I’ve been recently having a conversation with a reader in his 30s who just inherited $650,000 from his parents who recently passed away. By his own admission, he’s lived paycheck to paycheck his whole life (sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes out of lifestyle inflation) and so the prospect of having a nice bit of walking around money is new to him.

Our conversation covered the bases you’d expect—the wisdom of paying down student loan debt at a 3-4% rate, the prospect of buying a home in cash, investing at market highs, etc. Probably nothing new to the readers here.

But my conversation with him also had an additional moral element: he felt guilty about unearned wealth. He didn’t have $650,000 coming his way because he saved it up, made intelligent investments, or even collect a lottery winning. It was all the result of someone else’s efforts, and he wasn’t … Read the rest of this article!