Heirs Beware: 42% Spend Inheritance Within a Year, Study Finds
April 14, 2026 by Dinah Wisenberg Brin
Wink’s Moore on the Market: Nearly half of beneficiaries spend their inheritance within one year?!?
Michael Finke‘s research also supports these findings by Texas Tech University / the University of Alabama.
I personally put a spendthrift provision into my trust, so that my husband cannot blow the inheritance, once he will receive it at my death.
You know what’s interesting though? My grandma died of breast cancer when I was eight-years old. You know what my grandpa did with the money that was left over, after paying the funeral costs?
He bought a life only single premium immediate annuity.
That was in 1984. He received payments from that annuity, every month, for 33 years.
He would laugh and laugh over how he “got one over” on the insurance company, by getting back more money than he had paid into it.
THAT, my friends, is the power of an annuity. -sjm
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A significant portion of heirs burn through their entire inheritance within a year, and it’s different than the outcomes for other windfalls, new research shows.
The study, from researchers at Texas Tech University and the University of Alabama, found that 42% of heirs “had their net worth fall back to, or below, their pre-inheritance level when measured about 12 months later. In plain English, they had immediately blown it all,” one of the authors said in a recent LinkedIn post. Read at Think Advisor
