Suzie Tullett hadn’t anticipated having to help her children buy their first homes. But over the past five years, romcom author Tullett and her ex-police-officer husband have transferred tens of thousands of pounds to their two thirtysomething sons. When their younger son was struggling to save for a house amid soaring rental costs, the Tulletts sold their Yorkshire family home to him for less than the market value. He was transferred the majority equity in the property, and left with only the solicitor’s fees and a small mortgage to pay off. Their elder son was given £20,000 towards the fees to buy his first home.
The couple now live full-time in their second home in southern France. Tullett, 55, understands that they were fortunate to be in a position to help their sons, thanks to their dual home ownership and her husband’s police pension, but it wasn’t something they had saved up for. “At the time, interest rates were peaking, the cost of living was getting higher, and we thought, ‘We’re gonna have to step in,’” she says. “We said we’d stay in the south of France, for our younger son and his family to be able to get a nice property in a nice area without being burdened with a hefty mortgage or having to save up 10 per cent for a deposit.” While they could afford to help, she admits the decision has “limited” her and her husband’s future finances.
This is the modern conundrum of the bank of mum and dad, when parental financial assistance is, realistically, the only means for a modern young person to get on the property ladder (unless they win an Omaze house, that is). Wealthy parents have always helped their children out, but in 2025 – a time when soaring rental costs make it near impossible to save for a deposit – parental assistance has never been so prevalent, and not just among those with aristocratic surnames or Eton on their curriculum vitae.
Right now, the bank of mum and dad is among the top 10 mortgage lenders in the UK, but that is only a portion of the influence that parents have on the housing market: they are also acting as rent guarantors, landlords, and mortgage payers. According to data published by estate agent Savills last year, more than half of first-time buyers received financial help from their family, with an average of £55,572 given in loans and gifts by parents to enable their offspring to buy a home. The last time the numbers peaked this high was in 2009 after the financial crisis, when 70 per cent of first-time buyers received family support.
The bank of mum and dad, then, has never been so vital in kickstarting a financially stable adult life. Adam Rockall, a mortgage adviser at Pebbles Mortgage & Protection, tells me that during his 20-year career, he’s never seen the bank of mum and dad (and the bank of grandma and grandpa) play such a prominent role. On average, if he brokers five first-time mortgages per week, two or three of the deposits will have been financially subsidised by parents.
Rockall says it’s not just first-time buyers receiving help, either: it’s also “onward movers, where they can’t afford to get to the next rung of the ladder, and mum and dad are helping out”. He says he’s seen it all: multi-generation equity releases, parents of retirement age taking out lifetime mortgages (another form of equity release) or downsizing altogether. He’s worked on mortgages for first-time buyers earning over £100,000 per year, who still needed financial help from their parents to make up a deposit.
“We’re not talking about when I was given £5,000 or £6,000 to get me on the ladder when I took out my 97 per cent mortgage 20 years ago,” he explains. “We’re talking about parents and grandparents doing equity release from their mortgages. Everyone wants that 10 per cent mortgage, and most can’t do it without extra help.”
Rockall has worked with three generations of one particular family, all of whom have released equity in their properties to pass down. “The grandparents released equity for their children, and when they became parents, they remortgaged to help out their own children. The level of debt is quite staggering, but it’s all to own a property.” He says that while renting culture is the norm in many European countries, it’s different in the UK. The societal importance of ownership, he adds, is best described by the phrase “a man’s home is his castle”.
The staggering level of intervention from the bank of mum and dad is also a result of the wealth of the boomer generation. Baby boomers – those born between 1946 and 1964 – have been described by The Sunday Times as the “richest generation there has ever been”, with around a quarter of them owning £1m in assets. Over the next few decades, it is estimated that this generation will pass on £5.5 trillion to their children and grandchildren via inheritance. It’s forecast to be the largest flow of generational wealth in history.
It’s funny, then, that these individuals weren’t typically born into aristocratic families; many of them are middle-class types who have benefited from free university education, long-term pension plans, reasonable house prices and affordable mortgage rates. They got on the property ladder – and crucially, retained that property – just at the right time, before prices rocketed after 2008. The bank of mum and dad is no longer just a luxury for the one per cent.
As a young person, it’s easy to see the signs of someone being drip-fed family money – that sense of things not quite adding up. Perhaps you have a friend with a low-paid creative job who can still afford to rent their three-bedroom apartment in east London. Or maybe a freelance acquaintance who complains about constantly being broke, yet is suddenly a homeowner at the ripe old age of 28.
In recent years, the societal conversation around privilege has become slightly more transparent, especially when it comes to public recognition that being white, male, or a mix of the two can offer a headstart. But it’s considered passé to even mention your financial privilege, or that you have benefited from a leg-up. Peers who have admitted this to me have done so in hushed tones (“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my parents,” they’ll say, with a sense of faint embarrassment). But there’s no hiding that millennials and Gen Z – faced with this shambles of an economic situation – are two generations whose fortunes are morbidly dependent on another person dying, or being given pre-inheritance money.
David Sturrock, an associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), tells me that, economically speaking, the realities experienced by millennials and their parents’ generation are starkly different. While baby boomers have benefited from a combination of factors that have made them incredibly wealthy compared with any generation that’s come before, their children haven’t had the same luck. He explains that house prices have grown twice as fast as incomes since the 1990s, but at the same time, there’s been a big shift of wealth “through selling off council housing and the privatisation of industries”, which has led to “a lot more wealth in private hands”.
Sturrock says that, by comparison, those in their twenties and thirties today are earning similar wages to someone in the same age bracket 20 years ago, particularly when you account for inflation. “Putting this all together, it means that parents of adults are much better off, while their children aren’t,” he says. “This has resulted in a huge growth in wealth transfers across generations in the form of inheritances, but also ‘during-life gifts’, which are typically big sums given towards a home purchase.”
Historian Eliza Filby argues in her book, Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad, that the “inheritocracy” she refers to in the title has become the dominant social power in the 21st century, with opportunities being determined by parental wealth rather than hard work. She believes, though, that the current economic climate has made parents more sympathetic towards their children’s circumstances compared with a decade ago, when millennials were told to stop buying oat-milk lattes and save for a deposit instead.
Filby says that baby boomers have more empathy as they’ve seen the cost-of-living crisis play out. “Parents are more aware of the cost of being young, and they’re more in touch with what their kids are going through,” she says. “Most baby boomers are like, ‘It was much easier in our day’, and that wasn’t the case 10 years ago.” This has created the perfect storm, leading parents to parent – in the financial sense – for much longer. “Retirement plans and downsizing plans are being redrawn; savings plans are being rethought,” says Filby. “Some people are savvy and have the capacity to plan for their children’s university experience, or maybe half a deposit, but actually most don’t.”
The vast transfer of generational wealth expected in the next two decades will only exacerbate inequality, says Sturrock. In the first place, those receiving large financial gifts will be from relatively better-off backgrounds. “And those people are more likely to have already had a better education, and are more likely to be earning more in the first place,” he explains.
Help with a lump-sum deposit, then, allows wealthier people to occupy more expensive areas – those that have better access to labour markets with higher wages – thus perpetuating the cycle of inequality. “The size of your house may not transform the whole trajectory of your life,” adds Sturrock, “but accessing a very productive labour market, or getting on a career ladder that leads to a lot of progression and skill growth, can be more transformational, and we know that that happens in certain labour markets and not in others.”
He says that the knock-on effect of huge wealth transfers can lead to young people having to compete against one another. “There’s basically a fixed number of houses available, so if someone has extra money, everyone’s just bidding against each other. It comes down to a basic question of fairness. It kind of raises the possibility of who gets to go to London? Who gets to be in those labour markets with a lot of opportunity?”
While many parents don’t have a spare house for their children to live in, or £50,000 to give away, they are still trying their hardest to help out. Filby says that this often takes the form of the “hotel of mum and dad”, where those in their twenties and thirties are moving back home rent-free to pay off debts and increase their savings. A study published by Sturrock and his IFS colleagues in January found that the proportion of adults in the UK who are making this choice has risen by over a third during the last two decades (that’s roughly 450,000 more 25- to 34-year-olds living at a parental home compared with the number in 2006).
Staying at home for longer, though, has an impact on family dynamics, says Filby. “If you had planned on moving abroad in your sixties, or had planned on downsizing – all of those plans are shot,” she explains. “There is now an extended period of adolescence, and therefore an extended period of parenthood.”
Parents might not have anticipated sending regular bank transfers to their children in what were meant to be their winding-down years. And Tullett says she and her husband have faced criticism for their decision to help their sons. “I know some people think we’re daft for doing this,” she says. “They think we’re offering things on a plate.” But doing nothing wouldn’t have sat right with her. “You get to a point in life where you’ve worked hard and you find yourself in a good situation, and there is an element of guilt for parents,” she says. “I would have felt bad not stepping in and helping when we could.”
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