Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are still alive and well. Seldomly do they
have time to frolic around, but today, they are alone together and are up for
a bit of fun. They’re out in Philip’s beloved Aston Martin Lagonda 3-liter Drophead Coupe.
After Philip puts the pedal to the metal, Elizabeth shrieks with joy and asks him,
“How much do you think this baby is worth?” He tells her an American buyer wants to
give him around $640,000 for it. “Oh my,” she says, “That’s quite a princely sum.”
They both laugh at the pun, and then Philip reminds her
that Charles has a 1969 Aston Martin Volante DB6 MKII worth about $427,000.
“That’s mental,” Liz says, only for Philip to say it’s not as mental as the $73 million
they forked on property maintenance last year or the $3.6 million they spent on utilities.
Philip hits a corner with too much speed, making the tires screech. Elizabeth gives him that look
that says you’re not 20 anymore, Philip. Philip had lost concentration for a second,
thinking about money being wasted. He tells Elizabeth he’s still reeling
about Harry spending $265,000 on Meghan’s Givenchy wedding dress.
“Sick,” says Elizabeth. “Bloody waste of good money,
that’s what it is,” says Philip as the two speed up again and scare a farmer
half to death as they come up behind his tractor, honking the horn like teenagers.
Ok, so we guess we don’t have to tell you that this scene never actually
took place. As much as we’d like to think that the Queen used slang words like sick,
we doubt she never reacted that way when she heard about her family’s titanic expenses.
What is true, though, are the numbers we’ve given you.
In 2016, Forbes reported that Philip’s beloved Drophead was about to be auctioned
at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridgeshire. The car was expected to fetch
the price we told you: £450,000 (or $640,000). We got the information about property maintenance
and utility bills from the Sovereign Grant and Sovereign Grant Reserve financial summary posted
on the British royal family’s official website. It also said that the royals paid a whopping
$1.3 million on housekeeping and hospitality. That was a drop in the ocean in relation to
the Queen’s total payroll expenses, which was $24 million. The cost for other staff was $3.8
million. And as for spending big when it comes to luxuries, not something on that website, the
diamond-studded ring engagement ring that Harry bought Meghan was said to be worth about $350,000.
When Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton, he got down on one knee and slipped a ring on
her finger composed of a giant 12-carat sapphire in the middle of 14 diamonds.
This is said to be worth about half a million bucks right now. Ok,
so it once belonged to Princess Diana and was worth much less back in 1981 when she
and Charles decided to get hitched, but that doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that there are a lot of rings in the royal family,
and suffice to say, none were bought from the British Argos catalog,
a place where you can pick up a ring for the price of one of the former Queen’s socks.
The royal family’s lifestyle is not exactly cheap. From the year 2020 to 2021, its total
expenditure was said to be around $108 million. As you’ll soon see, this isn’t exactly true.
You already know where a lot of the cash goes, but we didn’t tell you about travel
expenses. That came to around $4.8 million. But these are the day-to-day costs of
just getting by. It doesn’t include what the family spends on luxuries.
Take, for example, the royal art collection, the biggest private art collection on the
planet. This is now partly the property of King Charles III. It’s said to consist of
about one million paintings, prints, watercolors, photographs, drawings,
and other objects. You’ll find works by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci, in there.
It goes back a long way, although not much in the collection was amassed before King Henry
VIII. From the time Elizabeth took the throne in 1952, to when she passed away in 2022,
she added about 2,500 objects to the collection. This included about 20 paintings. Not cheap ones,
either. We know she picked up modern works from the likes of
Lucian Freud and Andy Warhol. But she bought them with her own money.
We can’t say what the entire collection is worth, but we are talking about a hell of a
lot of money. Some say about $10 billion. The Rembrandt portrait alone is worth millions.
Still, we should remember that the Crown Jewels are part of the collection,
too. They might be worth about $5 billion, but that’s a wild
guess. Even though it’s a private art collection and the royals can add to it,
they can’t sell it. All we want to point out is that the royals tend to spend a lot of money.
She had to pay for that stuff, unlike the land portfolio she
inherited and that Charles just inherited. Charles now holds the land titles to around
6.6 billion acres of land throughout the world. This is often said to be around
one-sixth of the planet's land mass. Charles couldn’t sell that land even if he wanted to,
but it’s technically the Crown’s land. If that’s confusing, this is what the New
Statesman said in an article about the British royals and their great mass of land. The article
first talked about the Kidman family in Australia and the fact they have so much land. It added:
“Theirs is the largest private, non-monarchical,
non-state land­holding on earth. The Kidmans cannot ‘own’ land in Australia;
only the Queen does so there. What the Kidmans possess is a mixture of specific
Crown leases for fixed periods of time and freehold leases for indefinite periods.”
Another article said, “Due to the Doctrine of Tenure, the law in Australia holds
that the Crown has absolute ownership - notwithstanding any native title claims.”
As we said, this land cannot just be sold, but if we were to consider the value of Crown
land around the world, we are talking many trillions of dollars. Just bear in mind that
much of Australia and Canada is Crown Land, but the royals aren’t making money from it.
Then there are all the properties the royals have in the UK, called the Crown Estate. This
is sometimes referred to as “the sovereign's public estate.” It’s not part of the new
King’s private estate, nor does it belong to the government. It does make money, though.
It includes forests and farms, office blocks, and racecourses. It’s made up of parts of
the seabed (think oil), retail parks, shopping centers, and posh streets in London. But again,
the money made from these properties does not go directly into the royal pockets. The money
is mostly given to the British government. There’s a lot of money in these properties,
with the portfolio of assets in 2021 said to be worth in the region of $16 billion. That
year there was $521 million in revenue and $288 million in net income. Three-quarters of it went
to the UK treasury, and 25% went to the royals. The Queen has even owned McDonald’s restaurants
before. The UK media reported in 2016 that she had sold some land on Bath Road Retail
Park in Slough for about $180 million. There was a branch of Maccie Ds there, to use a
British expression. When the land was sold, the Crown Estate made millions on its investment.
Ok, we understand if this is a bit confusing for you because right now, it doesn’t seem
very clear where the royals get their cash to buy those expensive cars and diamond rings. It
sounds confusing because it is confusing, but we’ll try to make things more clear right now.
When the Queen popped her golden clogs this year, the media was saying that she left
behind about $88 billion in assets and had a personal fortune of about $500 million.
Some reports said she made much of that money from investments, art, jewels, and real estate,
but we must remember that she inherited a lot. We already told you about the expenditure of
the royal family, which you’ll remember was over $100 million. This was paid for
by the British government and came out of what’s called the Sovereign Grant.
It didn’t cover everything by a long way. As you’ll soon see, the people also paid.
Anyway, the Sovereign Grant pays for all that day-to-day stuff, as well as palace receptions,
visiting schools and other places, and traveling around the world. This can be expensive. One of
the Queen's solitary train journeys before she died cost almost $35,000. In 2022,
Charles’ trip to Barbados cost almost $150,000. The cost of William and Kate going to Belize,
Jamaica, and the Bahamas was over $240,000. We’ve seen the receipts! The royals are
open to some extent about what they spend, although, as you’ll soon see,
not always open about how they make money. The queen used to get about 15% of the Crown
Estate profits, but that went up to 25% in 2017 because she wanted about $380 million
to do up Buckingham Palace. This 25% of the profits made up most of the Sovereign Grant.
Even if the Crown Estate didn’t bring in any money, the royals would still get their full
whack of cash from the government. The Treasury would just pay. As we said, the public pays,
too, for things such as: · Metropolitan police
costs (likely several million per year). · General security costs for the royal family
(could be as much as $100 million per year). · Military procession costs (we don’t know,
and it depends on what happens that year). · Local government logistical
costs (we also don’t know). The true cost of those things is unknown,
but a report in the BBC recently cited a paper called “The true cost of the royals.” It said
on top of that $108 million expenditure, the public pays around another $262 million. So,
the cost of the royal family is estimated to be over $370 million a year.
The good news for Charles is that, unlike everyone else in the UK, he didn’t have to pay the 40%
inheritance tax when he inherited everything. This is because of something the Queen signed in 1993.
That’s when Prime Minister John Major said it wouldn’t be fair to charge the royals
inheritance tax. The new rule said the royals have surrendered what they own to the government,
i.e., the Crown Estate profits, the art collection, etc. So, it was ruled that
it would be “inappropriate for inheritance tax to be paid in respect of such assets.”
Still, that’s only in relation to the Crown Estate cash.
The royals also have private stuff going on, such as the Duchy of Lancaster. This
is a hefty portfolio of land, properties, and assets from which they can make money.
The government has said Charles won’t pay inheritance tax on that either,
because the royals need “a degree of financial independence from the government.”
The Duchy of Lancaster estate is worth in the region of $700 million and brought in about
$25 million last year. It includes properties and land in expensive parts of London, farms,
office buildings, stately homes, and more. The Duchy of Cornwall is another private money
spinner bringing in about $22 million a year. It consists of 205.1 square miles of land, including
farms and lots of beautiful country manors. It also includes a famous cricket ground, a prison,
as well as forests, rivers, and coastline. The seabed and coastline are very lucrative when
considering the oil and new wind farms. The entire portfolio
is said to be worth over $1 billion. There was no inheritance tax when
this was passed on. Charles will pay the top tier of income tax at 45%,
but he won’t pay capital gains tax or corporation tax. The Prince of Wales website explains,
“The Duchy is not a company and is not, therefore, liable to pay corporation tax, and The Prince is
not entitled to receive any capital gains from the Duchy, and therefore does not pay Capital
Gains Tax on capital gains from the Duchy.” The Queen also made a ton of cash elsewhere,
which she has now passed on. Her estates of Sandringham in Norfolk and Balmoral in
Aberdeenshire are worth a small fortune now. She also has a stable of racehorses that are worth a
pretty penny. The Guardian recently said that her royal stamp collection is worth over $100 million.
The royals often buy things as an investment, and usually, the prices of those things go up.
So, in very simple terms, they make money by already having a lot of it handed down
and investing it wisely. It’s hard to lose when you start the race a lap ahead of everyone else.
It helps that their entire cost of living is paid for by what comes to them through the Sovereign
Grant. It also helps that the public pays for their security and some of those expensive events
they hold for the public. It just means that they can focus all their money on making more money.
Those two Duchies alone are worth $18 billion, which is all their private cash. That’s how you
can afford dazzling rings and uber-luxurious cars. But there is more. There is all the secret money.
Something like $193 million in royal wills will not be published. The Windsor family
has gone to great lengths to ensure the public can’t know the content of what is said to be 33
wills. These assets are private things, such as jewelry, art, property, and whatever else
the royals might accrue throughout their lives. Also, when you have power, you are always able
to make a bit on the side. The New York Times wrote this year that Prince Charles
had received $3.1 million in donations from a Qatari billionaire. Some of it apparently
arrived in shopping bags! It was also said that his charities got $1.21 million from the family
of Osama bin Laden and it’s currently being investigated if he accepted a cool $2 million
from a Saudi tycoon in exchange for a knighthood. Still, how much Charles knew about this is up
for debate, but he certainly knew about the 3.1 million because it’s said he collected the bags
full of cash in person. It wasn’t illegal. We’re just telling you how a royal might make money.
It also helps that the royals can evade taxes at times. The media reported in
2012 that Charles's estate was engaged in “a well-entrenched tax avoidance scheme.” In 2017,
once the so-called Panama Papers were published, The Guardian wrote, “The Queen's private estate
invested millions of pounds offshore.” It said the money from the Duchies was
coming in and then being invested in dubious businesses whose offices were located in small
islands far away from the prying eyes of the tax collector. The BBC wrote, “The Duchy of Lancaster,
which provides the Queen with an income, held funds in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.”
The Queen may have known nothing about this, but again, it just shows how money can be made.
You can find legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes if you're rich. If you’re poor, well,
don't even think about fixing someone’s toilet for cash in hand. Ask Prince Andrew about having
friends with benefits, one royal who certainly doesn’t have the best reputation right now.
He stands accused of taking around $806 million from a Turkish millionaire on the promise of
helping someone get a British passport. The bankers involved with the transaction were told
it was a wedding gift for Princess Beatrice. Before Andrew stepped down from his duties,
he was being paid about $270,000 a year, and we’re not sure if the queen kept giving
him cash after that. He also got an army pension of about 21,000 pounds a year,
but that’s nothing compared to the $16 million he got when he sold one of his properties to the
son-in-law of the former president of Kazakhstan. He got much more than the $3 million he paid for
it, and the transaction was done through an offshore trust in the British Virgin Islands.
It probably helps to have mega-rich friends, too. Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah,
once borrowed money from Andrew’s now-dead close billionaire buddy, the infamous Jeffrey Epstein.
This year Andrew paid an out-of-court settlement probably costing millions,
and no one knows where he got the cash. Some people think the Queen gave it to him from
her private fortune. “No public money has been used to pay legal or settlement fees,” said the
British Treasury, but it shows that there are emergency funds for when the royals need them.
At the end of the day, we will never quite know how the royals get all their money,
not in detail anyway. You can’t even get to the truth through a Freedom of Information
request. The royals are often exempt from having to give up information to the public.
Now have a look at the stressful part of being a royal in “Insane Ways the
Queen of England Survived 3 Assassination Attempts.” Or, enter the rabbit hole in
“Mysterious Death of Princess Diana - What Do We And What Don't We Know About It.”