Everyone in the family has a number in their head. What they think their parents have. What they think they’ll get. What they think is fair.
Nobody says it out loud, because talking about a parent’s money while they’re still alive feels like buying the casket before the funeral.
But the number is there. It sits underneath conversations about the holidays, the nursing home, who’s helping with what.
And when the parent dies, the number turns out to be wrong almost every time, because the parent was running a completely different version of the same question, shaped by a completely different idea of what they owed their children in the first place.
Boomers worked for it, and a lot of them plan to spend it
A retired couple in their early seventies, splitting a bottle of wine on a Tuesday because they can, because this is what the savings were for.
They’re not being reckless. They’re being deliberate. They watched their own parents scrimp and save and leave behind a paid-off house and a life full of trips they never took, and they decided that wasn’t going to be them.
Northwestern Mutual surveyed more than 4,500 adults and found that only about one in five boomers expects to leave an inheritance.
Over half are explicitly planning not to. Only 11% say it’s their top financial priority. Most of them have a will, but their children are more likely to find funeral instructions in it than money.
Some of them are spending it on trips with the grandchildren instead, which is its own kind of giving, just not the kind that shows up in a will.
They’d rather pay for a week at the beach while everyone is alive and together than leave a check that cashes after they’re gone.
They gave their kids twenty-two years of showing up. Tuition, braces, summer camps, the whole run. In their eyes, the debt was paid a long time ago, and what’s left is the part of their life they finally get to live for themselves.
Their kids don’t always see it that way. Watching a parent spend freely in retirement while you’re splitting rent with a roommate at thirty-four creates a specific kind of tension that neither side knows how to bring up without it sounding like an accusation.
Gen X already knows what dying costs
They’re on the phone with a long-term care facility for the third time this week, trying to sort out their mother’s billing while their teenager texts from the kitchen asking what’s for dinner.
They’re not thinking about what they’ll leave their kids. They’re too busy paying for what their parents are leaving them right now, which is bills.
The Allianz 2025 Retirement Study found that 59% of sandwich-generation adults have reduced or stopped contributing to their own retirement savings to care for both children and aging parents at the same time.
Gen X is approaching retirement with roughly one-third the savings boomers had at the same age, no pension, and the highest credit-card debt of any generation.
The thing they most want to leave behind isn’t money. It’s the assurance that their kids won’t have to do this for them.
They’ve spent years watching what happens when a parent’s old age becomes a child’s second full-time job, and the inheritance they care about is the kind that doesn’t require a lawyer: a plan, a conversation, and the promise that someone already handled it.
Some of them are already having the conversation with their own children, years earlier than their parents ever did, because they’ve learned what happens when nobody has it.
The lawyer’s office after the funeral, the siblings who haven’t spoken in six months, the house that nobody can agree on. Gen X wants to spare their kids the version of that they’re living through right now.
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Millennials are expecting a safety net their economy never gave them
There’s money there. I’ve seen the house. I know they have savings. Something will come to me.
Sixty percent of millennials say they’re depending on an inheritance to achieve financial security and retire comfortably. The average amount they expect is around $320,000.
But 55% of boomers who do plan to leave something say it’ll be less than $250,000, and fewer than two in five Americans ever inherit anything at all.
The expectation comes from a generation that entered adulthood into a recession, carried student debt through their thirties, and watched housing prices double while their wages didn’t. The inheritance is the gap between what the economy was supposed to provide and what it did.
For their own kids, they’re trying to flip it. The 529 they opened before the child could walk. The life insurance policy they bought at thirty-two because they didn’t want their family scrambling the way they’ve seen other families scramble.
They don’t want to leave their children a lump sum after death. They want to give them the head start while they’re alive to watch it work. A down payment, student loans absorbed before they compound, the thing nobody did for them.
The tension with boomers is that millennials can see the assets and can’t understand why access to them requires waiting for someone to die.
Boomers can see the expectation and can’t understand why their children think they’re owed anything beyond the childhood they already paid for.
Gen Z is watching all of it and drawing their own conclusions
A twenty-four-year-old checking her banking app at a coffee shop, watching a direct deposit land that covers rent and not much else, then Venmo-ing her mom for the car insurance she can’t swing on her own yet.
Seventy-two percent of Gen Z is still financially dependent on their parents. That’s the highest of any generation, and they know it, and most of them aren’t comfortable with it. Eighty-two percent say they’re confident they’ll achieve financial independence eventually, which is a generation saying I need help right now, but I don’t want to need it forever.
They’ve grown up watching financial content online, tracking their own budgets at twenty-three, talking about money in ways their parents never did at that age. The dependence is a starting point they’re trying to leave behind as fast as the economy will let them.
The inheritance might come. It might not. Building a plan that requires it feels like building on someone else’s foundation.
When they think about their own kids someday, the picture isn’t a trust fund or a house with the mortgage paid off. It’s the absence of a mess.
No storage unit full of stuff someone has to sort through. No medical debt someone has to absorb. No guilt of watching a parent’s last years drain everything that was supposed to be left.
The cleanest exit they can manage. That’s the inheritance they’re planning for, and it has nothing to do with a number.
The definition of “owing” changed because the world around it did
Boomers believe they owe their kids a childhood, and they gave it, and now the money is theirs.
Gen X believes they owe their kids the promise that aging won’t become someone else’s crisis.
Millennials believe they’re owed the bridge their economy never built, and they want to build it for their own children while they’re still alive to see it used. Gen Z believes the best thing they can leave behind is nothing that needs cleaning up.
Each generation’s answer grew out of what they watched, what they carried, and what they swore they’d never put on someone else.
The only thing they all agree on is that nobody talks about it enough while there’s still time to.
