Dr Eliza Filby: The Great Wealth Transfer is only half the story
Eliza is an author and historian of generational change – and what it means for how we work, earn and live.
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When I wrote Inheritocracy, my book about the Bank of Mum and Dad and the Great Wealth Transfer, I began with a simple observation: inheritance is never just about money, but about family. Behind every transfer sit questions of fairness, obligation, resentment, love and who helped whom, when and why. I’m increasingly of the view that the biggest risk to succession of wealth isn’t bad investment, but choices around the way money is given, withheld or spoken about. These can shape families as profoundly as money itself.
These conversations are no longer confined to the reading of a will. They are happening earlier, more often and in more complicated ways: through deposits, school fees, childcare, business backing and care for ageing parents. Not all support appears on a bank statement. It can take the form of time, advice, networks or the confidence that comes from knowing there is family backing if life or work does not go to plan. For families thinking about succession, the challenge is understanding how wealth now operates inside the architecture of family life.
The scale of this shift is hard to overstate. Britain is sitting on vast stores of private wealth. The Office for National Statistics estimates privately owned wealth in Great Britain at £13.6 trillion, while the amount expected to pass between generations over the next 30 years is thought to be between £5.5 and £7 trillion. Legal & General began publishing its Bank of Mum and Dad reports in 2016. That such a category needs measuring tells its own story. While the broader economy has struggled, the family economy has thrived. Around £17 billion is gifted or loaned informally each year, overwhelmingly from parents to adult children. In housing, this has become particularly visible. Just over half of first-time buyers receive help from the Bank of Mum and Dad or wider family, and nearly a third of grandparents are contributing towards school or university costs. For many families, the Great Wealth Transfer is no longer a single moment of succession, but is already functioning as a private economic system inside British family life.
We tend to fall into one of two lazy stories about younger generations: either they are uniquely hard done by, or uniquely indulged. Neither is quite right. The world is not worse, but different. Many young adults are better educated, more culturally powerful and more technologically fluent than previous generations, but the promise they inherited was clear: work hard, get the degree, build the career, save sensibly and security would follow. Increasingly, that bargain has weakened.
The clearest example is housing. Homes in England now cost around 7.9 times average annual disposable household income, compared with around four times average earnings in the mid-1990s. The asset that once turned steady work into security has drifted beyond wages alone
This is also changing the succession conversation itself. Parents are increasingly asking not simply how much to leave, but when to give, how to be fair and how to support without creating dependency. Younger adults, meanwhile, are asking a different but related question: how can family support be used without losing independence, ambition or responsibility?
The Great Wealth Transfer is only half the story. As family wealth begins to move down the generations, younger people are also creating wealth in ways their parents may barely recognise.
The 1980s and 1990s reshaped wealth through home ownership, privatisation and wider access to investing. Today’s disruption looks different. Wealth is being created through technology, intellectual property, digital platforms, AI, specialist expertise and global online communities. Businesses that once required offices and large workforces can now be built with a laptop, a small team and access to a worldwide market.
YouTube creators alone contributed £2.2 billion to the UK economy in 2024 and supported 45,000 jobs. New wealth does not always look glamorous. Sometimes it is a teenager with a camera, but just as often it is a window-cleaning franchise, care agency or logistics business using better software, sharper branding and more efficient systems than its competitors.
"Businesses that once required offices and large workforces can now be built with a laptop."
Left to right: Michael Adex, Manchester-based music entrepreneur; Whitney Wolfe Herd CEO of dating app Bumble and Jess Hunt, influencer and founder of REFY Beauty.
Six in ten young adults say they want to be their own boss by 30, which I read less as impatience with employment than as a rational response to a less secure traditional path of degree, career, home ownership and retirement.
Crucially, these new wealth creators are not separate from the inheritance story. Eighty-five per cent of recent start-ups relied on the founder’s personal capital as their initial source of funding, while 20 per cent drew on contributions from family and friends. The Bank of Mum and Dad is not only helping younger generations buy homes, it is also helping some of them build businesses.
As Mike Pickett, Portfolio Director at Cazenove Capital, observes, many wealth creators see wealth as “fluid and active, something to be used rather than simply held”. Family capital may increasingly be used not simply to secure the traditional milestones of adulthood, but to provide the seed capital for the next generation of wealth creators.
Who family wealth is for is also changing. Daughters are inheriting just as much as sons, while increasingly earning, investing and founding businesses themselves. Women are now breadwinners in one in four relationships, while in 2022 women in the UK established more than 150,000 companies, more than twice as many as in 2018. Family money is being pulled in more directions: towards houses, school fees and university, but also childcare, career changes, retraining, care for ageing parents and the early stages of a business.
Younger inheritors are often assumed to be more values-led with money, but recent ESG (environmental, social and governance) research by the Harvard Business Review suggests something more pragmatic. Enthusiasm has shifted from values-driven idealism towards a more risk-first, economically grounded mindset. Younger adults are asking not only how wealth can express their values, but how it can create security, independence and agency.
The money moving down families over the next 10 or 20 years will arrive in a world where housing, childcare and care are expensive, education is being reconsidered and work no longer guarantees security in the way many parents once hoped it would. Much of it will be used defensively: to help children buy homes, support grandchildren, pay fees or absorb shocks that wages alone cannot withstand. Wealth accumulated over decades can be swallowed quickly by the cost of keeping the next generation afloat.
More interesting is the possibility that some is used to build as well as protect: to back a business, fund retraining, support a founder through the first unpaid year or help a young person create an asset beyond property. It is no longer only about preserving what one generation built but giving the next generation the confidence and capacity to build something of its own. The next generation are not simply inheritors; increasingly, they are builders too.
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