I mean, right on? Why is it my burden to do so if none of my recent ancestors obviously bothered to?
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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I'm sure they did, and then some other moron ancestor burned it all down, and here we are.
The fun thin abt being black is that someone else has generational wealth because your ancestors actually did lock in
That is too damn real. ToT
I could have sworn I've seen a study that said generational wealth dissolves like 99% of the time sometimes during or after the third generation, that is it's exceptionally difficult to maintain wealth for generations upon generations.
If you ever get wealthy and your interest is in keeping the next generation wealthy, you set up a trust with stricts rules on keeping up with inflation, balancing accounts to even out the distribution and an absolute iron gate against drawing out the principal.
The long-long-long term generation wealth families don’t just hand the next generation an enormous pile of cash. They hand them the right to continually receive cash from a trust.
Wasn't there a family that would only have one heir to the money, incentivizing having only one or 2 children and both raised\groomed to not fuck up the money. Like if backup kid needed money, they'd get a loan from the trust but have to pay it back with interest. They have a family estate so if anyone fucks up they don't end up homeless. With so many advisers making sure the money is OK above all else.
I swear the Medici family still has an heir living off of that generational wealth
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it typically requires unusual behavior like that or very unusual circumstances such as very large and valuable (typically land) holdings that cannot be sold. Either the wealth gets divided too much or there's infighting or someone is given the keys to the kingdom and ruins it.
That’s why you create a family foundation that controls it so that no one person can ruin things. The family as a whole has to decide what to do when there’s any major decision.
Great Great grandfather had the opportunity to buy half of Boulder Colorado. Decided instead to invest in that stock market thing, it's never lost. Invested everything in early October of 1929.
Fucked my whole family up. My grandfather abandoned my grandmother and all his children because he needed to be rich to get his father's respect.
I was doing my genealogy and found out my great-grandparents lived in like the richest area of Pennsylvania. Checked census data and they were a maid and a chauffeur.
Assuming you are a black American, there's a pretty good reason
I have an ancestor with a wikipedia page. Somebody fucked up along the way....
you know, there should be Wikipedia articles for ancestors that fucked up. ones that specifically call out how they fucked up. for posterity.
Just leaving this sketch by Key & Peele here because your comment made me think of it, it's only tangentially related
My great grandmother's side of the family is immensely wealthy from starting a company that's a household name across the world today, but my little branch of the family is quite poor because she was disowned by them when she married my great grandfather (who I grew up with and who was a very kind, thoughtful, and loving man) because he didn't come from money and was the "wrong" kind of white. I'm very grateful she had the courage to leave that kind of wealth behind and separate herself from her racist, classist family.
Because securing generational wealth isn't as simple as "locking in," and neither is maintaining it.
Firstly, there's a threshold of income that you have to reach before you even become capable of purchasing an appreciating asset without enough debt to make your financial situation too precarious. In the US the average threshold is around 90k per year (though this varies a lot by region). Below that threshold people have to invest nearly all their income into simply making ends meet, with anything left going to a rainy day fund that gets periodically wiped out by unexpected expenses (if they can even manage that, otherwise the unexpected expenses force them to fall back on others or take a hit that pushes them further down the income ladder). There is no self-directed opportunity for advancement at this level without taking on debt (and therefore a great deal of risk), or you need a lucky break.
Finally, let's say you do get your lucky break and manage to buy a nice house, or some land, or start a successful business. Now the problem is making sure your wealth not only holds its value, but grows in value at a rate that exceeds inflation, keeps pace with a changing economy, and multiplies by however many inheritors you intend to pass it down to. This introduces another threshold below which the wealth will dwindle and disappear after only a few generations (the value of a lone house can collapse in just one). I don't know exactly what this threshold is right now in the US, but I know that above it it's virtually impossible to lose wealth because it grows rapidly on its own without intervention (this is because owning private property enables you to extract the value of others' labor, yay capitalism!).
Leaving the work 4 u
Double it and give it to the next person
Per his journal my great great grandad was poker buddies with the Oreida potato trio, and according to said journal he opted not to try their newfangled method of potatoing so we're all a little angry with him. i could have been a spud princess
family legend, so who knows how much truth and how much horsepucky, but there's a bit of each in there
You'll always be our spud princess here on Lemmy.
Aww thank you. I'll always less than three you too
So your user icon, I take it, is a spud.
uuuhhhhhh sure
i stole it from cyanide and happiness. it's talking out your ass dude!
They've been trained to burn it all by the time they die. That's retirement planning.
there was literally this thing selling to boomers the idea that they should die poor. Was big sometime in the eighties into the 90's I think. that they were wasting it if they did not spend it. Of course rich families did not do this.
I really do not understand it. My parents are the oldest Boomers. They should be wealthy beyond reason, right?
Be pretty hit or miss for most people thanks to the Shirtsleeves Proverb. Even if someone did make some money the next generation would likely piss it away. It’s really hard to hang on to wealth.
Cause the US didn't start getting fucked till the late 50's.
we'll just ignore the depression from the 20s-30s, and the wars from the 30s-40s.
I mean fucked with wealth diversity. Not in general.
Generational wealth? Get a job it'll keep you human.
So you're fixing the problem right?
Or are your kids going to say the same thing?