“Self-made” is one of the favourite expressions whenever substantial wealth comes up. It suggests work, persistence and personal achievement. “Inherited” suggests an advantage that existed before its current owner did anything to earn it. These labels supposedly tell us something straight away about the people behind them. Sometimes, though, they reveal more about our ideas of achievement than about the lives of those concerned.
Take two people, each with a net worth of eight million euros. One founded and sold a business. The other received a similar fortune from a parent. Both can support themselves, make decisions without immediate financial pressure and help others. Yet they might describe what this money means to them very differently. One might associate it with decades of work. For the other, it belongs to a family history in which money has long shaped decisions, expectations and opportunities.
It would be tempting to turn these into two fixed psychological types. Those who earned their money are proud and content. Those who inherited it feel obliged to justify themselves. Human lives rarely work quite like that. What interests me is what the source of wealth can actually explain, where research finds differences and where we would simply be telling stories that sound convincing.
Wealth has an amount and a history
Looking at wealth only as a number leaves much of its origin out of the picture. A property portfolio may have grown over generations. A business may have increased considerably in value since its foundation. Some people receive substantial help from their families during their lifetimes and then build something themselves. Others start without those resources but benefit from education, contacts or favourable timing.
“Earned” also covers very different processes. Saving from a salary, building a business, holding equity or selling property can produce the same financial result while involving different decisions and lives. The same is true of inherited wealth: an unexpected sum, a business succession prepared over many years and jointly owned family assets have little in common once we consider their recipients' daily lives.
Simply assigning people to two groups will therefore always lose some of the reality. Wealth someone has built may include family support. Inherited wealth may subsequently be maintained, expanded or used up through their own efforts. Some fortunes combine several sources in different proportions that become almost impossible to separate after many years.
That is no reason to dismiss the source as unimportant. It can determine when someone's financial circumstances change, connect with relationships and influence how they understand their responsibilities. But asking where wealth came from should not be confused with passing judgement on someone's personality.
What a large study of millionaires actually found
In a study published in 2018, Grant Donnelly, Tianyi Zheng, Emily Haisley and Michael Norton examined two samples totalling more than 4,000 millionaires. Respondents came from 17 countries; the data were collected through surveys for a financial institution. Among other things, the researchers compared reported wellbeing with the amount and stated sources of wealth.
The frequently quoted finding was this: at comparable levels of wealth, millionaires who had predominantly earned their fortunes reported slightly higher wellbeing on average than those whose wealth came predominantly from unearned sources such as inheritance. The researchers themselves described the difference as moderate. A positive association with still greater wealth also appeared mainly at particularly high levels of wealth.
At first, that sounds like a clear answer to our question. But the study was not an experiment in which two otherwise identical people were randomly required either to earn or to inherit a fortune. It captured differences between people whose lives had already taken different paths. The samples were predominantly male, very well off and reachable through a financial institution. That is valuable for studying millionaires, but it is not a random selection of all wealthy people.
Sources of wealth were also recorded in categories. The researchers could not determine to the last penny what proportion of existing wealth came from personal effort and what proportion from transfers or other sources. Participants reported their own wellbeing, rather than providing an objective measurement of a happy life. The two studies also used different questions to assess it.
Above all, a statistical association does not give us an unambiguous explanation of its cause. Perhaps a sense of achievement plays a part. Perhaps occupation, life history, age, family or self-image differ. Perhaps something else contributes to the small gap between the groups. The study establishes an interesting connection between the source of wealth and wellbeing. It does not prove that people who inherit must be less satisfied psychologically.
What might matter about personal achievement
Work can give wealth meaning because the story of how it came about is familiar. Someone who founded a company may remember decisions, difficulties, opportunities and people they worked with. Someone who saved and invested over decades also knows the route to the result. The money may then represent skills, decisions and their own influence over the future.
That is a plausible interpretation, not something the millionaire study directly proves. Control over one's life does not arise exclusively through earning money. An heir can exercise considerable independence in running an inherited business. An entrepreneur, conversely, may spend years under financial obligations, debts and other people's expectations. The route by which wealth arrived does not automatically explain how much freedom someone experiences today.
Success never happens entirely in isolation, either. Someone selling a business probably achieved something themselves. Perhaps they also had good schools, understanding relatives, access to finance or a market that grew at just the right time. These circumstances do not diminish the value of their work. They simply complicate the story that someone created their entire fortune through their own efforts alone.
And heirs have achievements of their own. Someone might inherit wealth after decades of work. Someone else continues the family business and bears real responsibility for its employees. Financial advantage and personal effort can coexist in the same life without cancelling each other out.
Inherited money often carries a family history
Sociology offers a different perspective from measuring wellbeing alone. In twenty open-ended interviews conducted for a 2014 study, Merlin Schaeffer explored the social meaning of inherited financial assets in the United States. His interviewees included heirs, prospective heirs and people who wanted to leave something themselves.
The interviews revealed a tension between money that had not been earned and the idea of wealth being passed on as family support. Under this second interpretation, heirs sometimes also assume a role within the family: they become people who can help others. Schaeffer's study therefore helps explain why an inheritance might be experienced differently from the sale of a business someone founded, even when the amount is the same.
Hannah Quinz interviewed seven working heirs in 2022. She examined how they related their privileged position to ideas about achievement and fairness. Respondents developed different interpretations of their backgrounds and their work. These are illuminating qualitative findings, but seven interviews obviously cannot tell us how most heirs think.
Family ties therefore belong in a discussion of the source of wealth just as much as the financial transaction itself. Someone inheriting may also receive expectations, memories and habits. That can feel pleasant, burdensome or simply normal. We look more closely at the particular experience of feeling that inherited money is undeserved in A large inheritance and the feeling you have not earned it. Here, the broader picture matters: a source of wealth can carry a social history that appears on no bank statement.
How other people judge the source
Owners are not the only people who distinguish between earned and inherited money. Outsiders also judge who can fairly claim entitlement to wealth.
Sharon Baute, Luna Bellani and Katharina Hecht conducted a German vignette experiment published in 2025 with 6,018 respondents. Participants assessed descriptions of hypothetical wealthy people. Inherited wealth was considered less deserved than wealth acquired through entrepreneurship or management. Surprisingly, this did not translate into a correspondingly greater level of support for taxing heirs. The research appeared as an academic discussion paper; it captures social judgements about people described to respondents, not the inner lives of actual wealthy individuals.
That finding does not fit a simple story in which people fundamentally reject inherited prosperity. Apparently, they can consider a financial advantage less grounded in achievement and still accept it for other reasons. Family ties, conceptions of ownership and ideas of fairness may receive different weight.
For her 2017 book Uneasy Street, sociologist Rachel Sherman interviewed fifty affluent New Yorkers. The study describes how respondents justified their lifestyles and social advantages to themselves. Work, modesty and a desire not to consider themselves better than others played important roles. Interviewees included people with substantial inheritances and people with high earnings of their own.
Again, fifty interviews should not become a universal theory of millionaires. But they show how closely the origins of money can intertwine with social expectations. People do not only want to know whether they can afford something. Some also want to be able to explain convincingly why they are entitled to afford it. Whether that question concerns them at all varies from person to person.
An inheritance does not automatically change wellbeing
It is worth looking at the research from another angle here. The millionaire study compared people who were already wealthy. But what happens when someone actually receives an inheritance? Does their wellbeing change measurably afterwards?
Rachel Ong, Toan Nguyen and Garth Kendall examined this in an Australian longitudinal study published in 2018. They used data from 2001 to 2015 and distinguished inheritances from financial assistance provided by living parents. Using statistical methods, they attempted to account for differences between recipients and non-recipients. They found no systematic evidence of a causal effect of these transfers on the health and wellbeing outcomes examined.
That result does not automatically contradict the millionaire study. The Australian research asks a different question, examines a different population and uses different outcomes. It also cannot rule out strong effects on individual lives from particularly large or personally significant inheritances. It does, however, show why a transfer of money alone should not be assumed to have a fixed psychological effect.
A 2025 study by Ignacio Belloc, José Alberto Molina and Jorge Velilla, meanwhile, examined older people in 16 European countries. Among women, it found indications of an increased probability of depressive symptoms following an inheritance, particularly in some subgroups. At the same time, the authors found favourable associations for certain measures of physical health and activity. These findings are not a general statement that inheriting causes depression. They concern specific measures and groups in an observational study; an inheritance also often involves a loss whose own effects are difficult to separate fully.
Read together, these studies do not produce a convenient happiness ranking. The source of money can be associated with people's experiences. How strongly, in what ways and for whom is much harder to establish than the headline “Self-made millionaires are happier” might suggest.
What statistics do not know about your daily life
A source of wealth is initially an event, or a series of events, in someone's life. But other questions matter for what follows. Can they freely decide how to work? Is their wealth available to use or tied up in a business? Do other people have legitimate claims, or at least expectations? And what role does the owner want to take in future?
In a 2023 academic commentary, researchers Nicholas Buttrick and Shigehiro Oishi emphasised that many well-known studies of money and happiness measure income, although wealth has a different significance for people's long-term financial circumstances. They also point out that much more research is needed on the relationship between sources of wealth and wellbeing. Anyone relying on a particularly persuasive individual study should take that warning seriously.
Someone who has sold a business may miss their previous work afterwards. An heir may experience the freedom to choose their own career goals for the first time. Other people feel precisely the opposite. Such possibilities belong in a realistic account, but they must not subsequently be presented as measured findings of the cited studies.
Am I still the same person since becoming wealthy? looks at changes in self-image following financial advancement. Its focus is the journey between then and now. The source of wealth is only part of that journey, although sometimes an influential one.
The source does not determine what should follow
Perhaps the best way to answer the opening question is to distinguish two levels. The first is empirical: there is evidence that the source of wealth and wellbeing can be associated. Direct research among millionaires shows a moderate difference in favour of earned wealth. Other studies of actual transfers, however, find no uniform effect on health and wellbeing. That leaves us without a simple causal explanation.
The second level concerns the meaning people give their possessions. Someone can be proud of a business they built while recognising how much luck was involved. Someone can value an inheritance as a family gesture and lead their own life with it without guilt. Combinations are possible too. What people make of their financial history is not entirely decided by its opening sentence.
I therefore find a moral ranking of origins unhelpful. It would assume that the way money was acquired automatically determines character, life satisfaction or entitlement to ownership. Neither the data nor people's lives support all that.
Nor does the source of wealth tell us whether someone should keep, invest or voluntarily give it away. The idea behind Tired of Wealth explores the last possibility with unusual openness. It is addressed to people who want to consider it for themselves. Inherited money is no stronger a reason than earned money, and nobody needs to justify their financial history through a gift.
Ultimately, money has no memory of its previous owner. People do. Those memories, decisions and social relationships can explain why the same sum means something completely different in two lives. Its source is part of the story. How someone lives with their wealth today continues to write it.
Sources
Donnelly, Grant E., Tianyi Zheng, Emily Haisley and Michael I. Norton (2018). “The Amount and Source of Millionaires’ Wealth (Moderately) Predict Their Happiness”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(5), pp. 684 to 699. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217744766
Schaeffer, Merlin (2014). “The Social Meaning of Inherited Financial Assets: Moral Ambivalences of Intergenerational Transfers”. Historical Social Research, 39(3), pp. 289 to 317. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.39.2014.3.289-317
Quinz, Hannah (2022). “Die Weltsicht der ‚working rich‘: Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen und Legitimierungsstrategien von arbeitenden Vermögenserb:innen”. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 47, pp. 155 to 174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-022-00479-y
Baute, Sharon, Luna Bellani and Katharina Hecht (2025). “Deservingness of the Rich, Wealth Taxation, and the Paradox of Inheritance”. IZA Discussion Paper, No. 18043. https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/18043/deservingness-of-the-rich-wealth-taxation-and-the-paradox-of-inheritance
Sherman, Rachel (2017). Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691165509/uneasy-street
Ong, Rachel, Toan Nguyen and Garth Kendall (2018). “The impact of intergenerational financial transfers on health and wellbeing outcomes: A longitudinal study”. Social Science & Medicine, 214, pp. 179 to 186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.08.028
Belloc, Ignacio, José Alberto Molina and Jorge Velilla (2025). “When wealth hurts: Inheritances and the health of older Europeans”. The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 32, Article 100591. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeoa.2025.100591
Buttrick, Nicholas, and Shigehiro Oishi (2023). “Money and happiness: A consideration of history and psychological mechanisms”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(13), e2301893120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301893120