I am waiting for my friend Ellie in a pub car park where we often meet for a Friday lunch. Suddenly I spot her pulling up in a new Land Rover Defender which costs, what, about £58,000? ‘Wow,’ I say when she steps out. ‘I love the new wheels!’
‘Well you know how decrepit my last car was!’ she laughs. She is referring to a Volvo SUV which was only a few years old. Unlike my eight-year-old VW Tiguan, which I persuaded my husband to buy last year and we are still paying off.
Over lunch we chat about work and children. ‘How are you going to manage with the school fee rise?’ I ask. ‘We’ve told Matilda she can’t go on the school trip to Italy next year and new bathroom plans are on hold. It’s going to break us and we only have one to pay for. How are you managing with your three?’
Ellie shrugs and says, ‘Poor Matilda. Tricky, isn’t it. What do you fancy drinking, Chablis or rosé?’
I realise, with a sinking feeling, that this VAT rise won’t affect Ellie at all, probably because she has recently inherited a significant sum from her father-in-law, who passed away earlier this year. Her husband is an only child and his parents were wealthy.
Now, writes anonymous, in our 40s, a new divide has emerged, and threatens to overshadow all those years of friendship – the inheritance gap
I only know this through a process of elimination, however, not because Ellie has told me.
In the last year, she has reduced her working days to two, enjoyed a Caribbean holiday and is currently planning a family ski trip to Chamonix. She’s also taken up tennis, and signed up for a fancy cookery course. Yet she won’t admit anything has changed or talk about her windfall and, the fact is, it’s driving a wedge between us.
It’s not the money. It’s the secrecy I’m struggling with.
We’ve been friends for over 30 years, since our first term at our all-girls secondary school, and we have never kept secrets from each other. We were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings and have shared everything over the years.
Arguably, her finances are none of my business – but as we have discussed every other aspect of our lives for decades, it baffles me why she won’t talk about this. Could it be because the roughly parallel paths we have followed all our lives are now diverging?
When I inherited £10,000 from my late granny in my 20s, I used it as a deposit for a flat. I made no secret of the fact that’s how I managed to buy.
Most of my friends were in a similar situation – struggling on meagre salaries but working our way up. We relied on a bit of help from parents or grandparents to get on the property ladder, and most of our disposable income went on nights out. Later, it disappeared on weddings, holidays and home renovations.
But now, in our 40s, a new divide has emerged, and threatens to overshadow all those years of friendship – the inheritance gap.
Although my husband and I are comfortable by many people’s standards – he works in professional services for a top firm, I am a copywriter – we are struggling compared with Ellie.
I never felt envious of her before, despite the little holiday home in France and the occasional splurges on designer gear she has always enjoyed. But this has changed things. It has shifted the dynamic in our relationship.
Money hassles at this life stage seem more acute than ever. Faced with another 20 years of mortgage payments and rising bills, it’s now that we could really do with some help.
We would love to have been able to send both our children to private school. Our eldest, now 14, thankfully passed his 11-plus and attends a good local grammar. But our daughter, 11, isn’t quite as academic, so we made the decision to go private, at great personal cost.
It’s a first-world problem but shelling out £18,000 a year, which is what we expect the fees will be with the VAT rise, means forgoing expensive holidays (last year we spent a rainy week in Devon and another in Wales, but even that stretched us), putting off doing any renovations (despite the fact we really need new carpets and electrics) and cutting back on restaurants and day trips. In other words, the sort of things that make life fun.
I worry whether our son will resent me in the future for not educating him privately, but my husband refused to remortgage. I shudder to think of the six successive years of university accommodation fees we’ll have to find.
So, no, I’m not proud of it, but I do find myself resenting those who either inherit a tidy sum or still have the bank of mum and dad to draw on.
One, a woman I lived with at university, recently bemoaned the fact her parents had to sell their holiday home so they would no longer have a coastal bolthole – although they did enjoy the cash infusion when the proceeds were shared out.
This was after her parents previously sold their main home for £5million, much of which, I presume, went to her and her siblings. Estate planning is big business nowadays and she’s been a happy beneficiary.
Another very sadly lost both parents in quick succession – but inherited their old rectory. It’s no exaggeration to say she never really needs to worry about money again. Not that I think for one moment that money buys you happiness, but it’s the absence of worry about it that I envy.
I spoke about this to a close friend who is in a similar position to me. She confessed she felt like something of a pauper among her son’s prep school parents.
Earlier this year, she took her two young sons skiing in Val d’Isere with another family from the school. ‘We kept asking how much we owed them for the chalet before we realised they owned it,’ she says.
‘While he hasn’t told us that this chalet is the by-product of his elderly mother’s recent death and the inheritance he received, it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.’
Another friend is also feeling the sting of prep school privilege. Even though she and her husband, who works in private wealth management, are hugely well off by anyone’s standard, she doesn’t feel it in comparison to some of her new peers.
They may well have impressive incomes, but without the cushion of generational wealth they feel like church mice.
‘Freddie and Jack recently went to a tenth birthday party at one of their friend’s houses, which was huge – sweeping driveway, mullioned windows, you know the sort of thing,’ she says.
‘When they came home they kept asking why we only had two cars. It turns out the father has a secret Ferris Bueller-style garage underneath the stables with a whole host of supercars. Freddie was thrilled he got to sit in a Bugatti.’ When she Googled the name of the family, she discovered the son was heir to a well-known company.
The thing is, I have always had friends who are wealthier than me. Another ex-flatmate from my university days had a flat in Chelsea and a country pile in Yorkshire.
The residents in her mansion block near Sloane Square included a member of a popular 90s boyband and a dame. But as we always knew she was loaded, it was never much of an issue.
It’s the fact that a substantial sum of inheritance – or worse, a secret one – in later life changes everything. I can’t help but feel that I’ve slipped down the pecking order: Ellie has started spending time with a far grander gang of wealthy farming types who go shooting on weekends and have pictures of pheasants on their loo seats (I kid you not).
Ellie’s husband went to school with some of them and every now and then I hear her casually mention a dinner party I was never invited to. (‘Sophia Rutland-Edmonds makes a marvellous pavlova,’ and so on.)
I can’t deny I feel a bit envious. Nor that there’s now a rift which we may struggle to overcome.
Maybe one day I will find the courage to ask Ellie about her windfall or she will open up to me.
In the meantime, perhaps I should start saving for a Land Rover Defender. It will only take me about ten years to buy one.
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