I’m waiting for my friend Ellie in the car park of a pub where we often meet for lunch on Fridays. Suddenly I see her arrive in a new Land Rover Defender that costs, what? About £58,000? “Wow,” I say when she comes out. ‘I love the new wheels!’
‘Well, you know how decrepit my last car was!’ she laughs. It refers to a Volvo SUV that was only a few years old. Unlike my eight-year-old VW Tiguan, which I convinced my husband to buy last year and we’re still paying off.
During lunch we chatted about work and children. ‘How are they going to cope with the increase in school enrollment?’ asked. ‘We have told Matilda that she cannot go on the school trip to Italy next year and new bathroom plans are on hold. It’s going to bankrupt us and we only have one to pay. How do you manage with your three?
Ellie shrugs and says, “Poor Matilda.” Complicated, right? What would you like to drink, Chablis or rosé?
I realize, with a sinking feeling, that this VAT increase will not affect Ellie at all, probably because she recently inherited a significant sum from her father-in-law, who died earlier this year. Her husband is an only child and his parents were rich.
Now, writes anonymously, at age 40, a new divide has emerged that threatens to overshadow all those years of friendship: the inheritance gap.
However, I only know this through a process of elimination, not because Ellie told me.
In the past year, he has reduced his workday to two, enjoyed a vacation in the Caribbean, and is currently planning a family ski trip to Chamonix. He also started playing tennis and enrolled in a fancy cooking class. However, she won’t admit that anything has changed or talk about her windfall and, the fact is, she’s driving a wedge between us.
It’s not the money. It’s the secret I’m struggling with.
We’ve been friends for over 30 years, since our first term at our all-girls high school, and we’ve never kept secrets from each other. We were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings and have shared everything over the years.
You could say her finances are none of my business, but since we’ve discussed every other aspect of our lives for decades, it baffles me that she doesn’t talk about this. Could it be because the more or less parallel paths we have followed our entire lives are now diverging?
When I inherited £10,000 from my late grandmother when I was 20, I used it as a deposit for a flat. I made no secret of the fact that this was how I managed to buy.
Most of my friends were in a similar situation: struggling on meager salaries but working their way up. We relied on a little help from our parents or grandparents to get up the real estate ladder, and most of our disposable income went toward nights out. She later disappeared at weddings, holidays, and home renovations.
But now, at age 40, a new divide has emerged that threatens to overshadow all those years of friendship: the hereditary divide.
Although my husband and I are comfortable by many people’s standards (he works in professional services for a major company and I’m a copywriter), we’re struggling compared to Ellie.
He’d never been envious of her before, despite the small vacation home in France and the occasional splurge on designer items she’d always loved. But this has changed things. It has changed the dynamic of our relationship.
Money problems at this stage of life seem more acute than ever. Faced with another 20 years of mortgage payments and rising bills, now is when we could really use a little help.
We would love to have been able to send our two children to private school. Our eldest son, now 14, has thankfully passed the age of 11+ and attends a good local grammar. But our daughter, 11, is not as academic, so we made the decision to do it privately, at great personal cost.
It’s a first world problem, but shelling out £18,000 a year, which is what we expect rates to be with the VAT increase, means giving up expensive holidays (last year we spent a rainy week in Devon and another in Wales, but even that strained us), postponing renovations (even though we really need new carpets and electricity), and cutting back on spending on restaurants and day trips. In other words, the kind of things that make life fun.
I’m worried if our son will resent me in the future for not raising him privately, but my husband refused to remortgage. I shudder to think of the six consecutive years of university accommodation fees we will have to pay.
So, no, I’m not proud of it, but I do feel resentful of those who inherit a tidy sum or still have mom and dad’s bank to fall back on.
One, a woman I lived with at university, recently lamented the fact that her parents had to sell their holiday home so they would no longer have a coastal retreat, although they enjoyed the cash injection when they split the profits.
This was after her parents had previously sold their main house for £5 million, much of which I assume went to her and her siblings. Estate planning is big business these days and she has been a happy beneficiary.
Another, very sadly, lost both parents in quick succession, but inherited his former rectory. It is no exaggeration to say that you will never have to worry about money again. Not that I think for a moment that money brings you happiness, but what I envy is the lack of worries about it.
I talked about this with a close friend who is in a similar situation to me. She confessed that she felt like a poor person among the parents at her son’s high school.
Earlier this year, she took her two young children skiing in Val d’Isère with another family from school. “We kept asking how much we owed them for the chalet before we realized they owned it,” he says.
“Although he hasn’t told us that this chalet is a consequence of the recent death of his elderly mother and the inheritance he received, it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.”
Another friend also feels the pain of high school privilege. Although she and her husband, who works in private wealth management, are extremely wealthy by anyone’s standards, she doesn’t feel it compared to some of her new peers.
They may have impressive incomes, but without the cushion of generational wealth they feel like church mice.
“Freddie and Jack recently went to his 10th birthday party at one of their friends’ house, which was huge: a wide driveway, mullioned windows, you know, that kind of thing,” he says.
‘When they got home they kept asking why we only had two cars. Turns out the dad has a secret Ferris Bueller-style garage under the stables with a bunch of supercars. Freddie was delighted to be able to sit in a Bugatti. When he Googled the family name, he discovered that the son was the heir to a well-known company.
The thing is, I’ve always had friends richer than me. Another former flatmate from my university days had a flat in Chelsea and a country house in Yorkshire.
Among the residents of his mansion near Sloane Square were a member of a popular 90s boy band and a lady. But since we always knew she was rich, that was never a big problem.
It is the fact that a substantial sum of inheritance – or worse, a secret inheritance – in old age changes everything. I can’t help but feel like I’ve slipped down the pecking order: Ellie has started spending time with a much larger gang of wealthy farmers who go hunting on the weekends and have pictures of pheasants on their toilet seats (not I joke). ).
Ellie’s husband went to school with some of them and every now and then I overhear her casually mention a dinner I was never invited to. (“Sophia Rutland-Edmonds makes a wonderful pavlova”, etc.)
I can’t deny that I feel a little envious. Nor that there is now a gap that we may have difficulty overcoming.
Maybe one day I’ll find the courage to ask Ellie about her windfall or she’ll open up to me.
In the meantime, maybe I should start saving for a Land Rover Defender. It will only take me about ten years to buy one.