Where there's a will, the middle class will find a way First, she hoped my wife and I would both live to a ripe old age, so our offspring would be middle-aged or even older by the time they inherited. But the time that people really need a bit of capital is when they're younger, buying their first home and raising a family. Second, she didn't want the Chancellor to get a bigger bequest than any of our children. Inheritance Tax, applied to the estates of a married couple after the death of the second spouse, is charged at the rate of 40 per cent and kicks in at a threshold of £325,000. That does sound like quite a lot of money, by most people's standards. But is it? According to ONS figures released last December, the median value for household wealth was £232,000. In other words, half of all households in Britain are worth more than that. The minimum wealth required to enter the top 10 per cent of households - ­which is to say around 2.5 million, containing 6 million people - was a remarkable £976,000. Those in the top 1 per cent were worth a minimum £2,807,000. This wealth is, as one might expect, unevenly distributed. Families in the South East of England are more than twice as likely to be wealthy as those in Scotland. In fact, 60 per cent of middle-aged people in the South East enjoy a net household worth of £500,000 or more, and 11 per cent of the South East's young adults are growing up in families with a net worth of £1 million or more. The single biggest element of this wealth lies in the value of the pension funds held by the over-50s. Only a quarter of that money can be cashed in and thus be passed on to descendants, before or after death. But the second-biggest factor in household wealth is the value, net of mortgage debt, of the family home. And that can be passed on and, of course, taxed. Millions of people are suddenly faced with a problem once confined to Downton-esque aristocrats: the preservation of the family fortune from one generation to the next. The upper classes have long been obsessed with the challenge of finding ways around death duties. Traditionally, family money is placed into trusts, so that the wealth resides in an impersonal entity, rather than with any one individual. And then there's the thorny matter of Potentially Exempt Transfers. These are gifts made by an individual that are excluded from his or her estate, provided that they occur at least seven years before death. But history has shown that can be tricky. In 1943, the 10th Duke of Devonshire transferred his family's assets, including Chatsworth House, to his son, only to die in 1950, just weeks before the crucial seven years were up. Death duties were charged at 80 per cent, with the result that the Devonshires were handed a £7 million bill, worth more than £200 million in today's money. Now, very few people are ever going to face that kind of bill. But millions could be liable for six-figure Inheritance Tax. And that's already starting to have an effect on people's behaviour. I am a trustee of a fund set up by my parents. Their lifestyle is very modest, but they've bought and sold several houses over the years, have now downsized and have put some of the balance between their old and new properties into a fund. At the moment it's helping one of my daughters and my niece through university. I'm extremely grateful for that assistance, since it takes considerable pressure off my cashflow. Meanwhile, with most of our wealth tied up in our house, Clare and I are trying to work out the best way to pass some of that on to our children at the start of their adult lives. All of which is in the finest middle-class tradition of working hard and helping one's kith and kin. But, as any aristo can tell you, family money can very easily lead to family conflicts. Whoever controls the cash has huge power, making everyone else a supplicant for favour. I know one upper-class clan in which a father sabotaged his son's inheritance by splitting the family's stately home from the money-making estate that was meant to pay for it. This set up a bitter, mutually envious hostility between the titled, home-owning branch of the family and the richer, but less elevated landowners, which has poisoned all their lives ever since. So, as more middle-class types like me enter the world of estate-planning, trusts and Potentially Exempt Transfers, it's worth bearing one thing in mind. There's no point everyone squabbling over money given out by one living person to another. Because if it all ends in murder, that's the entire, oh-so-cunning plan gone for a very expensive burton.