Not My $40 Trillion

I was on the floor of my sister’s spare bedroom when it occurred to me that I was describing someone else’s life.

Everything I was saying was true. The $124 trillion great wealth transfer. The $40 trillion headed specifically to women over 50. I knew this material cold. But somewhere between WISH TV and KESQ and ONNJ News with Ken Rosato, cross-legged against a white wall with a ring light clamped to my laptop and my hair thrown up because it was Black Friday week and producers were calling and I kept saying yes, something shifted.

You know you’re not actually one of them, right?

Here’s The Story, Of In Case You Missed It

Between now and 2048, $124 trillion in assets will change hands. Most of it flows from Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation to their heirs, with a significant chunk passing between spouses first. And because women outlive men by an average of five years, 95% of those spousal transfers go to wives. Widowed wives, specifically. Women who, whether they managed the finances or not, will now be making these decisions alone.

The number that keeps getting cited is $40 trillion. That’s what’s headed to widowed women in the Boomer generation and older. Forty trillion dollars. More than the entire US economy.

The financial advice industry noticed. Wall Street noticed. CNBC noticed. I believed this story enough that when CEOWorld asked me to write about it, I said yes immediately. You can read it here. I still believe it. I just know now what it leaves out.

More than half of that $124 trillion originates from households that are currently high net worth or ultra high net worth. We are talking about 2% of all households in America.

Again.

I Am Not One of Those Women

My parents came from Cuba with nothing. That’s not a metaphor. There was no family wealth to speak of, no portfolio quietly compounding somewhere, no inheritance waiting at the end of the story. They built a life here, a good one, but the kind of good that gets spent on living, not passed down.

I’m not married. So the spousal transfer math doesn’t apply to me either.

And then there’s the third thing, the one that’s entirely on me. I’m an economics major. I know what underemployment means. I chose it anyway. I consulted ad hoc through most of my son’s childhood instead of climbing a ladder, stair, or org chart of any kind. I was there for every school thing, every hard thing, every nothing-special afternoon. I have zero regrets and a very unimpressive retirement account.

I chose presence over accumulation. I would make that trade again tomorrow.

The financial reward system was never going to recognize that trade. Not then, not now. You don’t get a 401k match for reading to 22 kindergartners. There is no compound interest on being present.

So when the headlines say women are about to become the wealthiest demographic in American history, I read that and I think: some of us are. Good. I mean that. And also, I know exactly which off-ramp I took and why, and I’ve never once seen a headline written for the women who took it with me.

The Women, Over 50, Not Inheriting Wealth Are The Majority Nobody Is Counting

I am not an outlier.

Nine years of building Kuel Life means nine years of hearing from women who will read that $40 trillion headline the same way I did. The immigrant daughters whose parents arrived with nothing and considered that a victory. The women who left marriages knowing they’d walk away with at least 45% less than they had, took the kids and a depleted bank account, and started over at 52 anyway. The ones who stepped off the career track to care for children or parents or both and are now doing the Social Security math at 3am. The women who were never inside the wealth-building system in the first place, not because they didn’t work hard enough, but because it was never built for them.

Here’s what the Ellevest Women and Wealth Survey found in 2024: more than half of women aren’t expecting an inheritance at all. More than half.

We are not an edge case. We are the majority.

The financial industry isn’t scrambling to reach us. The think pieces aren’t written for us. And honestly, that’s not new. We’ve been reading past ourselves in other people’s victory laps for a long time.

What’s different now is the number. $40 trillion has a way of making the distance impossible to ignore.

Welcome To The Floor

If you’re reading this and the $40 trillion story doesn’t have your name on it, welcome. Pull up a floor. Cross your legs. Join me.

You chose to be here. Maybe it was your kids. Maybe it was your parents. Maybe it was leaving a marriage that was costing you more than money. Maybe it was just deciding, at some point, that your life was going to look like your life and not like someone else’s financial plan.

I’ve been thinking about that floor a lot. Not as a metaphor. As an actual place where a woman sat cross-legged and realized something true about her own life. There are a lot of us who have had that moment. Different floors, same realization.

We’ve been here the whole time. We just don’t get a headline.

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