People lived longer. Houses became more valuable. Parents remained financially independent well into their nineties. And the great transfer of family wealth kept moving further into the future.

By the late twenty-first century, millions reached retirement still waiting to inherit. Homes, pensions and investments worth extraordinary sums remained concentrated among the oldest generation, while their children struggled with mortgages, childcare and retirement planning of their own. Banks learned to lend against expected inheritances. Governments tried to encourage earlier transfers. Care costs consumed estates that families had already counted upon. Eventually, an entirely new economy emerged around money that existed, but had not yet arrived.

The Wealth That Came at Seventy is a speculative future history of how longer lives could transform inheritance, housing, family wealth and social mobility. Written as though historians are looking back on events that have already occurred, it follows a society in which individually sensible decisions gradually produce an extraordinary result: people finally inherit the fortunes they spent decades expecting, only after many of the choices those fortunes might once have changed are already behind them.