Just had an interesting back-and-forth with @rickwilliamscpa, worth a follow. There's a lot of emotion and articles these days about (White) generational wealth and The Great Wealth Transfer to come. A lot of it is horseshit and I'd like to break it down in a short thread.
If you go off of news articles and Twitter, a lot of people are already counting their parent's money. This is a supremely foolish thing to do and basically comes from millennial entitlement and resentment. Most people are not inheriting a damn thing.
White millennials are being indoctrinated into narratives of White generational wealth so they feel entitled to vast fortunes that their parents don't actually have. It becomes a game of blame Old White Boomer (who usually has nothing to give).
From the BLS Inheritance Report and the 2019 SCF. The overwhelming majority of people - including the overwhelming majority of Whites - do not get an inheritance *at all*. Only 20.7% of households and 24.6% of Whites. If you're not at least middle class, count yourself out.
And of those who do receive inheritances, the majority are receiving middle class inheritances from middle class families. The median *inheritance* (so already cash in hand) is only tens of thousands of dollars. A million dollar inheritance is the TOP ONE PERCENT.
This is not money to live off, and people normally get this in their 40s or 50s (perhaps even their 60s these days). I expect to receive an inheritance of between $600k and $1mm depending on how many health problems Mom and Dad have, so in the top few percent.
But the other side of this is Boomer selfishness, which is also very real. 73% of millionaires come from millionaire parents. The old Dave Ramsey stat about 80% of millionaires being self-made just means they didn't inherit their money. And it's true. I did not inherit my money.
What most millionaires get is a good school, connections, cultural capital, the WASP money mentality, and a good job from their good school. This is enough, you don't need a money handout.
If we look at the BLS inheritance chart again, we see only 47.3% and 45.5% of the top two wealth categories got an inheritance from their parents. Averaging that out, we get 46.4%. Subtract the 27% that are genuinely self-made, and you get 63.5% inheritances in the latest cohort.
This will shift up and down based on the year, but it's a staggering number. Boomer selfishness is real. It means almost 40% of the Boomers who *can* leave an inheritance worth talking about choose not to. Every real story of Boomers blowing their kid's inheritance is from here.
The traditional WASP ethos is that you are the steward of a fortune that was not made by you and ultimately does not belong to you. It's family money. And millionaires tend *not* to be self-made. So a huge minority of Boomer millionaires received a handup and blew it.
They're eating the seed corn given them by past generations to provide for future generations.
To sum up: Many boomers *are* dicks, and many millennials have delusionally high expectations and entitlement.
To sum up: Many boomers *are* dicks, and many millennials have delusionally high expectations and entitlement.
I'm going to pin this as my last word on inheritance.
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