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Let's talk about the elephant in the room: inheritance guilt.

You know the feeling. You just inherited millions, but instead of feeling excited or grateful, you're drowning in guilt.

Maybe it's because you're still here while your loved one isn't.

Maybe it's the weight of unearned privilege keeping you up at night.

In this episode, I'm getting real about why so many inheritors struggle with these feelings and why it's so hard to talk about them with anyone - even therapists (yeah, I've got stories about that).

As someone who's been there myself, I'm sharing my perspective on why this guilt shows up and what you can do about it.

No sugar-coating, no BS - just honest talk about one of the most challenging, emotional aspects of inherited wealth that nobody prepared us for.

🗓️ Schedule a FREE call to talk about whatever money questions are on your mind.

Transcript:

Hey, I'm Katherine. Thanks for joining me at Heir Necessities, the podcast that turns complex financial concepts into real talk for GenX, Millennial, and Gen Z inheritors.

Introduction to Wealth and Guilt

I'm an investment advisor, a certified financial planner, and an inheritor, just like you. Each week on the podcast, I am tackling some of the most complex topics related to generational wealth and inheritance. If I do my job right, you're gonna be able to stop managing your money and planning your future by asking Google what to do.

On today's episode of the podcast, we are talking about wealth and guilt.

What Does Inheritance Guilt Feel Like?

This is a hugely loaded topic and there's a lot to dive into. I'm barely gonna scratch the surface in this episode. But the main subject is what are you supposed to do when you inherit money and all you feel is guilt? You don't feel excited about the possibilities of new wealth. You don't feel energized even about building a plan to give that wealth away. All you feel is guilt.

Common Sources of Inheritance Guilt

There might be a lot of different reasons that you feel that guilt. One of the really common and obvious reasons is that you have this money, but your loved one, the person who died, earned it. You didn't do anything to earn this money except be born or develop a relationship with the person who died.

And so you're dealing with the fact that you didn't earn this money on top of guilt, that you're still here to enjoy it while the person that you loved isn't. They aren't able to spend this money that they spent their whole life saving up and investing and growing for the future. They don't get to enjoy it, but you're here.

And now you have all the responsibility and the weight of figuring out what to do with this money and using it in a way that the person who died would have approved of the way they envisioned that you would use it, but you don't have their guidance and you don't feel equipped to manage this wealth on top of not being equipped to deal and to investigate these feelings of guilt.

Understanding Privilege and Inherited Wealth

Another super common reason that people feel guilty after inheriting money is because of the unearned privilege. Again, an inheritance by definition is money that you didn't do anything for in the vast majority of cases, except being lucky and being born into a family that had generational wealth to pass on. And so you're looking around at the world and all of the chaos and all of the really dark things that feel like they're happening in this world right now.

And it's like, well, shoot. You know, there are all these people struggling and meanwhile, I just had $10 million, like literally handed to me. And that's not really the case because again, in most cases, someone you love died. So you're dealing with a lot of grief and it's not like you just won the lottery. But in some ways, it's more difficult than winning the lottery. A, because you're dealing with grief and loss and all those feelings that are really terrible and awful to navigate. And B, because if you win the lottery, it feels like an equal playing field, right? Like everyone who played the lottery had the same chance and then that person won. And so that person got lucky.

But that's not the case with your inheritance. Like you were born on third base and then you have money that carried you home and probably carried you around the bases a few more times. So it's not like you started on an equal playing field with other people. You started ahead of the vast majority of the people in this country and even in the world.

Dealing with Complex Family Wealth Histories

And there are a ton of other reasons why people feel guilty for inheriting money. A lot of them are very situation-specific depending on the family relationships involved. For example, you might feel a lot of guilt if your family built wealth in a way that isn't aligned with your values. Your family built their money in the logging industry and your wealth was really grown a hundred years ago through deforestation. And you have a hard time justifying the fact that now this money has given you an incredible degree of privilege and freedom.

And also the source of this money is something that you feel is evil. And depending on where your parents came from, you may have a stronger or a lesser degree of that feeling.

If, for example, your parents made money hundreds of years ago in the slave trade, that was where your family's fortune originated, it's going to be hard to carry that through into today and not have some guilt and some confusion about how you acknowledge that legacy as part of your inheritance.

The Social Isolation of Inheritance Guilt

You might have another reason altogether why you feel guilty, but the point that I'm trying to make here is that guilt and inheritances are oftentimes very, very closely linked. But it's a difficult thing to deal with because it's not something that you can talk about in most circles.

You're not gonna be able to talk with your friends about how guilty you feel about your inheritance, especially if they don't have a significant inheritance. They didn't inherit $10 million. They don't wanna hear about your guilt. Because all they're thinking, and rightly so, this is a very fair feeling, and I'm not advocating that you try and like, open all of your friendships to these feelings of guilt that you have internalized about inherited wealth, but you know, they're thinking about their own financial stresses and how different their life would be if they had ten million dollars and so there's just this possibility of coming off tone-deaf which most people are very familiar with and so it creates this really strong bubble of social isolation.

Challenges in Finding Support

I have a whole other podcast episode on social isolation so if this is resonating with you I recommend when this one is done you go check that out. But you can't do anything about it. It just sits with these feelings of guilt and eventually as time moves on you decide what you're going to do with your inheritance and you make a plan to move forward and you know life goes on but those feelings of guilt never really go away and it can even be a hard thing to try and figure out and address in therapy.

I have clients who have tried to talk to their therapist about these feelings but their therapist came into those conversations with their own preconceived notions about money and wealth and their own financial stresses. So I literally have clients who have scared their therapists off with these feelings because their therapists are so uncomfortable and unwilling to acknowledge the fact that money and guilt and really high levels of wealth can be so closely linked and can be such a difficult thing for so many people to navigate.

Beginning to Process Inheritance Guilt

If you've made it this far in the episode, I haven't given you any solutions. I've really just given you more problems. And in part, that's because there aren't easy solutions to this. Naming the feeling and giving yourself permission to feel that feeling and as you can, creating space with other inheritors who are struggling with the same issues is one of the most powerful things that you can do.

And it's hard to do that because it's hard to find these people. It's hard to connect with other people who are going through what you're going through because it's not like you can just, you know, hold up a sign saying I inherited $10 million. Like, please come talk to me about how fucking guilty I feel. But it is really one of the only spaces I see where people can start to work through and process these feelings and to be able to just literally say them out loud and have someone validate that and say that it's normal and say that there's nothing wrong with you and say that you're not a huge jerk for feeling guilty and not being 100% happy about having millions or tens of millions of dollars, you can start to move through into what you want to do about it.

Moving Forward: Practical Steps for Managing Inheritance Guilt

Because the guilt that you have about inheriting money or about being wealthy, it is not forever. This is not a feeling that you need to carry with you for the rest of your life. There are things that you can do. There are steps that you can take once you start to explore these feelings to start bringing that guilt under control and to turning that guilt into positive action and to creating a new relationship to your inherited wealth.

And what those steps look like for you specifically are gonna be different depending on the source of your guilt, depending on what your inheritance looks like, what your overall financial picture looks like. But there are kind of clear steps that fit for everyone. So, you know, a big thing that can be a huge source of pride and start to change a relationship to inherited wealth is by building a giving plan and by giving away more money, personal giving, political giving, philanthropic giving, whatever it is, by being more generous and practicing that spirit of generosity in a way that feels authentic to you and also in a way that is informed by the guilt that you feel. Not that your guilt should be driving these giving decisions, but that you bring the history of your wealth forward and use that history to inform how you wanna be generous with inherited wealth.

Identifying Specific Sources of Guilt

Another big piece of it is again, just sitting with this feeling of guilt and sitting with like really those specific sources of guilt, like those specific points and most people have them when you take the time to like actually drill down with it and sit with these feelings and talk about these feelings like, feel guilty because of X. And like, you might not have only X, you know, might have X, Y, Z, you might be going all the way into your ABCs again, but narrowing down these specific pain points, these specific points that cause you to feel guilt can help you move forward.

So say you have a really specific guilt point because your dad, say for example, died too young and you inherited one of his retirement accounts and it was worth three million dollars and obviously it's a huge privilege to have that money but your dad also died when he was 55 or 60 and you would have obviously preferred that he had been alive to spend that money. And so there's a pain point at the guilt, right, that you have this money and your dad's not alive to spend it.

Breaking Through Guilt-Driven Inaction

And then there's also an associated fear point and like a sticking point associated with that guilt, which is really common too, which is, well, he can't spend it, so I shouldn't spend it. So you have the guilt point and then you have the point at which guilt is driving your action or inaction in this specific case. And once you've identified that guilt point and the inaction point, then it becomes easier to start building action steps to get beyond that stuck point that the guilt has created.

And once you start exercising those muscles and building those habits to get beyond that stuck point, then it starts to become easier to deal with the guilt. Because you're doing the thing that you felt guilty about, you can see that like, it's not actually that bad, right? But this is a process. This isn't something that happens overnight. It's something that can really help only happen in a safe space where you have time to look at this and think about it, interrogate what it means for you and what your guilt could mean for your wealth moving forward.

Connect and Learn More

If guilt is something that you're struggling with in relation to a current or future inheritance, I'd love to chat more about what you're going through and how I may be able to help. You can always email me at katherine@sunnybranchwealth.com.

You can also check out my Instagram @sunnybranchwealth. And if you'd rather just follow me here at Heir Necessities, I'll have another episode ready for you in two weeks.

Let’s take the next step together

Understanding how to manage and invest a current or future inheritance is not easy. Inheritors can encounter a wide variety of different situations requiring knowledge and finesse to manage. If you need more help, you can reach out to Katherine Fox, CFP® and CAP®, a financial planner for inheritors to learn how Sunnybranch can help you understand and plan for your future inheritance, whatever goals you’re trying to meet.