Fortune Daily
Bill Perkins, the hedge fund multimillionaire behind the best-selling book “Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life,” has a specific window in mind for when parents should actually hand over an inheritance: between the ages of 28 and 33, not whenever the parents happen to pass away.
His reasoning centers on timing money to when it can do the most for a person’s life, not simply preserving it as long as possible. “The reason why is that your brain reaches peak mental acuity at 28 on average, and you’re in decline and plateau starting at 33,” Perkins has argued. “The utility of money starts to decline and the seasons of your life start to pass you by.”
That thinking cuts against how inheritance actually tends to work in the U.S. Federal Reserve data shows the most common age for Americans to receive an inheritance is 60, an age at which many of life’s biggest financial decisions, buying a first home, starting a family, launching a career, are already behind them or long delayed.
Those delays have become more pronounced. The median age of a first-time homebuyer has climbed to 40, up from 28 in 1991, and roughly half of Americans between 18 and 29 currently live with their parents. Perkins’s argument is that money arriving decades after those milestones does far less good than the same money arriving while a person is still building their adult life.
Virginia Colin offers a real-world example of the gap Perkins is describing. She received a $130,000 inheritance at age 49, after her mother died. “It just would have been a lot more valuable a lot earlier,” she said.
Perkins’s broader philosophy, spending or giving away everything within your lifetime rather than maximizing what’s left behind, rests on a simple reframing of whose money is whose. “If you plan on giving money to your kids, well, that’s their money, not your money,” he said, arguing that treating an eventual inheritance as already belonging to the next generation should change when, not just whether, it gets handed over.
