To think, as a 'millennial', that we do have it quite good?

[kokosnuss]

Hate the term, but the common narrative amongst 'millennials' is that the baby boomers stole all the houses and good pensions, leaving none for us.

AIBU to think that yes, many baby boomers are in an enviable position (paid off mortgage, pension, savings), but only because:
(and I'm thinking only of my own working class grandparents and their friends here, others may have different experiences)

• They started working and saving early, often as soon as they finished school at 15, and had little opportunity to go onto higher education; many would have gone into jobs the millennial generation might consider 'unfulfilling' (e.g. my Grandma was a sewing machinist). They also led lives my generation might consider 'unfulfilling', e.g. simple (meat and 2 veg) food, no foreign holidays, few trips to restaurants, events, etc. Their lives were very much lived in the home i.e. very cheaply and expectations of life were very different.

Of course, many baby boomers now enjoy an expensive lifestyle, with lots of foreign trips and new experiences, but only because they're enjoying the fruits of years of careful saving. They haven't always lived that way, but there seems to be an assumption on the part of millennials that they have. So whereas my generation might only finish education at 21 or later, and then want to spend time travelling, or building up experience towards a 'fulfilling' career path, they also want to live what they consider to be a 'fulfilling' lifestyle, e.g. gadgets, subscriptions, foreign trips, going to events, restaurants, bars, the latest fashions, etc. And then are surprised when they have no savings or pension!

I'm nearly 30, renting, and only just in the position my grandparents would have been in at 18/19 - steady job, actively saving for a house, making regular pension contributions. But I don't blame anybody else for that, because I've had lots of opportunities and experiences in return that I know my grandparents (and female grandparents in particular) didn't have.

AIBU?

Even if baby boomers did have it 'easier' - so what? What difference does it make? Children complain that 'she got more than me' - who cares? How does that affect you? Just get on and do what you can with what you've got!*

I know what you mean, and I think the ‘problem’ only arises when people start with the “oh you go on fancy holidays and drink takeaway coffees, which is why you can’t afford a house” .

I’m a millennial who is lucky enough to own property btw, so I’m not being defensive.

My best friend is an Oxbridge graduate whose parents sit on their arses enjoying their early retirement. They did not contribute a penny towards my friend’s degree. He has finally managed to buy a shared ownership flat inLondon, where he works. He definitely isn’t a spendthrift. He has been without heating now for over a year as he can’t afford to replace the boiler! He is so proud of being able to afford anything as a single person in London, but his parents, who live in a much cheaper part of the country and who bought their house for about £12k and are now mortgage free, cannot fathom why he “hasn’t just saved a bit more”, so he can buy his own flat outright . I don’t blame his parents for being BBs, but I do think they are an ignorant pair and it’s the rhetoric from people like that who get millennials’ backs up I think.

It works both ways of course and I don’t criticise any generation because I think they had it too easy. As I said in my first post on this thread, it’s a totally pointless exercise.

Maybe some Bluelady. I heard about "the milkround" but it didn't exist for everyone or all careers. I worked as a volunteer for 3 months before landing my first job. My dh (same career) 9 months. A friend nearly 2 years.

Bluelady

That's bollocks, Flowerpot, and you know it.
Funnily enough, no, I do not know that my opinion and the facts of my direct experience (which I have lived, you have not) are bollocks.

In my day graduates got jobs on the milk round and segued seamlessly into well paid jobs. None of us would have even considered working for nothing. We'd have laughed at the very idea.

That's rubbish. Companies at milkrounds did not represent all industries, only a select group of companies ever attended the milkrounds at my university. Graduates would then follow the process of milkround applications on a smaller scale than graduates now do, so there again you highlight an advantage that millenials have now.

Internships, both before uni, during and after were all done as I said and has nothing to do with milkrounds anyway. For you to say None of us would have even considered working for nothing is a load of tripe. My whole friendship group did precisely that, whether it be for a week, a month or several months, we worked for free to gain the precious experience we could put on our CVs. The way we did that was to get paid work before, save up and live on that and work in the evenings stacking shelves and in bars to fund our rents. Not one of us got money from our parents or anyone else. We got the experience, added it to our CVs and it served us well.

I'm in my early twenties. Married with two children. Financially well off. Private schools, aiming to pay off our house within ten years, annual foreign holiday. It sure as hell isn't because I spent years traveling, partying, seeking fulfilment etc. I took a cursory year to have a bit of fun (after working very hard in school) then buckled down to finding a suitable husband, taking a serious (read kind of boring) degree, having and raising children etc. You get what you put in with a small allowance for luck. I put in the hard work early and am starting to reap the rewards. Obviously I have sacrificed quite a few things, some of those sacrifices will become more palpable as I get older. But if I hadn't made the choices I had in favour of having more fun then I wouldn't have anything at all.

LaurieMarlow

Yes, Flowerpot, how privileged to work for free for months and possibly years at a time just to get on the first rung of the career ladder, probably in a hugely expensive city, getting into debt as you go. How easy they have it.

Yes, how easy they have it. All you have written above is what we did. We didn't get into debt because we worked every spare moment to earn the money to fund it, and therefore chose not to get into debt. If you choose not to get paid work before or during, then you choose to get into debt. Depends which way you want it to go.

You write as if it's all new, that unpaid internships are a terrible thing that today's poor graduate has to cope with. In contrast, working unpaid is something we've done for generations to get experience. The only difference is now these internships are laid out on a nice plate for everyone to apply, there is a great equality of opportunity in getting them and they are better organised and a better experience than in my day.

That's rubbish. Companies at milkrounds did not represent all industries, only a select group of companies ever attended the milkrounds at my university. Graduates would then follow the process of milkround applications on a smaller scale than graduates now do, so there again you highlight an advantage that millenials have now.

Well in the late 90's not everyone got jobs from milk round. It was easier to get a job, any job and work your way up 20 years ago than it is now. Computers and self serve have done away with a lot of higher level support jobs.

My experience on leaving uni with a humanities - essentially useless -degree. I got a paid job in public relations (a supposedly hard to enter industry) with a month of graduating. Friends went into accountancy, NHS fast track, advertising, all straight after graduating. None of my peer group would have considered working for nothing.

I must admit I've never heard of unpaid internships before this generation, I'd like to see some non anecdotal evidence.

We didn't get into debt because we worked every spare moment to earn the money to fund it, and therefore chose not to get into debt. If you choose not to get paid work before or during, then you choose to get into debt.

Today's generation work too. But they're paying big city rents at hundreds a month, so they have no choice but to get into debt too as there aren't physically enough hours in the day. That's on top of their 40K loans from University. Just to get a start in a career.

The only difference is now these internships are laid out on a nice plate for everyone to apply, there is a great equality of opportunity in getting them and they are better organised and a better experience than in my day.

That's TOTAL bollocks. It's still a question of who you know. And many of them are still fairly crap experiences.

I took a cursory year to have a bit of fun (after working very hard in school) then buckled down to finding a suitable husband, taking a serious (read kind of boring) degree, having and raising children etc

So in 2 or 3 years you found & married a suitable husband & had 2 kids. This is clearly where my friends are going wrong 😒

And total exploitation.

It's also a question of whether you can afford to take the internship....

So in 2 or 3 years you found & married a suitable husband & had 2 kids

And the kids are old enough to be in school

YANBU, I missed out on being a baby boomer by a few years. I was surprised how many years it covers.
It's easy to look at previous generations and see how they had it easier, but you also need to look at the disadvantages too, like much less money, work opportunities for women, conditions, etc.
Far more distinction between the social classes, especially ito buying power and consumerism.

So in 2 or 3 years you found & married a suitable husband & had 2 kids

And the kids are old enough to be in school

And alongside this you have held down a successful career, so successful that you can afford 500k for the private schools & to pay off your mortgage.

Lots of millenialls live unfulfilling lives, in unfulfilling jobs and base their lives around the home.
They don't have foreign holidays, they work NMW jobs, will never own a house and think a costa coffee is a luxury if it's even a 'thing' on their radar.

Lots of my generation are plodding on at the lower end of the working class, as their parents did.

Their parents probably own a two up two down terrace or an ex council house on the estate which their children still live on.

The difference being that their children haven't even this to aspire to.

YABU by completely disregarding the experiences of those millenialls who aren't middle or even upper working class.

Myopic at best OP. Must try harder.

I'm in my early twenties. Married with two children. Financially well off. Private schools, aiming to pay off our house within ten years, annual foreign holiday. It sure as hell isn't because I spent years traveling, partying, seeking fulfilment etc. I took a cursory year to have a bit of fun (after working very hard in school) then buckled down to finding a suitable husband, taking a serious (read kind of boring) degree, having and raising children etc.

You must be totally loaded to be in a position to pay off your house by your early 30s (at which point most people nowadays are just getting together their deposit). You do realise this is in no way typical.

I'm in my early twenties. Married with two children. Financially well off. Private schools, aiming to pay off our house within ten years, annual foreign holiday. It sure as hell isn't because I spent years traveling, partying, seeking fulfilment etc. I took a cursory year to have a bit of fun (after working very hard in school)

Your timeline needs work, love

Well that will be rather difficult because they often weren't as structured as an internship they were just "volunteering". So what would the evidence look like and where would you find it? I guess if you dove into the archives of many/most third sector organisations you'd find volunteer job descriptions, or payments of volunteer expenses. If the job centre keep records of correspondence for 30 years you'll find plenty from people arging that they were allowed to volunteer as long as they were actively seeking work and available for work. But volunteering for experience has a long history in the third sector.

So in 2 or 3 years you found & married a suitable husband & had 2 kids

And the kids are old enough to be in school

And alongside this you have held down a successful career, so successful that you can afford 500k for the private schools & to pay off your mortgage

But she married a rich man, obviously! If only everyone else was as smart as her... marrying an older, richer man they could pay off the mortgage in their twenties.

Lol

Thanks Barbarian appreciate that. It would be interesting to see the scope then and now in terms of sector, but that would be difficult info to get one's hands on I presume.

2 Costa lattes....
£8 max a week
£32 a month
£384 per year

' If you can afford 2 costa lattes a month you can afford a house.'
nah...it would still take you approx 102 years to save a deposit of 40,000 which you can put towards a shoebox...great.

I do think you have a point OP. But it's sort of swings and roundabouts. Financially, my parents (in their 70s) are now very comfortable (good final salary pension which is considerably more than our household income). But what I remember from growing up (in the 70s) was that it was a much less comfortable life - my kids are definitely soft in comparison! The house was draughty - coal fire, no double glazing, ice on inside of windows in winter. Dad worked all the time (full time plus evenings and weekends trying to earn extra cash), mum worked part time. No kids 'activities', holidays mainly in my aunties caravan (crawing with earwigs, which we had to spend an hour or so getting rid of whenever we arrived). Mum (and then I) made most of our clothes, or they were hand-me-downs. I was working weekends from age 14, and had 3 jobs while doing my A levels (Saturdays I sometimes worked from 8am -10pm going from job to job. Funnily enough I didn't do very well in my exams!). But it was good. My first house I bought for £50k a few years after graduating. But again there was a lot of making do. My dining room table for a year or so was a couple of packing crates with a bit of chipboard and a table cloth on top. I think because of my upbringing I am still very frugal in some respects (though most definitly not in others), which means we have built up savings and own our house. It's priorites. But I think my kids won't put up with what I did when starting out, because their life has been far more comfortable than mine was so they aren't prepared for it.

Nowadays, I fully appreciate that some people have it hard, in a similar way to how I felt my parents did when I was a child. But the people I worked with who complained most about not being able to afford the deposit for a house were those who went to Costa every day, had the latest gadgets, several holidays a year and regularly had weekends away to go and see their favourite bands. Or would blow £100 on clothes in their lunch break. Or when looking for a new rental flat would only consider what I thought of as 'luxury' accommodation, rather than paying less for something not quite as salubrious. As a previous poster said - some of it is down to priorities. Not for everyone - but for many.

Gen Z, iGen, or Centennials: Born 1996 and later
Millennials or Gen Y: Born 1977 to 1995
Generation X: Born 1965 to 1976
Baby Boomers: Born 1946 to 1964
Traditionalists or Silent Generation: Born 1945 and before

Before I can respond, I need to know what Generation I am. b.1963