Updated July 29, 2026. Quick answer: These are two separate clocks and every page conflates them. The advice you will find — wait before you do anything — is about deploying the money, and it is good advice. It is not about hiring. Getting help early is often what lets you wait: someone whose job is the timeline can hold the line while you are in no state to. Retaining help is reversible. Deploying the money is not.
Separating the two clocks
| The hire clock | The deploy clock | |
|---|---|---|
| Is there any rush? | No, and no penalty for being early | No, for most decisions |
| Is it reversible? | Yes — an hourly or project engagement simply ends | Frequently not |
| What waiting costs | You make the irreversible decisions alone | Cash earns less than it might. Usually a small price |
| What rushing costs | An ongoing fee for finite work | The expensive mistakes are all here |
The clocks that are real, and none of them are yours
Almost nothing in an inheritance has a deadline that runs against you. A few things do have deadlines, they belong to the estate or the account rather than to your decision-making, and each has its own page because each is a rule rather than a judgement:
- Inherited retirement accounts have a drawdown schedule, and whether withdrawals are required along the way is its own question
- A withdrawal may be owed for the year of the death itself — the one genuinely near-term item, and the one that contradicts “wait a year” advice
- Refusing an inheritance outright is available only inside a window
- A surviving spouse has a choice to make that a non-spouse does not
- How the account is moved matters — the wrong mechanism is not fixable
- The estate has its own timetable, which is not your timetable
That list is the argument for hiring early rather than late. Every item on it is a rule with a consequence, and none of them waits for you to feel ready. The reason to bring someone in is not to move the money. It is so that the two or three things that are on a clock get handled while you leave the rest alone.
Urgency is a disqualifying signal. Anyone who needs the money moved before you have decided is telling you what they are selling. The correct response to “we should get this invested” in week one is that the cash can sit; the only things worth doing quickly are the ones on the list above, and they are administrative rather than allocative. If you are being pushed toward an ongoing percentage arrangement, the pricing model is the thing to examine.
The prior question, if the estate has not finished, is whether there is anything useful to do yet — and separately, an advisor may not be the first call at all.
Sources
Arithmetic computed for this page on the stated assumptions and recorded at context/project/inherit_fee_math_20260729.json — 6% gross annual return, a 1.00% advisory fee charged annually on the running balance, and a 0.10% self-managed cost. These are inputs, not forecasts, and not a claim about any firm’s schedule. Fee-level context: our own AUM fee pages. Every tax rule referenced is linked to the page that carries it rather than restated here.
This is arithmetic and decision framing, not tax, legal or investment advice. Nothing here states a tax deadline or a filing requirement — where one matters, the link goes to the page that carries it. Your own answer turns on what the inheritance consists of and on facts no page can see.