Take a hypothetical client, used here as an illustration rather than a real case. She is 56 and three years into a portfolio career that she loves but is starting to think about winding down. Her 27-year-old daughter lives at home, and her 84-year-old mother lives alone, still drives, and has no plans to stop. Our client’s retirement forecast assumes an inheritance arriving at around 60, though she has not yet had a robust conversation with her mother about it. She may not have considered that her daughter is making the same assumption about her.

If your retirement counts on your parent’s estate, while your children are counting on yours, how many financial plans is that one sum of money expected to fund?

The generation holding both ends

Many of Generation X are waiting for an inheritance while also being expected to provide one. About one in four 27-year-olds in the UK now lives with their parents, against roughly one in seven in the mid-1990s (ONS, Labour Force Survey, 2025). At the other end of the family, 47% of women aged 75 and over live alone, and 27% of men, which is an arrangement that works well until an unexpected change in circumstances means support is needed.

Eliza Filby calls the result an Inheritocracy, a country where family money rather than earnings alone increasingly decides what a life looks like. Generation X sits in the middle, with less wealth than the baby boomers held at the same age, and with no template for planning retirement. Many are working longer than they expected to, often like our hypothetical client, and far fewer can treat the house as the pension than their parents did. The result is a generation improvising with obligations from both above and below.

An inheritance counted twice

People are using an expected inheritance as a retirement plan, but their parents may need that money themselves.

Around 10 million UK adults expect to draw on an inheritance in retirement, at an average of £56,535 each. Yet fewer than half (46%) have discussed it with the person whose money it is. More than one in five 22% have never raised the subject at all, rising to 33% among 35 to 54 year olds (Moneybox, Psychology of Retirement, 4000 UK adults May 2026).

The timing rarely helps either. The Institute for Fiscal Studies puts the average age at which the last surviving parent dies at 58 for people born in the 1960s, 62 for the 1970s, and 64 for the 1980s (Bourquin, Joyce, & Sturrock, 2020). For about a third of the 1980s cohort, it will not happen until they are in their 70s or later. That is late enough to change expectations, because the plan the money is propping up usually starts well before then.

Three things can shrink the sum before it arrives: the cost of care in later life, the arrival of pensions inside the inheritance tax net from April 2027, and parents who live longer than their children’s spreadsheets allow for. When an inheritance has been counted twice, the shortfall usually stays invisible until probate.

Equal shares, unequal starts

How do you split an inheritance? An equal share at death can leave siblings in very different places, depending on the point in their lives that each of them needed help.
Consider two siblings with a ten-year age gap between them. The elder bought a flat in 2012 with a deposit that looks quaint now. The younger is trying to buy this year and is probably carrying a larger student loan balance into a market that has moved a long way. Dividing the estate down the middle stays true to the arithmetic but ignores everything a needs-based analysis of the children’s finances would show. Add a divorce on one side, and the gap widens again.

Families increasingly argue about this after a death which leaves an information gap. Applications to block a grant of probate, “a caveat”, rose from 7,268 in 2019 to 11,362 in 2024 (HMCTS, via Freedom of Information request), and disputed probate claims reaching the High Court passed 1,200 for the first time in 2025 (Solomonic). The second figure is the smaller one, but it matters more, because while a caveat costs £3 and anyone can enter one, a High Court claim arrives with lawyers and further expense attached.

Evening things up carries its own costs. It takes explaining, effort and time, and puts a parent in the position of judging their own children’s luck. It can be the catalyst that starts the argument it was designed to prevent. Some families choose strict equal shares because the rule is simple and defensible, and that is a legitimate answer to the question of what is fair.

What goes into the plan

We would start by taking the expected inheritance out of planning.
Run the retirement cashflow model without it and see whether the plan still stands on its own. If it does, whatever arrives later improves matters rather than rescuing them. If it does not, you have found the real problem while there is still time to do something about it.

For the generation above, the order runs the other way. Model the cost of care and your own security first, then decide what can be passed on and when. Generosity that leaves you dependent later has moved the problem down a generation rather than solved it.
For parents helping children at different points in their lives, keep a running record of what each one has received and store it with the letter of wishes. It costs nothing now and a clear record can help your executors understand your intentions rather than having to reconstruct them at the worst possible moment.

The plan you have not seen yet

Most plans in this position have never been tested both ways. Your adviser will run your plan through carefully, once with the inheritance and once without it, so you can see which version you are living in and what changes if the money arrives late or never arrives at all. The aim is not to predict the inheritance, but to make sure your financial plan does not depend on one uncertain event.