Imagine someone receives a large inheritance. Enough to be financially independent for the foreseeable future. They have not cheated anyone, taken anything from anyone or pretended to achieve something they did not. Even so, they hesitate to enjoy their new room for manoeuvre. Perhaps they are thinking of friends who have had to scrimp for years. Perhaps they can hear the old saying in their head that money is something you have to earn. And they may realise that these two thoughts are hard to reconcile with the wealth they have received.
To begin with, this is a possible situation, not a description of all heirs. An inheritance can be experienced quite naturally as loving support within a family. It can provide security or be the continuation of a succession that has long been discussed. Other people feel gratitude, obligation, doubt or several of these at once. A large fortune obliges nobody to feel guilty.
The question is still an interesting one: where does the impression come from that you are not entitled enough to an inheritance? If money is something you normally receive through your own work, what happens to that idea once a considerable sum changes hands because you belong to a family?
An inheritance cannot be explained by a payslip
In many areas of life, the story of personal merit is a familiar one. We learn that work, perseverance and skill ought to be rewarded. For certain decisions, that is a reasonable yardstick. With an inheritance, though, it only fits up to a point. A person usually receives the wealth because someone else wants to leave them something, or because particular family and legal circumstances provide for it. Their own professional ability is not necessarily what decides the matter.
This is exactly where a tension lies that can be resolved neither by simply praising a society built on achievement nor by condemning inheritance across the board. Families have their own reasons, values and obligations. Many people want to pass on something they have built. At the same time, we know that the distribution of great wealth does not depend solely on personal effort. Anyone born into a wealthy family can receive opportunities that remain closed to others.
This social observation, however, does not yet amount to a verdict on the character of any individual heir. The fact that a fortune did not come from your own work says little about whether you live responsibly, generously or independently. Conversely, a successful career does not automatically prove that all of someone's prosperity was earned entirely by themselves. Support and favourable starting conditions do not disappear from a life story just because someone later achieves a great deal as well.
So what interests me is less whether the recipient retrospectively “deserves” a particular sum. More interesting is which ideas of achievement, family and fairness they bring with them into their new relationship with this money.
When two ideas of fairness collide
In twenty open-ended interviews in 2014, the sociologist Merlin Schaeffer explored what inherited money comes to mean for people in the USA who had already inherited, were expecting an inheritance or intended to pass on wealth themselves. His analysis describes a moral tension: wealth can appear unearned while also being understood as a means of family support.
This second perspective matters. Within a family, money is often not treated as a neutral object that happens to change owners. It can stand for care, for passing things on or for the idea that the next generation should have a slightly easier life. Someone who has inherited therefore does not necessarily have to justify their entitlement through their own achievements. They can see it as rooted in a relationship that existed long before the transfer.
Schaeffer describes how people look for a personal balance between these meanings. This is a qualitative study, not a representative survey of millionaires. It shows possible interpretations, but not how many heirs actually feel uncomfortable. On such an emotionally charged subject, I think this caveat is essential.
You can see it in a simple, hypothetical situation. A mother has run a business for decades and wants to leave part of her wealth to her children. One of the children sees the inheritance as an expression of the family's shared history. Another experiences the same transfer as an uncomfortable advantage over people whose parents had no such opportunity. Both may have loved their mother. Both may take their own careers seriously. Yet they give the money different meanings.
There is no reason to turn either of these reactions into a universally binding moral standard.
Why people retell where they come from
A revealing study by Liz Moor and Sam Friedman from 2021 looks at people who had received financial help from their families when buying their first home. The researchers conducted 27 interviews with London homeowners who had made use of gifts or inheritances. Many tried to reconcile this advantage with their belief that economic success ought to be based on merit.
Some told lengthy stories about earlier generations who had worked hard or worked their way up in society. Others drew a line between the support they had received and the supposedly less deserved wealth of other people. Stories like these can help people connect their position with a familiar self-image. But they can also serve to make the influence of the support they received seem smaller.
That is understandable on a human level. If you have always seen yourself as independent, you do not want to give up that self-image just because of a transfer of wealth. And if you respect what your parents or grandparents achieved, you may feel their story is part of your own. You just should not turn a family success story into a claim that every later financial opportunity was earned through your own effort alone.
The London study is mainly about access to home ownership, not only about inheritances worth millions. For that very reason, it is not direct evidence of how much millionaires struggle with guilt. It does, however, make a mechanism visible: people link money to stories about who they are and why they are where they are.
One small question can help you look at your own story more closely: what have I built myself, what was made possible for me, and which parts of my life do I owe to other people's decisions? These questions do not call for self-reproach. It would just be a shame if you had to smooth over your own life story after the event for fear of an uncomfortable answer.
A guilty conscience is not an entry ticket to decency
Sometimes the insight that wealth is unequally distributed is turned into a surprisingly personal duty to feel ashamed. Anyone who has inherited something should at least feel bad about it. To outsiders, that may seem like a kind of moral balancing act. But a guilty conscience in itself changes neither the past nor the circumstances in which the inheritance came about.
The English phrase wealth guilt is sometimes used to describe feelings of guilt or unease connected with wealth. The term can describe an experience, but it is not a clear-cut psychological diagnosis. How often such feelings occur specifically after large inheritances cannot be put into figures with any credibility on the basis of the studies available here. Anyone presenting a general percentage would need to point to a suitable study with a clear definition and a transparent sample.
It is also worth distinguishing between guilt and shame here, at least in everyday language. A person can regret a specific decision of their own. But they can also feel uncomfortable about their social position, even though they cannot name any action they have done wrong. These experiences do not mean the same thing. An inheritance as such is not yet a personal failing.
This in no way means that questions about social inequality or the origins of great wealth are unimportant. You can think about them and argue about them publicly without prescribing a particular emotional state to every person who has inherited. Being glad of your own financial security does not automatically mean losing your compassion for people who have less.
Society cannot agree on what “earned” means either
How contradictory our standards can be is shown by an experimental study by Sharon Baute, Luna Bellani and Katharina Hecht published in 2025. In a German vignette experiment with 6,018 participants, respondents assessed different versions of wealth. Inherited wealth was judged to be less deserved than wealth acquired through entrepreneurship or management. However, this did not translate to the same extent into stronger support for taxing heirs more heavily than other wealthy people.
I find this contradiction remarkable. People can regard a financial advantage as less based on merit and at the same time consider it legitimate for other reasons. The idea that society has only one clear answer to inheritance does not do the subject justice.
It is important to be clear about what the study actually measures. It captures respondents' judgements about hypothetical wealthy people and their views on taxation. It does not measure the consciences of real heirs. Furthermore, the publication in question is an academic discussion paper, not a clinical study. Even so, it sheds light on how society judges where wealth comes from.
A qualitative study by Hannah Quinz from 2022 also shows how differently wealthy heirs justify their origins. Seven interviews with working heirs reveal different ways of reconciling a privileged position with ideas of merit and fairness. Seven conversations do not produce a typology that can automatically be applied to all wealthy families. But they round out the picture: even where people work and take on responsibility, the question of how much is down to their own achievement can remain open.
Gratitude can sit alongside unease
Another tension has, at first, little to do with the big public debates. Sometimes recipients themselves are not quite sure how to make sense of financial support within the family. Is it a gift? Is there an expectation behind it? Will something be asked in return later, even if nobody has said so?
In 2013, Sue Heath and Emma Calvert examined the experiences of young adults in Britain who received material or financial help from their families. In their interviews, gratitude and unease often existed side by side. Blurred lines between a gift and a loan could complicate matters. The people studied had not necessarily received a large inheritance. Even so, the work explains why the wish to be grateful does not provide a simple answer to every question of dependence or obligation.
Someone who has inherited can honour the person the wealth came from and at the same time reflect on their own new role. They need neither pretend that everything is purely their personal success nor take on a permanent debt of gratitude as their life's work. A financial transfer can change a person's relationship with their family's history without that history then having to dictate every decision.
The difference becomes especially clear when ideas about how the money should be handled later diverge. Perhaps the previous generation wanted the wealth above all to be preserved. Perhaps the heir wants to build something new with it. Perhaps a family has talked about such questions for a long time, perhaps not at all. The word “inheritance” on its own does not provide a complete plan for an entire life.
Who does an inheritance need to be fair to?
A look at those who leave wealth behind shows that they too are dealing with several ideas of fairness. For a study published in 2024, Rhian Powell spoke with 22 older people who were thinking about how to draw up their wills. The interviewees justified their ideas of a fair distribution with reference to closeness, relationships and differing claims, among other things. What seemed fair depended on the particular family context.
For heirs, this does not mean that every decision will automatically be free of conflict. One family may take equal shares for granted; another may consider different levels of support to be fair. There are expectations, disappointments and old stories. And sometimes an heir only discovers afterwards how differently the people involved understand the decision.
The actual experience of loss, and the connection between money and grief, are the subject of a separate article: When money and grief arrive together. Here, I am mainly interested in what happens to a person's sense of self after the transfer. The question of whether you deserved something can surface years later, long after the immediate events are over.
In families where parents already support their adult children during their lifetime, a similar tension plays a part. The article Wealthy parents, adult children: how much help is too much? looks at this relationship from both directions. It makes clear that support cannot be judged by its size alone.
A fortune does not have to be earned after the fact
Perhaps the question of an undeserved inheritance leads to a dead end if you take it too literally. Nobody can change, after the fact, the history through which a transfer came about. Someone who has received an inheritance cannot retrospectively turn it into self-earned income by putting in extra hours. And they do not have to try.
You can acknowledge where the money came from without romanticising it. You can name the part that family support played without belittling your own path through life. You can take responsibility for later decisions without having to prove your entitlement afresh every morning. Even contradictory feelings do not have to be turned straight away into a particularly impressive moral story.
How strongly the source of a fortune is linked to well-being and to a person's own experience is a larger research question in its own right. It is the subject of Earned or inherited: does the source of wealth matter?. Here, the focus is the narrower question of deservingness and the right to lead your own life with wealth you have received.
The idea behind Tired of Wealth approaches the voluntary handling of great wealth in an unusually direct way. But the thought that an inheritance was not earned by your own work creates no obligation to pass it on to me or to anyone else. A guilty conscience would be a pretty poor adviser for that decision anyway.
What matters, it seems to me, is that you need neither conceal where the money came from nor confuse it with your own personality. A person may have received a large inheritance and still decide for themselves what they make of it. The wealth says something about their family. The decisions that follow increasingly say something about them.
Sources
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
Moor, Liz, and Sam Friedman (2021). “Justifying inherited wealth: Between ‘the bank of mum and dad’ and the meritocratic ideal”. Economy and Society, 50(4), pp. 618 to 642. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2021.1932353
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
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
Heath, Sue, and Emma Calvert (2013). “Gifts, Loans and Intergenerational Support for Young Adults”. Sociology, 47(6), pp. 1120 to 1135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038512455736
Powell, Rhian (2024). “Figuring out fairness: The social construction of inheritance entitlements in close relationships”. The Sociological Review, 72(2), pp. 378 to 393. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231156681