Our story
A practice built around
one recurring question.
Why is it so hard to talk to our adult children about money — even when we want to, even when they seem open to it?
Back to homeHow Heirloom Desk came to be
Heirloom Desk began in 2019 when our founder, who had spent nearly two decades working in family wealth education across Asia, noticed a persistent gap in what was available to parents. There were financial advisers and estate lawyers, but almost nothing that helped parents with the conversation itself — the one that happens before the documents, the one that shapes whether those documents ever feel like what the family truly wanted.
The practice began with a single workshop series for a small group of parents in Wan Chai. Word spread, and over the following years the curriculum grew into three distinct programmes, each addressing a different moment in the long arc of a family's shared financial life.
Today, Heirloom Desk is a small team of educators and facilitators based in Hong Kong, with a roster of participants drawn from across the city. We have no interest in becoming large. The work depends on the quality of attention we can give to each cohort.
Our mission
"To help parents find the words for conversations that families need but rarely have."
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Established
2019, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
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Participants to date
Over 340 parents across three programmes
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Format
Small cohorts, in-person and online
The people behind the courses
A small team with experience in family education, facilitation, and wealth transition research.
Margaret Ho
Founder & Lead Facilitator
Margaret has spent 20 years helping families in Asia navigate wealth transitions. She designed the original Heirloom Desk curriculum and leads the flagship ten-week programme.
Daniel Chan
Programme Director
Daniel brings a background in adult education and family mediation. He oversees curriculum development for the four-week and six-week programmes and manages participant cohorts.
Patricia Lam
Research & Content
Patricia researches family financial communication in Chinese-heritage households and writes the companion workbooks that accompany each Heirloom Desk programme.
How we work
Our standards for the design and delivery of programmes are driven by what participants actually need from this kind of learning.
Small cohorts, always
No programme runs with more than twelve participants. This is not a marketing claim; it is a structural requirement for the conversations we facilitate.
Strict confidentiality
Everything shared in a session stays within the room. Facilitators do not discuss participants outside the programme, and we do not retain personal notes after the programme ends.
No financial advice
We do not hold financial advisory licences and we do not offer them. Our work is educational. This separation is intentional and important.
Curriculum reviewed annually
We revisit programme content each year using feedback from participants and our own reading in family communication research. The curriculum is not static.
Data protection
Participant data is stored securely, used only for programme administration, and never sold or shared with third parties. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
Grounded in research
Programme frameworks draw on published work in family systems theory, intergenerational wealth communication, and applied behavioural science — adapted for Hong Kong families.
Family financial education in Hong Kong
Heirloom Desk works with parents across Hong Kong who have reached a point in life where the financial conversations with their adult children feel overdue — or where the conversations they have been having are not quite landing the way they intended. Our programmes are not about numbers. They are about words, timing, and the particular difficulty of talking about money with people we are close to.
Hong Kong families face a specific set of pressures in this area. Property values, the expectations that come with multigenerational wealth, and the distance between how one generation experienced money and how the next experiences it — these are not generic challenges. Our facilitators understand the local context and shape each programme around it.
We offer three programmes for parents at different stages of the parent–adult-child relationship, from the early years of a child's working life through to the longer planning conversations of midlife and beyond. All programmes are available in-person in Wan Chai and online.
Curious about the programmes?
We are happy to answer questions before you commit to anything. A short conversation is usually enough to work out where to start.
Get in touch