Someone who doesn't understand finance and doesn't know how to invest is bound to lose the money sooner or later. There is always fraud, there's always wastefulness. How many generations it takes is irrelevant, that number four is just a meme that gets repeated because someone wrote this in an investment book once, and people think it sounds about right. It's not based on science.

It's an extreme example. But you don't have to just look at billionaires, it's easy to observe this all around you with families that are worth much less. And it would be very concerning if it were any other way.

> Someone who doesn't understand finance and doesn't know how to invest is bound to lose the money sooner or later. There is always fraud, there's always wastefulness.

I agree; if you don't spend a lot of time researching how money works, you will almost certainly get scammed. There are so many perfectly legal ways how to deprive a person of their money in a way that seems like investing. And the people who want to take your money will approach you, helpfully provide advice when you ask, get recommended by your friends (whom they also scammed, in a way that is not immediately obvious). Even the serious institutions provide some product that are designed to be bad.

I didn't inherit anything, but since I got my first salary, I tried to save and invest some of the money. Two decades later, I see (with the knowledge I have now, but didn't have back then) that almost everything I did was pretty much guaranteed to make the money gradually disappear. So if I inherited money, but not a very good knowledge how to handle it, it would probably be all gone by now.

The only good investments I made was real estate and bitcoins. Ironically, two things that many smart people on internet are strongly opposed to. If I knew in my 20s what I know now, maybe there were better options available. But all the other options I knew about were scams.

Heiress = Second generation, not first.

Noted. First generation of descendants, I should have specified, especially since the OP doesn't.

Of course, being HN, we start counting at zero by default anyway.

> Of course, being HN, we start counting at zero by default anyway.

Yes, but do we call something "the zeroth"? I think not; AFAICS it ends up in "We call the first generation 'Generation Zero'."

Buddy, I acknowledged the error/confusion and then made a light-hearted joke. Don't take it so literally that you act like a dick.