To be so sad about my slide in living standards?

[ColdNow]

I grew up in a not so nice area, but my parents had a big house with a huge garden that they bought on two fairly modest salaries when they were younger than I am now. My mum took years out of work when I was born and although things like holidays and eating out weren't a regular occurrence, my parents admit they were never really stressed about money despite having several children and easily paid off their mortgage.

Fast forward to now, where I did my very best to do the 'right' things. I got a good degree, decent and stable job, married and bought a property before TTC. I'm now pregnant and feeling so sad about our financial situation. We purposely went for a modest property with a tiny garden to give ourselves a buffer, but now with the huge increase in our mortgage repayments and other expenses we're struggling to keep afloat. I would love to work part time when I go back but it's now looking very unlikely that we'll be able to make it work without being extremely stretched. I'm always worried about money and already buy all my clothes second hand, shop at budget supermarkets etc. The main cost is housing though, because we live in an expensive city, but this is the city I grew up in and where all my family and friends are, and moving away would be a very difficult choice to make and remove us from all our support networks.

I just feel so sad that within a generation the things my parents were able to offer me (space, time) I'm not able to offer my child, despite me earning far more comparatively than they did. I'm also the youngest in my family and the older siblings are much better off than me, again just because of time - they got onto the property market much earlier before prices sky-rocketed and now although I don't earn a lot less than them, I'm only just scraping by. I notice this at work too, I have colleagues at the same level of seniority and pay to me but a decade or more older, and the houses and lifestyle they sustain far exceed mine.

I don't know what the purpose of this thread is except to just say that it makes me sad that this is the situation I'm in, and people younger than me (I'm in my early 30s) are even worse off.

I think millennials aren't taking potential inheritances into account because we are expecting it all to get gobbled up by care home fees. Most millennials who have managed to buy a house need two full time incomes to meet the mortgage.

This, coupled with delayed parenthood means that at the point their aging parents start to need help, the average home-owning millennial will most likely be too tied up with full time work and caring for their children to provide any kind of care for their elderly parents, so their parents' homes will need to be sold to meet the care home fees.

Agreed. and In some cases they may inherit from several sets of relatives .

What people earn is increasingly irrelevant to lifestyle as inheritances can be vast - far more than even someone frugal with a senior and stressful job could save. I have friends who don't really bother working as they've inherited one house and know they will likely inherit several more.

Economically it's a bit of a disaster as people on both sides of the coin will be less motivated to work hard

Only a very tiny proportion of people need care homes @AnonymousMusing And everyone I know would rather see themselves off than go into one. There will be a lot of millennials very happy with their inheritance.

Relatively few older people need care homes or expensive live-in carers. I say this as an elder millennial involved in the later life of three of my four grandparents (some twenty years ago) and my own father (more recently). Only one of them (one of my grandmothers - who was the only one who owned her own home 😂) ended up needing social care; the rest succumbed to their various illnesses with varying degrees of rapidity and were cared for by the NHS.
When social care is needed it is indeed hugely expensive but a great many people never need it and it also doesn't use all of a person's assets.
It's a whole other discussion about what health and care-related should/shouldn't be met by the state. But it's at best unrealistic and at worst totally disingenuous for people of my age to think that they won't financially benefit from home-owning parents and grandparents - especially if all their grandparents/parents own property.

Statically speaking most old people don’t end up in care homes though, so while you can’t guarantee an inheritance it’s not right to assume it will go on care home bills.

@Twiglets1 i looked this up recently at least half of older people need care either residential or visits to their home in the final few years.

and as we live longer and longer that proportion will go up. MOST people like their final 10-15 years or more with a least one if not multiple long term conditions being managed

Todays 60 somethings have got another 25 years to go on average!

we’re collectively in denial about what those final years of old age are really like.

few people live a healthy life all the way to the end and then die in their sleep at home.

I think the proportion will also go up as younger generations have to work longer to pay for their long mortgages so won't be able to care for elderly parents.

Most people in care homes need 24/7 care, about half of them have dementia. They’re beyond being cared for at home. Dementia is also the main cause of death in the elderly population. Most of us have had to work to pension age and provide some care for our elderly parents, it’s not a “younger generation” issue.

Aged 50. Both myself and partner have degrees, post-grad qualifications and Professional qualifications.

Bought first home by myself in 1998. I could not have bought that house again on my own salary any year after 2000.

Currently live with partner. If we were both working full time and both earning the most we've ever earnt at any point in our lives we would need a deposit of about 60% to buy our current home. On our current joint salary we'd struggle to buy anything more than a bang average one bed flat or horrid two bed in the town we currently live.

It is bonkers, and anyone having kids now needs to take responsibility for buying their kids a house or accept their kids will be on a work, pay rent, work work work treadmill forever.

DMIL was good for her age, but forgetful, until she wasn't. When Covid struck, her care team had gone back to the Phillippines to visit family. So my sister made arrangements for temporary respite ( while she had an operation she'd been waiting 18 months for). Then Covid struck. DMIL never came out of care, because she declined from that point. Then she fractured the top end of her femur, spent eight weeks in an acute orthopedic ward, and when they had done their best, she was discharged back to the care home for nursing, and she died a few hours later. No blame anywhere for anyone. She was nearly 94. I think she would have agreed that her carcass was just worn out.

As BlossomToes says, most people in care home with any form of dementia are beyond the caring capacity of a family. It's 24x7. Carers are not going to sleep, so you need at least two shifts,and that costs a huge amount of money. DMIL burned through 250K from the proceeds of her very nice home in two and a half years.

All things I couldn't afford in my 20s which my own children frequent regularly. And expensive show tickets.

I wonder how many people have avoided care homes or carers visiting because they have children who could help with caring duties? Up until recently women retired at 60 or didn't work at all. Now the pension age is rising, to 67/68, and people had their children later, it means there's not going to be any retired adult children around to do much caring. My mother will be 98 when I reach retirement age, do people really manage independent lives in their own homes with no care needed until 98? We don't know what this world where everyone works until 68 looks like yet as it's not been experienced before, but I can only imagine it will result in more care being outsourced and less provided by family.

Frankly, when I get a really serious problem, I'm going to buy a gun and a decent wet suit. I'll wade into the sea in it, turn my back on the world and fire the bullet up through my skull. Heck, I'll even leave a note explaining the logic.

My mother will be 98 when I reach retirement age, do people really manage independent lives in their own homes with no care needed until 98?

My parents were 95 and 97 before they needed carers and I was still working at that point. I helped out with shopping, appointments, etc but they were largely independent. Obviously they had a cleaner and gardener. They had professional carers at home for just over a year. They finally needed a care home just after my dad’s 99th birthday, he was only there for five weeks before he died and she died six months later.

Older people needing carers to come into their own homes is a lot more common than people needing to go into care homes and is nowhere near as expensive. My inlaws can pay for their own carers out of their own small pensions and they are not rich people. As this article shows

• The number of people living in specialist retirement housing or in care homes is relatively low; most older people live in their own homes
• Approximately 418,000 people live in care homes (Laing and Buisson survey 2016). This is 4% of the total population aged 65 years and over, rising to 15% of those aged 85 or more.

https://www.mha.org.uk/get-involved/policy-influencing/facts-stats/

Regardless of the care home argument, most millennials won't stand to inherit anything until they're in their late fifties or sixties (or later). My grandma lived to over a hundred.

That doesn't help people like the OP who are in their thirties with a giant mortgage and childcare, struggling to make ends meet.

I stand to inherit a fair chunk when I'm older but I think we should just slap a huge inheritance tax on it and be done with it. I didn't earn that money, it's fundamentally unfair and harms social mobility.

most millennials won't stand to inherit anything until they're in their late fifties or sixties (or later).

Just like every generation before them.

Yes exactly.

If you're lucky you don't inherit anything until your late fifties or sixties

No, the age at which people inherit will have risen steadily over the past 50 years due to the increase in life expectancy.

Also, inheriting later would matter less if people were able to buy property with their own money at 30 or whatever. Increasingly they can’t.

(I wish people would stop using “foreign holidays” as an example of modern luxury - holidaying in the UK actually tends to be more expensive these days. We don’t really get cheap British holidays any more!)

How lucky are you!!! 😆😆

Got any stats @user1477391263? Just about everyone I know lost their parents in their late 50s/60s. Life expectancy is decreasing now.

Interesting thread, lots of varying experiences. Baby boomer couple here, no inheritance. Our Gen X DC are far better off than we were, professional careers and high level qualifications. We prioritised buying a house in a reasonable area after renting for several years in the 1970s. Our wages were no more than the incomes of many who chose to remain on the kind of council estate where OH grew up. Our holidays were visits to family, our car was DH’s van.

Our DC didn’t grow up in an environment of ‘know your place’, as it was for OH, we encouraged their aspirations, and they grasped the opportunities that were available. However, we have teenage DGC. They may need help to live independently, but thankfully, house prices and rents here in the North are nothing like London. If we don’t need care, then our DC will inherit our home.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040159/life-expectancy-united-kingdom-all-time/. A quick google will show that in the past 50 years since the early 1970s, LE has risen about 10 years. It has dipped a year or so since COVID, but that’s about it.

I don’t have children so my niece will inherit my estate, I look at her sometimes (she is 5) and it does blow my mind that she will inherit the equivalent of a million pounds, she has literally won the lottery and she has no idea.