Inheritance has become almost a dirty word in our culture.
“Trust fund babies” are seen as perverted weirdos whose undeserved good fortune qualifies them for wholesale disdain.
Families break apart every day because selfish siblings start feuds over who gets to grab what Grandma left behind.
When we hear the word “inheritance”, we think of stuffed shirts at country clubs and cosmetic surgery queens on Rodeo Drive.
And we loathe them.
Some of the most financially successful men in our society have observed that money, when it is dumped onto a(n untrained, unprepared) future generation, has the tendency to utterly destroy them. They then concluded, in growing numbers, that money is so universally corrosive that, in an effort to spare their progeny the presumably unavoidable doom, they have dramatically slashed the would-be inheritance they’ll leave behind. Warren Buffett famously set aside just $250k of his $85 billion dollar fortune, saying that’d be all his kiddos would be receiving from him (each – he’s not a monster, guys). Then he created the Giving Pledge to give the rest away. Mark Zuckerberg is among those who joined Buffett with that commitment. That list includes more last names like Rockefeller, Bloomberg, Gates and Huntsman.
The world looks at this move and says “what a great bunch of fellas – giving all their selfish, dirty, privileged money away”. I won’t argue that all of these families are likely to do a whole boatload of good with the money they will put towards important causes, and that’s worth no small amount of celebration. But I’m not here to talk about giving- not today, anyway. For that you’ll have to go here, here and here. Today I want to talk about INHERITANCE… and hopefully restore a bit of its shine.
Whether you end up with eighty or 80 billion dollars at the end of your life, you might have the same questions that drove our billionaire friends to decide that inheritance wasn’t the destination of their fortunes:
“Will it hurt my children and grandchildren to leave them money?”
“Will taxes just eat up the money if I try to save it?”
“Will conflicts over money drive my family further apart when I’m gone if I leave them what I have?”
And if the answer to all of that seems like a big “YES”… and ridding myself of it seems like the best thing to do with my life’s earnings… and nobody but me could ever be trusted to handle my family’s money… then what the heck am I to do with this problematic verse ri’ ‘chere?
Proverbs 13:22 A righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.
I’m going to preview some things for you at this point. First, until we understand what the totality of scripture means when it uses the word “inheritance”, we’ll have a very hard time obeying the commands to build and convey one (and yes, they are littered throughout). Second, all of those pitfalls above are, indeed, very likely to wreck your family if you think an inheritance is simply a pile of money. Third, you should be spending considerable time thinking about leaving an inheritance that will outlive you (by a lot).
Lest you think of inheritance as some vestige of the Victorian era whence yon Downton Abbey was passed from one loafing dandy to his son for the sake of perpetuating an isolated wealthy class, allow me to correct that fallacy. Inheritance, which we’ll define as the passing on of resources through generations, has been critical to the fabric of God’s chosen people since day one. He made promises to them about things they would INHERIT from Him, and then he taught them over and over how to strengthen their families and their entire culture through the practice of inheritance across generations.
Around here, we believe that concept is sacrosanct. We will fight for it, in the face of a culture that wants radical independence for every person. (We don’t! Do you really want each generation to lose all knowledge, technology, insights, and skill that those before have attained? …of course you don’t.) We even believe that protecting this ideal, executed faithfully in every area of life, produces radical wealth (and again, we don’t just mean in dollars). But culturally, as stated above, the concept of inheritance wanes unabated. Could we reclaim that lost ideal? Even a bit of it? I think we could… but it’s gonna take some work.
So, in this series of articles I’m going to:
- Take a swing at defining inheritance in a more Biblically accurate way than our culture does (hint: it’s not about the money). Next,
- I’ll explore what happens to a culture (ours) that trades such a definition out for just passing along piles of money. Lastly,
- I’m going to give you a few steps, no matter where you are on your financial and family-building journey, that you could take to move towards faithfulness in this practice of inheritance.
Sounds like a lot — and it will be suckas– so tune in to PART 2 and let’s start hashing it out.
*Mark Parrett is one of the founders of Abraham’s Wallet. When not blogging for you here, he’s raising a family in Salt Lake City, UT and working as a financial planner at Outpost Advisors.
