Rich Camp: The Boot Camps Teaching Heirs How to Inherit
The Million Dollar Question: Goldman Sachs’ NextGS Investment Intensive — a two-week program for the Gen Z children of its private wealth clients — spends class time on which of these?
A) Reading the Wall Street Journal B) Touring the trading floor C) Buying art and watches with Christie’s D) All of the aboveRead on for the answer.
An entire cottage industry inside private banking now exists to solve one problem: a 20-year-old who is about to inherit eight or nine figures and has never had to manage a dollar of it. Banks, multi-family offices, and peer networks have started running multi-day boot camps — part finance class, part etiquette school, part group therapy — to get heirs ready before the money actually arrives.
What it is
“Rich camp” isn’t one program; it’s a category that has quietly formed over the past few years as nearly every multifamily office, bank, and peer-membership group has built its own version of next-gen wealth coaching. The format ranges from a three-day retreat to a full two-week residential program, and the sponsor is almost always the institution that already manages — or wants to manage — the family’s money. The pitch to parents is straightforward: send your kids somewhere structured to learn financial literacy and composure before they inherit control, rather than let them figure it out live, with real money, in front of the family.
What makes these programs distinct from a normal personal-finance course is who’s in the room and what’s actually being taught. The curriculum reaches well past budgeting and investing into boardroom etiquette, handling conflict with siblings over money, and the specific social frictions of visible wealth — how to travel with friends who have far less money, and how to field “nepo baby” criticism without becoming defensive or dismissive about it.
Who uses it
The attendees are almost uniformly college-age to late-20s, drawn from families already deep in a private-banking or family-office relationship. Bank of America’s version is built for the children of clients worth $10 million or more. Goldman Sachs’ NextGS Investment Intensive pulls from the firm’s private wealth management division, which services clients with fortunes ranging from $10 million to more than $1 billion and carries an average account size north of $90 million. R360, a peer-to-peer membership network, sets its bar higher still — a three-day retreat built specifically for families worth $100 million or more.
This is a distinction worth holding onto: a $10M-plus family sending a kid to a Bank of America boot camp and a $100M-plus family sending one to R360 are solving related but different problems. The first is largely about basic literacy — a first-generation liquidity event or a comfortable-but-not-dynastic inheritance, where the goal is competence. The second is about institutional survival — keeping a fortune, a family office, and a shared set of values intact across a generation the parents may not get to actively manage into. Neither cohort is the ultra-visible billionaire-heir stereotype; most of these families are wealthy enough to have a private banker but well below the Forbes 400 threshold.
The attendees themselves skew younger than the “heir” label might suggest. Most of these programs target the college-to-mid-20s window deliberately, on the theory that the habits and confidence built before someone has full control of real money are far easier to install than habits corrected after a costly mistake. A handful of families send teenagers to the lighter, more social versions of these programs; the denser, markets-heavy curricula like Goldman’s are aimed squarely at people old enough to sit in a real trading-floor briefing and follow it.
Why they use it
For the sponsoring institutions, the motive is not subtle: retention across the largest wealth handoff in history. Researchers at Cerulli project $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with roughly $105 trillion going to heirs and the rest to charity — and more than half of that total volume originating from families who are currently high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth, a group that makes up only about 2% of U.S. households. A bank whose relationship lives with a 68-year-old founder has a real, dated expiration problem: heirs routinely fire the advisors their parents trusted, sometimes within a year of inheriting. Getting a 20-year-old comfortable in the building, on a first-name basis with the private banker, and confident reading a market update is a multi-decade retention play dressed up as a summer program.
For families, the motive is the opposite of showing off — it’s damage control against a well-documented pattern. Wealth that isn’t actively stewarded by an informed next generation tends to dissipate inside two or three generations, the classic “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” arc that shows up across cultures and centuries. A structured program gives parents a way to transfer competence, not just capital, without every lesson turning into a fraught kitchen-table argument about money. It also gives heirs a peer group of other 20-somethings quietly carrying the same unusual problem, which several of these programs treat as being as valuable as the financial curriculum itself.
How it works
The specifics vary widely by sponsor and price of entry — meaning the size of the fortune required to get an invitation, not a program tuition.
Bank of America runs a three-day boot camp for the children of clients worth $10 million or more; it had a 120-person waitlist last fall, a real signal of demand rather than a novelty offering.
BDT & MSD, the Chicago-based merchant bank and multi-family office, runs a weeklong summer camp that brings in relatable mentors — past sessions have featured Walmart heir Lukas Walton — to talk candidly with clients’ kids about growing up around a family fortune.
R360, a peer-to-peer membership network for families worth $100 million-plus, hosts a three-day retreat where a wealth coach works with a room of college-age-and-older heirs on making the money last past their own generation, living a purposeful life around it, and using it productively rather than passively. R360 co-founder Michael Cole has framed the group’s core question directly: how do you make sure wealth lasts 100 or 200 years, and that heirs live a happy, purposeful life using it well.
Goldman Sachs’ version, the NextGS Investment Intensive, is the longest and most structured of the group — a two-week program held in New York City, now in its third annual run. Roughly 50 attendees, ages 18 to 23, spend mornings on market fundamentals — one session had the group work through Wall Street Journal articles for nearly an hour, building the habit of extracting a usable takeaway from market news — and afternoons rotating through crash courses: an equity trader from Goldman’s own ranks walking through the job, a trading-floor tour, hedge fund basics, portfolio construction. Beyond markets, the program devotes a full eight-hour day to communication and presence coaching, run by LifeHikes CEO Bill Hoogterp, where pairs of attendees act out job interviews and group-project scenarios. Vice chairman Rob Kaplan leads a session on leadership. And the curriculum reaches into the categories these families actually spend in: a Christie’s-led session on watches, jewelry, and handbags; a week on real estate and infrastructure investing; and a session on sports team ownership, timed to a moment when minority stakes in professional franchises have become one of the more visible ways UHNW families deploy capital. “A fundamental reason we created this program was to allow the young adult children of our families the opportunity to become more confident,” Goldman’s Brittany Boals Moeller, region head of the firm’s San Francisco private wealth management division, told Fortune — many of the attendees, she noted, aren’t finance majors and arrive from wildly different academic backgrounds.
What it costs
There is, notably, no tuition line item in any of this — these are not paid summer programs in the way a coding bootcamp or a private SAT-prep course is paid. The cost of admission is the underlying relationship: a family already banks or invests with the sponsoring institution at whatever minimum unlocks the invitation, whether that’s Bank of America’s $10 million private-bank threshold, R360’s $100 million membership bar, or simply being a client of Goldman’s private wealth management division. The camp itself is a client-relationship benefit, not a revenue line — which is exactly the point. Banks are not running these at a profit; they’re running them as a multi-decade investment in retaining assets under management once the person who opened the account is no longer the one making decisions.
Compare that to the closest thing a family without an existing $10M-plus relationship could buy on the open market: an independent financial-literacy coach or a fee-only wealth psychologist typically runs several hundred dollars an hour, and a multi-day intensive retreat modeled on the same content would easily run into five figures once travel, instructors, and access to people like a Goldman managing director or a Christie’s specialist are priced in. None of that is available for purchase outside these relationships at any price — the access, not just the content, is the actual product.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs
The tradeoff families are making, whether they name it explicitly or not, is outsourcing part of the values conversation to the same institution that will later manage the money. A bank-run boot camp is, by design, also a recruiting and retention exercise — the sports-investing session, the Christie’s watch-and-jewelry session, the trading-floor tour are all, in part, previews of the services and products that institution wants to sell this heir for the next fifty years. That’s not necessarily a conflict families should avoid, but it is a real one: the “confidence and literacy” framing sits alongside a straightforward commercial interest in making sure the 22-year-old in the room stays a client rather than moving the account somewhere else after the funeral.
There’s a subtler cost too. These programs are explicitly designed around peer cohorts of other extremely wealthy 20-somethings — which solves a real isolation problem (very few college friends understand fielding “nepo baby” criticism or navigating a friendship where the other person can’t split the bill evenly) but also risks narrowing an heir’s social world at exactly the moment many families would rather it widen. A camp built entirely around shared wealth can end up reinforcing the same insularity it’s ostensibly trying to help people navigate gracefully.
What people get wrong
The most common assumption is that these are remedial programs for spoiled or unprepared kids — essentially finishing school for trust fund babies. That’s not quite what the curriculum reflects. Sessions on reading market news, communication coaching, and job-interview role-play look less like indulgence and more like standard professional-development training that any competitive graduate program might offer, aimed at a cohort that, as Goldman’s Boals Moeller pointed out, often isn’t studying finance at all and needs the same foundational skills any young professional would.
The second misconception is that every wealthy family does this. Plenty deliberately don’t. Some families skip the camp model entirely in favor of the formal “trust reveal” — a single, meticulously planned meeting where lawyers and advisors walk adult children through exactly what they’re inheriting and under what conditions, resembling an executive briefing more than a family conversation. Others turn to niche financial-advising-and-therapy hybrid firms — services like Continuity Family Business Consulting, which has seen demand surge alongside the broader wealth transfer, specialize in preventing, managing, and healing conflict over business and money rather than teaching investing basics at all. And a growing number of parents skip formal preparation altogether by simply giving money away while they’re alive to see it used — helping with tuition or a first home in real time — though a few have already found reasons to regret how irreversible that choice can be.
The third misconception is scale. These programs sit well below the billionaire-dynasty stereotype. A $10M or $90M private-bank relationship — the range most of these camps actually serve — is a meaningfully different problem than a multibillion-dollar family office, and the curriculum reflects that: budgeting, credit, and basic portfolio construction sit right alongside the trading-floor tour and the leadership coaching.
Bottom line
Final Answer: D — all of the above. Goldman’s NextGS Investment Intensive spends real class time on reading the Wall Street Journal, walking the trading floor, and — alongside Christie’s — buying watches, jewelry, and art, on top of hedge fund fundamentals, real estate, sports-team economics, and a full day of leadership and communication coaching. The breadth is the point: a fortune-sized inheritance requires financial literacy, but it also requires composure, judgment, and the social skills to handle a life that most peers can’t relate to — and the banks and family offices building these programs have concluded that the second category is at least as important to teach, and just as good for client retention, as the first.
Related reading: Raising Heirs: Teaching Wealthy Kids About Money · The AI-Native Heir: Why Inheritors Are Ready to Fire the Family’s Advisor · Family Office: How the Very Rich Organize Their Lives and Money · Generational Wealth: How Long Fortunes Actually Last · Sudden Wealth: Liquidity Events, Lottery Winners, Athletes, and Inheritance Shocks
