Give your children a GOLDEN future
... but, as Karren Brady reveals, that DOESN’T mean handing them cash
You should be well on your way to a wealthier future by now if you have been following Money Mail’s star-studded How To Get Rich series all this week.
So far, we have had tips from City fund managers in charge of billions of pounds, shown you how to boost the value of your home and create a pension pot that will last for a lifetime.
We’ve helped you fine-tune your financial skillset from investing in the stock market to tweaking your spending habits to save thousands of pounds every year.
Today’s final instalment in our series is all about using your wealth to help your children and grandchildren.
Tax boffins explain here how to pass on as much as possible to your loved ones without paying a fortune in death duties.
We will also show you how to save and invest to help make your young ones the millionaires of the future.
But first we speak to Baroness Karren Brady, vice- chair of West Ham Football Club, who is best-known as one of Lord Sugar’s trusted assistants on BBC’s The Apprentice.
She reveals ways of supporting your children in their career and finances — without giving them a free ride.
With her withering looks and pithy retorts to hapless candidates on the television show, it’s clear Karren doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
But beyond Lord Sugar’s boardroom, she’s a champion of young people in business — particularly women — and wants to show the next generation ways to get ahead.
Dubbed the First Lady of Football, Karren is worth an estimated £85million and could, no doubt, afford to pay for everything her children ever wanted. But she firmly believes the only way to learn the value of money is to make it yourself.
‘Both my children have paid their own university fees.
‘I didn’t go to university and I took the view that if I had, I would have been really proud to have paid for it myself.
‘I didn’t think it was right to take away that gift that they could give to themselves.’
But Karren does admit to helping out her daughter Sophia, 23, a model with more than 30,000 Instagram followers, when necessary.
‘My daughter has her own job, her own flat and she’s completely independent. Yes, I have contributed to her rent. But in terms of all her bills and her living expenses and everything else, I contribute nothing to that.
‘ It’s quite hard to exist in London and she lives in a very modest one-bedroom flat, not a penthouse.’
‘When you work hard for your money you learn to make sacrifices and you’re not frivolous with it.’
Karren, who celebrated her 50th birthday this year, grew up in Edmonton, North London, and went to a local comprehensive school until her father Terry’s printing business took off. After this she transferred to a boarding school.
She confesses to being initially embarrassed as he collected her from the gates of the local secondary in a RollsRoyce. But Terry and Karren’s Italian mother, Rita, taught her not to be ashamed of the family’s wealth.
Nevertheless, she started out on her own path to riches at the age of 19 when, fresh out of school, she joined the cut-throat world of advertising as a trainee at Saatchi & Saatchi.
She fought hard to prove herself and moved up through the ranks, soon landing a new job at LBC radio where she won a £2million deal for the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport to advertise on the station.
Her business nous caught the attention of the newspapers’ then publisher David Sullivan, who offered her a job, and at the age of 20 she became a company director. When she spotted an advert publicising the sale Birmingham City Football club, which had been put on the market by the receivers, Karren persuaded Sullivan to buy the club.
It was while working there that she met her husband Paul Peschisolido, one of the he team’s star players.
By 23 she was its managing director and four years later when she had her daughter Sophia, Karren famously only took three days off work on maternity leave, something she now regrets.
When the club was floated on the stock exchange in 1997, Karren became the youngest managing director of a uKlisted company, at the age of 27. A few years later she had her son Paolo, who is now 20 and a student, studying politics and journalism.
‘If I could speak to myself at that age, I think I would say that
a career lasts a lifetime so it is important to find a balance within it,’ says karren.
After negotiating Birmingham city’s sale for £82million in 2009, karren joined the board of west ham united a year later and is still its vice-chair.
She cemented her fame on TV’s The Apprentice, first as one of lord Sugar’s job interview panellists, grilling the contestants in the latter stages of the series.
She took the place of Margaret Mountford, as one of lord Sugar’s two assistants in 2009.
Then former prime minister David cameron made karren a life peer in 2014 and she took the title Baroness Brady of knightsbridge.
She is passionate about closing the gender pay gap. She says: ‘More than 40 pc of uk companies have no women in senior management at all, which is just awful.
‘A lot comes down to gender bias and unconscious bias, but it’s also about confidence. your value and self- worth are linked.’