This is a terrible attitude to have if you care about the long-term viability of your family. My parents have inherited a little bit of money - it'd be a fortu

This is a terrible attitude to have if you care about the long-term viability of your family. My parents have inherited a little bit of money - it'd be a fortune where I grew up, although you couldn't buy a house in SF with it - but that money isn't really theirs, just like it won't be mine when they are gone. It's the slowly, painfully built fortune of the entire lineage, going back to before 1900, and it's something to be carefully grown and protected. If any generation blows it, there goes the cushion that we've worked for decades to climb out of subsistence farming to the middle class.