My husband and I have plenty of money to retire now, so 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 tension that many high-saving couples face as they close in on 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 by year-end, but guilt is holding her back: she wonders whether she should keep working longer 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, this couple has already done a great deal for their son. He will finish college without student loans, graduate school funding is in place, and his parents have seeded him with a stock account worth roughly $250,000. That is an extraordinary head start compared with what the average college student receives.

Her husband’s view is clear-eyed: they have given their son a substantial running start, and it is now his turn to build his own way. The OP sees things differently. She feels guilty about retiring to a lower-cost area while her son pursues a field he loves but one unlikely to generate high income. She describes him as hard-working, holding jobs and internships while still in school, and her goal is simply to protect him from financial hardship.

That fear is understandable, but the facts tell a reassuring story. Undergraduate costs are covered, graduate school is funded, and a $250,000 investment account is already in his name. By objective financial measures, this couple has met any reasonable standard of parental support. The guilt the OP carries is real, but it does not reflect a genuine shortfall in what she has provided. She has earned the right to enjoy the wealth she and her husband spent decades accumulating, including whatever portion she chooses to share.

The key insight is that she does not have to choose between her retirement and her son’s financial security. She can pursue both simultaneously.

How to balance retirement and family obligations

Focusing on the eventual inheritance is probably the wrong frame entirely. With any luck, the OP 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 arriving at 60 is a fundamentally different gift from meaningful financial support at 28. Optimizing for a larger estate, at the cost of years of retirement, misses the point entirely. 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, Cerulli’s 2025 research identifies Gen X as the generation receiving the largest annual transfers in the coming decade. Whatever the OP decides, her son will enter an era of significant intergenerational wealth flows.

A more useful frame is to identify concrete ways to help him now, without delaying retirement by a single day. 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 the prior-year edition. Applied to an $8.1 million portfolio, that rate would produce roughly $316,000 in annual income. That figure carries important caveats: the right withdrawal rate depends on asset allocation, inflation assumptions, and the length of the retirement horizon. Early retirees planning for a period well beyond 30 years should consider a more conservative rate, which would mean meaningfully less than $316,000 per year. Even so, given that this couple plans to leave a high-cost city and describes themselves as having simple tastes, their actual spending will likely fall well below that figure, leaving a healthy annual surplus.

That surplus is the practical answer to her worry. The IRS confirmed the annual gift tax exclusion at $19,000 per recipient for both 2025 and 2026. Gifts up to that amount require no gift tax return and use none of the donor’s lifetime exemption. A married couple can combine their exclusions and give $38,000 per recipient per year by electing gift-splitting on IRS Form 709, though filing that form is required to make the election. Beyond annual cash gifts, the couple could set aside funds over several years and contribute toward a home purchase when their son is ready. Neither path requires her to stay employed, and both allow her to remain an active and meaningful financial presence in her son’s life.

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 prior 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 case 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, that is a perfectly valid priority. The solution is not to delay retirement. It is 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 pass confirmed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s $15 million per-individual estate tax exemption (effective January 1, 2026, with no sunset) and the IRS-confirmed $19,000 annual gift tax exclusion for both 2025 and 2026, and it verified Morningstar’s 3.9% base-case safe withdrawal rate from the December 3, 2025 “State of Retirement Income: 2025 Edition.”

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