What’s wrong with planning a once-in-a-lifetime holiday? Or dreaming of buying your first home? Nothing, of course – unless it hinges on the death of your elderly mother. Increasingly, it seems, many people’s future plans depend on such family tragedies. The sorrow of losing a loved one, soothed by an inheritance pay cheque.

Friends speak openly about moving into a bigger house once their inheritance ‘comes through’

There is something unpalatable about the idea of using a deceased relative’s estate to repay a loan you chose to borrow, or finally booking the cruise that has been sitting in your Tui basket since your father’s first dose of chemo. But more troubling still is the revelation that people are planning to rely on their presumed inheritance to improve their quality of life. In other words, they are already imagining what kind of life upgrade they will purchase following the death of a family member.

My first encounter with this way of thinking came during my father’s illness earlier this year, when I ran into a former classmate and told him about dad’s diagnosis. Like any decent person, he sympathised, but before I could thank him, he’d pivoted to a silver lining of the most peculiar kind: ‘What were our plans for Dad’s car?’ Seeing my bewilderment, he hurried to explain that he already had a promise of inheriting his mother’s SUV. He intended to sell it and use the money to trade in his own car for something more suitable for his growing family. ‘The point is,’ he clarified, ‘it’s important to think about stuff like that – and it’s nice to know you don’t lose everything when your parents die.’ His mother was barely sixty and, as far as I know, in excellent health.

This kind of silver-lining – or rather, pocket-lining – thinking has caught me off guard repeatedly since my father’s death. Friends speak openly about moving into a bigger house once their inheritance ‘comes through’, as if they could neatly separate the idea of a windfall from the reality that it entails the loss of something infinitely more valuable and irreplaceable.

It isn’t only the young who think this way. A conversation with a retired family friend ended halfway through his monologue about moving to Central America once his ailing mother passed. With almost proud anticipation, he announced that he had already begun putting downpayments on a compound, fully expecting a hefty sum from the eventual sale of her house.

With such a mentality, it is perhaps unsurprising that challenges to wills are on the increase in England and Wales. Generally, a person has the right to decide what should happen to their estate after their death. But English law allows close relatives and dependants to challenge the deceased’s will if they believe that it fails to make ‘reasonable financial provision’ for them. Applications to block probate – the mechanism for challenging a will – reached an all-time-high last year. While only a small fraction of applications proceed to trial (approximately 1.8 per cent in 2024) the majority of disputes are settled outside of court. It is estimated that around 60 per cent of claimants succeed.

The rise in wills being contested may be down to the growing prevalence of more complex family structures, creating more individuals who can stake a claim to the deceased’s wealth. Melinda Giles, managing partner at Giles Wilson, warns that courts tend to view lifetime financial support as implying a similar obligation upon death. ‘If you are prepared to provide for someone financially during your lifetime, why would you not provide for them on your death?’ she says.

Other explanations include the higher cost of living and difficulty getting onto the property ladder, which keep younger generations financially dependent on relatives for longer. It also, inevitably, means greater public awareness of their legal rights.

Perhaps the law should evolve to ‘catch up’ with changing societal norms and relationships. But whether a shake-up is needed or not, what is strangely absent from much of the coverage is any recognition that these shifting norms may themselves be troubling. It is worth pausing to question a society that increasingly views inheritance as something to claim rather than something to receive.

Earlier this year, in Rogers v. Wills, a judge found in favour of a claimant who argued that she was entitled to a greater share of her mother’s estate than her siblings because of the unpaid care she had provided during her mother’s final years. The judge held that there had been a clear understanding between the claimant and her mother that the care she provided amounted to a contract for services, and that the mother, having benefited from that service, had been ‘unjustly enriched’ at her daughter’s expense.

The case potentially opens the door to new claims for reimbursement from family estates. Even if this is only one case, the reasoning behind it may prove highly influential in family inheritance disputes of the future.

Of course, there are situations in which contesting a will is entirely justified – such as in suspected predatory marriages, or cases where vulnerable dependants have been inadequately provided for. But normalising the contractualisation of caregiving between husbands and wives, and between children and parents – treating relationships primarily as transactions – is not just a slippery slope, but an erosion of the very foundation on which families are built.

And, speaking of slopes, I suppose I should now turn my attention back to planning that ski trip – a perfectly ordinary mother-and-daughter trip, I hasten to add, one in which both travellers intend to return home.