Inheriting a significant amount of money is rarely uncomplicated. Even when the relationship was loving and the planning was thoughtful, the experience tends to arrive with emotional weight, logistical complexity, and financial decisions that feel more urgent than they actually are.
The most important thing to understand going into the first ninety days is this: most decisions can wait. The few that can't are mostly administrative, not strategic. Acting quickly on the wrong things — and slowly on the right ones — is one of the most consistent patterns we see in how inherited wealth gets mismanaged. Here's what actually needs to happen, and in roughly what order.
The First and Most Important Rule: Don't Rush
There will be a strong pull toward action. Advisors may call. Family members may have opinions. You may feel a sense of obligation to do something meaningful with the inheritance quickly, as if leaving it untouched is somehow irresponsible or disrespectful to the person who left it.
Resist that pull. The biggest financial mistakes made with inherited wealth tend to happen in the first ninety days, driven by grief, guilt, pressure from people with their own interests, or simply the discomfort of sitting with unresolved complexity. Taking time is not the same as being passive. It's being deliberate — and that distinction tends to be worth a significant amount of money over time.
Handle the Administrative Steps First
There are time-sensitive tasks that genuinely need to happen, and these are worth addressing promptly. Retitling assets from the deceased's name into yours — or into a trust, if one exists — is necessary before those assets can be managed, invested, or distributed. Financial institutions require death certificates and paperwork confirming your authority to act. Beneficiary designations on accounts you already own may need to be reviewed and updated in light of what's changed.
These are paperwork tasks, not strategic decisions. Getting them done efficiently matters. But completing the paperwork is not the same as having made investment or planning decisions — and conflating the two is where people get into trouble. Get the accounts retitled. Update your own documents. Then slow down before making anything else permanent.
Understand the Tax Character of What You Received Before Touching Anything
Different inherited assets carry very different tax characteristics, and getting this wrong — particularly in the first few months — can be genuinely costly and irreversible.
A taxable brokerage account typically receives a stepped-up cost basis to fair market value at the date of death. This means embedded capital gains that existed during the original owner's lifetime essentially disappear for the inheritor — and selling those assets shortly after inheriting them often produces little or no capital gains tax. This is one of the most valuable and most underused aspects of inherited wealth, and acting before understanding it can mean paying taxes that didn't need to be paid.
A traditional IRA is the opposite. It does not receive a step-up in basis. Every dollar distributed from an inherited IRA is taxable as ordinary income — at your rate, in the year you take it. Life insurance proceeds are generally income-tax-free. Inherited real estate receives a step-up. Inherited annuities have their own rules entirely.
Understanding what you actually received — and what the tax treatment of each piece is — shapes every decision that follows. For a comprehensive overview of how inherited IRA rules work under current law and what the most common mistakes look like, this guide to inheriting a $3M IRA covers the mechanics in depth and is one of the most important things to read before making any distribution decisions.
Understand the Inherited IRA Rules Specifically
If you inherited a traditional IRA, this deserves its own conversation. The SECURE Act changed the rules significantly for most non-spouse beneficiaries. If you inherited an IRA from someone who passed after December 31, 2019, you are generally subject to a 10-year distribution rule — the account must be fully distributed within 10 years of the original owner's death.
IRS guidance has further clarified that if the original owner had already begun taking required minimum distributions, annual distributions are generally required in years one through nine, with the remainder due in year ten. Getting this wrong — or not knowing the rule existed — can result in substantial penalties. The 10-year clock starts at death, not when you discover it, which means time already spent not taking distributions counts against you.
This is one area where getting clear on the rules before taking any distributions is not optional. What you do in the first year of an inherited IRA can create obligations that last a decade.
Assemble the Right Team — Before Making Investment Decisions
Significant inherited wealth often creates a need for professional coordination that wasn't required before. That means an estate or trust attorney if assets are flowing through a trust or if the estate is still in administration. A CPA who understands the tax character of inherited assets — stepped-up basis, income in respect of a decedent, carryover basis, and how the inheritance interacts with your existing tax picture. And a financial advisor who can help you think through how the inheritance fits into your broader financial goals.
These relationships work best when they're connected — sharing information and working from the same plan, rather than operating independently and hoping the pieces add up. If you don't currently have a coordinated advisory team, this is the moment to build one — before making decisions, not after. For a look at what coordinated wealth management looks like for families navigating significant assets, this page on our approach to serving high-net-worth families explains specifically how we work and what that coordination involves.
Reset the Investment Policy for Your Situation
The investments the deceased held were right for their goals, their risk tolerance, and their stage of life. They may not be right for yours. An inherited portfolio that was structured for a 78-year-old living on investment income may be entirely wrong for a 45-year-old still in accumulation, or for a 65-year-old with a very different income picture and estate plan.
The point isn't to immediately sell everything and start over — that has its own tax implications, and in some cases the stepped-up basis situation makes the existing holdings quite attractive to hold. It's to evaluate what you've received against your own financial situation and goals, and make a deliberate plan for how to integrate it — ideally with someone who can model the tax implications of different approaches before executing any of them. For context on how larger portfolios are typically structured at the wealth level you may now find yourself at, this overview of how families with $5M–$20M actually invest is a useful reference point.
Watch for the Emotional Decision-Making Window
The financial stakes of inherited wealth are high. But the emotional stakes are often higher — and they tend to affect financial decisions in ways that are very hard to see clearly from inside the experience.
Guilt about receiving money drives some people to give it away too quickly or too broadly. Grief clouds judgment about what the person who left it actually would have wanted. Family dynamics — other heirs, expectations, informal promises made over the years — create pressure that has nothing to do with financial logic. And the sheer novelty of managing a significantly larger balance than before can produce both overconfidence and anxiety in the same person at different moments.
The families who handle inherited wealth most effectively tend to share one characteristic: they gave themselves time, assembled the right advisors, and made their major decisions from a place of clarity rather than urgency. The ninety-day window isn't a deadline for making decisions — it's a window for getting organized, understanding what you have, and building the team and the framework that will allow you to make those decisions well.
If you've recently inherited significant assets and want a second opinion on how to approach the planning, we'd welcome the conversation. This is exactly the kind of situation where getting the first steps right matters enormously — and where having the right team in place early tends to make everything that follows much cleaner.
Inheriting significant wealth is one of the highest-stakes financial transitions a family can face. We work with families throughout the St. Louis area to navigate inherited assets thoughtfully — from understanding the tax implications to building an investment and estate structure that reflects your goals, not the prior generation's.
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John Wahl is a CFP® and ChFC®, co-founder of One Bridge Wealth Management, and was named to the Forbes 2025 Best-In-State Next-Gen Wealth Advisors list. One Bridge is a fee-based independent wealth advisory practice serving high-net-worth families in the St. Louis area. One Bridge Wealth Management acts as a fiduciary when managing assets. 2025 Forbes Top Next-Gen Wealth Advisors, created by SHOOK Research. Presented in Aug 2025; based on 03/31/25 data. Advisors pay a fee to hold out marketing materials . Not indicative of advisor’s future performance. Your experience may vary. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalized tax or investment advice. Please consult a qualified tax professional regarding your specific situation.