My husband and I have plenty of money to retire now — should we keep working to leave our son a larger inheritance?

Should you stop working during your prime earning years, or stay on the job to build a larger inheritance for a child who may not earn much? A Redditor in the fatFIRE community is wrestling with exactly this question, and her situation captures a dilemma that many high-saving couples face as they approach their financial independence number.

The original poster (OP) and her husband are both 48 years old, hold good jobs, and live simply. Those habits have produced a combined net worth of $8.1 million. They plan to retire and relocate at the end of the year, but guilt is holding her back. She wonders whether she should keep working to leave her son a larger inheritance.

So should the OP sacrifice her dream of early retirement to build a bigger estate for her son, or step away from work and let her child chart his own course?

This post was updated on November 9, 2025 to clarify a safe withdrawal rate is based on multiple factors, as well as offer an objective perspective on financial support of a child.

How much do parents owe their kids?

By any reasonable measure, the OP has already done a great deal for her son. He will finish college without student loans, graduate school funding is already in place, and she and her husband have seeded him with a stock account worth roughly $250,000. That is a genuinely extraordinary head start compared with what most college students receive.

Her husband’s view is clear-eyed: they have given their son a substantial running start, and it is now his turn to earn his own way. The OP sees things differently. She feels guilty about retiring to a lower-cost area while her son majors in a field he loves but one that will not generate high income. She describes him as hard-working, holding jobs and internships while in school, and her goal is to protect him from financial hardship. Without additional help, she fears he will struggle.

That fear is understandable, but the facts tell a reassuring story. She has covered undergraduate costs, funded graduate school, and handed over $250,000 in investment assets. By objective financial measures, her obligations as a parent have already been more than met. The guilt she feels is real and valid, but it does not reflect an actual shortfall in what she has provided. She deserves to enjoy the wealth she and her husband spent decades building, including whatever portion of it she chooses to share with her son.

The central insight here is that she does not have to choose between her retirement and her son’s security. She can pursue both at the same time.

How to balance retirement and family obligations

The OP’s focus on the eventual inheritance is probably the wrong frame entirely. With luck, she will live for a very long time. Federal Reserve research shows that inheritance receipt tends to peak around age 60, meaning most heirs collect their windfall when they are already well into their careers, have paid down much of a mortgage, and stand within a decade of retirement themselves. An inheritance that arrives at 60 is a fundamentally different gift from meaningful support at 28, so optimizing for a larger estate misses the point. Cerulli Associates’ December 2024 projections estimate that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with Millennials projected to inherit $46 trillion and Gen X $39 trillion. In the near term, however, Cerulli’s 2025 research identifies Gen X as the generation receiving the largest annual transfers in the coming decade. Her son will be entering an era of significant intergenerational wealth flows regardless of what his parents decide today.

A more useful frame is to identify ways to help her son now, while still walking away from the workforce on schedule. Morningstar’s “State of Retirement Income: 2025 Edition,” published December 3, 2025, sets 3.9% as the base-case safe starting withdrawal rate for a 30-year retirement at 90% confidence, up from 3.7% in its prior-year edition. Applied to an $8.1 million portfolio, that rate would generate roughly $316,000 in annual income. The figure is an approximation: the right withdrawal rate depends on asset allocation, inflation expectations, and the length of the retirement horizon. Early retirees planning for a period significantly longer than 30 years should consider a more conservative rate, which would correspond to meaningfully less than $316,000 per year. Either way, given that she and her husband plan to leave a high-cost city and share “simple tastes,” their actual spending will likely fall well below that figure, leaving a meaningful annual surplus.

That surplus is the practical answer to her worry. Each donor can give up to $19,000 per recipient per year completely free of federal gift tax, with no gift tax return required. The IRS confirmed that annual exclusion at $19,000 for both 2025 and 2026. A married couple can effectively double that amount to $38,000 per recipient by electing gift-splitting on IRS Form 709, though the form must be filed when that election is made. Beyond annual cash gifts, the couple could also accumulate funds over several years and contribute toward a home purchase when their son is ready. Neither path requires her to keep working, and both allow her to remain an active financial presence in her son’s life without tethering herself to a paycheck she no longer needs.

The broader estate picture is also favorable. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, the lifetime estate and gift tax exemption rose to $15 million per individual starting January 1, 2026, up from $13.99 million in 2025. The previous threshold, set under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, was scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 and would have reverted to roughly $7 million per person without congressional action. The new law makes the $15 million level permanent with no sunset provision, giving a married couple a combined $30 million shield before any federal estate tax applies. The exemption is indexed for inflation beginning in 2027. For a couple with a net worth of $8.1 million, federal estate tax is simply not a realistic concern, which makes the argument for staying employed to “build a bigger estate” even weaker than it might first appear.

She has no obligation to pursue any of this additional giving. She has already cleared any reasonable bar for parental financial support. But if part of how she wants to enjoy early retirement is by smoothing her son’s path, there is nothing wrong with that priority. The solution is not to delay retirement but to build a deliberate giving plan that fits comfortably within her retirement income, so that both goals are satisfied at the same time.

Editor’s note: This revision corrects and refines the gift-splitting note to reflect that couples electing to combine their annual exclusions into a $38,000 gift must file IRS Form 709, adds Morningstar’s 3.9% figure from the December 2025 “State of Retirement Income: 2025 Edition” (up from 3.7% the prior year), and updates the Cerulli Great Wealth Transfer data to distinguish Millennials ($46 trillion) from Gen X ($39 trillion) and to note Gen X leads in near-term annual transfers.

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