Baby Boomers - The selfish generation?

[YellowTulips]

Ok - so this came out of another thread...but it got me thinking and gathered a few responses.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1743690-Please-I-NEED-to-know-if-IABU-before-I-take-a-stand-with-my-in-laws?pg=1

I have posted below as I did on the thread. What I am interested to know is if this is a really wide spread issue?

Disclaimer: Whilst I know (far) to many people this applies to, I have to confess my parents and PIL's so no signs of bonkers retirement plans (just good planning to give them a good standard of life).

Ok - so post below:

Whilst this case is at the extreme end of the spectrum, there seems to be (from the posts here and chats with friends/colleagues) a real reluctance on the "baby boomer" generation to make sustainable retirement plans.

Here in the UK many friends have parents who for years have lived off rising property values and the expectation that they can sell up or remortgage to fund what are clearly highly expensive lifestyles that can't be maintained over 20/30 years of non generation of income.

There seems to be a groundswell of entitlement often laughingly termed "spending the kids inheritance" - which in principle I don't object to - you can't take it with you and I personally would rather my parents enjoyed retirement than "save" or god forbid "scrimp" for me, but I am seeing this taken to "spend the inheritance and then let the kids bail us out".

I have lost count of friends who are now in some form or another subsiding their retired parents - parents who have "blown" life savings and house equity on mad "let's buy a house in Spain to live in half the year" or let's "travel around the US in a huge RV for 2 years" or "buy a boat and sail around the med" because they refused to really think if they could afford it.

Before I get beaten up, I don't object to people wanting to help family in desperate straights, I just seem to hear more and more stories where these situations were totally avoidable and parents have been - put bluntly - bloody selfish at worst and in denial at best.

The families involved are now making sacrifices that impact their children at the very time they should be the priority.

Do I just have an unlucky social group or is this issue becoming more prevalent?

Rant over.....hand me a !

[OrangeMabel]

YABU and a bit naive.

Only around 5% went to university. The majority left school at 15/16 and went into rather mundane jobs. To get promotion they would often spend years going to night school several nights a week. My FIL could only afford the mortgage on his house by working a second job at the weekends. They didn't have the disposable income most of us enjoy or the foreign holidays. Many didn't earn enough to save for retirement and those who could put as much as they could into their pension plans.

My FIL benefited from the rise in house prices but he worked hard to pay for it. Now he's enjoying doing some traveling during retirement - didn't have the chance of a gap year in his youth. And, like my late father, FIL had the threat of redundancy hanging over him for much of his working life.

My FIL is lucky, millions of pensioners live in poverty in this country. I do wish people would stop carping on about the older generation; the Tories have got us bashing the poor, bashing benefit claimants and now bashing the elderly. (My FIL would have a fit if he heard me referring to him as elderly )

[onedev]

My FIL is exactly as you describe Yellow (born in 1945) so I don't think YABU.

[Wibblypiglikesbananas]

Generalisations aside, it upsets me that despite DH and I spending five years at university each, working hard, blah blah blah, the usual, it still took a fair few multiples of our combined salary to buy a two bed flat as our first home in 2007. Back in 1976 when my parents married, they were able to get a mortgage on a decent sized house with a garden for 3x my dad's salary.

My mum never needed to work, though chose to from when I was about ten. Cue three foreign holidays a year, new cars, a very nice lifestyle (and all in the days when in their industries, 9-5 was 9-5, no Internet and Blackberries and being available 24/7 as DH has to be now). And my dad had a reasonable job with a reasonable salary but he wasn't a stockbroker! Just a regular guy with an average job but house prices were so much lower relatively speaking.

Fast forward to today and DM, retired now and married to retired DSD (who incidentally made lots of money buying and selling property - again, timing and luck, definitely not skill!) has two properties abroad, two in the UK, a brand new car, a huge inheritance from my DGF and can't understand why we can't always spare the money to go and visit them at one of their luxury holiday homes. It is infuriating!

We have a toddler and another on the way and have never been poorer - in that having been used to two salaries, we now have one (though this will eventually change when I go back to work, though childcare costs might delay it?). We are not on the poverty line but we have to budget and plan. It can be hard to hear how, like a poster mentioned above, it's always hard when your children are small - well, yes, it is in some ways but DM has NEVER been short of £ and simply assumes that we can't have worked hard enough, must have wasted our money, not planned well etc, rather than considering that the financial climate now is very different from what it was in their day.

ILs thankfully have a better idea, though also own multiple properties(!). They do lovely things to help us out though, eg give us their winter fuel allowance as they absolutely recognise that they don't need it.

Gosh - if I sound bitter, apologies! It is just galling at times to be told how you should have done things differently when life is very different now in many ways. I actively avoid talking about this very topic with my DM nowadays as if I did, I'd say something I'd regret!

Finally - by way of comparison, one DGF spent as long working as he did in retirement on a final salary pension. The other is still with us and retired in 1972 on a final salary pension also, it was £22,000 a year then! Needless to say, he had an excellent job and was extremely well respected in his field but he is very well off now as everything was and still is index linked.

[Grinkly]

Ah, well, Wibbly, maybe you'll inherit all their money when they pop their clogs and you too will have a great retirement!!

[TartinaTiara]

YABU, but sadly many people seem to share your views. Mostly I love MN, but this thread (and some others over the last few days) have been pretty distasteful in their blatant ageism.

People are selfish, stupid, generous, intelligent, self-aware, whatever, pretty much evenly across all generations. You don't get handed a personality fully formed and unchangeable depending on which year you were born. And if you'd started a thread saying "AIBU to think that Jews are the selfish race/blondes are the thick hair colour/Scots are the mean nationality?" you'd have people ripping you a new arsehole and rightly so. Why is it different if you make massive generalisations about a whole group of people just because of the year they were born?

There's a lot said on this thread about how terrible people's parents/PILs are because they just don't understand how things are nowadays, whilst a lot of posters (possibly the majority) are showing exactly the same lack of awareness of how things are for those very same parents. It wasn't the case that all baby boomers had it easy. Just like it's not the case that all Gen X's Y's and whatever other demographic groups have it easy. People have good luck or bad luck because that's how life works for them not because they've had the magic fairy bestow blessings on them when they were born.

[Wibblypiglikesbananas]

I doubt it, they're too busy enjoying all those holidays and buying fast cars . But that's up to them and I'd absolutely hate for that to be imminent - just wish they'd take a more pragmatic view...

[Wibblypiglikesbananas]

TartinaTiara - I agree that it's not always helpful to generalise, but in my individual case, the attitudes displayed by my own parents, are those outlined in the OP. I have many friends who have found the same thing. It's not right and it's not nice and it's perhaps not fair - but this is true to my own experience.

[TartinaTiara]

Wibblypig - I hadn't realised that the plural of anecdote is data. That's me corrected, then. As you were, OP.

[onedev]

I'm like Wibbly - I don't think the Op is unreasonable based on my own & friends experiences, so yes, that's anecdotal but still my experience so I agree with the Ops personal observations.

[YellowTulips]

Tartina - I refute the allegation I am being "ageist" or "generalist" simply because I deliberately asked "is this just my social circle or more widespread" .

That was the point of the post - I am not trying to damn an entire generation per se, but in my experience (early 40's) my grandparents attitude to retirement and self sufficiency was very different to my parents (again to clarify, based on the experience of many friends rather than me personally).

[janey68]

Just another point: I've seen a number of people on these threads recently citing that many of today's female pensioners had the 'advantage' of never having to work (or at least only ever doing very part time pin money jobs) and at the same time citing these gold plated pensions as some great advantage. You can't have it both ways- make your mind up! A woman who never worked, or never worked much wont have a wonderful pension- she'll be on the basic state pittance.

[ethelb]

I agree, but think that part of the problem is that a lot of selfish decisions were labled 'progress'. And after all, ther are so many of the baby bommbers generation that what was best for them, was at the time, best for society at large.

I think that this country has failed, utterly to invest in utility over the past couple of decades. That includes housing. And why is that? So that a certain generation could profiteer off it, by assuming that future generations will pay every increasingly inflated prices for them, due to increased demand.

What gets me, is if you talked about doing this with oil or arms to the oh, so liberal, summer of luurve baby boomers, they would howl with outrage. But apparently doing this with housing is ok. Property is not theft. Peace out.

Perspectives were very skewed for that generation (and VERY clear for gen y like me), so there is a degree of argument over who is culpable for the 'selfish' attitudes of that group.

[TartinaTiara]

OP, I stand by my opinion. You started a thread saying that you know loads of baby boomers and that from your experience and your friends, they're selfish. Then extrapolated from that to ask if baby boomers were a selfish generation. That's ageist, and generalist.

A bloke I know (sort of a mate) lives in an area with a lot of people who's skin color is different to his. He's suffered from criminal activity from a few - now obviously it's not down to the color of their skin, but because they are the majority ethnicity, they're going to form the majority of good and bad. Nevertheless, based on his own anecdotal experience he feels himself perfectly justified to make snide comments. Which I pull him up on, every time.

It's never acceptable to take your own limited experience and extrapolate that to a whole population. So yes, you're being ageist. Sorry if that offends you. Prejudice offends me.

[ethelb]

@TARTINA do you pull people up on ageism with regard to their youth? ie snide comments like "'if you just got rid of your iphone you could afford to buy a house" etc, as have frequently been spouted on MN over the past months/year

[AllSWornOut]

This is a really interesting thread OP.

Like quite a few posters I have mixed feelings due to quite different experiences of my DPs and DPILs. My DF ran his own company all his life with only middling success, has no pension really due to some poor investments and not very much spare cash in any case. DPs live reasonably ok but I am very worried about the future [I'm an only child).

DFIL on the other hand worked for one multinational all his life, took early retirement (my DF is still working some years after retirement age) and has pension that allows them to lead a very comfortable life. They have supported their children with house deposits and have multiple holidays a year.

We're not jealous of them by any means,I want them to enjoy their retirement, but it does gall me when they complain about how hard retirees have it considering they have it considerably less hard than my parents and are enjoying benefits that we will be unlikely to have even though both DH and I work for the same multinational. Already stuff like company cars, bonuses, pension payments, etc. have been significantly degraded compared to when we started our working lives and we're less than half-way through.

So I'm not sure it's a case of the selfish generation, rather a generation that has been very lucky and in some cases is a little reluctant to acknowledge it to those behind them.

[TartinaTiara]

Yes, ethelb, if I'd seen comments like that, then of course I'd have pulled them up on it. Why wouldn't I? Though I'm not sure that getting rid of iphone/buying house comment is aimed at a particular age is it? And again, says more about the person who talks shite like that than anyone to whom it's aimed.

I've started commenting on the pension/age threads largely because that's the job I do (pension law, not commenting on threads, though if anyone wants to pay me to do that...). Anyway, it drives me mad when people make sweeping comments about pensions and they've not got the facts straight, so I dive in, and that tends to mean I'm commenting on pension/age/babyboomer type stuff. Am happy to fight against all forms of prejudice though.

[ethelb]

Its interesting you should say tha Allswornout as presumably you and your DP's pay and benefit package is decreased because the company money pot is paying out your FILs pension.

[FarBetterNow]

I'm a baby boomer.
I had a mortgage at 19 on the cheapest house in one of the grottiest areas in the NW.
We didn't have a car for 10 years.
I cycled 20 miles each day to work and back to save the train fare.
I had very few clothes.
I bought 3 lengths of material with the £5 that I was given for my 18th birthday and made two skirts and a dress.
I made a coat from a big coat I got from a jumble sale.
I used to buy handknitted jumpers from jumble sales, undo them and then reknit them either into a more stylish jumper or crochet blankets.
We never, ever went out to the pub, the cinema or for a meal.
If we went out for a day, we made a flask and a packed lunch.
I didn't go abroad until I was 35.
Every holiday for 15 years was in a tent.
All this was through necessity.
I'm 60 and have never had a gap year and have only ever had three two week holidays.
After all that, I don't feel hard done to and I don't envy what other people have.

I find some of these replies very insulting.

How on earth, can you generalise about a whole generation?
It a bit like looking at the drunks out on the streets on a Friday and Saturday night and saying all young people spend every weekend pissed out of their minds.

I think there are quite a lot of chips on shoulders.

[Thumbwitch]

Interesting thread. My parents were pre-baby boomer and I am post, though, so have no personal experience of this. My parents were always on at us to save and save; I was lucky in buying my first house in 1991 when yes, interest rates were high but prices weren't really that high (honestly - first 3bed semi for £72k) - the first price crash happened not long after that, but we were very lucky to sell 3 years later at the same price we bought at. I bought my last house in 1995, similar property, for £5k more and I fully appreciate how lucky I am/was to do so, because since then house prices have gone up and up, and despite the dips and falls, I can't see them getting down to where my purchase price was ever again (house is currently priced at between 2.5 and 3x my purchase price), as the negative equity fallout would be too huge.

Luck and timing has a lot to do with it - I think the problems arise when people don't realise that, and think that you only have to do x y and z to achieve the same as them.

[ethelb]

@farbetter without meaning to get to three yorkshire men on you, we do most of those things and are currently looking at thecpossibility of buying in a grotty area of the NE with a duel post grad income at 30 and 27 and that is with an inheritance.
You were lucky!

[x2boys]

my parents were born in 1943 so just before babyboomers they both retired at 55 but out of good luck really they both worked for the gas board[as it was then] they made a few quid when it was privitised as they were given and bought shares and then as it was privitised as so very often happens lots of redundancies came up as they were both 54 and the redundany package they were offered was very attrative they took it [you would would nt you!] they were then able to draw there pension at 55 and have lived a very comfortable life ever since this however was more due to specific circumstances than anything . I,m a mental health nurse had i qualified 18 months earlier i would have had mental health offier status [ this was something given to those who worked in mental health which basically means that after paying in twenty years pension there payments doubled up so after 30 yrs of paying pension you got a 40 yr full pension] because working in mental health is considered stressful i think. Unfortunatley i missed it i should still get a decent final salery pension although my pension is again much better than those who are starting now but i will have to work my full 40 years so i,m looking at retiring around 63 i Could still retire at 50 but my pension would not be great so no point i,m 39 by the way

[YellowTulips]

TT - that's the point of the thread. I asked "if". Read my original post.

I am actually being the reverse of what you accuse because I am trying to form an opinion based on a MUCH wider experience than my own.

Thanks to all who have posted. Some really interesting perspectives.

I am to clarify to suggesting my generation are without fault! However

[Wibblypiglikesbananas]

TartinaTiara - there's no need for sarcasm, and not sure why it was directed at me?