The Steward's Desk · Inheritance
Far less than you think, and on a far gentler clock. Here is what can wait, and the few things that can't.
Jesse Plunkett, CEPA®, CRPC®
July 12, 2026 · Meet your advisor · 
Usually not. Almost nothing about an inheritance has to happen in the first weeks, and very little has to happen in the first months. The money can wait in safe, insured accounts while you grieve. A deliberate pause, what I call a decision-free zone, protects you from choices made in a fog.
Grief and money math are a poor mix. The weeks after a loss fill up with paperwork that feels urgent, and it's natural to assume the investment and tax decisions run on the same clock. They don't. Nearly every money decision an inheritance brings gets better with time, and almost none of them get worse.
So give yourself permission to set a date. Many families pick a season, three months, six months, even a year, and promise themselves nothing big happens before then: no new house, no large gifts, no portfolio overhaul. Naming the pause turns it from avoidance into a decision you made on purpose.
A few things do. Inherited retirement accounts have withdrawal rules, including the SECURE Act's 10-year rule for most non-spouse beneficiaries. The estate has a settlement process the executor runs on the court's timeline. Insurance claims need to be filed. None of these are same-week emergencies, and none reward panic.
The item that deserves the most unhurried attention is an inherited retirement account. An inherited IRA or 401(k) needs to be retitled correctly before anything else happens to it, and a casual choice, like cashing the whole thing out, can turn much of the account into a single year's taxable income. Nothing there has to be decided this month. It simply shouldn't be decided by accident. I wrote a plain-language walkthrough of the rules: read how the inherited IRA 10-year rule works.
Estate settlement mostly runs on the executor's calendar, not yours. Accounts take time to transfer, houses take time to clear, and a final tax return gets filed for the person who died. Months is normal. If you're the executor as well as an heir, an attorney and a good checklist carry more of that weight than any investment decision does.
Somewhere stable and a little boring. A high-yield savings account and a money market fund are the two usual parking places, and they are not the same thing. Bank deposits carry FDIC insurance up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category, so a larger inheritance may need to be spread across more than one institution to stay fully covered. A money market fund is a security: it is not FDIC-insured and it can lose value, though it is built for stability.
If the balance is large, or you want a little more yield while it waits, two options are worth knowing. An ultra-short-term bond fund holds its value with only slight movement from day to day and often pays a bit more than savings or a money market fund, which suits money you will not touch for a year or two. And CDs opened across several banks let you keep more of a large inheritance inside FDIC coverage at once, since the limit applies per depositor, per bank. None of this has to be decided this week. It simply gives the parked money a better home than a checking account while the pause runs.
A kindness clients have taught me: keep inherited money in its own account, separate from the checking account you live out of. The separation makes the pause easier to keep, protects the money from disappearing into the monthly flow, and gives every dollar a clear story when you're ready to give it a job.
The expensive ones are rarely about picking a wrong investment. They come from moving fast: growing the monthly lifestyle before a plan exists, saying yes to gifts and loans under family pressure, and holding a parent's concentrated stock out of sentiment. Each is understandable, and each gets easier to avoid with time.
Lifestyle growth is the subtle one, because it never feels like a decision. A nicer car here, a bigger travel budget there, and a year later the inheritance is funding a monthly life it can't sustain. A plan doesn't forbid any of that; it simply asks the money to say what it's for first.
Inherited stock deserves a gentle word of its own. Holding a parent's shares can feel like holding the person, and that feeling deserves respect rather than a lecture. Two facts help: under Section 1014 of the tax code, inherited taxable investments generally receive a cost basis stepped up to their fair market value on the date of death, so decades of gain your parent accumulated simply vanish for tax purposes. Sell the shares soon after inheriting and there may be almost no capital gain to tax at all, which often makes diversifying far cheaper than feared, and keeping a small, symbolic position is a perfectly good middle path.
That's a normal reason to reach out, and there's no clock attached to it. A short call is the place to start.
There is no single right number, but months is a healthier unit than weeks. The few true deadlines, like retitling inherited retirement accounts, still leave room to breathe. For everything else, waiting until the money feels like yours to plan with, rather than a fresh loss, is time well spent.
Usually not on the inheritance itself. There is no federal inheritance tax on the recipient, and only a handful of states tax heirs directly. Inherited retirement accounts are the exception that surprises families: withdrawals from an inherited traditional IRA or 401(k) count as ordinary income in the year you take them.
Yes, and I'd encourage it. Setting aside a small, deliberate slice for something your loved one would have smiled at is not a planning failure; it can make being careful with the rest much easier. What tends to hurt is unplanned lifestyle growth, not one meaningful, chosen splurge.
It's common, and it's a heavy thing to carry while grieving. A gentle script helps: the money is parked for a year while the estate settles and a plan comes together. That's true, it buys time, and it moves the pressure off you and onto a process with a calendar.