When Helen’s first grandchild was born, she was delighted with the pram she had found for her daughter. It was second-hand but in excellent condition, and the 64-year-old retired administrator from Cheshire had spent time cleaning it until it looked almost new.
Then the baby’s other grandparents arrived with their present. “It was one of those beautiful top-of-the-range travel systems,” she says. “I don’t know exactly what it cost, but I knew it was a lot. Suddenly I looked at mine and thought, ‘God, that looks a bit pathetic.’” Her daughter hadn’t complained. Far from it. “She was lovely about mine. Nobody made me feel bad. I made myself feel bad.”
It was Helen’s first glimpse of something she hadn’t really anticipated: what happens when two sets of grandparents have very different amounts of money.
Shorts
We tend to talk about grandparents as though they occupy roughly equivalent positions in a family. But grandparents can arrive at later life in extraordinarily different financial circumstances. One couple may own their home outright, have generous pensions and substantial savings. The other may still be paying rent or a mortgage and working well into their sixties or seventies. And when grandchildren arrive, those differences become unexpectedly visible.
