People Without Kids Are Leaving Money to Surprised Heirs

Charities, distant relatives and even pets are benefiting from surprise inheritances. They can thank people without children.

Not having children is becoming more common, both among millennials and older people. A July Pew Research Center analysis found that 20% of U.S. adults age 50 and older hadn’t had children.

And many of these people don’t have wills. An AARP survey found half of childless people age 50-plus who live alone have a will, compared with 57% of others that age. Those without wills have less control over what happens to their money, which often ends up in the hands of people who don’t expect it.

This phenomenon of a surprise inheritance is common enough that it has a name: the laughing heir .

“All they do is get the money and go, ‘Ah ha ha, look at that,’ ” said Michael Ettinger , an estate lawyer in New York.

Kelley Gilpin McKeig, a 64-year-old healthcare-industry consultant in Ridgefield, Wash., received a phone call several years ago saying her cousin Nick Caldwell left behind money in a savings account. They hadn’t been in touch for 20 years.

“I thought it was a scam,” she said. “Nobody else in our family had heard that he had passed.”

She hunted down his death certificate and a news article and learned he had died about a year and a half before in a workplace accident.

Caldwell, who was in his 50s, had died without a will. His estate was split among cousins and an uncle. It took about two years for the money to be distributed because of the paperwork and court approval involved. Gilpin McKeig’s share was $2,300.

Afterward, she updated her will to make sure what she has doesn’t go to “just anybody down the line, or cousins I don’t care about.”

Who inherits

There are trillions of dollars at stake as baby boomers age.

Most people leave their money to spouses and children when they die. A 2021 analysis of Federal Reserve survey data found that 82% of heirs’ inheritances came from parents.

People with no children say they want to leave a greater share of their estates to charity, friends and extended family , according to research by two Yale law professors that surveyed 9,000 U.S. adults.

Rebecca Fornwalt, a 33-year-old writer, created a trust after landing a book deal. While her heirs are her parents, her backup heirs include her sister and about a half-dozen close friends. She set aside $15,000 for the care of each of her two dogs.

Susan Lassiter-Lyons , a financial coach in Florence, Ariz., said one childless client is leaving equal interests in her home to her two nephews. Another is leaving her home to a man she has been friends with for a long time.

“She broke his heart years ago and she feels guilted into leaving him property,” Lassiter-Lyons said.

A client who is a former escort estranged from her family is leaving her estate to two friends and to charity.

Lassiter-Lyons, who doesn’t have children, set up a trust for her two dogs should she and her wife die. The pet guardian, her wife’s sister, would live in their house while taking care of the dogs. When the dogs die, she inherits the house.

In the Yale study, people without descendants—children or grandchildren—intended to give 10% of their estates to charity, on average, more than triple the intended amount of those with descendants.

The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, which manages $1.3 billion of assets, a few years ago added an “heirless donors” section to its website that profiles donors and talks about building a legacy.

“Fifteen years ago, we never talked about child-free donors at all,” said Lew Groner , the foundation’s vice president for marketing.

In the absence of a will, heirs are determined by state law . Assets can wind up in the state’s hands. In New York, for example, $240 million in unclaimed funds over the past 10 years has arrived from estates of the deceased, not including real estate, according to the state comptroller’s office. In California, it is $54.3 million.

Hard questions

Financial advisers say a far bigger concern than who gets what is making sure there is enough money and support for a comfortable old age, because clients without children can’t call on them for help.

“I hope there is something left to leave,” said Stephanie Maxfield, a 43-year-old therapist in southern Colorado. “But if there isn’t, I think that’s OK, too.”

She said she would like to leave something to her partner’s nieces and nephews, as well as animal shelters and domestic-violence shelters. Her best friend is a beneficiary.

Choosing an estate executor and who would handle money and health decisions on your behalf can be difficult when you don’t have children, financial advisers say. Using a promised inheritance as a reward for taking care of you when you are older isn’t a good solution, said Jay Zigmont , an investment adviser focused on childless people.

“Unfortunately, it is relatively common to see family members who are in the will decide to opt for cheaper medical care (or similar decisions) in order to protect what they will be inheriting,” he said in an email.

Kirsten Tompkins, who is from Birmingham, U.K., and works in consulting, along with her husband divided their estate among their dozen nieces and nephews.

Choosing heirs was the easy part. What is hard is figuring out whom to ask for help as she and her husband get older, she said.

“A lot of us are at an age where we are playing that role for our parents,” the 50-year-old said, referring to tasks such as providing tech support and taking parents to medical appointments. “Who is going to do that for us?”

Apple has dominated the electronics supply chain for years. No more.

Artificial-intelligence companies are writing huge checks for chips, memory, specialised glass fibre and more, and they have begun to out-duel Apple in the race to secure components.

Suppliers accustomed to catering to Apple’s every whim are gaining the leverage to demand that the iPhone maker pay more.

Apple’s normally generous profit margins will face pressure this year, analysts say, and consumers could eventually feel the hit.

Chief Executive Tim Cook mentioned the problem in a Thursday earnings call, saying Apple was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory prices were increasing significantly.

Those comments appeared to weigh on Apple shares, which traded flat despite blowout iPhone sales and record company profit.

“Apple is getting squeezed for sure,” said Sravan Kundojjala, who analyses the industry for research firm SemiAnalysis.

AI chip leader Nvidia recently became the largest customer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on a podcast.

Apple had been TSMC’s biggest customer by a wide margin for years. TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced chips for AI servers, smartphones and other computing devices.

Spokesmen for Apple and TSMC declined to comment.

The big computers that handle AI tasks don’t look like the smartphones consumers own, but many companies supply components for both. In particular, memory chips are in short supply as companies such as OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Meta , Microsoft and others collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI computing capacity.

“The rate of increase in the price of memory is unprecedented,” said Mike Howard , an analyst for research firm TechInsights.

That applies both to the flash memory chips that store photos and videos, called NAND, as well as the memory used to run apps quickly, called DRAM.

By the end of this year, the price of DRAM will quadruple from 2023 levels, and NAND will more than triple, estimates TechInsights.

Howard estimates that Apple could pay $57 more for the two types of memory that go into the base-model iPhone 18 due this fall compared with the base model iPhone 17 currently on sale. For a device that retails for $799, that would be a big hit to profit margins.

Apple’s purchasing power and expertise in designing advanced electronics long made it an unrivaled Goliath among the Asian companies that make most of the iPhone’s parts and assemble the device.

Apple spends billions of dollars a year on NAND, for instance, according to people familiar with the figures, likely making it the single biggest buyer globally. Suppliers flocked to win Apple’s business, hoping to leverage its know-how and prestige to attract other customers.

These days, however, “the companies now pushing the boundaries of human‑scale engineering are the ones like Nvidia,” said Ming-chi Kuo, an analyst with TF International Securities.

Demand for AI hardware is poised to keep growing rapidly. Apple’s spending growth is modest in comparison with what is being spent to fill up AI data centers, even though it is breaking records with huge sales of the iPhone 17.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are raising the price of a type of DRAM chip for Apple, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.

Big AI companies pay generously and are willing to lock in supply and make upfront payments, giving the South Korean chip makers leverage against the iPhone maker.

Apple signs long-term contracts for memory, but it has used its heft to squeeze suppliers.

Its contracts have empowered it to negotiate prices as often as weekly, and to even refuse to buy any memory from a supplier if Apple didn’t view the price as favorable, according to people familiar with its memory purchases.

To boost leverage with suppliers, Apple even began stocking more inventory of memory. That was atypical for Cook, who normally cuts inventory to the bone to maximize Apple’s cash flow.

Apple is fighting not only for current deliveries but also for the attention of engineers at suppliers.

Glass scientists who worked on developing the smoothest and lightest smartphone displays are now also spending time on specialised glass for packaging advanced AI processing chips, according to industry executives.

Makers of sensors and other gizmos inside the iPhone are winning new business from AI companies such as OpenAI that are developing their own hardware.

Still, suppliers said they were far from giving up on business with Apple. Working with Apple is a form of education, they said, because it remains one of the most demanding and disciplined customers in the industry.

TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, has built successive generations of its most advanced chips with Apple as its lead customer, relying on the big predictable demand for iPhones.

Now that TSMC is doing more business with Nvidia and other AI companies, people with knowledge of the chip supply chain said Apple was exploring whether some lower-end processors could be made by someone other than TSMC.

One of Apple’s biggest profit-spinners is selling extra memory for far more than the memory chips cost the company.

Last fall Apple discontinued the iPhone Pro model with 128 gigabytes of storage.

Customers who want that model must now start at 256 gigabytes and pay $100 more—the type of move that could be repeated this year to help Apple offset higher costs, wrote Craig Moffett, an analyst at Moffett Nathanson, in an investor note.

However, Apple isn’t expected to raise the price of its next iPhone models over similarly equipped iPhone 17s, said Kuo, the analyst.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.

People Without Kids Are Leaving Money to Surprised Heirs

The bequests benefit charities, distant relatives and even pets

Who inherits

Hard questions

Parts for iPhones to cost more owing to surging demand from AI companies.