When my husband and I bought our first house in 1981, we were able to draw upon an unusual source to help make the down payment. My late grandmother, a writer and inventor of children's games, left a small legacy -- the rights to the first mass-marketed "Go Fish" card game. Introduced in the 1950s, the small fish-shaped cards designed to fit in the hands of young children provided her, and eventually my father and mother, with several thousand dollars annual income for many years.

My mother thought it a fitting legacy that some of the Go Fish money help us get a start. When friends marveled that my husband and I had bought a house in pricey Southern California in the midst of a recession and record-high interest rates, my husband would respond with a straight face, "My wife is the Go Fish heiress."

Of course, the joke was that no one would ever confuse me with an heiress. My father sold printing products and my mother taught third grade. They both drove secondhand cars that often broke down in the desert heat of El Paso, Texas. Both my husband and I came from solidly middle-class families. His father was a machinist and his mother worked as a nurse to put him through college. In the early 1980s, we were newly married, working as newspaper reporters and thrilled that we were making the monthly installments on a home in the suburbs. The Go Fish money was the perfect sort of windfall, welcome help from an elderly relative who had lived far away and whom I had seen only occasionally.

Within ten years, however, I would be faced with inheriting all that my grandparents and parents had accumulated. In 1993, when my mother died at age seventy-four, I became one of the first in the wave of baby boomers to grapple with the bequests of their World War II-era parents. (My father had died in 1976.) This was a much more painful and complicated windfall.

My mother had thoughtfully prepared a will leaving me, as an only child, all her possessions. She had even handed me a list of her assets handwritten on a yellow sheet of legal paper -- bank accounts, stocks, IRAs, with their estimated values and where they could be found. Although her actions clearly said, "Here, I'm giving you everything I own. Use and enjoy," I felt whipsawed between guilt and elation. The sum of my parents' modest life when liquidated would be worth at least $500,000.

During many of the eighteen months my mother was terminally ill, I struggled to care for her in our home, while also caring for my two young sons ages five and one, working, and trying to find time for my husband. Every day was an exhausting one. And the thought of coping with my impending inheritance was sometimes overwhelming. I can still remember driving home from work one afternoon and suddenly realizing what her possessions added to my own family's would mean: Two cats, three houses, four cars and five television sets. That's too much! I can't handle it! I was beginning to experience, as have many other heirs, the emotional burden that comes with inheritance.

And all too soon, those things were mine. My net worth had just quintupled, but I was far from happy. My two young sons would never really know my parents or my family home. I couldn't call up my mother for tips on making homemade pie crust or a good laugh over the toddler who decorated the living room couch with a Hershey's squeeze bottle. Certainly, I was relieved to have some greater financial security for our family, but at the same time I was bereft, a thirty-nine-year-old orphan. I felt thrust into a new stage of adult life, where I was to get on-the-job training in managing a scary sum of assets.

My inheritance included: the family home in El Paso; a 1913 summer house on Lake Michigan that my father's father purchased in 1933; bank certificates of deposit; shares of Exxon, Central & Southwest, and Bell South; an old English painting; a $30,000 IRA; stock in a mysterious Canadian mining company; lots of old books; the rights to the Go Fish game; and a black cat named Sarah Jane.

At least, I told myself, once I get past the grieving I'll know how to handle this estate. After seven years as a general business writer with the San Diego newspaper, I had recently been named the personal finance columnist. I told myself, I'll learn just what to do with my mother's IRA, the family Exxon stock, and the summer cabin. Well, I was wrong on two counts. First, grieving isn't necessarily something you get over quickly. And second, knowing what to do with your finances and following through on that know-how are two different things.

I kept bumping up against my emotions as I tried to deal rationally with the assets I'd inherited. While I could write in my column that it's generally best not to have more than 10 percent of your investment assets in any one company, I found the prospect of selling most of my $130,000 in Exxon stock for diversification a frightening prospect. The stock gave me a feeling of safety and protection, as if my family were still watching over me. And I felt an odd sort of loyalty to the stock. Look how good it had been to my family.

I knew, too, that it wasn't smart to let my mother's house in El Paso, the family home since I was five, sit there month after month continuing to accumulate tax and utility bills. But I was frozen with indecision. When my accountant, logically, asked why I didn't rent it out, I recoiled as if he'd suggested renting out room in a mausoleum. I just shook my head. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone else living there.

It began to dawn on me that I couldn't discuss the "problems" I encountered managing an estate with just anyone. It's not a good idea to let drop that you've just had a big bump-up in wealth around the office, at the PTA social, or with most people who knew you prebequest. I worried that people might envy or criticize me. Just as people are quick to judge on appearances and first impressions, so too are they likely to judge you by your perceived economic station.

At work I dealt all day long with the subject of money, yet I couldn't share my good financial fortune with anyone except my husband, my accountant, and my estate planning attorney. It was liberating finally when I made a friend of a woman who'd come into an inheritance the same time I had. We discussed the challenges and complications with the silent understanding neither would ever "out" the other in our social group.

The more I wrote and thought about how people manage their money, the more I realized that inheritance is a particularly isolating event. Inheritors can find themselves suddenly at odds with siblings and spouses over the bequest. It's often said, correctly I believe, that money is the last taboo -- that people are more likely to tell you how many times a week they have sex than they are to confess their net worth. But I think of inheritance as a triple taboo -- at the intersection of three emotionally charged issues: money, death, and family relations.

Inherited money isn't like other money. You didn't earn it, save it, or invest it. You received it because someone -- probably someone for whom you cared -- died. That's why your feelings about an inheritance can be conflicted and confused. Getting an inheritance is not at all like winning the lottery or striking it rich with company stock options, as some have suggested. The lottery, of course, is just a matter of luck. And starting or working at a successful company requires some initiative. Even the lowliest engineer at a high-tech company who makes millions from stock options can say: I might be fortunate, but I earned it, I worked hard, I took on risk in choosing to work for this company over others. If these newly rich feel guilty, it stems more from the feeling that they have so much when others -- including family and friends -- have much less.

When I surveyed the books written for inheritors, I found several, the most popular containing solid financial and legal advice. But they were not written from the perspective of the heirs. Inheritors need more than just good advice. They need, first of all, to know they are not alone in treating inherited money differently from other money. They need an understanding of why they feel deeply about what they've inherited, how this affects their behavior, and what they can do to improve their financial security. That's when I decided to write this book -- combining my personal experience and that of other inheritors with my decade-long work as a financial writer. I wanted to acknowledge and understand the emotions that heirs feel so they could better manage their new wealth.

Researchers predict that a mere 1 percent of the nation's baby boomers will get one-third of all the wealth passed from the World War II generation. This book, however, is not just for them. It's for anyone who views an inheritance as a problem or an opportunity, or both. A modest bequest, if managed well, can make a huge difference in the life of the inheritor.

Looking back now as an adult, I can see that the small inheritance of $1,000 that my mother received from her parents in the late 1950s marked a turning point in our lives. At a time when my parents were struggling financially, it bootstrapped us into middle class. My mother used the money to make a down payment on a $13,000 two-bedroom house. Up until then, we had been living in a rented house for married graduate students at the nearby university. The "yard" consisted of dirt and hardscrabble rock outcroppings. The new house, on the other hand, had trees and a backyard with a lawn. The front opened out to a large green park. It was my parents' first and only home.

My husband's parents, who died several years after my mother, left an estate of roughly the same size, or about $500,000. Some $300,000 of that came from the sale of their comfortable two-bedroom home in the San Francisco Bay Area where prices had skyrocketed with the explosion of high-tech companies. The rest came from their savings. My husband and his brother each received about $250,000.

As the inheritances that my husband and I received illustrate, middle-class families can leave good-sized estates. Since the 1980s, two key assets have shown substantial growth: real estate and stocks. It's not uncommon for older Americans to own a home with several hundred thousand dollars in equity, a respectable portfolio of stocks, and life insurance. An estate of half a million, one million, or more is commonplace. And of course, some heirs will receive more than one inheritance. Many inheritors have told me they were surprised how much their parents, aunts, and uncles and other relatives had accumulated. One woman marveled, "Dad didn't even realize it. He was almost a millionaire."

When I think about what my parents left me, I'm amazed and gratified by their tenacity. The most valuable assets -- the cabin in Michigan, the Exxon stock -- passed from my grandparents to my parents and then to me. These didn't get sold to pay off a pressing bill or to buy a new car. In their own middle-class way, my parents were doing what rich family dynasties have long practiced: creating wealth for future generations. Talking about my long-term holdings one day with San Diego money manager Mark Dowling, he joked that I'd discovered the ultimate "hot tip" to stock market success: "Pssst!! Buy Exxon and hold it for fifty years!" As more and more Americans, and not just the upper class, accumulate valuable assets that can be passed on to their children, financial advisors are beginning to speak of the practice of "intergenerational planning."

Throughout this book, I seek the advice of those who have not just knowledge, but wisdom, about these sensitive subjects and what to do in these often trying circumstances. I hope you will get not only a general understanding of "how to," but also of "why to." For example, I'd like you to understand not just how the latest tax laws on inheritance work, but why it's important to seek the help of an attorney and to review your estate plan periodically.

This book does not purport to be a comprehensive work on estate planning or an exhaustive how-to on money management. Rather, I'd like to address the issues unique to inheritors in a manner that is both compassionate (I've been there, too) and objective (I'm not pushing a product or service). Although I am writing mainly for adults who receive an inheritance from their parents, much of the information applies as well to those who must deal with estates after the death of spouses, siblings, and others.

The book is intended to guide you through the stages of inheriting. The first chapters look at the "great expectations" created by the ongoing wealth transfer from the World War II generation to their children and discuss how adult children and their parents can plan the transfer together while preserving family harmony. Middle chapters deal with both the "how to" aspects of inheritance as well as the emotional burdens that affect financial decisions. The final chapters examine your new role as inheritor, as you decide what legacy you plan to leave your own children, how you want to share what you have and how to know whether you're "heirworthy."

It wasn't until several years after my inheritance that I gradually adapted the estate to fit the needs of myself, my husband, and our two sons. The inheritance has helped us buy a larger house, save for retirement and college, and allowed me the flexibility to become self-employed, work from home, and spend more time with my sons.

Inherited money is not like other money. Don't squander it. Regard it as your "inheritance venture capital," a rare opportunity to enhance your life, in ways that you define.

For one of the first articles I wrote about inheritors, I remember asking Henry E. Zapisek, a financial planner who specializes in windfalls, whether inheritance made people's lives better. He responded, "An inheritance might or might not make your life more enjoyable, but it will almost certainly complicate it."

I hope, at the very least, that this book will help make your life less complicated, and at most, that it will help you find joy in your good fortune.

Copyright © 2003 by Ann Perry