to think that the baby-boomer generation are ripping off the young?

[Upwind]

It has been mentioned on several threads here recently. The baby-boomers tend to hold the more powerful positions right now and they seem to be more than happy to deny younger generations the advantages they enjoyed. Especially in terms of affordable housing but also pensions, free university education etc.

see this transcript of a speech on social justice across the generations

Message withdrawn

Interesting thread.
My parents certainly aren't ripping me off (ie they know full well what the issues are for my generation and are constantly generous with time and money) and plenty of people of that age group haven't been so lucky, but I do get irritated when I hear well-off people of that generation insist that they made the money themselves without any help from their parents so it is their right to spend the whole inheritance on round-the-world trips etc even if their children are struggling - I think a lot of people are wilfully closing their eyes to the fact that the only reason they didn't depend on their parents was because they had free university education and housing they could afford on one income without parental help and our generation is simply not going to be in the position where we can retire at 55 and go on a cruise - it's not something that happens to every generation.

I read a history book recently by Lawrence Stone, 'The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500-1800', and it's fascinating to see the way money and power have shifted between generations at different times. I do wonder if parents are going to end up having more power over their children in the future because they will be dependent on them for financial help.

My mum always reminds me that although she was expected to give up work when she had her first child to live on her husbands wage, when she was in work her boss used to grope all the female employees regularly and you were expected to put up with it without question- yuck.
But in those days people in authority weren't questioned to the extent they are now, eg the family dr's word was law.
People would put up with terrible things in their relationships - that they would never dream of doing now.
I do think that the older peoples view of what the younger generation should put up with is sometimes unreasonable though. I am due to sell my house due to split with ex-h so am expecting to move back to rented accom. Parents view is that I should move into shared house as did when was student.
Why would I want to? Am 32- grown woman. Told them to look at their impending OAP home as student living with added servnts!
woke them up a bit.

have namedchanged for privacy but am a MN regular.

Happen to know quite a lot about this but upwind, are you serious, with that name?

UK baby boom occurs in two distinct peaks, around 1947 and 1964; birth rate rose sharply at those times and dropped off. Their prosperity coincided with post-war economic growth and is not really explained by anything they themselves were responsible for. In fact many baby boomers face multiple demands on their wealth - many ARE supporting their adult children and their ageing parents (people living longer means they will need to fund - often - parents' care AND their own, as care services are whittled away). And ill health - despite boomers' desire to be healthy - isn't escaping them as they enter their 50s and 60s - roughly half have some kind of long-term limiting condition.

But yes, there is an enormous benefit, in particular, from housing wealth for baby boomers. In real research on BBs there is little evidence of any complaining about their lives or younger generations: most are incredibly aware of the benefits they have had.

And the Willetts document (a Tory lets not forget...) is a pernicious, stirring document. There are much better commentaries on this situation...

And as others have pointed out, the situation is much worse for many BB women who have divorced than men, since most are left without housing wealth, pension or employment, and brought up children often on their own and unsupported before CSA etc.

At 51 (probably towards the end of the Baby Boomer generation), I certainly wouldn't say I was "happy to deny the younger generations affordable housing, free university education etc" - it just means I'll be paying directly for these things for my children instead of through taxes.

As for pensions, it's the recently-retired and about to retire who have been hit hardest by the pensions crisis - those who have lost their pensions and have little or no time to save up again.

And if these problems are, as the article suggests, the result of a smaller generation following a larger one, you may find your own kids saying the same kind of things about you....

And women couldn't get mortgages until the mid/late 1970s.

I do think it was downright disgraceful that all those MPs who had enjoyed a free university education merrily voted to take that away from their children's peer group. And that we let them get away with it.

There is also massive transfer of wealth from young to old in terms of housing. And, as housing has become an ever-bigger slice of the nation pie, that becomes more and more significant.

Is part of the problem that younger people don't vote as much as older?

"It isn't the babyboomers that load up their houses with plastic tat (aka 'educational toys'! "

No, they don't have it in their own houses but they're the ones that buy it for ours - haven't you seen TheDevil's thread?

Message withdrawn

The demise of the private sector final salary pension makes me . I believe (although I could be wrong) that David Cameron made a suggestion that MPs should be deprived of their ridiculously lavish penions which I think would be a brilliant idea. It is only when those with tax payer funder index linked final salary penions experience the cold reality of life after 65 "on your own" (even after a lifetime of working hard and paying taxes) that things will become better for everyone. I once heard a pension described as a "false promise from one generation to the next" and I couldn't agree more.

Pensions rather than penions . See how I get about it!

Baby Boomers come from all different classes and will have had different educations, different upbringings and different opportunities.

I don't think it's as simple as saying they are all the same. My mum and dad lived a very poor life until I was about 13 when they both got proper careers and were able to buy a house. Then they split (when I was in my 20s. My dad chose a more basic life, my mum kept on working but by no means lives an extravegant lifestyle. She is worried about her pension having worked as a social woker all her life. I don't know what her private pension is like but I would imagine it is similar to mine.

Most MPs come from fairly privilaged lives, most baby boomers do not. I don't blame them at all.

I think while it's stupid to try to apportion 'blame', it's definitely true that in many ways the baby boomers had it good. It was possible to live on one income, maybe not extravagently, but certainly comfortably. And as someone pointed out earlier, people tended to be able to go straight into a good size house - my parents bought a solid 3 bed detached as their first home in their twenties, whereas these days you have to save like crazy or have rich parents, and then start off with a tiny flat, work your way up to a starter home etc etc. But then I also think young people these days have incredibly high expectations in some ways. Possibly this is a result of feeling that they will never ever be able to afford the big things, like a house, so they spend on the smaller things. eg when i was at university, students prided themselves on wearing ripped jeans and eating lentils. About one student I knew at Uni owned a car. We didnt have the expectation of having money or possessions/These days kids at uni expect the lot - car, laptop, designer clothes etc. The free university education is a real issue for me - I think it's a disgrace that some people can't afford to go to uni. But then what can you expect when the government want to send half the population to university. The whole thing has become totally devalued.

One of the posters pointed out that roughly half of all baby boomers have some kind of long-term limiting condition.

In reality this means that at the first sign of an arthritic twinge they get themselves down the doctors and social security to avail themselves of £300 a week incapacity benefit and motor disability allowance, together with a blue badge.

my BB parents swear that they used newspaper coz they couldn't afford toilet paper, they put nice curtains in the lounge but couldn't afford to furnish it so lived in the kitchen and painted the floors (long before it was trendy) coz they couldn't aford carpet.

but, they did own their own property from their early 20s, although i think my grandparents helped them out financially a lot, though they were hardly rich themselves.

they did/do the same for me and i fully expect to do the same for DS when he's trying to find a spare million quid to buy a one bed flat in peckham

Yes!! YAB totally and bewilderingly unreasonable!

Exactly how are we baby boomers ripping off you younger people?

This is how it is. Many of us baby boomers, myself included, are still working full-time, still paying taxes to fund the child tax credit, childcare vouchers, nursery grant and maternity rights that you enjoy and that we never had (I don't begrudge you those for a moment; indeed I joined campaigns and signed petitions for those very things when I was a young mum).

Yes, it's true that house prices are much higher relative to income than 30 years ago when dh and I bought our first house. BUT we needed two mortgages to buy it and the interest rate was 12% and rose to 17% at one point in the 80s. The monthly repayments on the mortgage were over 50% of our joint gross income.

When ds was born, yes I did choose to stay at home to care for him, partly because there was no real alternative! There was not a nursery on every corner as there is now. In fact, our town had no nurseries at all, only a part-time term-time playgroup, for which one of the requirements of joining was that you also had to work there 3 days every half term as a volunteer.

We managed financially on dh's income, but only just. I had no new clothes for 5 years (did have 1 or 2 pairs of shoes though) and the children's clothes were all from jumble sales and charity shops. We did not own a TV, a microwave or a tumble drier to name but a few - and we had no central heating and never went on holiday. Of course we could never afford to go out and we didn't drink or smoke either. Every penny we had went on the essentials. But we were happy enough.

Now in later life we are better off than we have ever been. as one would expect now that the dcs have left home and we are both working full-time; the mortgage is paid off and we have been able to build up some savings at last (it's just as well, because dh's pension that he paid into for 14 years is now apparently worthless, as we've just discovered). So our savings are essentially what we will live on when we retire and we can't afford to retire for at least another 12 to 15 years, because we want to be self-financing when we do and not sponge off the state (which of course we have paid into these past 35 years).

Both ds and dd went to university, funded entirely by us and student loans. They both now own their own homes (mortgaged to the eyeballs of course), for which we willingly and happily lobbed out large chunks of the aforementioned retiremnent savings to help give them a leg-up onto the ladder.

So, how am I ripping anyone off, exactly??

Is this a wind up, by the way?? If it is, it?s worked!!

nametaken, I hope your post is a piss take.

I think it's a bit unfair to blame the housing crisi on one generation. what should baby boomers do? rent half their home to a young person?

now, property developers and second home owners are arguably partly to blame for it all (and we should tax them accordingly), but some of them are young.

and lol at the idea that half of 50-65 year olds are scamming the benefit system.

Agree with you SP.

every generation blames the one before - apparently