I thought an inheritance from my wealthy father would support me for life. But now, at 49, I’m renting and broke because he left his millions to his second wife…

Growing up, home was a safe and happy place. My father was a successful businessman. He was earning a six-figure salary, which meant our mother could stay home and take care of us.

We were very comfortable financially. My father drove a flashy red sports car. We always had two family holidays a year; one abroad and the other closer to home, in Jersey or the Scottish Highlands.

As children we lived in a leafy, affluent area of ​​Chiswick, west London, in a large, semi-detached house with a garden that looked almost the size of Windsor Great Park. Although we were not spoiled, we always received generous birthday and Christmas gifts.

But my childhood as I knew it came to an abrupt end in 1995, when I was 19 years old.

One Sunday afternoon, my parents sat my 12-year-old sister, Hannah, and me down in the living room and told me they were planning a divorce. I say parents, but only my father was there. My poor mother was so upset and still crying in the upstairs bathroom.

My father announced that he met someone else. He told us about his new woman on the outskirts of London and how he planned to leave the family home to move in with his daughter.

At first I thought he was joking, another joke from his rattle bag of practical jokes. However, this time his face did not wrinkle and turn into a smile. He remained serious.

He obviously found this to be a difficult conversation because his hands were shaking slightly as he told us. But when he stood in the doorway with a bag in his hand, he began to realize that he was really going to leave.

It wasn’t until he walked away that my first signs of anger surfaced.

Parental divorces can shatter any notion of security, and what was once solid ground can suddenly begin to shake. Life was uncertain, uprooted. My safety net was gone.

As part of my parents’ divorce settlement, my mother kept the family at home in Chiswick. We were now in Family 2.0, but without my father, we were definitely an inferior version of the original.

Even though our father made monthly child support payments until Hannah and I became adults and left home, we had to tighten our belts.

There would be less dining out and takeaways. If we were lucky there would be only one local holiday in a leap year. Meanwhile, my father bought a new, larger house with his new partner and took his new family on expensive vacations to the Caribbean.

After a while, my mother started working as a legal secretary. He found a beautiful new partner and returned to some measure of family life and stability, although things were never the same.

The bond we once had has not returned. With this new man around, conversations were more stilted, never more fluid, and all those shared experiences and years of family jokes suddenly had to be explained.

My father spent ten happy years with our stepmother Caroline and her teenage daughter Sophie. We visited them regularly. We would all go out to dinner and a movie.

The visits were strange at first; the tinkling ticking of an old clock interrupted many long silences.

We didn’t know what to say.

But Caroline was always the first to break the ice and asked for our opinions and interests.

My sister and I nicknamed our stepmother Anne-Lite; This was a cheerful reference to her status and a rather childish joke since she wasn’t as skinny as our mother. No matter how kind he was, he could never replace my mother.

However, in 2005, my father died unexpectedly at the age of 63. My stepmother called early one morning. He told me that my father was hospitalized in the middle of the night and succumbed to a massive heart attack.

The shock was huge. His death felt especially untimely as, at age 29, I had only just begun to process the pain of my parents’ divorce.

My relationship with my father seemed to change in my 20s. While I viewed him as a sage and a source of knowledge as a child, now as a young adult, I felt as if I were joking with a friend down the bar, rather than a father talking to his son.

Even though I had a lot of emotional support from my friends, I started to become more anxious and often had trouble concentrating.

Then, just as I was trying to come to terms with the loss of someone I loved so much, my grieving process was blindsided by another blow.

My sister and I were not excluded from the will this way. We just got much less than we expected. And I mean much, much less.

We both received a small sum after the succession was decided.

Enough for a holiday and a second-hand car. And maybe we should be grateful for that. But we didn’t do that because my step-mom and stepsister would take care of the rest.

This was about a million pounds; It was enough for my stepmother to never work and for my stepsister to get on the property ladder.

I couldn’t grasp it or try to grasp it, but it felt like a second loss. It was like I was having to start the grieving process all over again.

I felt cheated when I heard that I had so little left and these relative strangers would take it all. I began to wonder how much our father loved us and whether he did so even in our worst moments.

Loss of an inheritance means you have to grieve twice after the death of a loved one. The normal pain of losing a cherished parent is followed by crippling financial grief.

My sister and I nicknamed our stepmother Anne-Lite, a playful reference to her status and a rather childish joke, writes Lawrence Holland. Picture of the model posing

My sister and I were not excluded from the will this way. We just got much less than we expected. And I mean much, much less

First came denial and disbelief. This didn’t just happen, did it? Did I dream all this? How did I stay so short?

At the time I had a steady job in corporate PR and was sharing a rented house in Dulwich with good friends. Even though I was comfortable and had a great social life, at the end of the month I had very little money left to put into savings or a house deposit. It was definitely a time when I could have used some extra money; This was an unexpected opportunity.

My plans for the future changed overnight. I now realize that I must join the ‘work til you drop’ generation, indoctrinated to the end of their days, for which I was never prepared.

Given my prosperous early childhood, I expected to have a life supported by his inheritance, receive help getting on the housing ladder, and be able to retire and live a comfortable life in my late 50s.

This realization coincided with a period when I beat myself up and hated myself for a while.

I started blaming myself for not seeing the signs. I really should know, given what I know about my father. And it wasn’t like he didn’t give me any clues.

He was a self-made man who believed that others should make their own luck. He worked hard and relied on his intelligence to have a successful career.

This self-confidence was something he instilled in me from an early age: we always had to earn our own pocket money, whether from local newspaper trips or car cleaning.

How could I have been so stupid as to believe that my father would leave me something important?

It wasn’t that I wanted to fund a lavish lifestyle. But I was gnawed at by the feeling that it would be nice to stay behind long enough to put aside some money to use later in life.

Then came the anger, which took the form of passive-aggressive behavior towards my stepmother and her daughter. I ignored them for a while and responded to their invitations or requests with sarcastic and short remarks – and didn’t even bother to respond.

However, this did not last long, about a year at most. And with some honesty and mature reasoning, he corrected himself.

My father would not want this family grudge. And I reminded myself that my stepmother, Caroline, was a source of great comfort and joy to my father during the last decade of his life.

I was finally able to achieve some form of acceptance to a large degree, and what a liberating feeling that was.

I consoled myself by knowing that my financial inheritance was my father’s wishes and that I should accept them and live according to them.

It was also like he was sending me a message: that plans, including financial plans, sometimes change in life, and things don’t always go as planned.

Ironically, I think I probably had more drive and ambition as a result of my dad almost cutting me off.

I’d be lying if I said a little bit of inheritance loss resentment doesn’t still bubble to the surface from time to time, especially sometimes in the cold light of the morning when the harsh realities of life hit me in the face and my bank account is close to empty again.

It was a particularly stressful day a few years ago and I realized I only had £20 to my name. I was living in Surbiton, south-west London, and all the bills and payments were due at the same time.

Fortunately, things have improved immeasurably since then. But then some of my father’s money would definitely come in handy.

This occasional unrest is directed not at my father, but at my stepmother and her daughter.

Sometimes, when they invite me over for lunch or dinner, it’s hard to watch them enjoy relative luxury—fine wines, the latest gadgets, every TV subscription under the sun—and ask for nothing.

This is in stark contrast to the modest lifestyles my mother, sister, and I had to adapt to.

We tend to use things like cars, mobile phones or vacuum cleaners until they break rather than replacing them every few years. Sometimes we get the feeling that we should enjoy or have enjoyed what they have.

I’m now 49, I rent a flat privately and I still don’t own my house, I never expected to be told this and it’s so frustrating, especially considering my half-sister was able to get on the property ladder thanks to my dad’s money.

And my loss of inheritance sometimes surfaces when I hear my luckier friends talk about the inheritances they will receive after their parents die.

One friend in particular, an only son, will have four windfalls when his relatives die: an inheritance from two divorced parents and a childless uncle and aunt.

At times like these, I prefer to remain silent. I bite my tongue and remind myself that I cannot change the past.

Even though I’m not rich, I’m healthy, so I still consider myself very lucky in this lottery called life.

Names and identification information have been changed.