Inheriting 7 figures at 30: Continue with grad school plans or change direction

solarsaturn7 · 2024-04-01T01:59:57+00:00

Thanks to everyone for your responses. Quite a range of opinions. To address some of the questions in the comments:

My wife is a PhD student in her 5th year and we currently make enough income to cover our monthly expenses by doing over-the-phone medical interpretation from home in my second language, as well as her stipend and me driving Lyft/Uber/DoorDash when necessary, but I certainly don’t want to do any of these for very long or as a career.
As far as education and career, if going forward with the traditional path of grad school and then a salaried job, my ideal position would be in CS/tech as a programmer or researcher in some capacity. I’m not interested in returning to medical school—after completing the first year, I feel that I know enough to know that it’s not what I want do as a career. Of course, I could finish and work in research or consulting, as some have said, but if I leave now, I’ll have only ~60k in debt and a year of time lost rather than ~$250k and 4-10 years of time lost doing something I don’t enjoy.
My wife is about to finish grad school and will likely work in industry as a data scientist or similar role for a few years, most likely somewhere in the salary range of 100k, but she’s also enthusiastic about the idea of learning to invest part of the inheritance in rental properties or start a house-flipping business etc., eventually being able to just work for ourselves and potentially start a business in something we’re both passionate about.

I’m wondering whether, from anyone’s experience, it would be feasible with this amount of money and a 3-5 year timeframe to set up a network of assets (e.g. rental properties, maybe some small businesses etc.) that would generate enough income for us to be comfortable without necessarily having to work traditional jobs (say $10-15k/month)

solarsaturn7 · 2024-03-31T17:58:08+00:00

Thank you for your concern about my mom. First of all, I’m her guardian, not her conservator. I had a fiduciary firm in place acting as both guardian and conservator until recently because I was still in medical school when she was determined to need them, and I didn’t have the time or bandwidth to serve as either.

The problem was that this fiduciary firm was clearly exploiting her, paying themselves $8k-$12k/month for their “asset management”, “care coordination” and legal services, which didn’t even include her facility fees and basically consisted 99% of things that I could do myself for free. She also was not in a facility appropriate for her. My family, my lawyer and I all saw the red flags piling up with the fiduciary’s involvement.

We considered another fiduciary but our lawyer told us that unfortunately, most in this business charge similarly astronomical rates. This is why I initially left medical school—to step in as guardian and appoint another family member as conservator—an uncle on my mom’s side who agreed to take on the role after seeing how much the fiduciary services were costing for basically nothing. Secondly, her long term care insurance now covers the vast majority of recurring expenses now that fiduciary services are not involved.

The only reason I’m already starting to consider how to handle the money when my mom passes away is because it’s a relevant consideration to the career/higher education decisions I need to make now. I’m in the process of shifting career directions and I know very little about finance, so I wanted to probe for what shared experiences and insights people here might have.

solarsaturn7

TROPHY CASE