They Started in the Same Place. Now They’re £722,000 Apart.
A tale of two millennials that should make us stop and think....
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In this week’s episode:
A Tale of Two Millennials (A seriously depressing story)
What to make of THAT Fiverr email
What links Jimmy Choos and Motherhood?
Two Millennials, Two Futures
A tale of two millennials that should make us stop and think....
They started on £25k salaries. Thirteen years later, one has £794,000. The other has £72,000.
This is the story of two millennials - same degree, same ambition, same city. But one had help. The other didn’t. And that single difference changed everything.
Russell Group Meritocracy (2007–2010)
Alistair and Ben met during Fresher's Week. They downed Jägerbombs. They did bad karaoke. They turned up to lectures hungover, sometimes drunk. They lived together in student squalor. They sweated in nightclubs and sweated out their finals.
Neither was especially rich. Instead, they were bright, ambitious, and convinced the world was theirs for the taking. In 2010, albeit at the height of post-Crash austerity, they both graduated with 2:1s from a Russell Group university and landed their first jobs in London, each earning £25,000 a year.
But from the moment they walked off campus, their paths began to diverge. This had nothing to do with a lack of talent or effort, but purely circumstance.
The Renting Disadvantage (2010)
After graduation, Alistair did the wise thing and moved back in with his parents in the commuter belt. It made complete sense: no rent, home-cooked meals, and an easy travel into work. His mum still liked doing his laundry; his dad admired his frugality.
Meanwhile, Ben had no such option. His parents lived hundreds of miles away and couldn’t offer a spare room. Armed with two large suitcases, Ben began his long-term relationship with London’s rental market. First, taking a room from a uni mate whose parents had a buy-to-let. Yes, the ‘parents are my landlord’ type. Then, when they sold up, Ben moved on to another series of rooms and shared houses in a not-so-nice part of South London. Rent and the cost of living swallowed most of his pay packet. Despite being frugal, generating any measure of decent savings was impossible.
The BOMAD Deposit that Changed Everything (2012)
When he was in his mid-twenties, Alistair was fortunate to receive a £70,000 gift from his parents, which proved enough for a deposit on a one-bedroom flat in South London. He finally left the parental home, not because of his job or own savviness, but because of his parents’ generosity. He bought a place for £225,000 and committed to paying down the mortgage.
Ben, by contrast, remained stuck in the renting cycle. His wages rose incrementally, but never fast enough to outpace rent. Every move came with agency fees, deposits, and the exhausting flat-hunt treadmill.
Compound Advantage (2012–2023)
Over a decade, Alistair quietly built equity. His property appreciated by around 5% a year. Month by month, his mortgage shrank, his asset grew, and his wealth compounded. Alistair still stressed over bills and job security, of course, but beneath the surface, his house was working for him (and to a certain degree harder than his salary was).
Ben worked just as hard. His career advanced, his income rose, but so did his rent. He budgeted meticulously. Still, unexpected expenses - dental work, a broken laptop, a friend’s stag do - routinely derailed his savings plan. Saving £5,000 in a year was a genuine achievement. But still nowhere near enough.
Same Degree; Two different roads (2024)
At 35, Alistair sold his flat for £405,000. He’d built £305,000 in equity. With his partner, he upsized to a £700,000 home. A new mortgage and a sign that he was building wealth, but it was underpinned by a serious leg up.
Ben had £4,000 in the bank.
Finally on the Ladder (2025–2032)
Over the next decade, Alistair’s home continued to climb in value. He and his partner chipped away at their mortgage and gradually built savings. By 2032, they had substantial equity and a healthy financial cushion to ride out any financial shocks.
Ben, now 42, finally managed to scrape together a 10% deposit. He bought a £500,000 flat - a proud moment. But it came with a £450,000 mortgage and little room for financial error.
Let’s remember here, both had the same degree, same graduate wage, same work ethic.
One had early parental help. The other didn’t.
The eighth wonder of the world then - compound interest - applies especially to the Bank of Mum and Dad. When a gift or inheritance comes early, especially in your twenties, it multiplies over your lifetime.
The gap: £722,000. Alistair has ten times more wealth than Ben.
This is an imagined scenario between Person A (Alistair) and Person B (Ben), built by our new brilliant head of Data, Maria, who has illustrated how access to the Bank of Mum and Dad builds a divide between young people on the same career ladder.
I’ve had versions of this conversation countless times - with friends, clients, strangers - so much so that it is what prompted me to write my book Inheritocracy. Some feel quietly ashamed for being helped. Others feel quietly frustrated at not being given the same advantages. The culture of envy prevails - and has been accelerated by the latest windfall (see below). But the point is that this feeling of failure shouldn’t be internalised, because essentially it’s the system’s fault and not yours.
The Reading Room
What to make of the publication of the CEO of Fiverr’s email about the threat of AI? A chilling wake-up call, AI hyperbole or, potentially, a strategic move for a company that has made millions building a platform driven by hiring human freelancers, and may transition into a platform where you can hire out AI agents? I’m not sure, but let’s add ‘AI Jobs Warnings’ to the list of defining features of 2025.
This week I attended a dinner at the Resolution Foundation (Britain’s leading generational think tank) with the brilliant Bobby Duffy, David Willets and other esteemed academics to discuss intergenerational unfairness. The Baby Boomers were very much on the agenda. We tend to talk about this cohort like they were one massive wave, but there were, in fact, two waves. First, in the mid-1940s, then a dip, followed by a surge in the mid-1960s. The problem in 2025 is that second surge is now drawing their state pension. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects that spending on this alone will rise by £23 billion between the early 2020s and 2027–28, in just five years.
But work and pensions are changing at pace. Will millennials even expect a state pension? Will Gen Z, the auto-enrolment generation, need a flexible pension, which will be needed not to retire, but potentially a savings fund to up-skill in an age of AI? Will ‘unretirement’ become a thing? How is eldercare becoming more disruptive to pension savings for women than child rearing? And how is health at work becoming a GDP issue? There were few answers, but it was great to hear some brilliant minds chew over the dilemmas facing the UK (and frankly, the rest of the OECD).
More data coming in proves that Rachel Reeves has unleashed a windfall from the Bank of Mum and Dad with last year’s budget changes to Inheritance Tax. Parents donated £9.6bn in house deposits for their children last year. That’s double what it was in 2019, and over four years represents an increase of 71 per cent. More than 173,000 home buyers – 52pc of first-time buyers – were paid an average of £55,572. The inheritocracy just got real.
All aboard the entrepreneur-ship
I’ve started the DENT course cofounded by Daniel Priestley, and it’s been absolutely brilliant so far. It is all digital, naturally, but I appreciated this analogue gesture (lots of books) from the Dent team. The KPI course is all about how to leverage your insights to build a sustainable business, something that does not come naturally to this trained academic. For anyone out there who feels they run a business built on their time, wants to build better relationships with clients and enhance their profile, then do look it up. Honestly, my entrepreneurial spirit has been unleashed!
In the past three years, I’ve done Ali Abdaal’s YouTube course, done multiple years of business coaching, and am now having strategic sessions with a former YouTube exec. I’m a great believer in continuing to learn, learn, learn…..
Mother-overloaded?
Jimmy Choo and motherhood? Not exactly natural allies…. there’s nothing luxurious about motherhood. And that’s certainly the theme of Sarah' Hoover’s brutally honest ‘Motherload’ memoir, the launch of which I attended this week.
But it left me wondering, as
, wrote in her review in The Times last week, do millennials need to change the narrative on motherhood? Procreating has a really bad rep in literature at the moment - its portrayed as chaotic, depressing, imprisonment and well, just a bit shit. Is this the real reason young women don’t want to have children?I’ve been musing on this over the last couple of weeks…… will write about it soon.
Thanks for reading,
Eliza