Inheritance

[Anonymous]

For folks with aging parent(s) - over 80 years old. how do you think about inheritance?

Does anyone consider it as part of their retirement planning? Do you have a conversation with your parents about it?

I know the conventional wisdom is to not consider it - you never know, etc.

Let's say each parent set would be expected to give you $2.5MM.
Does anyone say, I am going to stop saving now that I am 50 years old and use
the (hypothetical) extra $50k that I would have saved to have a better time now with my kids (vacations)
or consider private school versus public school.

I am assuming in my example you have saved regularly and at 50 are well on the way to being able to retire at 65.
this is all about not putting the 50k you have been saving. not spending what you have in IRAs/brokerage accounts.

thoughts?

[Anonymous]

I don't expect as much as you do so I think about it differently. If you truly think there will be $5M coming your way in the next 10 years I think you can mentally count on, let's say, a third of that as a guarantee and the rest would be gravy. If you'd stop saving if you got 1/3 of what you expect, then go ahead and stop. If you need all of the inheritance stop saving, then keep saving because it's too risky to count on all of it.

[Anonymous]

You are 50 yo and thinking about someone else’s money is so sad (doesn’t matter who that someone else is)

[Anonymous]

Your parents could need their monies for caregivers at $35 per hour for the next 20 years.

Their monies are their monies.

[Anonymous]

No. It is not part of your retirement planning.

[Anonymous]

I don't think about it at all. Plan for what you know.

[Anonymous]

I count on it emotionally ("feeling stressed about finances in the long term, no it's ok, mom and dad have 5m and I'm an only child").

But not logically (likely to need to support in-laws, anything can happen and there's a big difference between 5m and 50m).

We do not factor it into our savings or spending. Could we save more? Probably not (we save a ton). Could we spend less? Yes, but that's not because we're relying on inheritance...it's because we like some nice things.

[Anonymous]

I talk about it with my mother because our family has always been open about money and we all use the same financial planner. He has built generational giving into our plans.

As far as changing my spending habits, it's less that and more that I now do not lie awake at night worrying that I will become a bag lady.

[Anonymous]

No, I was promised inheritance but they never gave me a dime when alive. Dad died and gave most of it to random women. My sibling grabbed the rest. I suspect sibling will get all mom’s money. Till you have it don’t plan with it.

[Anonymous]

I’m making sure I have enough to fund my own retirement. Anything I inherit will likely be to ensure my kids inherit (and that I can help them more in my lifetime). Now that 4 of my mom’s 7 grandkids are adults, she wants to revise her will to leave them some directly (right now it all goes to me and my 2 siblings).

But I’m not getting $5 million. I’m divorced, so only one set of parents involved. My mom has $4 million or so-but split between 3 kids (and likely 7 grandkids). She’s 85, and currently in good health-but who knows what is to come?

[Anonymous]

I have more money than my parents. My husband and I need to sort out the inheritance we will leave to our kids.

My current worry is that my father doesn't keep my mother in the loop about their joint accounts, logins and passwords, and my mother, who is disabled, can't readily access them. My father is likely to pass first and then I'll be on the hook to care for my mother until the accounts can somehow be unlocked and used. Neither are interested in solving this issue, because my father doesn't care what happens after his death and my mother knows that money is going to come from somewhere, and she doesn't care where. Sigh.

[Anonymous]

It's not part of our planning process. Anything I get I will likely pass straight on to my DCs, anyway.

[Anonymous]

I'm an only child so I'll inherit responsibility as well as money. I've saved for my own retirement since I was a teenager. I've talked about it with a handful of career women I know in a similar boat. But, mysogyny is real. A lot of the married women I know have been overt in telling me they consider themselves financially better off than a single woman like me. It seems to feed their egos to assume I'm broke. And that's fine. A guy I dated casually apparently Google stalked my parents after he found out I was an only child and got drunk one night and admitted he was primarily "financially attracted" to me. Since then I've been borderline secretive about what my parents have, or what I have. Luckily I don't have an ego and a ton of people really are very performative about wealth. So, if I bum around in jeans and a t shirt (because I'm work from home) and never do my nails (because my hobbies include gardening and painting) they assume I'm broke. Had lunch with an older female friend who was talking about a clutch of women she knows from the country club (I never joined) and apparently the ladies of the country club didn't want me to be involved in some charity project they were doing because they assumed I had no money. We both sort of shrugged over our margaritas. So no, not changing my own habits based on future inheritance. When my parents pass away I'll probably get much more serious about charitable planning.

[Anonymous]

I do not count on it.

Memory care is $140,000 to more than $220,000 yearly.

They could need memory care and that would eat up 2.5 M pretty quick, especially if there are two.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm an only child so I'll inherit responsibility as well as money. I've saved for my own retirement since I was a teenager. I've talked about it with a handful of career women I know in a similar boat. But, mysogyny is real. A lot of the married women I know have been overt in telling me they consider themselves financially better off than a single woman like me. It seems to feed their egos to assume I'm broke. And that's fine. A guy I dated casually apparently Google stalked my parents after he found out I was an only child and got drunk one night and admitted he was primarily "financially attracted" to me. Since then I've been borderline secretive about what my parents have, or what I have. Luckily I don't have an ego and a ton of people really are very performative about wealth. So, if I bum around in jeans and a t shirt (because I'm work from home) and never do my nails (because my hobbies include gardening and painting) they assume I'm broke. Had lunch with an older female friend who was talking about a clutch of women she knows from the country club (I never joined) and apparently the ladies of the country club didn't want me to be involved in some charity project they were doing because they assumed I had no money. We both sort of shrugged over our margaritas. So no, not changing my own habits based on future inheritance. When my parents pass away I'll probably get much more serious about charitable planning.

This is your insecurity talking. I have 25M and drive a beat-up Corolla, and while I dress well, I don't walk about with logos or visible signs of wealth. It's the point. I don't want people to relate to me just because I'm rich.

Stop blaming everyone else for your lack of confidence.