No. of Recommendations: 11
They should receive a decent inheritance, though their college education and planned gifting along the way is all we have told them to expect. I have no desire to impose a couple of trustafarians on this world.
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This is OT obviously, but have any here thought about giving kids an inheritance early instead of after death?
This has already started with what I referred to as planned gifting. I got a small inheritance as an adult, which was absolutely not when it was needed, so I suggested to DH that instead of simply building as high a pile as we could to hand off at death, that we start gifting now. We may do more later, depending on how things go with this round. The stated goal behind the gifting was to apply it towards something that would get them ahead, be it down payment towards a house, starting up a business, or more education. We expressly told them it was not for a splurge on exotic trips or anything that did not lend towards a more stable future. While we would not tell them what to do with it, we did want to know what they did with it and would of course be happy to be involved with their planning process if they desired that. Or not. Frankly much of this came up with a desire to get Youngest out of the undependable car he was in, as well as a desire to give them some funds to dream with and manage. It's hard to plan towards a dream, or even dream it, if you don't see a way towards funding those dreams.
Youngest did spend a considerable amount of time researching vehicles, following in on our example of paying cash for depreciating assets and only spending about 1/3 the gifted funds on what seems to be a great used vehicle that he will seriously be able to use and is much better in useability than the car with over 250K miles that was falling apart on him. He is looking at using some of the rest of the funds to get certificates that are required for his environmental career, in things like stream remediation, and it has freed him up to do some investing with the cash he already had on hand. He is considering buying a home, and is getting to know the market. Happily he is working for county gov't and not at great risk at losing his job, having in fact just gotten promoted.
Eldest is looking at buying a house with his funds. He is doing well at his career, but the gifting accelerated this option. He is in cybersecurity, so highly unlikely to not be able to find employment, and honestly receiving funds from us only because we wanted to give some to Youngest, who chose to save the world rather than go to a higher paying career.
Both kids are debt free, though not debt fearful. They have credit cards, but pay them off in full every month. Great credit, in part because we gave them in college one of our credit cards for emergency use. Never been used, but spike their credit by being added to a credit card that was older than they were. Youngest saw how his friends with expensive new cars had huge car loans as companions to their student loan debt, and shied away from what he was seeing as poor value. (Sorry, proud Mom brag.) Like most young men their age, they are still single, and know we have their back should the $hit hit the fan, which we had to do when Youngest graduated during Covid, when there were no professional jobs to be had. (Gave him the downstairs in-law apartment, rent free with utilities, which allowed him to preserve some pride and save money while he worked a landscaping job and looked for other work.) We also are confident that it would be unlikely they would ever need that back up, but knowing the back up is there lets you take on risk.
We have also always, since they started working at 14, paid the funds for their Roth IRA, up to the max allowed by law, and will continue to do so which allows them to focus on their Roth 401Ks. While we don't have control over what they do with this money, they know that we expect it to remain in the Roth for retirement. If they every have kids, we will pay for their college education. Teaching people how to fish is way better than always feeding them.
IP,
absolutely happy to hear of other ways to truly help the kids, without inadvertently hurting them
