That boomers should should avoid criticising younger people when..

[TeaCake5]

They are the "the worst users of drink and drugs"

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/23/wednesday-briefing-baby-boomers-worst-drinkers-and-drug-users

I guess they can afford to with housing not being a problem for them - people in their 20s and 30s have no spare money for drink and drugs!

You need to be spitting mad at a world where sub living wages are paid and topped by tax credits. Where zero hours contracts are the norm rather than a niche thing for casual workers. When workers rights are being eroded... etc etc etc.

Quite.

I'm a millennial in my twenties and live in an expensive part of the South East. I don't agree that we have less than our parents/grandparents. Myself and my friends have all bought houses over the last few years, and still manage to have foreign holidays, day trips and eat out on a regular basis

That sounds nice. What is your annual income @Racoonworld? Much higher than the average I'll bet.

We have got rather obsessed with home ownership. My parents were the first generation in my family (born 1930s) to own a house. Everyone else rented. I think more fairness is needed in the rental sector.

I find it odd that the so-called Boomers attract criticism for doing things that today's young people also want to do.

Buying houses, for example. Fluffiphox made the same point. In the past, it wasn't such a 'thing' to buy a house: more people rented. From the 1970s, however, more people wanted to buy their own houses, and why shouldn't they?

Whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher, her 'right to buy' scheme was a response to what people wanted: to own their own homes.

The trouble is, the more people want a particular commodity (housing, in this case), the more expensive it becomes. We don't have infinite houses available.

Prices are further pushed up where the means to buy houses become more easily available. What were the endowment mortgages of the 1980s, if not a way of arranging cheap repayments for people (plus, handily, earning fat commissions for financial services businesses)? Lenders increasing multiples of salaries, or taking two salaries into account when calculating lending, puts more people in the position of being able to buy, hence sellers ask for more. It's not a mystery.

Young people are frustrated because they can't get near affording a house in certain parts of the country, or can't buy the type of house they want. Blaming older people is silly: the 'boomers' saw something for sale at a price they could afford and bought it. Which is exactly what today's young people would have done in the same position.

I'm not one of the reviled 'boomers': I was born in 1971. I don't like to see older people being blamed for current problems, though. It's a bit too convenient, isn't it? As other posters have noted, divide and conquer.

Here's who young people should be annoyed with:

1. The financial services industry, for reckless lending that pushed up house prices. One of my neighbours spent the late 1980s and early 1990s pushing endowments, personal pensions, etc. He made a shedload of commission. He admits that he knew "fuck all" about them and congratulates himself on getting out before the mis-selling scandal. The financial services institutions didn't care, did they? They got a steady stream of buyers for their crap products.

1. City pension fund managers, who demand that the profits of businesses they hold shares in must increase year after year so that they can make good on rash promises of income they made to fund members years ago, and to cover for ill-advised 'contribution holidays'. Whilst still taking their nice bonuses, of course. How do those businesses make more money? Why, by paying employees less, of course, and having fewer of them, and if everybody has a degree, who's going to pay a premium?

1. University vice chancellors and management teams, who keep dragging kids through the door of the (often sub-standard) institutions they run, so that they can get their hands on the fees and keep themselves in style. Have you seen what these people get paid? They never tell the kids the truth, do they? Which is, that a degree in law from Edge Hill university isn't going to get you anywhere near a proper career in the law and that you'd be better off saving your £27k and doing something else.

5rivers7hills a household income of around 70k, so only just over the average for salaries in our area. We both have to work full time long hours for this and I wouldn't ever expect not to, you get what you work for!

"Because once again, this generation is going to be worse off than the last"

Boomer here who is much less well off than my parents or late pil and that's on two incomes not one.

a household income of around 70k, so only just over the average for salaries in our area. We both have to work full time long hours for this and I wouldn't ever expect not to, you get what you work for!

Not always though. I know couples who work long hours and work hard who earn less than 40k between them. I also know people who don't work hard at all and have a large salary. It's ok if you get a decent salary, but not everyone does. I hate the theory that if someone earns little it's because they don't work hard or long enough or if someone has a brilliant salary they must be hard workers.
It's not always true.

"Love one another" is not a had ideal for life. Do we have constantly to have these generational battles? It is not a competition. Most of us over an 80 year life span will have some pretty awful times and some better times.

I don't drinnk and have never taken drugs. I think I'm a bit young to be a boomer. I didn't drink at university at all and surprise surprise came top of the year with law prizes! Not surprisingly that has meant my CV looks pretty good.

They have benifitted from HUGE house price growth and lowest ever IR Final salary pension schemes Add to that most of them grew up when the nhs was new and shiny and they got great care Also free university!

But they didn't have any control over those things, it was just the world they lived in then. And every single person bar none would take full advantage of all those things if they were available today.

Also I think with social media expectations comparisons and aspirations are at an all time high. It's easy to bash those who seem to have more because they're older but they have naturally had more time to gather things. I'm not a boomer, but I see more need to show wealth amongst the young today whereas it was a bit inverse in my day where you had to be a bit scruffy and go on marches to be cool ;-) we're all the same under the skin- if you cut us we all bleed the same so why the need to stir up hate?

YABU

Not ALL baby boomers went to Uni, own their own home and have a zillion holidays a year !!!

Oh, on reading the thread I am not a baby boomer either . Born in 65 so no idea .

I think there is a problem but I do not believe it's necessarily boomers fault that they've benefited and millennials will lose out. I believe there's going to be a great transfer of wealth - from boomers to big business and government not to their children/grandchildren. For example most elderly people will have to go into residential care at some point, and their assets will be sold off to pay for it - ok fair enough, I hear some people say, but what about the trickle down to their family? They'll get nothing. So with home ownership amongst the young being so low, there's going to be a lot of people who won't ever inherit a bean from their parents. The money will go to g4s or whoever runs the care homes, or government or equity release companies. This is a massive problem for the future, because who or how will elderly care be paid for, for millennials? It's a ticking bomb. I don't blame the boomers for this, they've taken advantage of opportunities presented to them, in the same way anyone would. But it does worry me. I expect to be euthanized due to being unable to pay for care bills when I get old. It's a scary thought but what can you do?

I believe there's going to be a great transfer of wealth - from boomers to big business and government not to their children/grandchildren.

That's my worry exactly, Elephants. As someone upthread said, boomers saw something they wanted at a price they could afford, and bought it (ie housing). They're not to blame for what has subsequently happened, and the narrowing down of opportunities for younger people, though it's annoying when someone who has benefitted massively from house price inflation trots out the line about 'I worked for every penny'

Does anyone else get the rage about the special pleading by the WASPI campaign? I would be all for campaigning to lower the state pension age for everyone. But arguing for a transitional pension for women born in the 1950s seems selfish, and missing the point: it seems to imply that had women born in the 1950s received more notice and individual notification that they weren't going to be able to claim a pension at age 60, they would have planned differently, ie saved instead of spent. But the very people who are at the sharp end here, people on low incomes, wouldn't have been able to save enough to retire several years before claiming a state pension. And anyone on a low income is in that boat, irrespective of whether you're a woman or a man, or which decade you were born in.

I wondered how long it would take for someone to have a go at the WASPIs. How were women on half the income of men supposed to save?? How many actually had access to a private pension? Get real. Tell you what, scrap family tax credit and working tax credit and go back to how the majority of boomers scraped a living!! At least they paid into the system before taking a hell of a lot out. Yes I rage, guess what about, - self righteous snotty little shits like you, who really haven't got a clue.

Bananas you must only know boomers living in the south east then. Because most of the rest of the country was on its uppers in the 80s.

My boomer parents went through the miners strike so pretty sure they weren't living it up.

I wondered how long it would take for someone to have a go at the WASPIs. How were women on half the income of men supposed to save?? How many actually had access to a private pension? Get real. Tell you what, scrap family tax credit and working tax credit and go back to how the majority of boomers scraped a living!! At least they paid into the system before taking a hell of a lot out. Yes I rage, guess what about, - self righteous snotty little shits like you, who really haven't got a clue.

1. WASPIs spent most of their working lives in the 70s and onwards, not the 30s and onwards. Yes, to be sure, equal pay has been and continues to be a long time coming, but it's misleading to say that, as a group, women born in the 50s earned half as much as men for all or most of their working lives. Some did very much better than their equivalents are doing today.

2. Some women, and some men, were and are on very low incomes. None of them were/are able to save. This, sadly, is true of all generations. They get the double whammy of exhausting, physical jobs and no opportunity to retire before the state pension age be that 65, 66, 67, 68 or more.

3. I'm a (tail-end) boomer myself, and I know that the stereotypes of the group as a whole don't hold true for all of us. I went to school at a time when working-class girls weren't expected to achieve and I didn't - I survived for many years as an SP on a low income (series of shitty jobs) before I had the good fortune to be able to go to university and study, and eventually get a job that enabled me to put money into a pension, but too late for me to have the kind of big-house-early-retirement-loads-of-holidays lifestyle that boomers are stereotypically assumed to have. I know it's not true that we all swanned around partying on the proceeds of our house price bonanzas.

4. I would have every respect for the WASPIs if their campaign focused on fair treatment for everyone. As it is, it smacks of special pleading - once they're alright, will they be on the campaign trail for younger workers, or for men? Somehow I doubt it, because there's nothing in their campaign material to suggest they would.

I think generalisations about boomers vs millennials is a bit daft. People are different. If I'd been a boomer I'd have been completely shafted - the medication that keeps me sane hadn't been invented and I'd probably have wound up like my great aunt and long term institutionalised. My DH wouldn't have had a house/great pension etc because he isn't white and would have had to deal with the kind of relentless racism PiLs faced. DB, who is gay, wouldn't have his great husband.

Boomers had a great time if they were male, white and heterosexual. Not necessarily so fabulous otherwise. Yeah, millennials face issues, but so did the boomers in their day. It's all swings and roundabouts.

I think YABU