I thought giving my children an early inheritance would make our lives better… instead it’s torn us all apart: SUSAN WAKEFORD

Do you feel a tinge of jealousy when you hear about people inheriting a sizeable sum of money? Do you picture them living new and exciting lives, all problems solved? Or at least feeling a great deal happier now financial burdens have been eased.

A more comfortable life was what my parents had in mind for us when, with years of shrewd planning, they tried to ensure our family benefited from their generosity, love and lifetime of hard work. The trouble was, inspired by their selfless legacy, my husband and I decided to share some of the spoils with our children early.

After all, in these challenging financial times, why not help younger adults out now? If we are lucky enough to lead long lives, they’ll be less likely to need the assistance at that point. And there’s the not insignificant matter of reducing inheritance tax.

Presenter Anne Robinson, thought to have amassed a £50 million fortune, confessed recently she’s doing everything she can to distribute her fortune among her family and friends before she dies, to keep it out of the hands of the taxman.

It sounds like a wonderful idea all round, doesn’t it?

But let my story serve as a warning. Our act of generosity has driven a wedge between my children, my husband isn’t on speaking terms with our youngest son, while my eldest couldn’t be more geographically remote if he tried. I can honestly say that the plan has ruined our lives.

Rather than bringing us closer together, giving my three sons some of their inheritance early has made us more distant than ever.

I’m an only child and Mum and Dad were lucky enough to carve out careers in the medical field. They accrued property over the decades in London, Cornwall (where I live), as well as a holiday home overseas.

In 2012, Dad died from a heart attack, and after that Mum was preoccupied with trying to ‘get everything in order’. By 2014 our home in Italy had been sold and the only remaining property was Mum’s bungalow.

Mum set up a trust fund because she didn’t want her lifetime’s work to be hit by a hefty inheritance tax bill. She really did her homework. An aunt and I were appointed trustees – we ‘managed’ the asset, though unlike me she wasn’t a beneficiary.

Inheritance tax rules give a seven-year time frame, meaning if Mum died within seven years of setting up the fund, then tax would have to be paid. And typically, my clever, organised, dear mother got the timings perfectly.

In 2022, eight years after she set up the trust, we were devastated to learn she’d been diagnosed with a brain tumour. She was fairly stoic about it and made it very clear that she didn’t want to undergo invasive surgery and treatments. 

Instead, she summoned her best friends to see her to say their goodbyes, drank champagne most days, and we buried her that Christmas.

You might say we’d won the lottery, and in a way we had. My husband and I are in our late 50s and while I earned a small wage in the care system, my husband was a car mechanic with his own business.

Based on the trust fund of £500,000 we decided to take stock of our lives, sold the business to my husband’s employee and took early retirement, intending to live modestly off the trust.

We had barely welcomed 2023 when, out of the blue, my husband suggested we give the boys, all in their in their late 20s and early 30s, a lump sum each.

Hand on heart, at first I wasn’t sure why they needed to have the money right now. Admittedly, none of them owned their own properties. Our eldest had trained as an animal behaviourist, the youngest worked as a waiter and the middle one flitted from one carer job to another.

So maybe this would be the boost they needed. And I had to admit it would be lovely to be able to witness all the ways it would benefit them.

But what was a decent amount to make a difference to their lives? I was adamant that we wouldn’t use more than half of the trust, and my aunt was in agreement.

We naively assumed that giving each of them £75,000 was a life-changing gesture that would allow them to get their foot on the property ladder.

When we had the boys home for a rare weekend together not long after their grandma had died, we sat them down and explained what we were going to gift them with. They could have been a bit more grateful!

Looking back, maybe they assumed all the money would be shared out between them. I had to explain that I didn’t have the authority to do that, it was decision I could only make with the other trustee, their great-aunt. And, in any event, we needed to live off something, too.

We didn’t set any provisos but we did stress this was the perfect time to use the cash as a downpayment for a property. Perhaps we should have been a bit firmer in our expectations of how the money was used, because we absolutely hadn’t anticipated what came next.

The day the cash hit my youngest son’s account, he texted: ‘Guess what? I’ve resigned! I’ve only got one life and I’m going to live it how I want to.’ This was followed by an airplane emoji.

Always a bit of a hippy, he’d never enjoyed school and drifted from one job to the next in adulthood. What was going to be a career in hospitality turned into various gigs as a waiter. He says he doesn’t want to be tied down to ‘working for the man’, which I try to understand… to an extent.

My husband phoned him immediately but it was too late; he’d booked a one-way ticket to India. On arrival, he wasted no time in getting a new collection of tattoos. I have no idea how much these things cost, but I know how they were financed.

A year on, my husband remains incandescent and refuses to speak to him. And our son isn’t coming home any time soon: ‘I’m staying put until the money runs out, Mum!’ He has a five-year visa, so I doubt we’ll see him in the near future. I last ‘saw’ him in a video call on my birthday: he is thinner, with long hair, a tan, and all those bloody tattoos.

Our middle child, who’s 32, followed my footsteps into the caring system and we’ve always been close. The problem is not him but his avaricious girlfriend.

The minute he came into his inheritance, she decided they should move in together. She’s 35, but the number of years she has actually worked can probably be totted up on one hand.

She now lets my son cover the bills and is named on the deeds of their new property as a co-owner. She was canny enough to make sure he set some funds aside to buy a new car for her, too. I privately wept when he told me.

With almost all the money now gone, when last winter’s gas bills were sky high – and his girlfriend was at home all day with the heating on full-blast – I helped him out by paying some of them.

So nothing about his life has changed – apart from the so-called security of co-owning a property with a woman who will continue to leech off him for as long as he has the funds.

Our eldest, now 35, did buy a house on his own – but 500 miles away in the Scottish Highlands, where he’s carving out a life on a game park. It breaks my heart that he’s so far away.

None of my sons are particularly close to each other and the money only drove a bigger wedge between them, forcing their lives down drastically different paths.

So, I can’t help but think we should have waited and kept the money in trust to be distributed after we’d gone. That way I would’ve been spared the pain of seeing what a mess my family has made of spending it.

Susan Wakeford is a pseudonym.

As told to Samantha Brick