You have seen the number by now. One hundred and twenty-four trillion dollars, changing hands by 2048.
It is a real figure from a real firm. Cerulli published it in December 2024. Everyone in the business has quoted it since.
It is also close to useless to you.
Half of that total leaves households that are already high or ultra high net worth. Sixty-two trillion of it.
Those households are two percent of America.
50%
Share of the coming transfer leaving high and ultra-high net worth households
2%
Share of all American households those are
Half the transfer leaves two households in a hundred. The other ninety-eight split what is left of it.
Run the same question at household level. The picture changes shape. Across all American households the average inheritance is about forty-six thousand dollars.
At the top one percent of recipients the average runs near seven hundred nineteen thousand. Across the bottom half of recipients it is about nine thousand seven hundred. Two different events. One name.
Roughly three households in ten ever receive one at all.
Timing is the other thing it hides. The Federal Reserve data put the typical heir in his late fifties when the money lands.
By then it arrives on a retirement account already most of the way built. Mostly it tops that up.
It is a supplement with a funeral attached.
Most of what moves is a house. American households held close to fifty trillion dollars of owner-occupied real estate in the second quarter of this year.
A house is not money until somebody empties it.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and what is left of it at the end of the list.
Which brings you to a business. Most people never hear of it until the week they need it.
Before a house can be listed, forty years of a life has to come out of it. The furniture, the china, the boxes in the attic, the tools in the garage. Three siblings in three states have to agree on all of it.
Companies do this for a fee.
There is a hard ceiling on that business. Worth saying out loud. The fee comes out of an estate the family has not been paid from yet.
Plenty of families do the job themselves with a rented van and a bad weekend. It is labor, so it scales the way labor scales. A good operator caps out at what one crew can finish in a week.
The arithmetic
Total wealth expected to transfer through 2048, the $62 trillion coming from high and ultra-high net worth households, and the 2 percent of all households those represent: Cerulli Associates, US High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets 2024, published 5 December 2024. Average US inheritance of about $46,200, the roughly $719,000 average among the top 1 percent of recipients, the roughly $9,700 average across the bottom half, and the share of households that ever receive one: Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances. The late-fifties age at which an inheritance typically arrives: the same survey, as summarized in Federal Reserve research. Owner-occupied real estate held by US households, close to $50 trillion in the second quarter of 2026: Federal Reserve financial accounts.
The figure you will keep seeing is one hundred and twenty-four trillion. The figure in your family is a house, two accounts, and a conversation that keeps getting postponed. Put the real rows on one page this week. Yours, not the country’s. It takes an afternoon, and it is the only version of that number you can actually do anything about.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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