I read somewhere on Maggie's old tumblr blog that Niall left the Lynch brothers 5 million each + properties. The 5 million thing is also in Dream Thieves (? I think) when Ronan read's Niall's will. With 15 millions total not in investments but in their bank accounts, they're pretty rich.
For some reason I had thought that we didn’t get definite figures cited in the will, but I was wrong about that, so thanks! Here are the relevant parts:
So assuming these numbers are accurate, the Lynch family assets as of the time of Niall’s death are:
$9m in liquid assets (when you’ve got 7+ figures, your shit is invested; it’s not sitting in a bank account earning 2% a year. But we can decide that they’re fairly liquid investments and not tied up in real estate or IRAs or w/e)
$23m in a trust, to manage the Barns and to cover the brothers’ education, “care,” and housing
a second trust, funding unknown, to care for Aurora
an empty field in Northern Ireland, value unknown
a townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia; my good buddy Zillow suggests that $600k is not an unreasonable value to slap on this bad boy
Eyeballing this, I’m going to call it a $40 million estate. Which is higher than I was thinking; I had expected there had to be some kind of trust for Aurora, because who’s paying those home nurses we hear about, but I really hadn’t figured on the twenty-three million in the Barns & Boys trust.
In terms of how this impacts my assessment of their day-to-day financial status: not much? If they’ve each got $3m for their principle instead of $2m like I’d figured, now we’re talking annual income of $75k for each of them. This is not actually a preposterous income. I had the…mixed…fortune of being on the outskirts of a social group where everyone was in roughly this income bracket while I made, ha, significantly less, so I absolutely agree that this is an obnoxious amount of money for young childless single people to make, but it’s not world breaking, which is a consideration that I am interested in when trying to figure out what rules apply to a fictional character.
Of course, this is money the Lynches don’t have to work to make, which is a glaring huge privilege. And on top of that income, they’ve got a trust that covers their “care, education, and housing,” so their expenses are going to be lower than most people’s. They don’t have to pay rent, presumably the trust covers property taxes, they won’t have student loan debt…I’m a little unclear what “care” is supposed to mean but I imagine it’s things like medical bills as opposed to groceries, just because I can’t imagine anyone going through the hassle of balancing the trust’s books every time they go to Kroger.
But they can’t actually spend that $23m on things beyond what it’s earmarked for. To paraphrase Chidi, that’s called embezzlement and it’s generally frowned upon. Besides, “stealing from and thereby jeopardizing the family and the family home” would be rather out of character for any of these boys. We know that Declan is the executor of the trust (as always, what the fuck, Niall) until all the boys are eighteen, but we don’t know what happens after that. Possibly the trust could be dissolved and they could each take $7.something million…to what end? The Barns will still need to upkeep (unless it no longer exists, I won’t be surprised if the Barns doesn’t survive The Dreamer Trilogy), and they’re all trust beneficiaries already. So it only makes sense to do if they want or need to make some kind of big purchase, at which point – poof! – the money’s gone. It’s a Daffy Duck stunt: a great trick but they can only do it once.
So I stand by my assessment. They don’t have the funds to continuously spend big sums. They have an estate that provides each of them with a middle class income – which is a huge amount of privilege! It definitely makes them “rich.” I suppose at the end of the day we’re quibbling over degrees of “rich,” but quibbling over canon is fun. I don’t find it unreasonable that Declan would be stressed about spending the sums that he spends in this book, and I don’t think that anything we’ve been told before is inconsistent with anything that gets said in Call Down the Hawk.
kaledo-art
dededos
origamiaround
annaxmalina
vaporwave
kianamaiart
discoholicmusic
