Inheritance

Yesterday

Esme Gordon-Craig

Boomers are skiing off with Gen Z’s inheritance

No one enjoys bringing up the topic of inheritance with their parents. Discussing money is bad enough. Toss in a reminder of someone’s impending expiration date and the result is a situation that’s both distasteful and uncomfortable. However, this affluent elephant in the room is one which cannot be ignored. Yet judging by the rather reckless spending activities of boomers these days, it seems that’s exactly what’s going on. There’s something deeply disheartening about the severance of parental wealth from the success and security of their offspring If you’re over 65, it’s highly likely that you are a ‘SKI-er’. No, not someone who plummets drunkenly down the French Alps (though you probably do this too).

Tuesday

Amanda Craig

A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed

It’s 1796, and an idealistic young English doctor, Duval Harlington, just released from La Force prison in revolutionary Paris, learns that his father is dead. He is now Lord Harlington, heir to a fortune and the idyllic estate of Muchmore. But in order to gain possession of his heritage – and, as importantly, foil the aspirations of his unpleasant cousin Ralph Carson – Duval must marry within two days and seven hours. No suitable partner is available, so he buys a woman in a Norfolk wife sale for ten guineas. Money, its acquisition and loss, is woven through this hugely enjoyable novel.

Thursday

Arabella Byrne

Millennials don’t want brown furniture

For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was passed on to my sister, who paid a considerable sum to store it because she had no room for it in her terraced house. Some years later, I was informed that I must house this precious mahogany albatross myself. After some handwringing and sadness, lack of space forced me to pass it on to someone in my village. She took one look and promptly vowed to ‘do an upcycle’.

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Scrapping inheritance tax is a terrible idea

There is no hole deep enough that a Conservative minister cannot muster the spadework to excavate it to even greater depths. No sooner had Kwasi Kwarteng announced that he was dropping his proposed reduction in the upper rate of income tax, than Andrew Griffith, one of his ministers at the Treasury, declared that he would like to see inheritance tax abolished. ‘I have lots of my fantastic local association [members] with me here and they will know because they asked me at my selection meeting 27 months ago which tax, if I had the choice, I would most like to see eliminated. History will record it was inheritance tax, ’he told Conservative party conference.