Crogglement

[feuervogel]

Thanks to a conversation on twitter, I know I'm not the only person who feels this way; I'm just wondering how common it is.

I'm completely croggled that people casually assume or casually state that they'll be getting some sort of inheritance when their parents die. I've never assumed I'd get anything other than debt to pay off or possessions to sell off when my parents die. At least my mom's house is almost paid for; no idea about dad's. (And another comment on twitter reminds me that someone's got to pay for the funerals...)

To copy and paste someone's comment to a friend's post (completely without attribution and with some paraphrasing/editing), this is what sparked this line of thought:

There's also a sense of "it's spending down the inheritance either way; this way's just time-shifted". I trust my parents to have a good sense of their financial planning and what they intended to leave me, and if they happen to want to transfer some of that to me now rather than later, that's fine.

My mom doesn't buy me stuff. She stopped even sending me money at Christmas and my birthday a few years ago. She had to do two major home repairs last summer (ac/heat and water heater both died at the same time), and her tight budget got even tighter. I honestly don't know if she has a retirement savings plan, or if the United Methodist Church even offers one for their secretaries, or even if they did, if she'd have enough income to be able to split off a hundred bucks here or there to save up. (She's a blasted SECRETARY. For a CHURCH. If she makes more than 30k (or equivalent for the DC-Metro area), I'd be astonished.) The only thing I expect to receive from her is the treadle-powered Singer, which is what I told her I wanted when she asked when she made her will. If I'm still in this country, anyway. (It would be really cool if I could figure out how to get it to work, because it has feet useful for old-fashioned clothesmaking, like piping.)

Dad does buy me stuff sometimes, usually alcoholic beverages on the rare occasions we see each other. I have no idea what his financial situation is like. I assume not very good, because he's never been good at saving, and he's an owner-operator (that is, truck driver). I don't think you get 401(k)s with those jobs. He's got his truck and his house, which together could fetch probably half a million*, though I don't know what of that his girlfriend co-owns.

*Truck resale value depends on the age of the truck, mileage on the engine, and how fancy the sleeper area is. His has a huge bed (2 bunks, I think), a kitchenette, and a lav with shower.

Anyway, it just boggles my mind that people casually mention things like inheritance. Is it just me? Is it a product of my working class upbringing?

Comments

[feuervogel]

I'm surprised that it's normal among people I know (though as tiurin said, there are a shocking lot of trust fund babies in our (DaP/Mudd/CTY) circle) to blithely assume that there'll be money to inherit when their parents die, even beyond sale of a home. That the money their parents are spending today (to buy them fancy dinner, say) is "just" paying down the inheritance. I edited out a few lines about the parents spending the money now for tax purposes so the child will have less of a tax hit later. (You went to college with the originator of the comment I pasted. She has a 5-yr-old baby now. She and I are not friends.)

I can honestly say that I've never been a part of discussions of saving money for future generations or receiving money from past generations. When Grandpa's brother died, then his widow died 5 or so years later, they left their money to their niece and nephews (my mom and her brothers). That's all been distributed now (Grandpa parcelled it out into tax-free bits), probably over 5-6 years. No idea where they got their money; they never had kids, so that's one bit. Jack was in the Navy during the Korean War, don't know what he did after that. He died when I was in high school. I don't think Amy ever worked; her English wasn't very good. (She was from Japan.)

When my grandparents moved into their retirement village, they had to shuffle their assets and savings to pay the entry fee, and they have rent on their apartment, too. I have no idea what they'll leave. I vaguely recall them saying they basically entrusted the Village with their money, but this was a long time ago--before I met Ben, even.

The only thing I've ever heard about Grandpa's dad was that he specified in his will that his (gorgeous, based on pictures) house in Pennsylvania overlooking the Susquehanna not go to the family, because he didn't want to cause strife over who got the house and who didn't.

The planning of and for inheritances is as alien to my experience as living on Mars.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I may be reading you wrong, you still sound upset here and I still don't understand why. (Unless my original guess was right: do you just mean that it's rude for better-off people to talk about their good fortune around others?) You've said, "blithely assume that there'll be money" (and earlier, "blatant displays of privileged ignorance"), but it's not clear why such negative language is warranted. If I expect to inherit some money when my parents die, I wouldn't call that a "blithe assumption": the odds are very good that it's true (and I know enough about their finances to have a basis for that belief).

I have no idea what the context of that original comment was, of course, so I can't really comment on how rude or out of place it would have seemed to me. The "spend/give money now to reduce later tax burden" idea is pretty much standard fare, in any case: it was certainly one of the first things discussed (and done) in my family when my grandparents approached the end of their lives. I'm very lucky to have grown up in a family that both had money to pass down and talked about how to preserve it for the next generation, and I think it's generally a good thing for anyone with a positive net worth to learn the basics (whether they plan to pass that money on to kids or cousins or charity or whatever else). So I'm a little uncomfortable with making the topic a complete taboo.

(Finally, I'm sorry to hear that you don't get along with that particular DaP/Mudd/CTY person. Assuming I'm not thinking of the wrong person, she's a good friend of mine.)

[feuervogel]

The issue I have is that there seems to be an underlying assumption that everybody gets these inheritances, that everybody has these discussions with their parents. That it's normal and expected. (Which may not have been the intent in the context of the discussion, though most of the comments there were ... displaying some sort of economic privilege.)

So the answer to my original question would seem to be, yes, it absolutely is related to my working poor upbringing that I've never had these discussions that all the middle/upper-middle/upper class people I know have had. "Positive net worth" has never applied to my family.

I have nothing against her in specific. She apparently has a strong dislike of me, for reasons I don't know. I replied to a comment of hers once in someone else's journal, and she completely brushed me off. Some time before that, I added her to my flist, and she never added me back, so I dropped her. I subscribe to "they got nothing to say to me, I got nothing to say to them."

[kirin]

I think this exactly is what's causing Stu's bafflement at your bafflement... Having actually read the original thread I really don't see anyone intentionally implying that these things apply to everyone, or implying anything at all about what's "normal" *in general*; they're just giving individual experiences in response to a request for data-points.