My inheritance is being drunk through a straw in a coconut in the Caribbean
A howl of anguish from the generation who fear their parents' high living will burn through their precious legacy
NOW is the time of the year when thoughts turn to booking summer holidays, and at my parents’ house in the West Country I am listening to their plans for Tuscany.
‘We’ve booked a villa with a pool,’ my mother tells me, scrolling through online photos of a beautiful old Italian farmhouse overlooking olive groves. My mind does the maths.
‘For just the two of you?’ I ask. ‘Or are some friends joining you to … share the cost?’ ‘Nope,’ she replies. ‘YOLO after all.’ YOLO is an acronym for You Only Live Once, and — oh irony — it’s one I taught her several years ago. It has become my parents’ mantra. They might as well put it up in neon lights in the living room that they so rarely ly inhabit these days.
For, like so many newly-retired boomers, my parents seem to have developed a full- on travel bug. And with every taken- on- awhim excursion to Provence, every luxury jaunt to Thailand, New York or Costa Rica, I’m afraid to say I grow ever more resentful.
It is not a pleasant thing to admit, but the fact is their dream holidays are draining my inheritance.
As an impecunious 34-year-old millennial in an impossibly expensive property market, I am relying on, at some stage, a handout from them. But all I can see is my money receding into the distance on a long-haul trip to Bali.
With many of my friends in a similar position, and the cost of living crisis still at full throttle, the question troubling us over the generational divide is this. Who is being selfish? us for wanting them to save their money so we can one day have it? Or them, for splurging it all so freely on themselves?
At the start of their travel spree, about five years ago, I loved the bravery and ambition of it. Growing up, we usually went to Devon or Cornwall once a year. But when there was just the two of them (my younger sister and I have long since flown the nest), they could afford to globe trot. For a bit.
Well, good for them, I thought. Let them, in their late 60s, have a couple of lovely holidays, before settling into a cosy retirement at home.
THE problem was it didn’t stop at just one or two. It didn’t even stop at three or four. Five years on, my phone is flooded with photos of Thai fishing boats bobbing on aqua seas. Mum’s friend moved there several years ago, and she thought: ‘Why not visit?’
She spent two weeks driving around Thailand on the back of her friend’s motorbike, going to bars, restaurants and beaches like a twenty-something backpacker.
Then Dad — a man who used to be quite content to watch Rick Stein’s cooking travelogues from the comfort of the sofa — took a sudden interest in Tokyo street food and Japanese night markets, which he obsessively researched on YouTube.
Flights to Japan do not come cheap: this much I know. Nevertheless, he booked some.
They have been to Ibiza, where they had spent much of their early 30s; to Madrid rid (my mum learned ed some e Spanish on Duolingo for that); and d many other th gorgeous, warm, interesting places. What I’d imagined as a ‘gap year’ between work and a UK-based retirement, largely pottering around at home, is fast becoming a ‘gap decade’.
While their pensions are healthy, this level of travel is eating into their savings. Is it unbelievably awful to think of the money they spend on these trips as mine?
They had, after all, mentioned they’d divide any eventual sum between my sister and me, and I’ve been quietly counting on that to get a leg up.
At 34, I am still renting and living hand-to-mouth. unlike the boomers, my generation are more used to working freelance or making do with gig economy jobs than climbing the corporate ladder in a solid job for life. Soon, AI will come for the white collar workers among us anyway.
I know that when I finally get on the property ladder, I’m going to be in so much debt that there will be no way out without help.
How can I ever settle down and give them grandchildren if there isn’t any money in the pipeline to support them? Do they want to go on holiday more than they want me to be able to have and bring up children?
I’m not alone in agonising over where my parents’ hard-earned money is going. According to a survey by an online wealth management advice firm called Money-farm, Money farm, two in five adult children chil dren feel thei their ‘ blood boiling’ at the th idea their parents are ar blowing their inheritance on luxury holidays.
Among adult children aged between 35 and 50, 40 per cent thought their parents should provide them with an inheritance (compared with 25 per cent aged over 65) — and 20 per cent had already argued with them about what was going to be left.
Most coldly, almost half of them wanted the money while their parents were still alive.
‘Of course your parents are being selfish,’ says my friend Kerry, a 38- year- old interior designer in Edinburgh and mother to a two-year- old. Her father died six years ago — at which point her mum realised, aged 75, that she wanted another go at life. She now goes on dates, Kerry tells me, is less around for promised childcare and has ‘found Saga’.
‘It’s obviously great that she’s having a life after my dad, but I do think, “Must you really see India again?” and “Is it even safe still to be skiing?”
‘She’s 80 now and she’s had a whole happy life of travel already. She’s had the marriage, the kids and the house at a time when none of it cost anything like what it does now.
‘And it’s not just the inheritance I need. I need the childcare so I can actually work. I can’t even afford to work!’
ANOTHER friend admits she puts phone notifications from her mum on silent when her parents go ‘ gallivanting abroad’ — because all the pictures of dreamy destinations make her jealous. And resentful.
‘My inheritance is currently being drunk through a straw in a coconut in the Caribbean,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be slim pickings at this rate.’
Though constant travel is my principal bone of contention, it’s not just that. My parents refinance a new car every couple of years, while I can’t even afford to learn to drive. They assured me the upgrade price of the new model four months ago was ‘very reasonable’ — but when flowers arrived the next day from the garage they’d bought it from, I had to suspect otherwise.
As for the holidays, I haven’t been away for six years. You have to have a lot of disposable income these days to cite YOLO.
Surprise, surprise, the advice from Money farm is for adult kids to save now in case their inheritance isn’t as much as they were bargaining on. They reckon 70 per cent of millennials are doing just that — though that’s a figure I find very surprising. Saving for a financially secure future when you’re living in a financially insecure present is soul-destroyingly difficult, in my experience.
Apparently it’s not all bad news. Around 60 per cent of older people said they were scrimping for the sake of their children and grandchildren, and 80 per cent will leave everything to them.
The question is: what will be left? I already know exactly what my inheritance will be. An evergrowing collection of Wish You Were Here postcards.