What to Do With Your Inheritance

This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while. It feels important for a small number of people. It’s potentially triggering to the larger part. But when the less have power to influence the many, crowding them out of consideration seems short-sighted.

So here goes. I’m going to say a bad phrase. You may not like me anymore after it.

I, my friends, am - deep breath - a Trust Fund Kid.

To be more specific, I’m an inheritance kid. My family came from poor starts, my grandpa fleeing the Holocaust in Austria and arriving penniless. But he worked for the government and got a pension. Both my grandmothers became teachers. My parents were doctors. Professional incomes add up.

When my grandparents and then my dad died, I was left with more money than I ever intended to earn. More money - combined with a hardworking, frugal set of values, passed-on dying expectations to “not use, only invest”, and a massive amount of privilege guilt.

Inheriting a lot of money seems to come with a different set of confusions than earning a lot of money. Lottery winners are little to not at all happier than people who did not win the lottery. In contrast, people who earn lots of money seem to have developed clearer goals for how to spend it. They also have a stronger sense of “I won this, so I am allowed to use it” - as well as a belief in replaceability. When you inherit or win money, it is a fixed sum, aside from investment returns. When you make it, you know there will be more.

After my dad died, I went from “I have enough money that as long as I keep working indefinitely, my savings will cover emergencies” to “fuck, if I invested all of this I could go a couple decades without working at all”. I then had a minor breakdown from the cognitive dissonance. I’ve always worked for $15-20 an hour inside my own not-for-profit business, taking on investment to make ends meet.

I still do take investment. I want to keep my business and personal finances separate; I don’t have enough that I could float my life AND my business; and I’m not the only one I pay. But, every one of my employees makes more than me. (Even in writing this article, I have to give the privilege guilt caveats - “I swear, I don’t spend this money! I’m not a bad person!”)

That privilege guilt is the reason for this article. I imagine I’m not the only one who got or will get handed money at some point in their life, through chance or trust or inheritance. I imagine I’m not the only one who spent a lot of time Googling "what to do with inheritance" and came up with a handful of empty platitudes. Or who spent years flagellating themselves with the whip of "money = bad, so me = bad" in ways that led to frozen impotence instead of better decisions.

All of us are products of our environment, either acting in accordance or in reaction to it. Some find it normal to spend, as their parents did or did not do, on nice things or philanthropy. Some select investment as the obvious choice. But I imagine many of us are pulled tight between the values of our past and our current times: with a world in pain and media exposure to it all, do we donate more than our parents did? With an uncertain and perhaps crisis-bounded future, do we save for retirement that may never come?

So, this article will be my take on some of the questions that have most bothered me over the last few years:

• How to think about money

• How to use it philanthropically

• How to save it for safety

• How to spend it for safety and joy

I am not an expert on this. I have a desire, down the road, to make this an interview series - we’ll see if anyone finds it useful enough to justify that - to present multiple perspectives. But today, I’m going to talk about what I’ve personally discovered, from talking with other inheritance kids and research and a fair amount of therapy.

The rest of this article is going to be paywall’d. If you need to read it, you can afford it; and the irony of charging for this one amuses me. (But on that note - something I should have said explicitly long ago - if you ever want to read my work but can’t afford it, please message me and I will give you a free membership.)

Here we go.