Is it Fair to Leave Different Inheritances to Your Kids?

Dave and Gary discuss why inheritance decisions shouldn’t be a one-way conversation.

💈💈💈

 Fairness, unfortunately is often quite subjective as people look at it. What’s fair to one sibling, the other sibling may think is completely unfair. You brought up the fact that occasionally, in fact, more frequently now, we’re seeing people leave different amounts to their kids. We did not see that very often at all, 10 and 20 years ago.

I understand why people would want to do that, but in the real world, what I’ve run into limited examples, but let’s say four or five, is that even when it’s made sense financially, the sibling getting less has been somewhat bitter and they’ve just felt it wasn’t fair. They get it by the way logically, but emotionally they’ve been very challenged by it.

And what ends up happening is it affects the relationship of the two or three siblings, which to your point, is the worst possible result. So again, that’s a specific example. Would you deal with that again by having the conversation earlier and getting the feedback from everybody?

People treat a will or inheritance as a one-way street but it isn’t.

Right. These conversations are intended to make it 360 degrees. You have an intent. What is your intent? My intent might be to see that my offspring and their offspring prosper in some way or go to school or whatever it is I want.

But you need to then get the 360 feedback.

Well, I, I wanna send my kids to private school that’s gonna cost more than this. Or like, it’s really interesting, the nuances we don’t think about. And so I just, I think the conversations are really about alignment. And you’ll never go wrong with alignment in life, be it. You know, values, money you know, job, there’s always, always, you know, good outcomes in alignment.

And what’s interesting is, I mean, let’s be honest, some of these conversations, you’re not going to get to perfect resolution. You could have conflicting objectives sometimes, but at least you’ve discussed them and people are able to hear your perspective. They often see that it’s well intentioned, that there was some logical thinking backing up.

It makes it less likely you’ll have the friction down the road, or if you do, it’ll be at a lesser level. Although again, some of this stuff is beyond complicated.