Do You Expect to Inherit from Your Parents?
Written by Karen Bryan
I recently wrote about the save or spend dilemma. One of the reasons I gave for not spending our savings was so we could offer our sons financial assistance. I think that waiting until your parents die to inherit any money is not very useful, as you may be in your 60s or over by that time. I think that you need more help when you are younger, e.g. to get a foot on the housing ladder or when your own kids are young.
I inherited a few thousand pounds in my early 20s when my Granny died, which was immediately used to pay off some of our mortgage. This is part of the reason that we were mortgage free by the time we were in our 40s. Now it would’ve been very easy just to blow that inheritance on a fancy holiday or car, but we were trying to plan for the future.
However, the issue for us as parents is how much money should we give our kids and when. We’re unsure of how much money we’ll need for the rest of our lives. It’d be silly to give our savings to our sons and then not have enough money to live on ourselves. Conversely, what’s the point in having money sitting in the bank losing value when it could be helping our sons?
We’ve never had any expectations of inheriting from our parents and I don’t think it’s crossed our sons’ minds either. That’s probably the best way; to make plans based on your own earnings and savings without factoring in any possible inheritance.
I’ve never met anyone that openly relied on inheritance as part of their financial planning, except when I was a kid. I remember hearing from other rich kids at the time how they will never have to work again in their life because they’re going to inherit their family’s fortune. Makes you wonder though, what of them now?
It’s best to assume you’ll inherit nothing, for the sake of your own character development. Or, think of the inheritance as something generational that’s passed down for you to look after, wealth not for your personal use but a responsibility to keep it growing, before passing it on to your own children, and so on, like a custodian of the family wealth.