"Maybe not," Roger agrees. "But you've got to wonder if our kids could maintain this lifestyle -- or even make a living -- if the money quit coming.
"We think we might have been better off giving a little less and waiting a little longer," he adds. "Some of our kids were barely 21 at the time, and it might have been wiser to wait till age 30 or 35." Like other entrepreneurial parents, the Fergusons have also wondered whether it might have been wisest to simply take the kids off the dole and watch them make their own way in the world.
"Too often inheritors get the power before they've got the smarts to use it," says Stevenson, the Minneapolis inheritor and career consultant. He recalls being a 21-year-old millionaire who suddenly felt his career concerns were irrelevant. "In this culture the main standard for success is how much money you make, so at the time I thought if I already had what seemed to be all the money in the world, why should I start at the bottom and work my way up the ranks? I was already making more off my trust fund per year than I could in the first few years of a career." Had he been older, he might have had a ready benchmark for success to substitute for the money that had dropped into his pocket. As things stood, he struggled for a while until finally deciding to start his own business.
Stevenson didn't know ahead of time that he was going to inherit the money, which, he says, allowed him to lead a normal life. But most experts think there is a point at which children should know their parents' intentions. "I know of plenty of kids who turned 35, even 45, and still couldn't get an answer," says psychologist Barber. "They had been responsibly supporting themselves for years, but when they needed to know what to expect so they could do their own financial planning, the response was 'Don't worry, you'll have enough money.' "
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No matter how much their childhood affluence would seem to have prepared them for it, most inheritors say actually accepting the check with all the zeros changed their lives. Wade Ferguson, the number-two son of Roger and Sybil, speaks of his inheritance quite rapturously. "All of a sudden I could buy what I wanted, spend all kinds of money, and not worry," Wade says, delighted by the memory. "My wife and I went to town pretty good, and sure, we blew the interest for the first year or two." They traveled the world, they bought a Mercedes, and they showered relatives and friends with gifts. If Wade's parents disapproved, he certainly didn't know anything about it. "I remember their saying they wanted us to have a good time."
By all accounts, spending sprees are common among new inheritors. They are so common, in fact, that most experts say parents should quit worrying about them and start accepting them as part of the experience -- "so long as there isn't some deeper emotional need spurring it on," says Tracy Geary, cofounder of the San Francisco Women's Foundation, which offers a program for women inheritors. Rather than evidence of moral turpitude, a fling may simply mean the child has grown up with enough self-confidence to express himself or herself, and experiment with lifestyles.
It is at least as common, although probably not as psychologically healthy, to see new inheritors immobilized. Sometimes it stems from feelings of guilt attached to their newfound wealth; other times it's simply the result of discovering that their inheritance has removed one of the biggest motivations anybody has for doing anything: making money. Either way, it's a painful experience.
Cathie, for example, had trouble embracing the $500,000 windfall that resulted from her father's company being sold in 1978. "The buyers kicked him out right afterward, and it really left him a broken man," she says. How could she enjoy something that had caused her father such grief and disillusionment?
"For a long time I tried to pretend the money wasn't there," Cathie says. She didn't keep track of her investments because she didn't wholly understand them, and she procrastinated on self-made promises to become more informed. Like many other new inheritors who fail to come to terms with the changes in their lives, she had a tendency -- now curbed -- to let envelopes of bank and brokerage statements pile up in a corner, unopened.
"I mean, how do you define yourself," Cathie continues, "if you've got money and don't need to work for a living? I've had that concern myself, and I've seen it in other inheritors." It doesn't stop with the first generation, Cathie notes with humor. "The typical dilemma for inheritors who are also mothers," she says, "is this: if your kid's selling Girl Scout cookies, do you drive her around and help her sell them, or do you just buy the whole lot of them?"
Rachel, the film producer, felt similarly immobilized -- not by guilt but by opportunity. "Inheriting, for me, was a mixture of positives and negatives," she says. "The positives were the number of options that suddenly opened up to me and the immediate lack of financial pressure." And the negatives? "Only the options and the lack of pressure," she says wryly. Just as someone who's wearing two watches is never quite sure what time it is, the child of inherited wealth is often paralyzed by choice.
Not surprisingly, many inheritors assume a low profile, revealing their wealth only to their own, monied kind. "Half the time they're worried about being kidnapped, and the rest of the time they want people to think they've earned the money on their own," career consultant Stevenson quips.
