Updated July 29, 2026. Quick answer: Order by what is irreversible, not by who returns your call. That usually puts the estate attorney first when the estate is unsettled or property is involved, the tax preparer second because the tax consequences are set by decisions made earlier than people expect, and the financial advisor third — because allocating the money is the one decision that is still fully available to you next month.
The ordering rule
First, the reassurance that is usually true. An inheritance is generally not taxable income to the person receiving it. The exceptions are categories rather than fine print, and each has its own page: money coming out of an inherited retirement account, a handful of states that levy an inheritance tax, and separately a few that levy an estate tax on the estate itself. If your inheritance is cash from a bank account, none of those is in play.
| Call | When they go first | What they cannot undo later |
|---|---|---|
| Estate attorney | The estate is open, there is property, there is a trust, or anyone disagrees | How the estate is administered and what that costs |
| Tax preparer or CPA | An inherited retirement account, appreciated assets, or property is involved | Whether an account drawdown was set up sensibly, and how a basis question was handled |
| Financial advisor | The money is yours, unrestricted, and the question is what to do with it | Very little, if you have not moved anything yet |
Why the advisor is usually not first, stated plainly. The advisor’s work is allocation, and allocation is the most reversible decision in the set — cash sitting still costs you a little yield and nothing else. The attorney and the preparer are dealing with things that harden. Calling in reverse order is how people end up having optimised a portfolio inside a structure that was set up wrong.
The overlap trap. All three will tell you they coordinate with the other two, and the good ones do. What none of them will tell you is that for a simple cash inheritance you may need only one, briefly. The number of professionals a situation needs scales with the number of irreversible decisions in it, not with the dollars.
What to have ready before any of the calls
The same short list makes all three conversations shorter, and assembling it is work you can do alone: what the inheritance consists of and roughly what each piece is worth; how each piece is currently titled; whether the estate is open or closed; who else is inheriting; and whether you are the spouse of the person who died, because that changes the rules on retirement accounts. Without that list you are paying professional rates for an inventory.
If the estate is still open, there is a narrower question about what is even actionable yet. And none of this requires you to decide quickly.
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.