I was thinking, Rachman.

OK....

Firstly, if you sell your 2nd property "now", that triggers a CGT liability, assuming you sell it for a profit. Put simply, the taxable gain is:

What you sell it for, less the costs of selling (eg estate agent, solicitors fees).
MINUS
What you paid for it, including the costs of buying it, plus what you've spent on 'improvements' over and above 'ongoing maintenance' (HMRC has lots of guidance regarding what can be included)
MINUS
£13,000 - the CGT allowance for this tax year and assuming you've no other capital gains this tax year (NOTE: this figure is set to fall significantly over the next couple of tax years).

If you have a joint owner or owners, you and each of the joint owners does the above calculation for THEIR SHARE of the property. Thus a husband and wife (say) would end up protecting £26,000 of the gain from CGT (IN THIS TAX YEAR - less than £26,000 in future tax years, when the allowance is going to reduce).

If you gift the property to your kids (or to anyone), that is treated as a disposal even if no money changes hands. The above calculation therefore still applies, but the first line of it will be based on a valuation of the property's market value at the time of transfer. That valuation will have to be accepted by HMRC, so you can't claim that the value was 50 quid (for example!). I THINK any costs of transferring the property (eg legal fees) can be deducted from the gain, but this would need to be checked. NB HMRC will in any case be "interested" in the value, because 'ad valorem' stamp duty will also be payable - yes, stamp duty is payable on the value of a property on transfer even if no money changes hands. For 'normal' property sales, the price paid by the buyer is generally accepted as the amount liable for stamp duty, but not always so - for example if HMRC determines that the property has been sold for less than the true market value. You can't therefore sell your property to your kids for £100 and avoid stamp duty.

Now to IHT...

Any gift - whether a property or the proceeds of the sale of property in this example - over and above certain annual allowances (lots of detail on HMRC website about what those allowances are), will, as you say, be potentially liable for IHT on death within 7 years of the gift. However, the IHT rate payable on the gift reduces across the 7 years, from 40% on the day of the gift down to 0% on the 7th anniversary. I say "potentially" because it all depends on the size of the estate plus any gifts within the previous 7 years. Put in a simple example: if you have £200,000 of assets and you give half of it away then die a year later leaving £100,000 in your estate, then no IHT will be payable because your estate plus the gift are less than the IHT allowance (£325,000 at present).

I hope this helps.

Why would you think that? I've never rented anything to anyone.

I think that because we never had money growing up I was not interested in borrowing any (other than the mortgage) so I didnt have credit cards or anything else on the strap, if I couldn't pay cash for it I didnt have it - probably lucky as it turned out -

What industry do you work in out of interest?

Assuming the '91' in your username is your birth year, I was born in 93 and your experiences seem broadly similar to mine.

I've also managed to buy which next to none of my peers have - I put it mainly down to having an above average income myself, and a long-term partner in the same position. Our combined earnings are/were vastly beyond what 99% of single under-30s could hope to earn. I don't view it as something attainable for a significant majority of people.

I would challenge your third point on consumerism which feels a little bit stereotypical to me - I can't say I really have any friends/colleagues who are living as you describe and moaning about affordability. Those people do exist, but in my experience they are mostly people from better-off backgrounds who know they're due an inheritance one day anyway and thus don't really have any need to plan for the long term.

Didn’t have a credit card until in my 40s. Still only use it very occasionally