An inheritance arrives at a difficult time and brings decisions that don't need to be rushed — but do need to be made carefully. Getting professional advice before you act can make a significant difference.
You are grieving. You are dealing with an estate, a family, and very likely a property settlement that will drag on for months. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, people — a bank, a solicitor, a sibling, perhaps a well-meaning friend — will start asking what you plan to do with the money.
At Ferncourt, we see this regularly. Receiving an inheritance is one of the most financially significant events in a person's life, and it almost always arrives at a moment when sound financial thinking is the hardest to access. Our job is to slow things down, help you think clearly, and make sure that when you do act, you act with confidence.
Unless the estate has placed a genuine time constraint on you — and most don't — there is almost no financial decision that needs to be made in the first two or three months. Cash in a term deposit, a property sitting in probate, shares held by an estate trustee: none of these will evaporate if you take time to think.
What does evaporate, quietly and permanently, is the money that gets committed too early. A well-intentioned decision to pay down a mortgage, buy a property, or restructure your affairs — made at six weeks in a fog of grief — can close off options that would have been worth more in the long run.
We encourage every client in this situation to do very little for the first 60 to 90 days. Let the estate process. Let the grief settle to a manageable level. Then sit down with Alastair and map out what you actually have, what your goals are, and what your options look like — in that order.
For many of our Sydney clients, the most complex part of an inheritance is not cash — it is property. An inner-suburban home, a small investment flat in an established suburb, a commercial premises. These assets frequently carry a very large embedded capital gain built up over decades of ownership by the deceased.
The question of whether to sell, rent, or transfer inherited property is not just a lifestyle decision. It has significant tax consequences that depend on:
Getting this wrong is expensive. Getting it right — with proper advice and timing — can make a material difference to the net outcome. We work through this in detail with you, including coordinating with your accountant where needed, so the tax tail does not wag the investment dog.
Some inheritances are a modest top-up to what you already have. Others are transformative. A client who has been building wealth carefully on a professional income and a modest investment property may suddenly find themselves with $800,000 or $1.2 million in new capital. The money is real. The strategy they were running before may no longer be the right one.
This shift in scale is one of the things we focus on closely. A more substantial asset base means different structuring options — family trusts, self-managed superannuation funds, and direct investment portfolios all become more relevant and potentially more efficient at higher levels of wealth. It also means different risks: concentration risk if the inheritance is a single property, sequencing risk if you invest a lump sum at the wrong time, and estate risk if your own affairs haven't kept pace with your new position.
Alastair's role here is not to talk you into complexity for its own sake. It is to make sure that whatever strategy you end up with is genuinely suited to the scale and nature of what you've inherited — not just a scaled-up version of whatever you were doing before.
Inheritances are rarely simple when more than one person is involved. Where an estate is split between siblings, or where a family property needs to be sold or bought out, financial decisions become entangled with relationships. Sometimes old tensions surface. Sometimes one party needs liquidity and another doesn't. Sometimes the asset itself — a beach house, a family home, a share portfolio — carries sentimental weight that complicates any rational analysis.
We don't pretend to be family mediators. But we can provide a clear, objective picture of what the options look like financially so that conversations between family members are grounded in facts rather than assumptions. Having a neutral professional frame the numbers often makes those conversations easier to have.
If you are buying a sibling's share of an inherited property, or structuring a shared ownership arrangement, we can help you think through what that looks like in your broader financial context before you commit.
An inheritance is also an opportunity — often the largest single opportunity you will have — to step back and review where you stand. Not just what to do with the inherited capital, but whether your superannuation is on track, whether your own estate planning reflects your current life, and whether the financial structure you built ten years ago still makes sense for where you are now.
Alastair takes a whole-of-life view with every client. If you come to us because of an inheritance, we will of course address the immediate decisions. But we will also look at the bigger picture: your income, your existing assets, your protection arrangements, your retirement timeline, and your own estate. Most clients leave that first conversation with a much clearer sense of where they actually stand — not just on the inheritance, but on everything.
If you have recently received an inheritance, or are in the process of settling an estate, we would encourage you to reach out before you make any significant decisions. There is no obligation in that first conversation — just clarity.
Book a Consultation with AlastairBook a no-obligation initial consultation — an honest conversation about where you are today and where you want to be.