Jason isn’t asking his father for an allowance, a luxury car, or even help with rent.
The 38-year-old New York City-based comedian has spent years making what he considers “reasonable requests” with a clear plan and proposal.
He wants a shot at the big time — a $600 improv class, a plane ticket to Los Angeles for a gig that will bring exposure and connections, the occasional investment in a career he’s been building while juggling two jobs.
Despite his father recently inheriting millions, the answer is almost always no.
But Jason, who asked to use a pseudonym, sees things differently.
“When I die, you’ll never have to work again,” Jason told The Post of his father’s reasoning. “He kind of pokes fun that I’m not more financially stable — ‘when I was your age, I had a boat, an apartment on Park Avenue, I owned a business’ — his success was handed to him.”
“A warm gift is better than a cold gift,” he said. “Help me while it can actually change my life. Why wait until I’m 60?”
This increasingly common disagreement is playing out just as America enters the largest transfer of wealth in history.
An estimated $124 trillion is expected to change hands over the next two decades.
But it begs the question: what do adult parents owe their children? And do children deserve to benefit from parents’ blood, sweat, and tears?
For many children of the wealthy, the question isn’t even whether they’ll inherit someday; it’s why parents who could help change their children’s lives today often choose not to.
For 43-year-old Ashley, her parents’ decision not to buy her a condo despite being aware of the tax benefits is something she still stews over.
The New York native told The Post her parents sold their apartment in the city and then decided to rent — but lamented over the taxes.
“They could have funneled it into a condo for me and made my life easier,” she told The Post.
“Entitled: yes. Honest: also yes,” she laughed.
Despite being married and in her 30s at the time, Ashley, who also asked to use a pseudonym, thinks that with her parents’ successful careers, especially a mother who worked in real estate, it was almost expected.
“In retrospect, I think they were too self-involved and felt they paid for my wedding and college and private school, so why help me out,” she reasoned.
“I should have been more assertive. When I was little, all I wanted was an American Girl Doll. I left catalogs around. Read the books. They never thought to buy me the doll. They wouldn’t think to do it. It’s the same thing on a much larger scale.”
Despite being financially comfortable, she feels the weight of their decision as she shops the housing market in Los Angeles.
However, she is aware of the privilege she was given.
“I know I sound like a spoiled brat, but the doll thing is sad and true.”
Rich Kingly, a baby boomer Texas business owner with three grown children, sees financial restraint as one of the greatest gifts he can give them.
“Fresh asphalt feels smooth, but if the foundation underneath is weak, it eventually cracks,” the paving CEO told The Post, arguing that parenting works the same way.
“Money poured on top of an untested life can hide weaknesses instead of building strength. I’d rather watch my kids struggle, adapt, and succeed on their own than pave over every obstacle for them.”
Kingly was realistic about the reactions his children may have when it was far from excitement.
“Over time, they’ve come to understand that my goal isn’t to make life harder for them — it’s to make sure they never feel limited by relying on an inheritance,” the father said, adding that he was raised with the expectation that if you wanted something worthwhile, you earned it.
New Jersey business owner Doug Conner echoes the same sentiment.
The 55-year-old says he’s more interested in passing down values than dollars. The father of 30-year-old twins believes inheritance can become “a substitute for ambition,” and says the greatest legacy he can leave his children is the mindset that helped him build his success—not the money itself.
Parents like Kingly and Conner aren’t necessarily trying to punish their children. In fact, wealth advisors and financial planners say they hear this philosophy over and over again.
“Sometimes the greatest act of love from a parent isn’t just solving every one of their child’s problems that come up. It’s helping the child learn how to solve their problems themselves,” Michael McAuliffe, a debt management and credit counselor, told The Post.
McAuliffe adds that he’s repeatedly seen significant inheritances be blown because of the lack of financial literacy.
“One of the questions I encourage parents to ask in this scenario is, “Am I creating an opportunity or creating a dependency?””
Several wealth management experts told The Post that the conflict between generosity and stinginess comes up often, and is rarely black and white, despite a hard-line position.
“There’s typically a combination of pride and fear that’s going on underneath,” private wealth counselor Paul Ferrara told The Post.
“Almost one-third of the parents I speak with share in my concern: easy money now means dependency later.”
But Ferrara notes sometimes it’s not about the child at all.
”It can actually save the parent’s runway as well. I have seen retirement plans that were slowly destroyed over the years by years of small loans that were never repaid,” he said.
But it’s not always black and white for parents, many of whom want to do anything they can to help their children.
Joe L., a 62-year-old retired Texan with three adult children, says that over the years, he’s let children move back home when they needed to, helped one daughter buy a used car after she earned her MBA by covering the payments for a year, and provided student loan payments knowing the cost of living has been significantly inflated on this generation.
But every decision comes with the same calculation: how to help his children without jeopardizing his own retirement or creating long-term dependence.
“If everything is handed to someone, my experience is they don’t appreciate it,” the Texas native told The Post.
“The struggle is good to a point, but at the same time if someone has a lot of money and their children are just living in poverty there is a line where parents should help.”
There is also nuance from the child perspective.
A popular social media account, @catherinelovesastrology, focused on intergenerational family dynamics, says the comments on her videos reveal a sharp divide. Facebook users, many of whom are older, often defend parents’ right to spend their money as they please.
On Instagram and TikTok, she told The Post she finds younger users frequently share stories of feeling abandoned, financially controlled, or left to struggle while watching affluent parents accumulate wealth.
But according to estate planning attorney Robert Strauss, the conversation families are having around kitchen tables often looks very different from the one unfolding online. And often, demographics and geography shape the money mentality.
Strauss, who advises clients worth anywhere from a few million dollars to several billion in Beverly Hills, says the internet has amplified the idea that wealthy parents are increasingly cutting their children out of their fortunes. In reality, he says, that’s rarely what he sees.
“I would have a hard time finding a client who didn’t leave all of their assets to their kids,” Strauss told The Post, referring to most families with less than $10 million in assets.
In the end, Strauss says families often end up arguing over two very different questions: whether children should eventually inherit their parents’ wealth, and whether they should benefit from it while their parents are still alive.
Not every family, however, is withholding wealth by choice.
For Bliss Bendell, 43, the expectation that financial help would always be there slowly dissolved — not because her parents refused to give it, but because life got there first.
Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Bendell enjoyed what she described as an enviable childhood.
Her father worked on Wall Street. They had a family home in the Hamptons, took vacations, had boats and horses, and lived with the kind of financial security that led many to assume an inheritance was inevitable.
“I had charge accounts and credit cards. I never saw the bills,” Bendell told The Post. “People assume I received financial help throughout my life. The reality is much more complicated.”
As her parents aged, everything changed.
Her mother developed Alzheimer’s disease while her father suffered serious health problems and was unable to work.
Since the pandemic, the pair have cycled through dozens of hospital stays as medical bills mounted and long-term care costs ballooned.
“There was absolutely nothing left, which came as quite a shock,” Bendell said. “I always thought my dad had it all under control.”
Watching her family’s finances unravel has changed the way she thinks about inheritance altogether.
“I don’t know if my dad ever planned to live this long,” she said.
Source link
#Exclusive #parents #loaded #wont #buy #condo #Meet #poor #rich #kids #whining #wealthy #parents #wont #lavish #homes #cars