Can’t believe how much money my parents have amassed

[Tallular819]

My parents started out with nothing, not a penny from their families. My mum was a dinner lady, Dad was a secondary school teacher.

They paid off their mortgage in their 40s. As children we had a holiday abroad every year and multiple uk holidays throughout the year.

They had a lease car which would be replaced every 3 years with a new one.

They paid for mine and my sisters weddings and house deposits.

They’ve travelled all over the world in their retirement and I’ve just found out they have £200k in savings.

WTF?! DH and I have comparable careers, we run 1 old banger of a car, we have 1 uk holiday per year, we’ve stopped at 1 child, we’re on target to pay off our mortgage when we reach retirement, we have a grand total of £4k in savings. We don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t buy expensive clothes.

Its just hit me how vastly different our financial situations are. I didn’t appreciate just how different the cost of living is today compared to 40 years ago.

How fabulous for them! And they have helped set you up for life as well - so generous too.
And you will likely inherit the house and cash, so you will be in exactly the same position as them at some stage. Well played your parents.
You are not moaning about this are you? If so you can do a deed of variation and allocate the money to someone else.

No, she is creating, as many people have also contributed to, a good discussion about what society and the economy are like now, the realities of how to navigate that, and what we should advise our kids to do. Unless we’re not allowed to do that, unless we should just be doffing our caps and saying ‘yes guv, thank you guv’ and slithering back into the primordial pond of serfs and peasants and slum inhabitants that people fought several world wars and a boatload of European revolutions to haul themselves out of?

It’s not about having a go at Deirdre for her tidy bungalow and three weeks a year in Spain.

It’s about why a huge amount of all of our income goes to mega-industrial behemoths like Amazon (as 2 working parents don’t have time to go out and stroll round shops to carefully choose a thrift purchase let alone ‘knit their own clothes’ ahahaha), to mega-corps like tesco and Lidl and Asda, to faceless financial institutions like Santander and hsbc and NatWest for mortgage interest, to student loans for degrees that got many people no further than minimum wage, for childcare bills because we can’t afford to step off the treadmill for a year or two…

And for what? to live in a smaller house, with less security, longer working hours due to the insidious creep of Teams and Slack, to barely see our kids who are suffering mental health issues in massive waves, all to fund either the sinister political machinations of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel or the sickening excess of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the latter of whom has literally bought a big chunk of Hawaii to hide in when the shit he caused to societal function really breaks down?

Not even touching on the fact that OP’s parents worth will disappear, as so many people’s have disappeared, into a Byzantine and torturous care system that somehow pays its staff fuck all too.

It is absolutely allowed to question this, to analyse it, and to fight for a better future. Anyone who wants people like the OP to pipe down should be ashamed, this is the political conversation about the future we should be having all day every day.

I’m not angry with my boomer mother and what’s the point playing the blame game? But I’m staggered she a) lacks the self-awareness to know that she was in the right place at the right time to comfortably buy a three bedroom house for £11K with two below average incomes, and b) that despite the (repeated) implication by her that she slogged her guts out for the house, she worked no harder than anyone else. My parents weren’t special, just like many other parents at the time, they didn’t do anything extraordinary.

I’m so sorry that your mother is this dumb ☹️ She’s delusional if she thinks like that. I’d be pee’d off if my parents said stuff like that too but, fortunately, they both realise how lucky they were. They had very ordinary jobs but they managed to get a small house built on land my paternal grandfather helped them buy and they raised two children on one full time and one part time wage. I knew families who had less than us and I never felt impoverished until I went to high school and realised that some of my classmates had land, big houses, ponies etc. Even back then there were haves and have nots. It wasn’t a utopia where we all lived high on the hog.

Here here

Yes discussing all these points is so important Indo agree with you.

Is blaming the new discussing though? How’s about we look for solutions instead of endlessly pointing the finger and airing our grievances? That is getting us nowhere. In fact, one day our children might be finger pointing at us and asking us what we did to solve the Great Recession.

Yeah true I’m sure our kids will be blaming us for all sorts, you’ve got to identify the problem to find the solution though!

the sickening excess of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the latter of whom has literally bought a big chunk of Hawaii to hide in when the shit he caused to societal function really breaks down?
@Backupbatterydown 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Yes to finding solutions 👍

I think the anger comes when someone from the older generation has the audacity to suggest that they have done so well financially because they worked harder than the younger generation and had less takeaways. Especially when so many retired young from a basic job or was a SAHM their whole life. It's horrible how hard we all have to work now, for a great deal less, the least we could get is some appreciation instead of "we struggled too".... because on the whole their generation did not need to struggle as much as the current one.

There's also lots of people who look for blame in observations though. Discussion never ends up being had because too many instantly jump on the defensive. Can't get to solutions until people stop taking mention of house prices as a personal attack.

@WaryCrow

Blair’s time was only good for some- it was the beginning of gross inequality - and most of us outside London knew nothing of it.

I fully agree. Unfortunately those who benefitted the most from that era simply won't accept that lots of other people suffered in various different ways. It was also the start of the move to Brexit and then the rise of Reform. Most of today's problems can be traced back to Brown/Blair, especially the public finances.

Yes, I agree, it's definitely their attitude that they did well through hard work and good choices, when it reality for most it was sheer luck of being born at the right time.

Totally agree 👍🏻

Agreed but not everyone’s parents says dumb sh*t like that so I think we’re in danger of focusing too much on what we think they did wrong, whilst doing nothing constructive ourselves. Not that I’ve got the answer, unfortunately, but I’d vote for anyone who has!

How’s about we look for solutions instead of endlessly pointing the finger and airing our grievances?

House building and social housing made it onto poltical arena and current government at least trying to do something because people have been talking about it more and more past few decades and poltical pressure has grown especially amongst younger voters.

We have had housing criss before

Which frankly I knew little about.

It's not just the UK - UN been looking at fertility rates:
https://news.sky.com/story/global-birth-rates-crisis-people-do-still-want-to-have-children-but-many-cant-heres-why-13381290

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynq459wxgo

Cost of living seems to be a barrier in some countries - and that starts to be a sprial in some places - cost going on working population fewer kids fewer workers.

I think OP just been taken aback at how much her parents have saved - but there are many reasons for that - economics - including around wealth inequality - demographics, time- stages of life- and perhaps changes in attiudes - later parenthood/less frugalism.

It's a close to home example of lowering standards of living - something most people are vaugley aware of.

That’s not me, so I can’t really help with that other than to say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. I think we need to start becoming solution focused instead of blame focused and that goes for both sides. We’re all living in the here and now and housing, food, clothing, transportation etc are all prohibitively expensive. I want things to change for the better but I know that blaming previous generations isn’t the answer. Maybe we can learn from the past as well as vilifying the way that life was back then? We should mainly look to the future though.

I’m at work (self employed) so I’ve not got time to watch the whole video yet, but I’ve watched a bit and it looks interesting. Thanks 😊

I didn't say it's you. But it's a recurring theme with these topics. We also need to remember that we're not really talking about "previous generations", they are still very much alive and voting - the solution needs to be a joint effort rather than "wasn't my fault, stop blaming me".

Is that all that’s happening though? What proportion of senior people are saying it’s not their fault. Many are not. Does any of that actually prevent us reaching a solution?

Like you say, older people are still voting, eating food and wearing clothes etc so they’re also suffering, albeit not necessarily on the cost of rent/mortgages. Some of them will still have either rent or a mortgage to service though, so it’s in everyone’s interest (well not the mega rich I guess) that we solve this problem. It’s pretty global from what I understand, so not just a little localised difficulty.

I'm not saying that's all that's happening. I'm saying that it's usually the way discussion goes. People get defensive and we start squabbling about that instead of discussing actual issues and solutions. It's happening right now.

I think we’re of the same mind 🙂 Now we just need to come up with ideas that might help the world become a better place. Trouble is, I’m not intelligent enough, but I’m hoping someone else is!

They probably didn't spend much money on non-essentials though. Nowadays, people expect to buy new duvets regularly (thinking, bizarrely, that they need washing or replacing), or go to soft play or on day trips at weekends or in the school holidays. We all just used to go to the free local playground if our parents could be bothered, but mostly pottered about in the garden. People expect their children to do paid-for activities every day after school. Everyone has a phone and wifi. On holiday, it used to really just be an occasional ice cream as a treat, whereas now it's an activity plus ice cream or cafe trip most days, so none of it is an actual treat as it all blends into one big old expense.
Growing up, we only ever went to restaurants on holiday in Europe. Never in Britain. My parents were middle class professionals and this was completely normal.
My family is doing that again now, as everything is so bloody expensive.

I understand what you’re saying but that was then and this is now so it’s not a direct comparison.

Also, we regularly visit the local park and playground with our toddler. We take him swimming at the leisure centre once a week, do beach walks and have picnics on the back lawn. He has a ride on toy car, a sand and water table and mini garden tools, all of which he loves playing with, so we don’t feel he’s missing out on anything even though the only paid activity is the swimming and transport costs for short car trips. It’s pretty much like my own childhood to be honest although our toddler goes to nursery two days a week and I didn’t because my mum stayed at home when we were pre schoolers. That last point is a big one though because how many mums can afford to stay at home nowadays due to the high cost of living and housing costs?

I still stick to my point that complaining because our parents had what we perceive to be cushy lives isn’t always a) true and b) not helping us in the here and now to lead more financially comfortable lives.

There weren't the daily extravagance of technology and the cost of it, houses were a lot less, bills were cheaper, savings rates and investments more lucrative. If you worked hard you could afford a good standard of living and save on a regular wage. Also, supermarkets were mostly just food, you had to go out shopping specifically for clothes and no online! Whole different world. Xxx