>but for it to be generational wealth you must then pass on more than you inherited. Further it doesn’t serve as a major investment, because your parents only die ~25 years before you do, meaning it can’t be used to start a business or something similar.
At least in theory that's not hard to pull off. From the article:
>By one calculation, if America’s rich families in 1900 had invested passively in the stockmarket, spent 2% of their wealth each year and had the usual number of children, there would be about 16,000 old-money billionaires in America today. In fact, there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires and the vast majority of them are self-made.
The average inheritor might be too spendthrift to stick to the plan, it's not exactly impossible as you suggest.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for someone to invest inherited money, just that on average, the returns aren’t that significant and the money comes too late. I’m sure there are people who’s parents pass way early and they get a lot of money at 25
If we’re talking about an average population, the authors premise doesn’t make sense if you look beyond one generation. It sort of feels like the author is jealous of someone else’s inheritance, and wrote this article to complain about it.
>If we’re talking about an average population, the authors premise doesn’t make sense if you look beyond one generation. It sort of feels like the author is jealous of someone else’s inheritance, and wrote this article to complain about it.
Are you arguing that because the average person only inherits $100k or whatever, rather than the $20M+ required to build "generational wealth", everything's fine?
At least in theory that's not hard to pull off. From the article:
>By one calculation, if America’s rich families in 1900 had invested passively in the stockmarket, spent 2% of their wealth each year and had the usual number of children, there would be about 16,000 old-money billionaires in America today. In fact, there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires and the vast majority of them are self-made.
The average inheritor might be too spendthrift to stick to the plan, it's not exactly impossible as you suggest.