Will Your Inheritance Be a Life Jacket or a Legacy?
Planning Around Money That May Never Be Yours
Waiting for an inheritance to fund your life and right-size your financial decisions is like being on a sinking ship with a potentially faulty life jacket.
It may save you. It may not. And you won't know until the ship is sinking.
That's the problem with building your life around an inheritance you expect to receive. You are making decisions today based on money you don't have, don't control, and don't know when you will receive.
Who Said The Money Is Yours?
And there's another part of this conversation that doesn't get discussed enough. What makes you believe you're entitled to it? You didn't earn it.
Someone else worked, saved, invested, sacrificed, built a business, bought property, or made the decisions that created that wealth. They get to decide what happens to it.
That’s where our TRWC philosophy, “Treat Wealth as a Family Business,” changes the inheritance conversation.
Treat Wealth as a Family Business
From that perspective, an inheritance isn't simply money waiting for the next generation to spend. It continues the mission, vision, and values of the people who created the wealth and chose to share it. Money implements the terms.
The earners determine what they want their wealth to accomplish. The inheritors, when given the opportunity, decide how they will carry that legacy forward and add their own vision to it.
That's a very different conversation from "How much am I getting?" The better conversation is: What are we carrying forward?
If you're expecting an inheritance, understand the full legacy attached to it. What did it take to create this wealth? What mattered to the people who created it? What do they want it to make possible? And what are you prepared to add to it for the people and institutions that come after you?
That's treating wealth as a family business.
Adulting While You Wait
But families may need to have another conversation, especially when adult children make life decisions based on an expected inheritance.
Why are you waiting for someone else's money to fund your life? That question becomes even more important as people live longer.
If you're 30 years younger than your parents and they live well into their 90s, you could be in your 60s before you receive an inheritance. That's a lot of years of adulting.
You still have to build a career. Pay for housing. Raise a family, if that's part of your plan. Save. Invest. Prepare for retirement. Navigate setbacks. Make choices. Build something of your own. So if your financial life doesn't work without the inheritance, that's information.
Maybe your lifestyle costs too much. Maybe you're not earning enough to support the life you want. Maybe you haven't built sufficient assets of your own. Maybe your parents have been subsidizing your adulthood. Or maybe knowing family money exists has allowed you to postpone financial decisions you otherwise would have had to make. That's the conversation to have now.
Envision your inheritance as legacy building
An inheritance should not become the financial plan. And generational wealth shouldn't create generations of people waiting for someone to die so they can live differently. Build your life with what you can build. Then, if wealth is transferred to you, you can receive it from a position of strength rather than dependency.
Honor what built it. Understand what it was intended to do. Add your own vision. And leave the family, the wealth, and the institutions that matter to you stronger than you found them.
That's how you inherit more than money. You inherit the responsibility to carry the wealth forward.
Blog post written by Lazetta Rainey Braxton, MBA, CFP®, TRWC Founder, Visionary Guide & Wealth Strategist
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