Back in 2012, when my Grandmom was still alive, my Mom, who was handling some of Grandmom's financial affairs, dipped into our inheritances a bit early. It was with Grandmom's blessing, so there was nothing underhanded going on. Anyway, Mom cut a $10K check for each of us...herself, my uncle, and me.
Unfortunately, after the fact, we found out there were some implied strings attached. Not from Grandmom; she didn't care. But from Mom! Mom had simply put her $10K into a savings account, as sort of "emergency money" in case we needed to help out Grandmom later in life. She assumed that my uncle and I would do the same. But, she also must have assumed we were mindreaders, because she didn't actually TELL either of this until after the fact!
Anyway, I used my $10K to pay down the mortgage. My uncle used his $10K, a few months later, to make a substantial down payment on a new 2013 Camry. Mom was annoyed at both of us. I just told her that if we needed money to help out Grandmom later on, I could either cash in some investments. Or, simply pull it back out of the mortgage, as it was actually an HELOC. And as for my uncle, well that Camry was only about $20-21K total, so it's not like he was going for something extravagant. That down payment covered almost half of it, and his previous car was an '03 Corolla with about 240,000 miles. And, perceptions of vaunted Toyota reliability aside, that thing was a rolling time bomb at that point.
Anyway, that was the only time Mom did a premature disbursement from Grandmom's estate. But, when Grandmom passed away, in 2015, she was just fine, financially.
I have thought about, as I get older, pulling out some of my money and giving it to some friends, and relatives, who have kids that might need help with college and such. I don't have any siblings, and no kids of my own, so the closest relatives would be cousins and their kids.
In my case, as for getting $200K at the age of 30, or $500K at 50, I'm not sure which would have done much better for me. Looking at my records, when I was 30, which would have been 2000, I had about $50K in invested assets. I had a mortgage balance of around $73.6K or so on a condo that might have been worth $95-100K. The interest rate was 7.25%, but at the time that didn't seem bad. The principal/interest portion of the monthly payment was $506. I had also recently bought a 2000 Intrepid, on a 5 year term, but it was at 0.9%. Its payment was $347.66/mo.
So, if I landed $200K at that timeframe, I wouldn't have used it to pay anything down. However, I did have aspirations of one day selling the condo and moving to a single family home, so I might have used the money to help facilitate that. Back in 2000, you could still get the type of house that would have made me happy for around $150-175K, so I could have upgraded from the condo to a house, but still keeping a mortgage, and invested the rest.
However, at that age, it might have also set off a chain of events that altered my life, compared to where it is now. For instance, Grandmom had a second house, across the street from her, that had been in the family since before the Civil War. Well, the property had been; the house only dated to 1916. She had been using it as a rental. In 2003, she let me move into it. She also put my name on the title, as well as my uncle's, so that he didn't get screwed out of his ultimate inheritance. We would have put Mom's name on it as well, but she wasn't concerned about it. Anyway, I got to live there, rent free, although I did take out an HELOC, and some of that got invested. When I sold the condo, I walked away with a pretty good amount, as well.
But if I had landed $200K in 2000, and gone on and upgraded from the condo to a house right then and there, it's doubtful I would have moved in to the old 1916 house a couple years later. In the overall scheme of things, I might be better off today or worse off, who knows?
Now, if I landed the $500K at 50, which would have been in April of 2020? Well, my nest egg was down pretty significantly thanks to that Covid crash. I actually bottomed out on March 23 and made a pretty good recovery by my birthday, but still had a ways to go. So, investing a good chunk of that, at market lows, it would have bounced back nicely as the market improved.
By the end of 2021, I was around the $2.5M mark, and briefly topped it a few times, and was seriously considering retirement. I even remember thinking that if I was still around $2.5M by my 52nd birthday, I'd do it. By April of 2022 I was down to around $2.4M, but was also aware of how bad inflation had gotten, so that number wasn't as good as I had once thought it was. And, I just had a feeling things were going to get worse, so I kept working.
If I'd had that extra $500K, it would have put me over $3M by the end of 2021, and I would have probably retired then. Even if I wanted to hold out to my 52nd birthday, I would've still been at least around $2.9M, felt that was good enough, and probably retired. And then, as the market kept dropping, I'd probably be on here whining about second having second thoughts
Anyway, sorry for the drawn out response...but sometimes these "what if" scenarios can be kinda fun to think about.
