AIBU to wonder why retired parents live in big houses and don't help family?

[Dojos]

Not judging the choice but i can't help finding it odd that you can have two sets off grandparents living in and owning several properties and adult children both in full
Time work struggling to make ends meet.

Bright enough and big hearted enough to know inheritance is a gift not a right, and rightly so. I'm just curious how parents can sleep In 5 bedroom homes they don't need at night whilst their good steady grown up kids struggle a whole Gang into a 2 or 3 bed semi.

I guess that applies further - why do the elderly generation not downside and keep the lifecycle of a family home going?

I heard a fantastic interview on the radio, it may even have been any answers...but a retired person what demanding the government to something because his adult children were finding it impossible to get a suitable house as there where no larger properties on the market, they couldn't afford a deposit blah blah blah, and they were asked what they were living in...and yes of course it was a 5 bed house with just the two of them in it...

The guy didn't even make the connection immediately, so the interviewer had to ask him directly if he didn't think that people occupying large houses they didn't need was a part of the problem. He was all 'yes, well obviously....erm...but I earned this house, there is no way I would ever move.'

Fair enough but stop bollocking on about how awful it is for your children if you are prepared to do sweet FA to help.

TBH BB piss me off a lot at the moment. They are full of how hard they worked to get what they have with no apparent realisation that people are working just as hard now and getting nowhere near the same rewards.

Many need to go look up the word 'privilege'.

Two sides of the same coin. Personally I don't think we worked any harder than the next generation does now but we were hard up when we were younger although we keep being told how well off we've always been by people who weren't born when we were struggling.

We worked hard but we could afford houses on 100% mortgages and more. Not available now. We progressed and earned more whilst wages have stagnated for the past 10 years.

We paid 15% interest on those mortgages too. It's a cliche but every generation has different challenges. I can never remember one generation being so resentful of another before.

Nursy, read the post above mine. Expect appears about every other sentence

Em, no. Expect appears once when talking about my grandfather's generation's (those that fought in the war) expectations about each generations responsibilities to those above and below it.

And I am not a millenial, I'm generation X, the sandwich generation currently supporting our own small children and elderly parents. I have a 4 bedroomed house bought without any parental help (although unlike the millenials I didn't have crippling student loans). And as I did to Koka may I refer you to my earliest post in this thread where I discussed the choices we are currently having to help MIL make because my PILs didn't downsize when they were younger, healthier and not thinking ahead. I plan to downsize on retirement a) to free up capital for my retirement and b) to prepare for the stage of life when our health declines to make things easier for my children.

We paid 15% yes but not for ten years. The current millennials will be repaying their student loans all their working lives. We who work for a living are constantly screwed over down all the generations.
Look after your family and they will look after you. Dont pay overpriced private healthcare companies all the family wealth. Make your own arrangements. It’s better value and better for you.

Despite all their big houses and holidays the BBs don't seem to be very happy.

Oh Nursy, I thought we'd put that one to bed!

You are happy Bluelady with your choice.
Others though, with a bit of planning can choose alternatively, it’s just that many B.B. don’t plan until there is a crisis. Then it’s a panicked decision so that Mum/ Dad can be discharged from hospital because they can’t come home. No downstairs loo. Doors too narrow for wheelchairs etc.
I don’t know why you are so down on the younger generation. I think they are hard working and getting a raw deal.
I am a happy B.B. farfoutis. I feel I’ve been blessed in life, we have worked hard and done well enough financially but our real wealth is our family.
I would not have rattled around in our large house whilst they struggled. It was lovely but it didn’t mean more to me than my kids.
Can’t really understand why anyone wouldn’t do that.

Nursy, you don't have the BB attitude - maybe that's why you are happy. Your children are lucky.

Nursy, I'm not down on the younger generation at all. I agree that many of them work hard. I'm really angry about student loans and fees, not least because a lot of them are getting into ridiculous debt for a degree which will get them a job that would only have needed A levels in my day. They're getting ripped off.

My son and stepchildren work incredibly hard, fortunately the two with degrees did them when fees were £1k a year and my stepson has almost paid his off, he's also bought a house with his soon to be wife. None of them expect or want our money.

And that's what bugs me about some of their contemporaries. Yes, if their parents want to give them money, that's fine. But it's not a right and nobody should expect it. Or begrudge their parents the nice home or holidays they've worked for.

No one ever got 100% mortgages in my day! you had to save with the same building society for years and even then they would often turn you down; you needed a good deposit and it helped if the manager liked you. They were not doling out mortgages like smarties.

Xenia that is so true - the mortgage application process was so stressful, and you had to pay money to apply, whether you got the mortgage or not!

Mortgages were doled out like smarties in the early 90s. Unfortunately jobs were not.

I agree I had to have a face to face meeting and needed to show I could save X for potential mortgage payment and bills (less bills currently paid) for 6 months prior to applying

They poured over all your bank statements and you could have a mortgage and a credit card

Times changed for the worse and look at the mess the banks chit the country into

In small town Ireland in the 70 and 80s they made you feel like a beggar when you were applying for a mortgage, and it really did come down to the bank manager's discretion a lot of the time.

I don't think boomers should feel pressured to downsize to help their kids, but I do think that (if they are intending for their kids to have any inheritance) it's worth considering how to provide it before the state takes it all in elderly care fees. I think I read that care home fees are currently something like £1000 a week? That's £52,000 a year! If you stay in that lovely 5 bed house until you require a care home it would not take long for the fees to absorb all but £24,000 (I believe this is the correct current figure that is protected from care home fees).

I also think that the boomer generation need to realise that yes they worked hard but so does the current generation. The difference is that the boomers saw standards of living increase whereas the current generation is seeing them fall. This is nothing to do with hard work and obviously there will be exceptions but it is just how it is. So the way we are headed the current generation will be lucky even to have paid off the mortgage on their modest 2/3 bed house and be able to retire on the most basic standard of living by the time they are 70. That's not to say that this means boomers should feel obligated to help their children - they've earned their money so they should spend it how they please. But it is not right to assume that their children will have the same good fortune from hard work alone.

Care home fees are precisely why some of us aren't giving our money away, Scarlet. It's not the state that takes that money, you have to pay for a care home that isn't a shit hole and to choose where you end up.

This thread has been quite sad really. As a pp said further upthread, I've never known a generation to be so resentful against another generation. The medical profession are helping us all to live longer but what's the point when we're all being made to feel guilty just for enjoying the extra years we've been given?

It's similar to the blue badge syndrome where disabled people are having to fight to acquire one, then being questioned by randoms whether they are entitled to it. This phenomenon goes across all ages though. All very sad.

Yes. Mortgages were hard to get in the 1970s. Then all that changed at some point in the 1980s and they were very easy to get which completely overstimulated the housing market contributing to the crazy rises in price.

In the 1970s. I agree Bluelady that you only needed a decent set of O levels and night school and you could have a good job. They were plentiful ( I walked out of a clerical job one week I didn’t like. I had another by the following Monday with better pay!)
Now you need a degree for even an entry level job. University Chancellors earn hundreds of thousands and six figure bonuses! as do a whole slew of Management jobs. We, the B.B. allowed this to happen along with the rest of the privatisation racket.
We B.B. have been such a demographic bulge the Gov has always fallen over themselves to pander to us. As you say bluelady we had high interest rates for a time in the early 1990s but the housing repossession mess is caused was fixed because as voters, our generation held the whip hand. We still do unfortunately and, in our dotage, impose our will on the rest of the population to their detriment imo. No wonder there is a generation divide! Look at the statistics.our age group hold all the wealth in the U.K.

I don’t myself know any of my childrens contemporaries who have felt entitled to their parents money or lazy about working for their own. Can think of one off the top of my head who is a bit of a waste of space but he has MH issues to be fair.

Care homes are ridiculously expensive because we the B.B. are there to be taken advantage of. Successive governments have failed to provide good, state led provision for old age. It has been given to the private sector who are getting very rich on our assets. I’d rather keep it in the family thanks.

The mortgage illustrates the difficulties with comparing generations. Most of us are adults from about 20 - 80 so 60 years. In any of those 60 year periods there weill be dreadfully awful things. I was reading my grandparents' 1916 letters - bombs falling on England WWI even; then my parents similarly were bombed in WWII. I haven 't been bombed. So we will all have ups and downs over the years financially and in other ways. I sold my last house in the 90s at a loss as I'm sure I've bored people to death about but I do it because everyone thinks if you bought a house in London in those days you always made a massive profit on it which isn't true.

It's the same with getting jobs - I applied to over 100 and had 23 interviews when I graduated - height of early 80s recession after those dreadful 1970s years of strikes, 3 day weeks, power cuts (I still have the oil lamps my parents had to buy then). Some graduates at that time never ever got a graduate job. Also I am from the NE and we lost the mining and ship building jobs - not that that particularly matters (I have found one ancestor down the mines at 12 and one at 14 on census forms and the family worked very very hard through education to get out of that situation).

So there may be a decade or two in any of our 60 years when things seem to go really well. My daughter bought in London in the last 10 years and prices then rose. My other children may well find their properties bought after that are worth less than they paid at present. It just depends on your timing.

I agree that currently for young couples it is getting a deposit together in cities where there are jobs which is hard. A couple doing the jobs we did when we bought (newly qualified lawyer and head of department teacher) can still buy the house we bought in outer London by the way but that of course is not say 2 newly qualified teachers although even back in the 80s the school had to offer teachers school flats (where we started out in - I slept on a mattress on the floor in one when pregnant, not that that's a problem) as the London weighting was ridiculously small compared to the 4x prices of even outer London places compared with the North in 1983.

The years of additional retirement the BB feel they 'deserve' to enjoy due to medical advances are being taken back away from younger generations every time the retirement age is increased.

Why would anyone feel they 'deserve' extra years of retirement?

My great grandparents lived in a time before retirement really existed for the majority. I live in a generation where many don't feel they will live long enough to retire, and if we do it will be the best part of a decade later than the BB are, with a pension that is a small fraction of what the BB are getting.

I think what is really really hard about this particular inequity is the summary changing of conditions. I've been paying into a pension plan for 15 years and am now discovering that all that money was paid to BB and there is not enough put away for my generation for the T&C I signed to be honoured. I don't really understand how its possible that a pension fund can just turn around and say, sorry you may never get anything from us, let alone the money you put in, or heaven forbid more than you put in. That feels unbelievably unfair.

sorry that was mostly addressed to falmer. Hard not to resent other peoples retirement when you are losing years and pension benefits you were promised year on year.

Bluelady, I can understand your desire to choose your care home (should you ever need one). It is unfortunately the case that the majority of us cannot have it all in life. Personally I'd rather use what money I have in old age to enjoy life and look after my children than spend it on a care home, even if that means refusing to go in one. But that's easy for me to say - I'm not at that point. And in all likelihood I won't have the option to choose a nice comfortable private care home anyway - as I said, it'll be a struggle to end up in retirement with a small house at all what with the cost of things.

Xenia, agree that each generation will have their ups and downs. But it is widely accepted that the baby boomers grew up in a time where society saw (generally speaking) improvements in standards of living whereas this generation and the next are seeing those standards fall. That is not to say that we are not still fortunate as compared to other societies across the world and compared to our great grandparents. But I think baby boomers just need to realise that the world is very different for younger generations i.e. wages are not rising, the cost of utilities and food are increasing, private pension provision is insufficient, the state pension age is rising, technology is replacing jobs, university costs are soaring and more jobs than ever now require a degree (which means now students go on to effectively pay an additional tax on their earnings), buying and running a home now often requires a dual income yet childcare costs are soaring, housing costs are increasing and there is a shortage, the NHS and state school system is buckling under the pressure of increased demand. I don't blame the baby boomers for any of this. But I do feel that many boomers' outlook on life is that standards of living will just somehow improve with a bit of "hard work" (because that is what they have seen happen generally in their lifetime), when the reality is that there is absolutely no guarantee of this and actually it looks more likely that standards will continue to fall.