as a cultural crossroads. If we’re only thinking about money and property, we’re missing half the story.
Wealth isn’t just financial. It’s also intellectual property, digital creations, oral history, family archives, cultural traditions, and hard-won knowledge passed down through creative labor.
So many of us are creators — but are we preserving our creations?
📌 The real question is: Are we ready to receive and protect not just wealth, but wisdom?
In many Black and marginalized communities, we’ve often been left out of traditional wealth pipelines. So we built our own — in barbershops, beauty salons, kitchens, basements, and yes, home galleries. But now, those spaces are shifting online.
Our blogs, Gumroad shops, YouTube channels, e-books, voice memos, and digital portfolios are part of our inheritance. They are modern archives. They are digital homes.
What we need now:
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A right to collect — our own work, ideas, and stories.
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A right to preserve — by organizing and protecting our digital assets.
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A right to lend and share — with those we trust, across generations.
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A right to co-create and cooperate — because no legacy is built alone.
These rights form what I call “The Digital Collector’s Creed,” a personal and community-based approach to legacy-building that honors the past while preparing for the future.
Here's how I’m preparing:
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Using Gumroad to archive and value my digital creations.
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Saving family photos, videos, and voice notes in cloud-secure folders.
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Creating a living document of digital assets and passwords for future access.
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Teaching younger family members how to build, protect, and respect digital work.
Final Thought:
The great wealth transfer is coming — but for some of us, we’re not just inheriting money; we’re inheriting memory.
And memory deserves protection, too.
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