To Think My Parents Have No Idea What Life Is Really Like?

[GreenlandTheMovie]

for most people?

DM was a teacher, DF some kind of computer repair engineer but took early retirement at 50. Yes, 50. Never worked again. Both on final salary pension schemes.

They were moaning this week about how "poor" they are, because their pensions don't entitle them to more than index-linked increases to keep up with inflation, unlike people in salaried jobs who can get actual pay rises (I haven't had much of a pay rise in the last decade but theres no telling them). Apparently, they don't have enough money to "do the things they want" without using their savings.

The "things they want to do" include having a large holiday home in France where they normally decamp 6 months of the year, having a Carribbean cruise and a holiday to China last year, similar holidays in previous years, and running their 5 bedroom house. They have a nearly new luxury motorhome and 2 cars. They have also benefitted from 2 large inheritances from relatives dying.

Theres no telling them - apparently, life is very unfair and hard on pensioners like them and retiring at 50 is not at all unreasonable because of the way the company was run.

UnmarkedByThat Taking stupidly early retirement has aged my parents and narrowed their world and vision so very much.

Yes, early retirement hasn't served them well. They have become more isolated together and no longer keep up with friends. Even in France, they don't know anyone. Its all about what they do with their money and how much they can spoil themselves.

I'd actually forgotten that DF retired at 50 (for some reason I'd imagined it was 55 or so) and was only reminded during my visit, hence this thread.

I do think its really lazy to retire at 50 in perfect health and never work again.

I do think its really lazy to retire at 50 in perfect health and never work again

Why? If you are able to support yourself why would you work any longer than necessary? Quite apart from the fact that you have already done around 30yrs of work you can free up job movement for the next generation.

nokidshere I do think its really lazy to retire at 50 in perfect health and never work again

Why? If you are able to support yourself why would you work any longer than necessary? Quite apart from the fact that you have already done around 30yrs of work you can free up job movement for the next generation.

I answered it above. Its been really bad for DF. He's become incredibly inactive and lazy, he has basically sat in a chair (when he's not in France) for 23 years, has no friends and has become quite an unpleasant person. If he had done some part time work (B&Q and Sainsburys for instance employ a lot of retired staff part time as its a really popular thing for them to do in their retirement) or taken up a hobby or volunteered or something, but the fact is current taxpayers/shareholders/employees are paying for him to sit on his backside becuase he's contractually entitled to a generous final salary pension scheme which will probably end up covering more years than his working life ever did.

My ILs were like this, some of that generation are I think. MIL never worked, FIL retired from the bank at 50 with a huge pension, and actually spent more time retired than he did working. They did benefit from affordable house prices, good pensions, good interest rates.

It doesn't have to be paid work, though. My DM spent many years working long hours running an English language school for foreign students. Then my F died soon after and she's spent many years since working for her Christian charity supporting a literacy and Bible translation in West Africa. She still spends two months a year there at the age of 81.

So the work you do doesn't have to be paid, there are so many charities that are desperately in need of volunteers.

From page 1 There is a distinct lack of empathy and realism from SOME members of that generation.

There was a distinct lack of empathy and realism from the many students who my DS met when at Uni in London in the early 2000s.
Some people are pita rich and some aren't - it's not just one generation.

I answered it above. Its been really bad for DF. He's become incredibly inactive and lazy, he has basically sat in a chair (when he's not in France) for 23 years, has no friends and has become quite an unpleasant person. But that's your DF. I am involved in a number of voluntary organisations providing services to people, and the bulk of the volunteers are in their 60s and 70s. Early retirement has allowed some people to start volunteering at 55 or 50. There will always be people who have the get up and go to keep active after retirement, whether in education or in voluntary work, and those who will sit down and wait to be entertained. Nothing to do with the age at which they retired.

My parents are like this. But stingy as anything. It winds me up every Xmas.

This type of post makes me want to delete Mumsnet entirely!

Someone give me a reason to log back on😩

@HoneyQueen don't be such a ❄️😁

My mum is late 70s and was forced to give up work because of covid. She doesn't have that much to live on.

I would say your parents haven't a clue how lucky they are!

My mums the same.
She gets more from dads pension than DH and I earn but she will be tight as anything with general stuff.

She asked me why we had to remortgage to have the house rerendered (£8K). She genuinely thought we'd have that lying around!

YANBU To hear them tell it, my parents are the most hard done by, poverty-stricken people on the planet.

One thing to look forward to is a boom in inheritance as all us boomers die off. It will peak in 2035 according to this report.
www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-42519073
Unless, of course, the government find a way of taxing it to pay for the current lockdown borrowing.

YANU and you will always find people who spend their entire lives in victim status.

If you're brave say: I'm sorry but your life is unbelievably easy compared to mine and I'm really not interested to hear your tale of non existent woe anymore, particularly when you cadge off the rest of us.......then walk away. Repeat as necessary, they will eventually get bored.

Failing that say: poor you, I wish I had your problems and repeat.

My 75 year old Dad is one of the out of touch boomers. He got lucky in 2008; he complained to his financial advisor that he spent £50 almost every week to get an investment portfolio valuation so his advisor suggested swapping between providers. It involved collapsing everything into a cash account held by that financial company, transferring over to the new company cash account and then reinvesting. It was collapsed into a cash account 3 days before Lehman brothers went bust whilst his advisor was on a weeks holiday. By sheer luck he checked out at the top.

The four bed house he bought with mum (she died Dec last year of Alzheimer's) in 1983 cost £78k. A new rail station was built a few years later and ongoing upgrades to the line mean non stop trains into London in 40 minutes. That means his fully paid off house is now north of £500k. I know he has over £300k in investments too because he's shown me the reports.

Currently he's in a foul mood because his 4 month round the world cruise on Cunard (only the best for my dad) which he proudly told me cost £27k for him - and the same again for his new partner - has been cancelled. She is the third partner since mum (his wife) was admitted to a secure care home which he never had to pay for.

Last year his 3 year old RAV4 needed new brakes. When told he'd have to leave it with them for five days due to a fully booked garage his solution was to avoid the wait and buy a brand new RAV4 instead the same day.

Meanwhile my wife and I can't afford our first house (I'm 42) after losing much of our house deposit due to being made redundant 3 times in five years (I've spent more than 14 months during that time out of work).

My wife is 7 months pregnant with our first child. You'd think he'd be excited about becoming a grandpa but no, he's shown zero interest. He never calls us to ask how either of us are. He's not offered to help buy any of the kit a baby needs or to start a savings account in her name. Forget about asking for help to buy a house, we have outright asked half a dozen times and it simply doesn't register. I tried to get him to sign over the house he lives in to legally dodge inheritance tax, he refused saying the paperwork is too much bother.

All he does these days is sit at home watching TV all day. He has no friends, just money. He's clearly suffering from depression but despite repeated attempts by my New Zealand living brother and I, it's futile to get him to go see a GP for help.

I don't talk to Dad that much. I find him toxic.

Very curious about your parents past careers. Your mum having been a teacher and your Dad some sort of computer engineer.
Neither of those jobs sound like they’d usually command income and then pensions that would allow them to retire at 50 with the lifestyle you’ve described.
Do you think maybe your parents were actually Russian spies or manufactured drugs in their basement? Or maybe they won the lottery a few years ago and didn’t which allowed them to retire so comfortably lol

I wonder if all these "wealthy boomers" are crying poverty to fend constant hints that they should be handing over their money to their offspring instead of enjoying it themselves.

Mine does the reverse. He can have a conversation about cruising, which ship is the best, which captain he met was the nicest, which port he visited he liked and didn't like. He can tell you how much a château neuf de pape costs on Cunard ($129 apparently, daylight robbery). He is an avid watcher of Jane McDonald and discovered cruise TV is a channel on his skybox, he watches it for hours at a time.

He can't have a conversation about anything else whatsoever mind.

InsanelySilver Very curious about your parents past careers. Your mum having been a teacher and your Dad some sort of computer engineer. Neither of those jobs sound like they’d usually command income and then pensions that would allow them to retire at 50 with the lifestyle you’ve described.

DM retired at around 59/60. Only DF retired at 50 and he wasn't a proper computer engineer as in a programmer, he used to set up computers on sites and get them up and running or fix basic problems. Big company looking to make redundancies then told him he could have early retirement instead, which he took.

But you are right. Neither final salary pension schemes go any way to affording all the assets they have. They have been remarkably secretive about the inheritances they received (and certainly haven't shared any with their children/grandchildren), probably because it doesn't fit their narrative. But I'm pretty sure they've had two decent sized inheritances, possibly 3. They must be lying about it, because they denied receiving anything, yet DGPs and uncle left sizable estates and it must have gone somewhere.

I don't think they want to admit how much money they've spent in the past. It must be hundreds of thousands. Motorhomes at 20-30k each (4 or 5 different ones), the holiday home in France has no mortgage and was the second one they bought (at one point they had two), always a newish car every couple of years bought for cash, and since an uncle died, all the expensive holidays and cruises started.

Theres no shares that have been sold, they are very ordinary, risk averse people. The house mortgage is paid off, and hasn't been re-mortgaged.

Both my parents and in laws regularly days how much luckier they were then they're children are. My MIL really struggled until my DP was around 20, they had really tough periods sometimes. Still she days that she doesnt know how her youngest (low paid job) will ever get a mortgage and I know it stresses her out.
My parents have never had to struggle, my family and I are not from the UK (and non of my family live here) and come from a Scandi country were pensjons are great, there are loads of benefits to people (long paid parental leave, very low child care costs, easy to work part, free education including university). My siblings will still have these benefits but houses are shot up in prices the last 20 years so they struggle to get on the property ladder, even with well paying jobs.

If it cheers you up, DH and I live on state pensions and it's not easy. When one of us dies, the other will struggle even more. We may be in the "choosing between heating or eating" category. Some oldies are well-off and complacent but many are not.

To cheer you even further, being old is crap. I used to spring about like a young gazelle, now my arthritis is so bad that my knees won't bend and I can barely walk. When you're old, you look at the person you love and wonder how many years they have got left to live. You know that the only way that you can avoid their death is to die first. Of course, everyone knows this in theory but, when you are old, it becomes real and it weighs on your mind.

Then there's your kids and your grandkids. You want to help your kids but maybe you are going to turn into a burden instead. And you probably won't get to see those little grandkids grow into independent women and men. Again, the full impact of this doesn't really hit you till you're old.

So don't feel too resentful of your well-off, patronising parents. The clock is ticking for them as it is for all us oldies.

Of course, there are a few benefits of being old, even if you aren't financially comfortable. I'm happy to be at home with my DH, who worked insanely long hours before he retired. I am also happy that, because I am old, nobody expects me to do things that I didn't want to do anyway. I'll never have to go camping again!

Of course it doesn't cheer me up Fatredwitch I have nothing against pensioners and I don't know why you assume I do have.

This is about something going on in my family which isn't very pleasant for me to deal with and which affects my relationship with my parents.

@GreenlandTheMovie

I don't know what other peoples' parents are like, obviously (though *and all of Christmas's dad is about the only other one I've heard of retiring at 50) but mine definately are spoilt by their circumstances and I'm fed up with their stealth boasts/DF''s little digs. Its almost as if they have convinced themselves they are hard done by. Their favourite phrase is actually "we are poor pensioners". They are anything but poor, and they havent worked that hard. Who on earth can afford to retire from an ordinary job at 50 now?

They also conveniently forget they have had 2 large inheritances and thars where the money for the holidays and vehicles comes from.

Its honestly horrible to listen to. I'm reasonably well off myself so I'm not sitting feeling resentful or anything, but they literally have no idea how lucky they've been.

I do find DF quite sexist - he's quite bossy around women and likes to check up that they've returned to full time work after having children. Yet he retired at FIFTY! He could easily have hit another job, even part time, but he's so used to women going out to work and I think DM stealth boasts to try and make it seem better that she was still working when he was sitting with his feet up. She retired at 62.

I’m seeing Mr. & Mrs. Elton from “Emma” in your every post.

“I am but an old married man,” said Mr. Elton.

When you are young and you have kids life is hard. As you get older and your kids leave home, you pay.off mortgage.lifr becomes easier. When I was young mortgages were 12 percent. UK was tied to the ERM and we tracked the German banks. The government did not give help with childcare or housing benefits. You got child benefit and that was it. No government top ups unless you were unemployed. Property was cheaper and mortgages easier to get.but only ever 3 X single salary or 3 1/2 times joint salary. Anything else was unheard of. There seemed less to spend youronry.on. No internet, no streaming services, no mobile phone contracts. I had it really hard wheny kids were small and we all went without things. Now they are adults and struggle at times whilst I am well off, retired at 56, bought a 7 bed home in France, lots of nice holidays. I do try to share though not just with my family but friends too. I can afford to treat my adult children now and help with childcare costs for grandchildren and they can have a free holiday.in French house whenever they want. I buy all grandchildren shoes and helped out don with.depodit for his house. I can remember the days when i got really excited about getting a new coat.