I don't expect anything because both my parents are gone, but while I was reasonably sure that they would leave me something, I planned and went about my life as if they wouldn't.
My mother spent the last few years of her life traveling, which was wonderful, but then started to cut back and talk about being concerned about outliving her money. But she kept talking about helping us make improvements on our house, so after she passed and left us $250K, we used about 20% of that to do home improvement projects we had been considering. She would have liked that. The rest we spent down in order to subsidize maxing out our retirement savings, as it would have been really uncomfortable to put that much into retirement at the income we were making back then. We basically shifted money around to put what she left us in our 401(k)s and Roth IRAs, even though technically we could not do that directly.
My father put me on his accounts a few years before he passed, and made sure I knew where everything was. I tried to pay for things for him because he wouldn't spend much on himself, and eventually showed him our detailed balances in an effort to show him that we would be fine if he didn't leave us anything. He left us $650K, and that is going towards the kid's college and other life events, as he would have wanted. It also enabled us to up our yearly charitable giving, although we've hit a bump with that. I did make a sizeable one-time contribution in his name to a cause that was very important to him (VFW).
My partner's remaining parent is doing fine, and their property is worth quite a bit, but all we're really expecting is that they'll be able to provide for their own health care/home care until the end on their own, we're not counting on inheriting anything except some small items of sentimental value. If there is a considerable estate, we will probably leave a very large donation to their church, where they are very active, and another cause or two where they devote a lot of time (AAUW).
