“Here’s how to retire early,” promise TikTok’s financial influencers. But the life hacks offered never cover the most important advice: pick the right parents. Because looking ahead, inheritances will decide who does, and doesn’t, get a decent gap between the carriage clock and grim reaper.
Household wealth has surged in Britain in recent decades, to total over £15tn, while wealth inequality is twice as high as income inequality (that’s before we recognise that official figures underestimate the assets of the very top by £800bn). Wealth gaps have also stretched between young and old: home ownership rates for young adults have plummeted, while a staggering one in six baby boomers own a second property.
Crucially, these assets do not disappear when their owners die: an inheritance boom is coming as bequests double over the next two decades. Our family finances are going to be shaped more in the years ahead by who our parents are, and less by how hard we work, posing huge challenges to how fair Britain is and feels.
We focus on what this means housing-wise with the bank of mum and dad: nearly half of first-time buyers in their 20s receive some financial support, largely from parents. But we overestimate how much inheritances can solve younger generations’ home ownership traumas, because the most common age at which millennials will inherit looks set to be 61. That’s too late to finance the family home, but it means we’re missing a huge story: that inheritances will increasingly determine when, and how comfortably, we retire. Inheriting an average home equates to a decade less working on the average wage, creating a new kind of deeply felt inequality. So want a nifty retirement plan? Choose your parents carefully.
• Torsten Bell is Labour MP for Swansea West and author of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back
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