What To Do When You Suddenly Have Money: Inheritance, Bonuses & Windfalls Explained

By Molly Benjamin, Founder of Ladies Finance Club

Listen to the full podcast here.

A windfall can feel equal parts exciting and completely overwhelming especially when it arrives wrapped in grief, surprise, or guilt. In this episode of Get Rich, Molly sits down with financial advisor Lauren to unpack exactly what to do when a lump sum lands in your lap.

Whether you’ve just received an inheritance, landed a bonus you weren’t expecting, or found yourself with a chunk of savings you’re not sure what to do with, the very first thing Lauren recommends is pressing pause. Not for days, not forever, but long enough to check in with yourself and your goals before making any big moves with your money.

It sounds simple, but it’s genuinely one of the most powerful things you can do. Because when a lump sum arrives, especially one tied to loss, it tends to come with a lot of feelings attached. Guilt. Overwhelm. Even a strange sense of not deserving it. Molly shared stories of women who received inheritances and kept the money sitting in cash for months, not out of laziness, but because they didn’t know how to emotionally reconcile having it. The mindset piece here is real, and it matters.

What are your actual goals?

Once you’ve given yourself a moment to breathe, this is where the real work begins. Getting clear on your goals, not just vague ones, but the things that genuinely matter to you is what makes every financial decision that follows so much easier. Do you want to take the financial pressure off at work? Set your family up for the future? Retire early? Upgrade the home you’re already in? Your goals are the compass, and the strategy just falls into place around them.

This is also where working with a financial advisor pays off enormously. A good advisor won’t just hand you a generic plan, they’ll help you articulate what wealth actually looks like for you, and then build backwards from there. Whether that means paying down debt, boosting your superannuation, or setting up an investment portfolio outside of super, the decision only makes sense once you know what you’re working towards.

“Once we know what our cash flow and income goals are, we can kind of just work backwards — and the strategy really takes care of itself.” — Lauren

The debt vs. invest vs. super question

Almost everyone who comes into a lump sum wrestles with this. And the honest answer is: it depends. If you have a home loan, Lauren points out that offsetting it is rarely a wrong move, it’s tax-effective, low-risk, and chips away at your biggest liability. Putting money into superannuation also has real tax benefits, and there’s more flexibility than most people realise when it comes to catch-up contributions, you can potentially top up the last five years of super if you haven’t hit the annual threshold, and carry forward contributions up to three years ahead.

For those who are still a long way from accessing their super, having a separate investment strategy running alongside it makes a lot of sense. Where you invest, whether in your own name, your partner’s, a family trust, or inside super will depend on your tax situation and your longer-term goals. This is exactly where the guidance of an advisor shifts from helpful to genuinely invaluable.

What about tax on an inheritance?

Good news for Australians: there’s no inheritance or death tax at the point you receive the money. In most cases, it lands in your account ready to use. That said, things get a little more nuanced when superannuation is involved. If a parent had a significant taxable component in their super fund and you’re an adult child (which generally doesn’t count as a tax dependent), you may be liable for around 15% plus Medicare on that portion. It’s worth understanding especially if you’re the executor of the will but for most people, the lump sum arrives untouched.

What matters more, as Lauren puts it, is where and how you invest the money from that point. The savings you make by structuring your investments tax-effectively can add up significantly over time.

The biggest mistake? Doing nothing.

This one surprises people. Spending impulsively gets all the attention, but sitting on money in a low-interest savings account for years while inflation quietly erodes its value? That’s a mistake too. So is giving too much of it away before you’ve secured your own position as warm-hearted as the impulse is, gifting your wealth before your own financial foundation is solid can leave you worse off in the long run.

Molly has seen it both ways: women who blew a $30,000 or $40,000 inheritance in their twenties and spent years regretting it, and women who let their money sit untouched for so long that the opportunity quietly slipped away. The goal isn’t to be perfect, it’s to be intentional. Even a small, thoughtful first move is better than paralysis.

Ready to find your advisor?

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