to ask if you're pissed off with the Baby Boomers?

[DamFineBeaver]

Because people who are currently young-ish adults (MN's main demographic?), and younger, will be paying for the lavish lifestyle they've enjoyed?
The money borrowed for their nice big pensions will be paid back by us and our children.

Does this mean they shouldn't spend so much time in Tenerife?

BTW thanks for the mention on grannies net. I'm very happy to be standing my own ground, despite the rampant jealousy trying to grind me down in here.

handout, BINGO!

Rampant jealousy? I thought you were hard done by given you only have the same amount of income as the average household in the UK?

Oh I give up, I am wasting my breath, yet again. I shall join the others in ignoring that caricature of the worst type of ignorant ingrate. Perhaps it is the OP trying to stir up the debate with this goading.

You didn't waste your breath, Bedraggled

I am a contemporary of BloomingMargaret and I have never met anyone at all similar to her in RL.
Odd isn't it?

Ditto drudgetrudy

However I don't find it odd. I think there's a perfectly good reason for it...

Yo stayed off this thread after my first scathing remark because it makes me so angry.
No, for me, it is not the name baby boomers, it is being lumped into one group and having the assumption made that we are all so much better off than the young.
How would it go down if I stated that all young people were Jeremy Kyle watching binge drinkers? Not very well, because it is not true!

I was born in 1961. I am from a working class background, my dad was killed when I was very young and my mum worked full time to support me.
When I married, we had nothing. No TV for a year until we saved up for it. Rent took up half of our joint income. We travelled all over the country for work. Neither of us went to Uni because it was just not the done thing in our lives.
I turned out pockets on a Thursday night, trying to find enough money for a tin of corned np beef or sardines which could be topped with mash to fill us up.
Work was easy to get, but not well paid, particularly for me. We struggled to get our first home, first car, first holiday. After 6 years of marriage, we could afford to have a child. No maternity pay, it was expected that you left when you gave birth, but I had to work, so delivered leaflets, worked in the evenings whenDH a came in to take over childcare.
I would say we struggled until our children were in their teens, then things got easier. Until both boys went to Uni, then we were penniless again.
We still have a way to go in our working lives, but I expect to be made redundant in the next few months and will never be able to replace my current salary. I have only had a pension plan for the past 5 years, because We could never afford for me to pay into one. My pension? Well, when I am 65 my private pension of £2300 per annum kicks in. I have to wait for another couple of years for my state pension.
DH has a pension, will be about £14k.
We have no real savings, we have helped our children in their way as much as possible. We are now paying for my mum to receive care for her dementia, it is crippling us, tbh.
So please do not lump us all together. I, personally, have never had it easy, and by the looks of things, never will.
My life expectancy will probably not see me to retirement age anyway, so the only benefits I remember ever receiving was child benefit and if I remember rightly DH got a married Mans allowance on his tax. I claimed 2 weeks dole money when I was 18.

Sorry, thi is an essay, it just pisses me off that discrimination is rife, even on MN.

I would (rightly) be slapped down for targeting single mothers, IVF seekers, benefit claimants, because one size DOES NOT fit all, so a little more understanding and support for everyone and their varied situations would be great.

And breathe.

And sorry for the typo's!

Hacked off by criticism of BBs who did not choose to be born when they were.

Nobody is criticising them for being born when they were. Some of us are critical of the way they are pandered to by the political elites and the choices that they made both in the past (broadly supporting the actions of successive Tory governments that left us in the mess we are in now with scarce social housing, benefits for the young healthy old rather than the properly elderly, the sick or the young, and no utilities/infrastructure in public hands any more) and right now (the Tories are buying their vote because they believe it to be for sale. That belief is rooted in fact). There are of course plenty of BBs who opposed all the bad things that happened in the past and whose vote is not for sale now - but as a group the BBs bear responsibility for what has happened and is still happening. They vote and they get what they vote for - hence child benefit was decimated but benefits for the fit healthy and well off BBs remain, and the public sector employees in those areas where pensions are unfunded (which isn't all of them, the USS and the LGP schemes are fully funded, for example) are now paying more (much more) in so that the BBs can continue to receive their generous pensions (far more than the BBs paid in) but will receive nothing like the same benefits themselves when the time comes for them to draw their pensions. Thre are gigantic structural inequalities now based soley on age and that is wrong - but while the BBs continue to vote with an eye to their own well being rather than the country's this will continue. And that is what pisses people off. Not that they were born but that their voting patterns are maintaining their position at the cost of others - and that they aren't even honest about that.

Pointless trying to discuss things with the bigoted posters here. They are clueless about life in the 20th century when we apparently had it so good.

I was going to say I'd rather be a bitter 30 year old than a hard working 60 year old, another 30 years of life, but you know what, I prefer being 60 than one of these miseries.

Final salary schemes had to change because they had gigantic black holes as a result of the use of inaccurate/inappropriate actuarial assumptions over a long period of time. There was also an amount of legal abuse where companies (and the state) took contributions holidays - some just for the employers but many for the employees also - because the impact of the inappropriate actuarial assumptions was not fully understood. The impact of the push to contract out and take out private personal pensions (which were defined contribution schemes and vastly inferior making money really only for the providers - who were of course usually big Tory donors) in the 1980s was also underestimated for too long. The Maxwell scandal was the final straw that broke the final salary pensions' collective back but the writing was already on the wall - the pensions promises could not be kept, and the only way to maintain the payouts to the existing members (the BBs) was to first close them to new entrants and second ramp up massively the contribution from the younger members while slashing their future benefits. This isn't really the boomers' fault (although they were happy enough to take the contributions holidays and the short term savings from contracting out). What is their fault is their collective refusal to participate in sharing the cost of mistakes that were made on their watch. And to pass that cost on to future generations. While telling the generations that have been shafted that if only we worked harder we'd be fine.

Woolly - I doubt many 51 year olds have unfunded final salary pension schemes. Outside the public sector and the top few blue chips very few 51 year olds will have final salary schemes of any description. The very youngest boomers have been shafted in exactly the same way as the oldest gen Xers. It's a very imprecise form of categorisation. But the older boomers are in a very different situation and until people start voting in the general interest rather than in their own self interest the situation will not improve - the general interest would see sensible progressive changes to the way things are - if the pendulum swung completely the other way, to pander to the 18 year olds, we would have huge problems in a different direction. All sectors of society need to be considered, not one at the expense of the rest. The generational inequality needs to be reformed, not replaced by a different generational inequality. And there are inequalities other than generational that need to be addressed too. The issue with (some of) the boomers isn't isolated it's part of a much bigger issue but until these inequalities are acknowledged and tackled nothing can be done and while the privileged groups deny that the inequalities exist we are all stuck with the way things are.

There was huge house price inflation in the 70s too - but there was wage inflation as well which masked some of it. If thetories didn't believe they could buy the boomers' votes (and they are clearly aiming their tactics at the older boomers not the ones born in the early 60s) then they wouldn't be wasting their time trying to do so. Those who vote get stuff (as an inducement) those who don't vote get stuffed. I would love it if the boomers proved the Tories wrong. It would be the best possible thing for the country because it would prove that people do have a sense of responsibility for society as a whole rather than just a concern for their own self interest. But I'm not holding my breath, partly because I'm a pessimist but partly because the Tories have done the Maths and they are very good at electoral maths.

So the boomers voted Thatcher in too?
Seriously?
Hilarious.

woollyjumpers What would you propose as a measure to iron out the inter generational equality specifically, rather than general inequality?

I think you have to restore fully funded education for the less well off, and to do that, you need to make it more elite again. It used to be the case that if you were very bright, but from a poor background, you could go to university and "better yourself" (as several posters on here have said they did). Because only the brightest went to university, you were pretty much guaranteed a decent job. Now of course, in the name of equality, everyone who wants to go pretty much can. Whether or not it meets a great social need, who knows. Personally I think its more about massaging youth unemployment figures.

I just don't believe most people vote to shaft their children and grand children. Obviously not all families get on with each other, but I think most do - atleast well enough to take responsibility for their care in old age and not to want to see their grandchildren in penury.

I look at my mil who spends all her money on caring for her 90 year old mil and her grandchildren I see somebody that is fairly representative of other women her age. What would be the point of voting out of self interest when her life is so tied up with the rest of her family? (It's not as though she even likes flying...)

The divide is between families like ours who have somebody that they could go to on a crisis, and families who have no support, financial or otherwise.

I think there is a touch of conspiracy theory about the idea of 'baby boomers' acting as a group.