LET’S TALK ABOUT SUCCESSION for WOMEN AFTER 50: What the Family Behind Cartier Can Teach Us About Handling Our Heirs

Let’s be frank, many of us women over 50 don’t have a dime to our name. I don’t mean to be crude but let’s just be real and get that out of the way before we start talking about billionaires, Cartier and succession planning.

For millions of women, the financial conversation after 50 these days isn’t about trusts, family offices or deciding which child gets the country house. It’s about whether there will be enough money for retirement, whether there will even be enough to pay the rent and put food on the table, whether the mortgage will ever be paid off. Whether an unexpected €5,000 expense would be manageable. Whether the years spent raising children, caring for parents, surviving divorce, starting over or simply earning less than the men around us have left enough time to build something substantial.

But here’s where I think we sometimes make a mistake.

We assume that succession is a conversation reserved for people who already have fortunes.

It isn’t. Not necessarily.

This week, the family behind Cartier gave us a rather spectacular example of what succession looks like at the opposite end of the financial spectrum.

Johann Rupert, the 76-year-old chairman of Richemont—the luxury group behind Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and some of the world’s most prestigious maisons—is continuing the process of positioning his son Anton within the business his family controls.

Now, unless you’re reading The Marion Chronicles from your yacht off Saint-Tropez, the chances are that the Rupert family’s succession problems bear very little resemblance to mine and yours.

But the questions might. Even if all you have is a little solopreneurship, there are questions you still should be asking yourself at this age:

What have I built?

Who should eventually have it?

Are they capable of looking after it?

When should I start involving them?

How much should I tell them?

And perhaps the uncomfortable one:

What if the person I love isn’t necessarily the person I trust to take care of what took me a lifetime to build?

You see, you don’t need to be wealthy to have heirs. If you’ve got a €20,000 savings account, a paid-off apartment, jewelry, a little business, copyrights, photographs, recipes, a pension benefit, a website, or even instructions about what happens to the things that matter to you, you have decisions to make.

And if you genuinely don’t have a pot to piss in?

At 50+, perhaps succession begins with deciding that you’d still like to acquire the pot of your own.