When parents help their grown-up daughter buy a flat, hardly anyone needs it explained. If they give their son start-up capital for his own business, everyone immediately understands what's going on as well. Financial support within a family is familiar, often extremely sensible and frequently a very concrete form of affection.
I'm starting here on purpose, because a topic like "giving money to other people" can easily create the wrong impression. As if giving within the family were an old-fashioned habit you first had to shake off. That's nonsense. People who want to give something to their children or other relatives often have very good personal reasons for doing so. And people who aren't planning gifts like that don't have to defend their choice against what others want either.
Both can sit side by side.
How central the family is to giving during your lifetime is borne out by the figures, too. The UK's Institute for Fiscal Studies examined larger transfers of money and wealth between living people. In the British data it analysed for 2018 to 2020, 83 per cent of the total value of recorded gifts went from parents to their children. That says nothing about whom any particular millionaire ought to give their money to. It shows how natural family support is in practice.
And it can achieve a great deal. A financial gift can make an education easier, put a roof over someone's head or provide extra security during a difficult stage of life. Or it can simply bring joy. Not every gift needs a master plan.
Some wealthy parents want to give their adult children large sums. Others prefer to help now and then. Others again combine financial support with the wish that their children become independent and gain their own experience. None of these attitudes is automatically wiser, more loving or fairer than the others.
This is exactly where conversations about large fortunes often turn moral surprisingly quickly. Give a lot, and you are supposedly encouraging dependence. Give a little, and you are supposedly mean. Yet financial support can make independence easier without guaranteeing it. And going without help doesn't automatically make a young person more self-reliant.
Families are far too different for sweeping judgements like these.
A qualitative study of Polish families from 2026 describes how parents and adult children reconcile financial support with the desire for independence. Among other things, the participants looked for ways of accepting or passing on money without losing their sense of themselves as self-reliant adults. This is research from one particular social setting, not a rule for wealthy families everywhere in the world. But it makes one thing clear: even well-meant help is negotiated within relationships and experienced in different ways.
If the question of support and independence interests you in more detail, I've already written about it in Wealthy parents, adult children: how much help is too much? Here I'd like to stay with a different question: does the recipient of a private gift of money actually have to be family at all?
In short: no, not as a rule. People also give money to friends, partners or other people. Whether a particular gift is possible and legally valid, which formal requirements apply and what the tax consequences are, however, depends on the specific circumstances and the countries involved. A blanket answer for the whole world would be misleading.
In any case, I find the human side more interesting. Perhaps someone has known the person they want to give to for decades. Perhaps it's someone whose work or outlook they admire. Perhaps they want to support a particular path in life. And perhaps there are reasons they would rather not explain to anybody.
None of that is a reason for anyone to speculate about family relationships.
A different choice is not a verdict on the family
I don't have much time for articles that suggest wealthy parents should, on principle, give their children nothing. The idea that young people should grow up independent can be a personal value. But it is no scientific licence to claim that parental help is harmful in principle. Nor does an outsider have any right to judge a particular family's story by looking at a bank balance.
And I certainly don't want to turn a private decision into a competition. Nobody should read an article on my website and suddenly feel they have to act against their own family in order to do me a favour. If someone wants to give their daughter money, I hope the decision turns out to be right for both of them. There's nothing to belittle about that.
There are, however, people who are thinking about a different kind of private gift. Perhaps they have no children, want to give to someone outside their family for personal reasons, or simply have other ideas. Their motives are, first and foremost, their own business.
That's hardly a great revelation; it's actually pretty mundane. And yet we talk surprisingly rarely about private gifts of money to people outside our personal circle, while family support and charitable donations are instantly available as familiar categories.
On Tired of Wealth I've published a personal offer: if someone, out of their own conviction, is considering a larger private gift to me, I'm open in principle to talking about it. I genuinely would like the money. I'm not promising to use it for charitable purposes, and I'm not telling some invented tale of hardship to get it.
Nor am I claiming to be the only person in the world making an offer like this. And I'm not assuming that someone will get in touch tomorrow wanting to send me a seven-figure sum. Saying the possibility out loud mainly costs me one thing: the nerve to admit what I'd like.
Nothing follows from it for anyone else. I don't want to talk anyone out of supporting their children, their family or their favourite charitable cause. Someone who wants to keep their money owes nobody here a justification, any more than someone who supports their relatives does.
The same applies to my offer: a large gift would have to be voluntary and well considered, and checked independently from a legal and tax point of view before any transfer. The rules vary considerably from country to country, as an OECD comparison of gift and wealth transfer taxes also shows.
Giving money to a stranger is, after all, a big personal decision. The fact that I'm willing to be the recipient makes it neither automatically sensible nor automatically wrong.
Frequently asked questions about gifts of money outside the family
Can I give money during my lifetime to someone I'm not related to?
In many legal systems, this is possible in principle. The requirements, the form of the transfer, any taxes and reporting obligations can, however, differ considerably. With large or cross-border gifts in particular, independent legal and tax advice is essential.
Do I have to give my children money if I'm wealthy?
Simply being wealthy doesn't create any general moral duty to give your own children money during your lifetime. Whether specific legal obligations exist depends on the relevant legal system and your personal situation. This article doesn't pass judgement on individual family decisions.
Is it wrong to give money to someone else rather than a family member?
There's no blanket answer to that. Relationships, obligations and personal convictions vary enormously. A private gift to someone else is no proof that a family is a bad one, and a gift within the family is no sign of a lack of independence.
Would Tired of Wealth accept any large gift?
No. If only because a large gift would need careful, independent checks, my offer is not an automatic promise to accept. I explain the details and the limits on the page My offer.
Perhaps that's why this topic ends with a surprisingly unspectacular conclusion: the most obvious person to give something to is often someone in your own life. If that's exactly who you want to give to, you don't need to go looking for an alternative. And if, of your own accord, you have a different recipient in mind, there's no need to turn that into a crusade against family support.
Sources
Boileau, Bee, and David Sturrock (2023). Who gives wealth transfers to whom and when? Patterns in the giving and receiving of lifetime gifts and loans. Institute for Fiscal Studies. https://ifs.org.uk/publications/who-gives-wealth-transfers-whom-and-when-patterns-giving-and-receiving-lifetime-gifts
Olcoń-Kubicka, Marta (2026). "Managing ambivalence: Relational work in financial support between parents and adult children". Journal of Consumer Culture, published online 12 October 2026. https://doi.org/10.1177/14695405261495004
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2021). Inheritance Taxation in OECD Countries, chapter 3: "Inheritance, estate, and gift tax design in OECD countries". OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/inheritance-taxation-in-oecd-countries_e2879a7d-en/full-report/component-6.html