Recently widowed spouse inheriting significant assets, navigating estate settlement, survivor benefits, advisor relationship.
H-04 models the recently-widowed HNW survivor — typically the surviving spouse of an H-02-or-larger household — navigating estate settlement, inherited-IRA mechanics, qualified widow(er) filing, and advisor-relationship transition simultaneously. It's the canonical fixture for the transition-of-wealth surface that most planning tools render badly.
H-04 exists because the recently-widowed HNW household is in a unique structural state that doesn't reduce to either a steady-state single-filer profile or a steady-state HNW household. Estate settlement is in progress — the §645 election (to treat a qualified revocable trust as part of the estate) may be active, Form 706 is being prepared, the §6166 deferral on closely-held business interests may be elected, and §2056 marital deduction has flowed assets into a surviving-spouse share or QTIP trust. Portability under §2010(c) preserves the deceased spouse's unused exclusion via Form 706 election — a near-mandatory filing even when no tax is owed. The survivor inherits qualifying retirement assets with surviving-spouse-specific rules: the spousal rollover into the survivor's own IRA, or the inherited-IRA path; with the SECURE Act, non-spouse beneficiaries face the 10-year rule but the surviving spouse retains favorable treatment as 'eligible designated beneficiary.' Survivor Social Security benefits coordinate (or don't) with the survivor's own benefit, and the qualified widow(er) filing status is available for two years post-death if a dependent child is in the household. Below this archetype (RL-02), the widowed-elderly profile sits at much lower wealth tier with different planning concerns; above it (H-02/H-03 active), the household has both spouses present.
Cash-flow shape is single-earner-or-pension-plus-investment-income, post-inheritance. Median combined income is $356,541 — meaningfully lower than the deceased-couple income would have been — but the more diagnostic numbers are net worth (median $12.06M, well above H-02 because of the inherited consolidation) and liquid net worth ($5.3M). All 20 households are single-filer; all 20 are homeowners; median age is 65 with the range stretching to 74. CA, NY, and WA cluster 11 of 20 households. Notably, 13 of 20 still carry student loans (likely co-signed or co-held with the deceased spouse and not yet released) and all 20 carry mortgages — debt-settlement items the survivor inherits and is working through.
What makes H-04 distinct from neighbors is the *transition-state* nature of the household. H-02 below shares wealth band but operates with both spouses present. RL-02 covers elderly widowed at much lower wealth tier where survivor benefits and family support dominate. E-01 covers inheritance specifically but at younger primary age and lower scale. H-04 is the specific intersection of HNW wealth, recent widowhood, and active estate settlement — a 12-to-36-month window where advisor selection, asset titling, and estate-tax filings all happen in compressed time.
Aggregated across the 20 H-04 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Margaret is a 71-year-old single-filer healthcare professional sitting near the lower-quartile of the H-04 net-worth distribution at $10.3M, with $4.46M liquid and $1.19M of liabilities (mortgage plus inherited student-loan balance). The diagnostic shape is on-track emergency fund but off-track retirement — a $5.79M retirement target against a balance sheet that, naively read, looks more than adequate. The bug this surfaces: standard retirement-readiness logic that doesn't distinguish between liquid investable wealth and total net worth (which here includes a primary residence and an illiquid inherited concentration), and that doesn't reflect the post-loss income drop from a two-earner to one-earner household. Use this profile to validate single-filer post-MFJ projection logic and inherited-IRA RMD handling.
Every H-04 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles draw on H-04 most heavily. Estate-administration platforms (estate-administration software and advisor-tooling estate modules) validate Form 706 preparation, §2010(c) portability election rendering, marital-deduction and QTIP-trust funding allocation, and §6166 deferral election scenarios. Wealth-platform advisor teams use H-04 to validate widow(er)-specific onboarding flows — the 12–24 month transition state where standard new-client onboarding fails because the household isn't accumulating, isn't divorcing, isn't retiring fresh; it's settling. Tax-software teams use H-04 for the qualified-widow(er) filing status (two-year window), single-filer post-MFJ bracket transition, inherited-IRA RMD calculation under SECURE eligible-designated-beneficiary rules, and the survivor-Social-Security-vs-own-benefit election logic.
H-04 is calibrated to the recently-widowed HNW survivor at the $3M–$15M wealth tier with active estate settlement. Widowed-elderly households at lower wealth tier (mass-market or mass-affluent) belong in RL-02, where survivor benefits and family support dominate rather than estate-tax filings. Active HNW couples with both spouses present are H-02 by wealth tier. UHNW widowed survivors at $20M+ are not separately modeled in v3 — the corpus tops out around $16M for H-04. Divorce-in-progress single filers in a similar age and wealth range are S-01, where QDRO mechanics and alimony replace estate-settlement as the dominant surface. Households where the widow(er) is well past the settlement window (3+ years post-loss, advisor-transition complete, estate closed) belong in H-01, H-02, or RL-01 depending on wealth tier and age. Younger widowed survivors with dependent children belong here when the wealth tier matches; below the HNW threshold they belong in A-02 (single parent) by life-stage.
H-04 income and net-worth bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to Cerulli US widow(er) advisory-channel data and SCF widowed-household wealth-tier distributions at the upper end. The wealth-tier inflation relative to a steady-state H-02 reflects estate consolidation — assets that previously appeared on two balance sheets now consolidate onto the survivor's. Persistent mortgages (all 20) and student loans (13 of 20) reflect inherited debt the survivor is working through rather than affordability stretch. Geographic concentration in CA, NY, and WA mirrors HNW concentration generally. The 'years since loss' dimension is not stored as structured data — households are modeled as being inside the 12–36 month settlement window, but exact time-since-death is not parameterized. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen and per-domain priors aren't independently auditable; treat calibration claims as descriptive of synthesis intent rather than reproducible.
Active HNW household with both spouses present at the same wealth tier. Use H-02 when the testing focus is steady-state HNW operations rather than estate settlement and advisor transition.
Elderly widow/widower at mass-market or mass-affluent wealth tier. Use RL-02 when the planning surface is survivor benefits, fixed income, and family support rather than HNW estate settlement.
Millennial inheritor specifically. E-01 covers younger non-spouse inheritors with the 10-year-rule inherited-IRA mechanics; H-04 is the surviving-spouse case with favorable eligible-designated-beneficiary treatment.
Divorce in progress at similar age and wealth tier. QDRO division, alimony, and asset-split mechanics replace estate-settlement and inheritance as the dominant surface.
H-04 — Widowed HNW Spouse is the recently-widowed HNW survivor (typically within 12–36 months of spouse's death) navigating estate settlement, inherited-IRA mechanics, qualified-widow(er) filing transition, and advisor relationship change simultaneously. Primaries are typically 55–75, single-filer, with net worth that has consolidated from a two-spouse balance sheet onto one.
RL-02 sits at mass-market or mass-affluent wealth tier where survivor benefits, fixed income, and family support dominate. H-04 is specifically HNW — $3M–$15M wealth with active estate-tax filings, inherited-IRA elections, portability under §2010(c), and HNW-tier advisor-transition dynamics.
Combined gross income median is $356,541 with a 25–75 range of roughly $280k to $398k — lower than two-earner H-02 because the household is now single-filer. Median net worth is $12.06M with $5.3M median liquid, reflecting estate consolidation of previously two-spouse assets.
Because the survivor inherits the deceased spouse's debt obligations. All 20 households carry mortgages and 13 of 20 carry student loans — typically co-held or co-signed debts not yet released or refinanced. These are diagnostic patterns for the settlement window, not affordability stretch.
The status is available for two tax years following the year of death if a dependent child is in the household. The H-04 corpus has only 1 of 20 households with a dependent (5%), so most households default to Single filing — but the surface is modeled and testable for the qualifying subset.
H-04 is tagged for six bundles — B01, B03, B05, B11, B12, and B27 — covering behavioral finance, social security planning, executive compensation, business planning, estate planning, and family financial dynamics. See the right-hand sidebar for the data sets that ship H-04 households.
No. The shipped v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09 per CLAUDE.md §9). Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI.
Download households matching this archetype as part of a Wealth Data Set.
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