A woman calls a financial advice show to ask for guidance about how she should split her sizable estate between her two daughters. One daughter and her husband are in the top one percent of income. The other makes about fifty thousand a year. She’s been uneasy about it for several years. You can hear in her voice each and every one of those years and the real pain she’s been experiencing for too long.
This is a real problem. If she divides the inheritance evenly then the daughter who needs nothing gets exactly the same amount as the daughter who could use it. Divide it by need and she’s ranked her kids in a document, in black and white. They’ll read it after she’s gone, with no chance to explain herself. Six feet of soil tends to muffle the voice quite a lot, you see. Most people with more than one child and more than one dollar in the bank arrive here eventually and then choose to handle it by not handling it at all. I wonder whether or not this is the first time she’s asked someone else for advice. Probably not, but one thing’s for sure, she’d been chewing on it long enough to call a stranger.
She never gets an answer. Not because the question is a difficult one (though it definitely is) but because seven minutes into the call the show becomes a different conversation, and she sounds relieved.
The shift happens when she mentions what she spent on college, over half a million dollars, and says her daughters have become socialists. There’s laughter all around. The host tells her she sent them to the wrong school and nobody mentions these incomes again.
Nobody asks what she means by the word, either — socialist. Nobody wonders if the daughters would actually use that term to describe themselves, what they really believe, or how the mother even knows their sociopolitical views. Nobody considers if this is a fight about tax policy or something that has already become broken in the relationship. Two people get convicted on one word from the only witness, who is also the plaintiff, and who has just said she’s been upset about them for years.
The easy version of this essay makes her the villain. I don’t want to write that essay because she’s not the villain here, actually she’s the only person in the segment who’s legitimately hurting.
She says she’s depressed about where she sees her children heading. She says she doesn’t want the money to go to them, and then, right away, that she feels terrible about that. It’s the only moment when somebody describes what’s happening inside them instead of stating a principle in judgement. This woman isn’t arguing. She’s telling a stranger that she’s lost something, and she recognizes that some part of her wants to punish her daughters over it. It makes her feel like a bad mother.
What she gets back is that she shouldn’t feel terrible, because her daughters aren’t entitled to the money. They didn’t hit the DNA lottery1.
That isn’t comfort. It isn’t disagreement either. It’s a way of taking the feeling off her, and it works, because she never raises it again. She called with grief and guilt about her own children and hung up with neither, and it must have felt like a weight coming off. But the guilt was holding something up. It was the part of her that still wanted them back.
Her guilt assumed she owed them something. That isn’t a strange thing for a mother to assume. They didn’t ask to be here, she decided they would be, and the whole shape of a parent’s obligation comes from that: you made a person who needed you, and their need is not a claim they have to earn. Nobody on the call asked whether she was right about that. It just got taken from her, in one line, by a man who had never met her daughters.
Then comes a moment that lasts maybe nine seconds and sounds, if you’re not listening for it, like the setup to a joke.
She asks whether she could put the money in a trust. Something they can’t touch until they’re seventy.
I spent years in ministry and I’ve sat across from people at that exact moment, and it isn’t what it sounds like. I don’t hear a woman working out how to cut her daughters off. I hear a woman looking for a way to not cut them off. She’s stalling. She wants a structure where they stay in the will, where the money is technically theirs, where she never has to make the call and can keep hoping something changes before she dies. Seventy isn’t a sentence. Seventy is a very long runway for somebody who hasn’t given up.
The host answers with a joke about a seventy-year-old socialist. She laughs and says she hopes they’ll have woken up by then. She doesn’t reach for it again.
I don’t think it was cruelty. I don’t think he saw it. A show built to give fast, clean answers about money isn’t built to catch the moment when the money question is standing in for a different one, and hers was standing in for a different one from her first sentence. But it was right there.
What happened on that call is that she came in with a distribution problem and left with a disinheritance framework, and those are not the same thing.
A distribution problem makes you decide. It makes you weigh need against fairness, think about what money does to somebody who already has plenty and what it does to somebody who doesn’t, and treat your two daughters as two particular people rather than a category. No rule solves this. You decide, and then you live with having decided.
A loyalty test asks none of that from you. One test, applied the same way to both, and the test is theological agreement. The incomes stop mattering, because under the new frame they’re beside the point. Both daughters fail on the same grounds and the problem this mother originally called about is gone. Not solved. Swapped, for something so much easier to answer. She took it without noticing the trade that was just made.
The part that really hacks me off here is that nobody gave her bad advice. A question was answered that was never asked, and the substitute question was answerable in a way hers never would,or even could be.
A pastor built a whole reaction video around this call and I’ve left him until the end on purpose, because he isn’t the subject. He’s using disinheritance as the family’s version of excommunication, the household’s last sanction against a child in rebellion. He builds it carefully and he isn’t a fool, which is what people get wrong about this stuff. He knows the material. He knows it well enough that when the prodigal son comes up, and the father in that parable hands over the inheritance in advance of his son’s rebellion, knowing exactly what his son will do with it, he doesn’t use it as a carrot or a stick, the father sees the problem coming and yet he still gives it. Josh says it’s interesting. Then he keeps going.
He had the exit in his hand. He looked at it and kept driving. Most of the time what’s wrong with an argument like this isn’t confusion or ignorance. It’s somebody with real skill declining a turn he can plainly see, which is harder to catch than a more blatant mistake and much harder to argue with, because from the inside it feels like he’s just being thorough.
Later he mentions he’s written something similar into his own will, and that he wants his kids to feel a consequence in the back of their minds at the moments their faith could go either way. He calls it a failsafe. He wants a backup motive in place for the times the real one doesn’t hold.
A man who installs a failsafe has told you what he expects to fail. In this case, he expects his children’s faith to fail and hopes he can use money to somehow compel them to stay aligned with his version of Christianity. Sounds like a solid plan to alienate his children, but evidently he’s A-O-K with that.
The other daughter never even comes up.
She makes fifty thousand dollars, which is about the national median. She has a mother with some undisclosed amount of money and a sister in the one percent. Presumably the former has a job she drives to, rent she pays, and opinions she arrived at somehow. And now she has a mother who just called a national radio show to ask whether she should be written out of the will.
By the end of the segment she’s a parasite. Not for anything she did. Not for anything anybody on that call knew about her. But for a word her mother used one time, seven minutes in, that nobody bothered to define.
Nobody on that call knew her name.
The call is from this segment of The Ramsey Show. I watched it via Josh Howerton’s reaction episode. If you want to check my reading of it, these are the moments:
[03:10] — her question, and the two daughters’ incomes
[11:00] — “socialists,” and the laugh
[24:10] — “they didn’t hit the DNA lottery”
[47:14] — the failsafe
The phrase is used here as shorthand for the idea that being someone's biological child isn't a claim on their money.