Bill Perkins, the hedge fund multimillionaire and best-selling author of Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life, argues that parents should hand their children their inheritance while they are still young enough for it to transform their lives—decades before the traditional post-death bequest.

Perkins, who earned his first million dollars before turning 30, told Fortune Daily host Ellie Austin that the widespread practice of passing down wealth after death often means the money arrives too late to deliver its greatest impact.

Instead, if parents already intend to leave money to their children when they die, he said, the better approach is to place it in a trust—a legal arrangement in which one party holds and manages assets on behalf of a chosen beneficiary—and hand it over while the recipients are between the ages of 28 and 33.

“The reason why is that your brain reaches peak mental acuity at 28 on average, and you’re in decline and plateau starting at 33,” he said, adding: “The utility of money starts to decline and the seasons of your life start to pass you by.”

At first glance, earmarking an inheritance for children might appear at odds with the central message of Die with Zero, which urges readers to spend or give away all of their money during their lifetimes. Perkins notes in the book, however, that dying with zero also entails making sure children are taken care of.

To illustrate the point, he recounts the story of Virginia Colin, a woman who had to raise four children on her own after a divorce and struggled financially even while her mother had plenty of financial resources. When her mother died, Colin was 49; she and each of her siblings received an inheritance of $130,000. By that time, though, she had remarried and was no longer “at the edge of poverty,” as Colin, who was 68 by the time the book was published, put it.

“It just would have been a lot more valuable a lot earlier,” she said.

Perkins acknowledged that his thinking runs contrary to current practice. In the book, he cites data from the Federal Reserve Board showing that the most common age for people to receive an inheritance is 60.

Waiting until death to transfer wealth, he argues, leaves the outcome to chance: it would take a great deal of luck for the money to arrive the moment a child might need it most. Delaying the handoff also raises the odds that parents may outlive some of their children.

“If you plan on giving money to your kids, well, that’s their money, not your money,” he said. “And then we think about when is the best time to give them that money, and the answer—the short answer—is it’s not a bequest. It’s long before you die.”

His argument lands at a moment when researchers project the largest intergenerational transfer of household wealth in U.S. history, and when younger Americans are struggling to afford many of the milestones earlier generations reached sooner. About half of Americans ages 18 to 29 live with their parents as mortgage rates rise near 7%, putting a first home out of budget for many buyers. Accordingly, the median age of a first-time homebuyer rose to 40 last year, up from 28 in 1991. Last week, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, as the August consumer price index rose 0.4%. Inflation has remained above the Fed’s 2% target rate for the past five years.

At a younger age, a person could use an inheritance for a down payment on a home or to pay off student loans—but by the time they are older, Perkins argues, that money may simply not have the same effect.

When it comes to inheritance decisions, he said, people are simply following the status quo by giving away their money after they die, rather than considering when it might benefit the children receiving it the most.

“That is not really thinking about your kids,” he said. “That’s kind of like an autopilot decision that’s passed down from generation to generation.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.