Ruth Sunderland

The Bank of Mum and Dad: should parents lend money to their adult children?

I don’t normally glean insights for my personal finance columns from police dramas on TV, honest. Recently, though, I caught up with series one of Line of Duty.

One of the plotlines explored the middle-class money dilemma of our time: how much a good parent should shell out for their kids.

A decent officer was corrupted, not through drink, drugs or gambling, but because he needed money for his daughters’ ruinous private school fees.

This is not the kind of thing you can imagine happening to DCI Gene Hunt or Dirty Harry.

But then, back in the Life on Mars 1970s, parenting wasn’t even a verb, let alone a competitive sport. School fees were far more affordable and university education was fee-free.

There was certainly no such thing as BoMaD, or the Bank of Mum and Dad. If there had been, we’d have probably thought it was a music festival, or an up-and-coming district of New York.

It was also still possible then for young adults to get on the housing ladder by saving their own deposit – an outlandish idea now.

As a consequence, BoMaD is probably the fastest expanding financial operation in the UK, and is now on a par with the ninth biggest mortgage lender.

Helping the kids onto the housing ladder is an obsession with many 40-and-50-something parents.

I hear it all the time in my circle. One mother-of-two late teenage children tells me she and all her chums are planning to sell their family homes and move into smaller properties to free up money to give to their offspring.

Another friend, in his late 60s, is still working full-time, partly so he can go on helping one of his kids with his mortgage payments. The ‘child’ in question is approaching 40.

No wonder, then, that BoMaD will this year lend more than £6.5

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