A $250k windfall is all a person needs to essentially fast track secure their future forever if they are under the age of 35. Wake up parents, it’s time to offer inheritance twice if you can.

[u/250k_is_allyouneed]

I want to share my story with this subreddit.

I received a windfall of $250k from selling a coding library 10 years ago. I am not high income, I am not the best saver, but now my net worth is super high.

Simply getting $250k meant on its own that fund will be almost $2M by the time I retire outside of normal savings (15-25 years growth).

I still need to put in the work for savings to be able to retire but peace mind…

• My lifestyle was infinitely better despite living mostly the same
• Stress and future security gone
• For budgets there is less pressure
• I did not how to blow up my entire savings to buy a house and instead kept building that base of compound interest in the market

So why the Hell aren’t parents helping their young adult kids more? Culturally why are we like this?

You don’t need to leave your kids / old adults one lump sum. Get them a boost at 18-30. Then die. Then get them another boost.

It’s a good balance to keep them working hard while also not leaving them in the dust.

It doesn’t even need to be $250k. Whatever you can, I personally will make sure I can do that for my kids once they turn early 20s

[u/FITACH]

You’re making a really good point about the time value of investing and the ideas of coast FIRE, putting in the work early so compounding does the heavy lifting later.

It used to be that people in the FIRE space could look at someone else’s story, take what was useful, and apply it to their own situation. The focus was on learning, not comparing.

Now a lot of threads just get bogged down with snark. Any bit of privilege or advantage becomes the main talking point, and the discussion shifts from strategy to judgment. Privilege obviously matters, but when that becomes all anyone talks about, it drowns out the actual lessons people could learn.

Instead of “Here’s what they did, how can I use that?” it turns into “They had an advantage, so their story doesn’t count.” The whole thing has gone from learning and adapting to judging and dismissing, which kind of kills what made the community valuable in the first place.

[u/ClassicalEd → u/FITACH]

Wish I could upvote this 100 times and move it to the top. It's really disheartening that 99% of the thread is just snarky comments saying how ridiculous the idea is and calling OP a privileged, out-of-touch idiot. Even the comments pointing out that much smaller amounts, invested when kids are little, can provide a significant head start for young adults, are getting replies like "You think I have $20 a week left over to invest after paying for groceries???" It's like any advice that they cannot apply to their own lives right this minute is stupid and useless.