On Being Disinherited
And the social meaning of money
One of the first things that students ask in my Wills and Trusts class is whether you can disinherit your children. The answer is always the same: a resounding yes. There are lots of countries in which you cannot legally disinherit a child, but ours is not one of them. To disinherit a child, it is as simple as leaving that child out of your will or excluding them as beneficiaries on other forms of estate planning like life insurance, trusts, or retirement accounts.
Estate planners, nevertheless, recommend that you specifically mention the child you wish to disinherit with instructions that nothing be given to that child. Failure to do so may lead to a claim of unintentional omission and, if the claim is successful, the child may get a portion of the estate. Explicit disinheritance in the will can be swift and elegant, even. Calvin Coolidge famously wrote in his will: “Not unmindful of my son John, I give all my estate, both real and personal, to my wife, Grace Coolidge, in fee simple.”
Sometimes, the reasons for leaving a child out are sympathetic. One child is doing well financially while another child has acute needs. A child is financially comfortable and the parent wants the money to go to charity. Disinheritance can still, even under such circumstances, bring unexpected grief for the child.
More often than not, however, disinheritance is an act of anger or disappointment, the final act of a parent who wishes to use money and its withholding to make a statement. A parent may disinherit a child because the child went against the parental wishes or failed to act in accordance with family expectations. In some of these cases, an estrangement precedes the disinheritance; and in many of these cases, disinheritance is used as a mode of control while the parent is alive.
Novels are full of disinheritance plots and full of characters who revel in manipulating their children and other family members through money. King Lear may be one of the most famous disinheritance plots in English literature. But the disinheritance plot comes into its full glory in the nineteenth-century novel.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility features a threatened disinheritance, when:
[Edward’s] mother explained to him her liberal designs, in case of his marrying Miss Morton; told him that she would settle on him the Norfolk estate, which, clear of land-tax, brings in a good thousand a year . . . and in opposition to this, if he still persisted in this low connection [to Lucy], represented to him the certain penury that must attend the match.
Almost every novel written by Anthony Trollope features some kind of disinheritance plot or inheritance drama; Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit is all about an older man toying with his relatives by dangling the possibility of disinheritance in front them. And Henry James explored disinheritance in Washington Square, a novel in which a father tries to control his daughter’s marital choices. These disinheritance dramas reveal a number of things – anxieties over personal and family legacy; the desire of the person with money to control things from beyond the grave; and the ways in which money – whether through threat or promise- has the power to shape the behavior of family members.
One of the more important take-aways, however, is the reminder of how many meanings, many deeply personal, money has. Sociologists of money have explored the “social meaning of money,” explaining how a dollar received in a paycheck possesses different meanings than a dollar received in government benefits, just as it differs from a dollar received in a divorce settlement. Writing a child out of a will and the responses that this act provokes confirm that money received (or not received) through inheritance has a very particular social meaning. And that the meaning of inheritance extends far beyond the economic, seeping into calculations about personal value, parental feeling, and family identity.
That's a great one! For not parents in Trollope, my favorite is always Mr Scarborough's Family and the Prosper Miss Thoroughbung storyline 🤣.
As a last comment, I'll add that it seems to me that inheritance creates a "wealth" of social problems, including exacerbating inequality and disincentivizing work. It's painful for children to be disinherited, and the problem is really a much bigger government policy problem. If I could set the policy, inheritance taxes on large estates would be much bigger, not smaller, at least over certain limits!