How wealthy is Kate Middleton's family?
By Sally Hamilton
17 November 2010
The prince to marry the pauper? Well, not quite. Although a commoner, Kate Middleton's finances - or at least those of her family - are what many a middle-class Brit would aspire to.
Parents Carole and Michael have built up a comfortable cash pile from a successful online party business, Party Pieces - established in 1987. It is a mail order business that aims to help parents create 'magical' parties for their children at home. Party Pieces is run from a call centre, with eight staff, out of a barn near Reading in Berkshire. It also has a website which attracts around 150,000 potential customers a month. [Read more:
partypieces.co.uk] Although profit and loss accounts are not published because it is a partnership rather than a limited company, the income has contributed to a lifestyle that includes a 1m house in leafy Berkshire and putting their three children, Kate, Pippa and James, through some of the most expensive private schools, which for Kate alone would have cost an estimated 250,000. ''
How Partypiece.co.uk makes money They also bought her a flat in Chelsea now worth between 750,000 and 1m. [Update 25/11: There is no mortgage on the flat, according to Land Registry records] At the age of 28, the future Queen of England, has rather a thin CV for a bright A grade Marlborough educated pupil who earned a 2:1 in History of Art from St Andrew's University.
Father of the bride: Mike and Carole Middleton
Until recently she was working for the family firm after a brief post-graduate foray into the outside world working for retailer Jigsaw. Now that her family is to be the Royal variety, she need never worry about money again - if indeed she ever did. As consort to Prince William she will surely be looked after in the manner she has been hoping to become accustomed to since she first met her Prince at St Andrew's. The new level of wealth is seen from the start with the ring she's wearing - Diana's engagement ring - worth a cool 85,700. Since the age of 25, Prince William (now 28) has enjoyed a lavish income from the 6.5m capital left to him by his mother Princess Diana, plus money from the estate of his great-grandmother the Queen Mother who died in 2002.
He also earns a decent salary as an officer in the RAF - a flight lieutenant earns 37,170 a year - and is given an allowance from his father from his own income from the Duchy of Cornwall estate. And should his father pre-decease him, his income will go stratospheric when the whole of that income is transferred to him.
Research by author Claudia Joseph for her biography Kate: Princess in Waiting, suggests that money has also trickled down from ancestors on at least one side of the family. Former air stewardess Carole Middleton (nee Goldsmith), now 55, was a builder's daughter and descended from a family of penniless Durham coal miners. But Kate's father Michael, 61 and the Leeds-born son of an airline pilot, comes from a wealthier background that includes an 18th century wool manufacturer and merchant from Leeds who left the equivalent of 33m in his will.
Although depleted somewhat on its way down the generations it is thought that at least some was left to help the modern Middletons fund their well-to-do lifestyle.
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