Expecting an Inheritance Is Expecting Unearned Money.
The dollar amount of your first paycheck was small. The feeling of pride you experienced on earning it was big.
We don’t just earn money by doing work. We “earn a living.” We buy our ticket to life’s thrills and spills and and tears and beers.
If you are expecting an inheritance, you are expecting to see a big bunch of money that you did not earn by working for it. It’s nearly impossible for that not to cause you some feelings of shame. You’ve spent decades developing a worldview that says that money must be earned, that those who obtain it without working for it are morally inferior, and now you are throwing out the rulebook.
Should you feel ashamed? Perhaps. Perhaps not. You certainly should stop for a moment and think about it.
Expecting an Inheritance Can Ruin You.
Smart parents do everything they can to prevent their children from coming to expect an inheritance. They make them work for extras when they are teenagers. They don’t cover all of their education expenses. They don’t buy them new cars as gifts. They don’t let them know the size of any potential inheritance until death is close. They give to charity regularly and make it known that charities will be helped in their wills.
Looking forward to an inheritance can ruin you. It can diminish your work ethic. It can cause you to look at your options in a different light when you work under a tyrannical boss. It can cause you to put off learning about saving or investing or career growth even longer than do most of those not expecting an inheritance.
Expecting an Inheritance Is Usually a Mistake.
The human is the rationalizing animal. The devil tempts us all to look for the magic solution. Expecting an inheritance is usually a mistake.
An inheritance comes as a windfall. That means that you don’t anticipate it. If you get it, great. But you should not come to feel that you need it, you should not come to count on it. If you do, there’s a good chance that you are going to be disappointed. People live longer nowadays. Late-life health expenses can eat up large portions of an anticipated inheritance.
If you let yourself count on an inheritance, you are going to experience feelings of shame, and for good reason. To rely on an inheritance is to cross a line that should not be crossed. It is to diminish your sense of self-respect and your memory of your parent.
There Are Exceptions to the Usual Rule about Expecting an Inheritance.
One of the primary themes of this site is that those who achieve financial freedom early in life are those who plan their financial futures. My parents let me know during the time that I was putting together my plan for making a shift from corporate employment to the running of the writing business that I am building up today that an inheritance was a possibility. Was it possible for me to give this possibility zero consideration in the crafting of my plan?
Yes and no.
I left all the numbers in my plan as they were before I learned of the possible inheritance. I allowed my knowledge of the possible inheritance to influence my thinking about how many layers of fallback positions I needed in the plan. My guess is that my knowledge of the possibility of an inheritance caused me to hand in my resignation from my corporate job a year sooner.
Expecting an Inheritance Can Be a Cause of Joy.
The receipt of an inheritance need not bring on feelings of shame. In the right circumstances, it can be a cause for joy.
To understand how, it helps to think deeply on what an inheritance is. The purpose of an inheritance is to permit one generation to live on through the next. The reason why we feel shame over the misuse of an inheritance is that we are letting our parents down when we use their gift to cause us to make less of ourselves. In cases in which we use our parents’ gift to make more of ourselves, we can and should feel pride over being able to put their gift to a use that would have brought them joy.
One of my father’s unrealized dreams was to start his own hardware business. To the extent that his inheritance permits me to get my writing business off the ground, I am letting him live his dream through me.
One of my mother’s unrealized dreams was to have an education (she was forced by her family’s difficult financial circumstances to quit school after completing eighth grade). To the extent that her inheritance permits me to put my schooling to good use, I am letting her live her dream through me.
My parents did not understand the drive that made me want to start a writing business. To them, my safe corporate job was the very definition of the “good job.” I see my decision to use the money in a way in which my parents would not have used it as my contribution to the effort to make the inheritance work. We don’t honor our parents by being what they would be if they were still with us. We honor our parents by being what only we can be while being influenced by what they were and by seeing the connections between what they were and what we are.
We get our chance to see things from the other side when we are dying and when our children are picking up the reins and taking the horses into country into which we would never think to go.
I can’t wait.
What am I saying?
No rush. No hurry. There is a time for every purpose under heaven.