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.

It really isn't the elderly that you need to worry about caring for , it is the many that are children that have such complex needs now. They will never live independently and will need intense care. Then there are the children that do not have complex needs but will always need support in varying degrees. Social care will only expand not decrease.

This is interesting. Do you think it will be a neat swap between high care needs elderly people and high care needs working age people (for want of a better term).

I fully agree. The total taxes should be the same, whatever the income source. It's crazy that a pensioner with the same income as a worker pays less tax than the worker. And yes, before the smart arses say anything, NIC IS a tax!

The children of baby boomers will inherit, which means there will be a big gap between millennials/Gen Z who do inherit vs those who don't, due to house prices spiralling to ridiculous prices over the past few decades.

How do you think this will affect the cohesiveness of society? Will there be an uncrossable schism between the haves and have nots?

Property will just lose value as supply will outstrip demand. So many may even have two properties.

I think there will be changes to IHT & CGT. Even though this would impact me I think it’s better for society to have higher wages rather than rely on inheritance. UK salaries are pretty shit.

I also think more younger people will migrate to other countries for better opportunities.

@virgocatlover In my first post I make the point about comparatively few inheriting all or 50% of parents home.

Yes, there are tax paying pensioners - but these guys are also getting £11.5k a year handout each from the government paid for out of working people taxes. Older people are also the biggest burden on the health service.

Will you still consider it a ‘handout’ when it comes time to collect your own pension I wonder ?

To answer the OP's actual question, yes there will probably eventually be a temporary reduction in care home needs when the majority of the boomers die, but that will be
a) very temporary because there's a large number of Gen X coming up behind them, and of course the boomers will die over a long period of time and
b) is a long time in the future, the vast majority of the baby boom generation aren't even needing care yet.

My parents and in-laws are the Silent Generation and even they don't need care yet, although they do need massive amounts of NHS and private healthcare input for one thing and another.

Here's the actual data, although I realise that's not really in the spirit of this thread. 🙄

In the past immigrants might have stayed in the U.K. but I think many of the wealthy medical staff who have moved here will send money home and retire there. Their DCs maybe educated in the US or wherever.

They will pay tax but their wealth might not remain here.

There are many eg Polish sending money home and moving back.
I don’t think immigration is the answer the gov claims.

Many boomer parents have already passed on significant amounts to their children so they absolutely aren't in the position of waiting for us to die before getting any help. It absolutely makes financial sense to do so in order to make assets work for the whole family, i.e. for young adults to be able to have a deposit for a house. This is what I have done in two tranches, one for a house deposit and another one to help ease the financial stresses of having a young family while both working. What's the point in waiting until you're dead? You don't have the pleasure of seeing your money being used for the benefit of your beloved family.

It may well be that the rest will be swallowed up if either of us need care - but at least they've benefited at a time when they need it the most. Some of the funds were actually passed on from an inheritance from my parents and some from a fairly recent property downshift.
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Turning to healthcare needs, I notice that people some 20 odd years younger than us seem to be very ailing in many cases, so I think there will still be pressure on the NHS. As to where we go with funding the latest diagnoses for adults and children with special educational needs, that is completely uncharted and unfunded territory, which will require very expert, innovative and costly solutions. Societal needs will continue through the generations - but the boomer contributions as altruistic volunteers will surely be missed.

@Badbadbunny

I hadn't intended it to read in that way, but can see how it could have come across as such.

I meant:

My understanding is that one of the main problems re housing is to do with relatively young people wanting to buy a flat or small house within a reasonable distance of where they work, quite understandably and then discovering that their salaries are too low to make even the tiniest studio flat possible.

I was writing from a London/South-East perspective, I will concede that.

Thousands and thousands of young people come into Central London every day to work, but many of them will never earn anywhere near enough to be able to buy a flat near their places of employment.

That's what I had in mind.

I think the inheritance question is interesting, a lot of baby boomer inheritance will go to people easily in their 60s I would think, so already approaching retirement, but who may not be / never have been home owners. Too late to get a mortgage, even if still working?

Will inheritances be smaller as the baby boomers have had to pay for care homes or carers as people live longer but less independently? My grandparents all died at younger ages than my parents did now, and at home without carers.

I have bought my home so just wondering really - but does the housing market rely on people inheriting to buy? I was given help by my parents. Will grandchildren be the ones inheriting? I think it’s hard to buy without an inheritance now or some kind of cash gift as wages just haven’t kept up with house prices.

@Spiderwmn I agree that there will be shifts in migration.

This is fascinating. Those war-period 'female surplus' figures are so sad. And I wonder about that indentation between 40-50 years old?

Same is happening in other cities now, even Northern ones. Unfortunately, they suffer the double whammy of crap public transport, so commuting from "cheaper" areas is an expensive and time consuming (and unreliable) affair.

Many boomer parents have already passed on significant amounts to their children so they absolutely aren't in the position of waiting for us to die before getting any help. It absolutely makes financial sense to do so in order to make assets work for the whole family, i.e. for young adults to be able to have a deposit for a house.

Most of that generations wealth is in housing though so many aren’t in the position to pass it on. Not everyone wants or can downsize.

This is the point though, the generation that comes after gets successively smaller.

I think we're already seeing the impact of a bigger retired population and a smaller working age one. For example, care homes, schools not able to fill vacancies.
We may well end up with care homes not being financially sustainable and there being fewer of them. We're already seeing some being under-occupied.

This is absolutely going to be a huge issues. We'll just move from health & social care spending huge amounts on very elderly people with complex needs to the money being spent on prematurely ill & disabled middle aged people - with the additional problem of a greater proportion of people being off work due to chronic health problems, but benefit to government of spending less on pensions due to lower life expectancy

I don't think the female surplus is particularly due to war deaths. It's due to heart disease, road deaths, suicide.

I am a baby boomer.

You do realise that we aren’t even at retirement age yet?

In 20 years I expect to still be here and given I don’t have a pension (state or otherwise) I don’t think I will be retired

Also after watching what happens to people after they retire, even if I had a huge guaranteed income. I certainly wouldn’t give up work

I think we're already seeing the impact of a bigger retired population and a smaller working age one.

Economically we definitely are. And people living longer should be celebrated but no government has planned for any of the changes which is the problem. Although I think they don’t confront the issue because society doesn’t want to either.

These generational name tags have been donned by marketing folk to make sweeping statements about the types of people each contains. Population figures do marry these to some extent but they are increasingly becoming watered down as societal changes occur far more speedily these days. Those post-war babies do take a lot of stick for having lived through the "you've never had it so good days".

So now for some generalisations about Gen X and what is to come - we will be the first big "inheritance" generation - IHT will be a big political hot potatoe for a decade or more. However, our pension provisions are in the main in a sorry state as we were/are a spend now generation and we were encouraged to buy property, cars, have nice holidays rather than save for the future. We are relying on parental hand me downs to fund our retirements and if they aren't there we will be working way into our 70s to keep up the lifestyles to which we have been acquainted. However, some of our lifestyle choices - we smoked, we drank and had fun are now coming home to bite us and a run down NHS is already struggling with the impacts of cancer, obesity, etc

So to answer the OPs question, I think we will just have slightly different problems to deal with. There is and will be no golden generation who will have it all!