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.

Already happening. It’s why economic growth is such a problem in this country. We lose a lot of our bright young people to Oz (as if you don’t have gifted/inherited wealth you cannot get on in the Uk anymore). Why work hard to pay lots of tax and not have a decent home etc.

If your parents paid your house deposit and your wedding why do you not have more savings? What are you spending your money on…

I was thinking this the other day, me and my DH have much better jobs than my parents did, had half as many kids and we have a smaller house yet they went abroad every year and retired in their 40's! While we just scrape by, our kids have never been abroad and we are constantly worried about money

Yes, @AntiHop its really noticeable in London. Left to work overseas for a while, could have afforded a flat by myself before I went, when I came back could not afford anything and had to move to another area. London born and bred, cant afford to live there.......

In your parents day essentials were cheap and luxuries expensive. Now luxuries are cheap and essentials are expensive. Think about the house prices compared to TV prices

I can’t believe how many people on here are still going on about Wi-Fi, mobile phones, Netflix etc. They are not the reason that younger people today can’t buy houses!!!

The inter generational unfairness to which you refer is well documented. Several other contributors mentioned the growth in house prices from 2-3 times average salary to 9-10 times now in many parts of the country. Most of their wealth wasnt earned from their jobs. Also they paid lower taxes as there were many more workers supporting lower social and pension spending. The demographics of an ageing population are startling and only getting worse.
what is particularly galling is that the government recognises that this group is the wealthiest generation that will ever be yet they still pander to them with triple locks and winter fuel u turns. They are just so good at galvanising their vote, which is why govts never go after their loot. Most of the new taxes go on the young and workers. Remember universal child benefit, remember free university education. Aah I could go on…..

The boomers also worked and paid taxes though. If they’re universally as rich as everyone seems to think then they must still be paying taxes.

Also, they can hardly start having children in their 60s and older in order to provide a workforce who will, in their turn, pay for benefits for others. That’s physically impossible, so it’s down to our current generation to start having more babies if they want to keep the show on the road and enjoy “the boomer lifestyle”. I think we can only criticise the behaviour of others if we’re equally willing to do things we might not want to do/find very difficult.

I can only afford to have one child myself, so that’s my plan. I’d like a second child but that’s not financially possible so I’ll probably be castigated further down the line for not providing more cannon fodder a.k.a. tax paying units.

Where are you getting the stats from for your final statement?

And now young people who have little chance of getting on the property ladder will be taxed more to pay for winter fuel for a generation that has been financially stable. All the older people in my family got it and really didn’t need it. All getting it reinstated too. The government should have held their nerve and stuck to the pension credit threshold.

Ask old people how much they bought there homes in the 60's and 70's if you live in London. You'll be fucking shocked at how much they have made in that time from £10,000 to £30,000 for homes and now 2 million. Edit in Hackney

Can we please avoid turning this into a bash the aged

the savings the op parents have made over the decades are not the profit that has accrued on their house which will either go to a care home or to the OP as inheritance

I understand what the op is saying.
just a word of warning one year in a nursing home ( not a care home) most are around £6000- £8000 a month regardless of how good they are
thats 72,000-£96,000 gone in a year . my parents had similar savings until last year . When my dad was in full nursing home for a year . He’s moved to sheltered housing now as he got a bit better and social services wouldn’t fund him when his savings ran out .
he now has 30 mins care a day .

my mum was in a nursing home now at home with carers 4 hrs a day at £32/£41 an hour (double in bank holidays.) Approx £3600 a month .

this is just an example of why you need some savings to get nice care .
don’t rely on social services for nice care you get perfunctory 15/30 mins at most .

The reason why people are poor today is because you voted to leave Europe. Let's bash the young for not voting and therefore making themselves poorer and then complaining about it after. British people were passionate about Brexit but not when they are poor and they no the reason. Older people have more about them than the young people today they put up with no foolishness back in the day. They were doers. I have more respect for older people than I do for the young adults today they do what they say and they say what they mean.

Edit if it's the inheritance your talking about. Back in the day people had to get their own money together and work out there shit.

Everyone pours an ever increasing part of their salary into the housing bubble.

All fair points. The main difference being that due to the inept housing policy of successive governments (started by Thatcher) come say 2050-2060, those still carrying a bit of a mortgage when 50 or 60 years old will be the relatively lucky ones, not the hard done by. There will likely be a good 30%+ of people who have never been able to escape renting. Retirement will have to go up to the 70s.

The scary part of that is the sentence “the wealthiest generation there will ever be”. Which is of course true but nobody wants to talk about it. Capitalism is failing right before our eyes but people choose to ignore the elephant in the room. “But look at your shiny mobile phone and your takeaway coffees! If we’d had them we’d have been more than happy to work well into our 70s without ever owning a home”

My parents had modest jobs and managed to pay off a house and retire at an age I will never be able to do.

I don’t feel resentful.

My dad was a bricklayer and mum a housewife, they had paid their mortgage off by the time they were in their forties and have amassed around 170k in savings . But their mortgage was 6k, they had one basic car, no phones, consoles, computers. They did not have expensive tastes.

I’m in my forties and I’m luckier than the generation that follows me. We have a mortgage tgat currently stands at around 90k and will be paid off in around 15 years. We have about 15k in savings. Dh has a professional job, I earn a lower part time wage.

Back then a house could be bought for 3 x 1 salary with a 100% mortgage. Pensions were (largely) final salary and cost of living was low and people were generally more frugal (less eating out or take away)
but we )
(it’s my generation) lucked out and kids and young people today will never ever have the opportunities we had. My heart goes out to young people born in a popular area or big city who will never be able to live near their parents or support systems.
I can’t bear the way my generation act like the millennials and gen z are lazy. We worked hard, yes but moving up was relatively easy.

and to think that it was my generation who removed student grants and young people social security and shut libraries and pools and community centres and encouraged the sale of public assets and bought the shares and the council houses and embraced Thatcherism and greed is good makes me feel ill.

Those days are long gone!

We're in our early 50s & were brought up thinking we would be just like our parents in that the mortgage would be paid off & we'd have decent savings. It's just not the case & I'm struggling to think I've got to work until 60 just to afford to retire. I think our parents generation will be the last ones in the situation that the OP describes. Its sad that our hard earned cash is being used to pay extortionate mortgages & untility bills.

It depends where. As a young woman newly married and pregnant I wanted to be near my family (a very nice sought after area) I was able quite easily with 100% mortgage to
do so. My kids will
never ever have that luxury until
I’m gone (I can’t help much as im
asset(house) rich and cash poor.
I can’t bear that they have to live so far away from me and each other to put a foot on the ladder

I think that I, as a single boomer who will be renting for the rest of my life, and who has to pay bills, buy groceries etc., am not remotely disconnected from the realities of today. I have owned a house, which I lost due to separation just as house prices were rising at a ridiculous rate shutting the door on my buying another one, and I have money inherited from my parents - but not enough to buy a place of my own, and when it's gone, it's gone. We aren't all living the high life you know! In fact I still live a fairly frugal lifestyle, and other than paying for a cheap mobile phone plan don't seem to "need" all these other things people are paying for today, which apparently they can't possibly do without.

All my friend's children have bigger, more expensive, houses than their boomer parents and a higher standard of living than their parents at the same age.

There is no doubting that life is tougher now when it comes to buying a house, but many seem to think that this will change by them whining, rather than actually trying to make changes. None of us are "owed" anything in life. Maybe some of them should actually try to find out how lots people used to live before playing the "poor me" card.