Average American inheritance: $177,000

To break down nabia9's comment, there is no such thing as a negative inheritance, so the base is $0. Bill Gates is worth $67 billion, which is $200 per person. Warren Buffett has $53 billion, Larry Ellison has $43 billion, and so on.

Get the list from http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/03/06/full-list... . The US billionaires have $1872.5 billion. Assuming all of that will be inherited (after all, 3 heirs of the Wal*Mart fortune are in the top 20), then that alone is $5,700 per person in the US, or over 3% of the "average American inheritance."

Somehow, I don't think I'll get one cent of their fortunes.

To get a sense of the distribution skew, in 2012 MSN reported "the median inheritance for today's baby boomers is only $64,000, according to a 2010 study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College" (http://money.msn.com/gen-x/banking-on-inheritance-good-luck-... , referencing http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/how-important-are-inheritances-for-... ).

Many web pages reference that source, but note that it's only talking about what baby boomers would get from their parents, and not what (say) a baby boomer who dies now might leave to any heirs.

There's a 2007 comment at http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2007/04/dont_count_on_a.html quoting a MoneyCentral piece: "The median inheritance was $37,700. About 1% of those surveyed received an inheritance greater than $1 million, and 5% inherited between $250,000 and $1 million."

In any case, both of these median values are well less than the $177,000 "average."