What happens when the baby boomers die?

[LargeSquareRock]

Sorry about the title, but that’s literally it. I’ve wondered this since I was a child.

Obviously we are about to enter a 20 year spike when a smaller number of tax payers support a higher number of elderly people in healthcare and elder care.

What happens in 20 years when the spike is over? Do we have empty care homes, plentiful housing and easily available health care?

I really have no evil agenda asking this- demographics has always fascinated me.

Yes. I agree. But it is here or soon for the boomers born in the 1940s and 1950s.

There's a big difference for female Baby Boomers between those born at the beginning of the period and those at the end.
At the beginning those got to retire at 60 and would have had more time building up a final salary pension (if it was available for their job). Most private sector final salary schemes closed in the noughties I think.
Those born in the early 60s have to work to 67 for the state pension, and will have had less time to build their final salary pension. My final salary pension closed in 2010 when I was 47 so I lost out on at least 13 years of contributions which will have a massive impact on my pension.
The late Boomers' situation is more like early Gen X.

Until we have a proper joined up system which appreciates the difficulties faced by disabled people in the workplace, and introduce a better assessment system than the completely unfit for purpose one we have now, unemployment among the sick and disabled isn’t going to get any better.

Just to address this point: Spain's Basque region has a multi-co-operative model that looks after their workers (including those who become disabled). The individual co-operatives are commercially viable - if one fails, then the workers are folded into the overall structure and retrained for the new. Because its a large co-operative, the training and support costs can be absorbed.

I would love to see something similar set up here, independent of the Government as it would afford people dignity and ownership of their work.

Not all tax is income tax/NI. Everyone also pays VAT for example, most people pay council tax, and also maybe petrol tax, road tax, and alcohol/tobacco duty.

Yes, agreed.

It's not as much as you think though. Road tax, a few hundred a year; council tax, a few thousand. VAT 20%, tobacco duty around 16%, alcohol duty harder to work out but around 40-50%.

To get to your £16k contribution level, you're probably needing to spend around £60k-£70k per year on a combination of these things. At which point you're likely to be on a salary that makes you a net contributor anyway 🤷🏻

I think we will see a return to the tradition of families living with parents and grandparents, providing care for them while they give house room to the younger generation.

But the cutoff point where the combination of income taxes and expenditure taxes meets the 16K level will be noticeably lower than the numbers in your income tax only calculation.

Easily convertible to housing/schools etc Refiges? Homeless?

Might be nice if they'd be used for convalescent homes -much needed and not just for us oldies

Me ànd my DH too. Dont need any help from the so called younger generation we are sorted for life and then leaving our house to a cat sanctuary because we didnt have any children.

Maybe in London, but not in the regions. The younger generations often have to move away to get decent jobs which are concentrated in London and a handful of other towns. OK if the younger generation are "happy" to work in retail or hospitality where there are jobs everywhere, or teachers, doctors or nurses where there are jobs within commuting distance. But other than that, the youngsters with ambition now have to move away to Uni and then onto where the jobs are. They tend not to come back to their home towns. Why would you? Why graduate in a particular discipline and instead of getting a well paid job in your chosen field, go back home to work in the corner shop or local pub! Sadly that's the reality after a few decades of centralisation with London sucking the lifeblood out of the rest of the country. 40 years ago, my small town had numerous bank and building society branches, numerous professional offices (some branches of national firms), tax offices, local newspaper offices and printworks, a couple of breweries, insurance branch office, etc. And not just customer facing "front desk" work either - they'd have large back offices with managers etc., so it was possible to get a foot in the door and work up internally in your local town. You can't do that now. Until we reverse the centralisation trend, then any idea of "staying in your home town and looking after your elderly relatives" is only for those living in big cities and for the less aspirational people who are happy to work in retail or hospitality on NMW wages.

Can I just check you're not claiming state pension, free prescriptions, and other benefits? After all, you're claiming to be self sufficient.

Good for you. As per my OP, what happens to society when your generation dies though? Most of your generation will have taxpayer funded health and care needs, as will most of the following generations. It’s a demographic question. It’s not an insult.

I think a lot of million pound houses are going to get passed down from families who had quite normal jobs. It’s going to create a lot more millionaires and the gap between rich and poor will become even more stark.

Yes I am getting all those which I have paid for after working 54 years thank you very much.

You're all f@cked because we Gen x ers have got no time for anyone's shit.

DS didn't come back to our small town where the jobs really are just warehouse and shop work, he stayed in his university city, he had to really to get a decent job, he has now moved to another large city. There are no jobs where we live which are much more than minimum wage

I fully agree. That's why we need capital gains tax and inheritance tax to be broadened to include more people. We need a mechanism of taxing "windfalls" such as when people finally stop living in their home and it's either sold or passed to beneficiaries.

Grossly unfair that we're going to have lots of younger people inheriting relatively large sums of money for neither them nor their parents actually "earning" it, yet others are going to be left behind, for no fault of their own.

We certainly need to reverse the relatively recent additional exempt amounts where "family" homes are passed down to children. There's no reason for it.

I'd also like to extend "windfall" taxes elsewhere too, i.e. more tax on all other forms of "unearned" gains/profits like house price inflation on rental properties, windfalls on share transactions, business sales, etc. CGT in particular has been far too low for far too long.

I am just about a baby boomer by a year I'm 62. I cannot see myself retiring. I have a modest home, I'm not wealthy. I'll retire officially at 67 then immediately join the NHS bank and work until 75 which is the limit..part time. Given my medical history I'll probably die at about 85 if not sooner. I have no intention of having emergency treatment for cancers, no dialysis or resuscitation. I've filled out a form at my GP for all that and taken it to a solicitor. No way I'm going into a nursing home. I have a sheer dread of them. Unfortunately nobody seems to want to die these days, they get treatment for everything right up until their 90's. I don't agree with it. We should be prioritising expensive treatments for children and younger people.

My house will be going to my one child. He has his own home so hopefully it will enable him to retire early.

Do younger people really begrudge pensioners their pension?

We paid taxes all our lives too. We had mortgages, childcare problems, hard times too. We do know what it's like to struggle to get by. We supported the older generation, and one day you'll be supported too.

I agree that free prescriptions and eye tests should be means tested, but so should child benefit. There shouldn't be freebies on offer for anyone who doesn't need them.

But the state pension? For many of us it's what we signed up for 40 years ago.. the goal posts are moving for us too.

Thanks to Tory austerity, the rise of food banks, COL emergency and economic stagnation in the UK since 2008 we have a rising public health burden of ill health which is closely linked to poverty and an ill equipped NHS to manage that. Due to Brexit etc we voted not to allow young healthy working taxpayers to come here from other countries and boost our economy. So more younger and middle aged people will seem likely to need ‘elderly’ care because of the effects on grinding poverty on their minds and bodies. I can’t imagine need will reduce. Just fewer younger healthy taxpayers around to fund it.

I wonder whether something which will happen will be a change in what is available re child care.

It's not a given, of course, but some families are able to benefit from the availability of retired relatives to help with child care, even if just for one or two days a week.

If, say, a woman in her mid-twenties needed childcare for her toddler for a couple of days a week, it's possible that her grandparents would help. Her parents would probably still be working and not able to help during the week.

With the grandparents no longer available, that would mean a need to switch to other forms of childcare and all the difficulties which that brings.

Why are you shouting? Will shouting get your arguments over more coherently?

I don't begrudge pensioners their pension. I don't want to see old people starving or on the street. But pensioners today (generally) take a lot more out than they paid in, for example they didn't have to pay for the triple lock for their parents.

I think the ill feeling is because many people believe the state pension will not exist for many of us when we get there, or the age will be so high we will be dead before that point. It's not a sustainable scheme as it currently functions.

Literally no-one in this thread has begrudged pensioners their pensions. The hysteria is something else.

41K a year to be a net contributor? Eh? Income tax 5685, National insurance 2843. If you have 2 children in state school education, it costs taxpayer 9K to 16K pa, depending on where the school is. If you have a spell in hospital with say, an appendix, or sepsis, or anything requiring 5+ days of hospitalisation, no way your 2843 will cover it. No way is it a net contributor on 41K pa, unless childless, in perfect health and never use anything state-sponsored, like emergency services or public transport or libraries (these are council-tax allegedly, but we all know it is not), etc.