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?

I CBA reading the whole thread but I have to say that there are a lot of people on here who seem to have a huge chip on their shoulders. Perhaps if they opened their eyes they would see that rather than 'baby boomers' having a privileged existence the priorities and people's expectations and values have changed. My parents started in council housing with no money at all, scrimped, saved, went without in order to buy a house which they were gradually (over a period of about 40 odd years) able to upscale and pay off. They have always managed with one car, used public transport, saved the odd and sods of food so that they can save money.
They are now in a position where they can afford to go on holidays etc but only because they still save money where possible. They have a TV that they have had for over 10 years, when stuff breaks, they fix it rather than buying new etc. etc
My step kids (and I love them dearly) prioritise going out, eating takeaways, having mobile phones and TV packages over saving for a house - their choice and that is fine. But the reason they can't afford to pay for a deposit is that they would rather enjoy the here and now than go without in order to have something in the future. Fair enough, their choice but their inability to pay for a house has no relationship to what people of my mum and dad's generation did / are doing.

I work with young people (late teens and early twenties) and a lot of them (not all) seem to be quite incapable of looking at their own behaviour and reflecting on the impact of this. The first response is usually to blame someone else - it is so frustrating and reflected in the sentiment of many of the posts I have read on here.

we are well off now, but in our 30's we were in negative equity, each working 40-50 hour weeks, raising a family and broke despite being in professional, stressful jobs. maybe those people complaining about how hard life is for them, will also find it improves as they get older - who knows.

i do know that i will have worked all my adult life in a job i don't really like in order to give my family financial security. if i had stayed at home to look after my kids (which is what i really would have preferred) we wouldn't be in this comfortable situation now.

i also think we have paid well over the odds tax wise - far more than we are ever likely to get back in terms of benefits and pensions/child benefits/NHS treatment etc. And it looks as if, despite paying more in total NI than the average person, I'm not going to qualify for a full pension because i opted out of SERPs.

one of the main issues is the cost of housing. from what i read this is because of extra demand caused in part by people living alone and immigration - have i caused either of these, no.

at least i didn't vote for a party (labour) thats caused the massive balance of payments problem.

Just come back to the thread.
Getting tired of pointing out that BBs are a diverse bunch of people.

To the poster who said that the remarks by some posters on this thread are not discriminatory I would say that they are.
Prejudice is making advance judgments about a person based on superficial attributes such as race, gender etc. without any real knowledge of them.
There is real prejudice by some posters on this thread based on age.

I am not going to try to argue with them any more because it is impossible to shift that prejudice-which IMO is unacceptable and if it was based on anything other than age would lead to deletion of the thread.

Try "AIBU to be pissed off with single parents" for example.

I certainly agree with Mrss and dreaming. On SERPS I contracted out too. I am ld enough (just) to be able to get one of the new state pension projections from the Government. That shows my state pension will be £123 a week as a consequence. However I think the opted out of SERPs pension will pay something like £28 a week so I suspect the two together for those of us who opted out of SERPs will be much the same as if you had stayed opted into serps.
I will also have paid continuously with no breaks (no maternity leaves in my case) national insurance over about 46 years until I reach my state pension age and cease having to pay NI even if I carry on working which I will.

I do hope someone's going to come back and explain how boomers - the younger generation at that time - kept the tory government in power during the '80s.

I do get pissed off when they think it's all down to their hard work, and not a housing boom, favourable pensions and politicians permanently focussing on winning their votes.

this

Is anyone going to come and explain? I need to go to bed soon.

In a lot of cases it was down to hard work though.
No mod cons to help with housework that we have today, it was a bit more than running a hoover round, wiping a bathroom and loading a dish washer.
In many families only the man worked as considered bad form if your wife had to work as you were seen as a man who couldn't provide.
no foreign holidays, no maternity, no equal pay etc.
They also paid bloody high interest rates too, lots of negative equity and repos.
There are winners and losers in all generations and younger people complaining about their lot may be the ones future generations are complaining about. Who knows what the future holds and if history is anything to go by, it usually starts off quite tough financially and eventually gets better during your life, if you are lucky. irrespective of when you were born.

MoreThan lots of negative equity and repos

And of course, no-one but the BBs has the risk of that...

We've had the right to equal pay since 1972! One of the most important cases was still the Price v Civil Service case which was in the mid '70s (it decided that it was discrimination to insist on a maximum number of years service with a maximum age for progression to a Civil Service grade as more men than women could comply (with women being more likely to be out of the marketplace for a few years due to having children).

I'm pretty sure there were hoovers and washing machines in the '70s and '80s too.

I do hope someone's going to come back and explain how boomers - the younger generation at that time - kept the tory government in power during the '80s.

We didn't. That was the older generations. Remember pensioners nearly always vote, in whatever era. I was out knocking on doors for the Labour party every election from the time I was 18. Only one of my wider circle of BB friends has ever voted Tory. Don't blame us for Thatcher.

Blame the already rich and all those flag waving after the Falklands.

I very much doubt BB in the Welsh valleys were voting Tory after the pits closed.

The Chandler
People of the BB generation have had the property boom and crash repeatedly thought their working lives so if they were unlucky will have had to start again repeatedly through their lives. I know someone very well who paid into a mortgage for 7 years (can't remember the name of the type of mortgage now but it was the one being recommended by all and sundry) only to be told he had paid off £130. He'd been paying £400 a month over 7 years!
Women might have had the right to equal pay since the 70s but this takes time to realise in practice as we are finding now with historical cases still being brought to court.
And yes, there were washing machines and hoovers, often twin tubs which are a very different kettle of fish to an automatic washing machine and our Hoover was a bissell.
In all honesty, if people looked less at other people in order to moan about how unfair life is and just got on with it, they would be a hell of a lot happier. Particularly as the grass is usually only greener on the other side as its fertilised with bullshit (whether this is applied by the person on the other side or the one looking)

Thank you Mythical and Woolly.So no-one came back to explain this voting phenomenon then? Glad I didn't wait up.

the big difference now is house prices and rents, and the availability of jobs.

not hoovers and washing machines.

Good point. The 80s were a dreadful time.

Some people look at what people older than them have and want it immediately I suppose and may not be too interested in the fact some of us had no maternity leaves, didn't have the holidays people have now and that we put off good things then to be able to afford that 12% interest mortgage and started in a hovel of a house and worked up. Also you tend not to see not well off older people quite so much - they don't leave the house, they don't show off their poverty so you might think all people over 60 are well off when in fact they aren't. They may not even claim benefits they should.

What we should look at is how to ensure people are happy today, now. Much of the country has not had massive house price rises. In my father's area prices rose 9% since 2008. Inner London is a very unusual area where most people even 30 years ago could not afford to live. In the 1930s people had to commute in. In fact even before that some people walked 2 hours into London for work every morning and every night before trains went out as far as they do now - unimaginable now.

The state has chosen to protect the NHS, the old and schools when cuts are really needed so the cuts have been deeper elsewhere and taxes have gone up for everyone else so not surprisingly that causes conflict between generations. It is the young you should give higher savings rates to not the old or else do it fairly between all generations.

People get angry with baby boomers and people with 'more' than them. People get angry with people on benefits who are living off 'their' money. People spend too much time focusing on what everyone else has and have a very possessive attitude over money that wasn't even theirs in the first place (tax, National Insurance, company pension) and who gets to 'have' it. The people who feel that way are wasting anger on looking at what everyone else has got, it's pointless and petty.

i graduated in the 80's and there were 80 applicants for each of the type of jobs i was applying for. I'm not saying its great now - but it wasn't great then either. And then a few years later our mortgage was at 15% interest rate and our house nearly got repossessed.

Yes, my house is now worth a lot more than we paid for it, but how does that benefit me unless i want to downsize, which i can't due to the number of kids i have living here?

Exactly. Although I have a house which has no equity in it other than what I earned paid out of taxed money (as in effect the equity came out of it to my spouse on divorce) so I am unusual, but even those whose houses have risen in value have no real gain if they plan to live in it until they die. Mine could be worth £10 or £100k or £500k and it would not matter as I do not plan to move. I have virtually no pensioner even though I am supposedly a baby boomer - just; because I work for myself and have never worked in the state sector.

A whole generation of 80s graduates could not find work ever in jobs that were suitable. Vast swathes were left without jobs. Even I top of my class made over 100 applications to get a job. It was a very tough time for many aftrer the horrible 1970s

I agree with some of the PP - I guess I am a late boomer (50) we didn't have "stuff" or holidays or a car - we had "the house" (we were the first generation of my family to actually BUY a house) - into which every spare penny went, with the hope of building equity so that we could move out of the bedsit, into the flat, out of the flat into the maisonette, out of the maisonette into the starter home and out of the starter home into the 3 bed and FINALLY out of the 3 bed and into the "family" home we have now. My first foreign holiday was at the age of 38.

It IS harder to buy now because prices are so high, but expectations and lifestyle are also partly the reason for that.

My neighbours around 10 years younger than me rent - they say we are so lucky because they are broke and can't afford to buy. They earn more than we do, have 2 cars, which they "need", loads of the latest gadgets and go away twice a year. (I get the bus to work 3 streets away from where my neighbour works, DH cycles to where his wife works in the same building).

We have also paid an awful lot more for our house than just the headline sale price (Interest rates have not always been so generous)

There are apartments for sale here which cost under £60k - so less than 3 times the national average wage. (when I was first buying, I earned 1/3 of the price of the first place shithole I bought.

Life is different now for all of us, but starting out you would be surprised how similar it used to be.

Wooly, you are my new hero

Everything I was trying to say further up thread is being written so much more eloquently by you. I agree with everything you say, and your experiences mirror mine to a large extent.
When you post on this thread in future, can you add 'and Tooold says so too'?

For us the 80s were horrendous.

We were the parents of 3 young children. The only work I could do was 'outwork' from a local factory. The pay was an absolute pittance and I used to sit doing it until 2am sometimes. I might manage the odd hour in the day but it wasn't safe to do with the DC around. DH was a chartered engineer so not poorly paid, but he worked very long hours, often away from home.

We were very careful not to include my pre DC salary into the equation when applying for our mortgage. The mortgage adviser thought we were mad quite frankly not borrowing up to are limit. Thank god we didn't.

I'm not going to go on about the high interest rates, inflation, redundancies of the time because I doubt if anyone will listen if I do.

The only people to benefit then, as always were people with cash to spare. They were the ones who lapped up the high interest on their saving and could buy shares in the sell offs.