To be so angry sorting out my parents stuff

[DazedorBemused]

I've just cleared another carload of stuff from my parents attic. They were born either side of WW2, and talked. Talked so much about rationing, poverty, striking, unions, etc.
My brother was occasionally ill as a child. To compensate he had fancy Lego, computers when they first came out, hand held video games.
The contrast between his pricy toys and my enjoy your family board game type stuff is obvious.
Then my parents got into collecting stuff - porcelain, dinner services, up scaled their Christmas decorations again and again.

I'm sorting through all this stuff and finding receipts for expensive trivial stuff in the early 90s when I was at uni, working two term time jobs and full-time in the holidays and I'm a 50 year old woman upset at having to go to the tip again.

I’m finding this thread sad for so many reasons now.

First and foremost because of the difficult time OP has been having.

But also how some really interesting and engaging insights have just descended into the inevitable “boomer bashing” (I feel I have to add a disclaimer that I am a late Gen X).

And probably my lasting takeaway is sadness at how some (not OP) seem to HUGELY resent their late parents having spent any of their own money, and others equally resent their parents having saved money!

I discussed it with my older teens this evening and was at least slightly heartened that they were also shocked. It has made me think that perhaps the thing to do is not to just leave everything to one’s kids, but instead to get it all cleanly executed by solicitor. Kids get a nice round lump sum each of a few hundred thousand. Solicitor arranges a house clearance. Anything left in the estate goes to charity. That way kids don’t have to decide if they should keep things or sell them, nor whether there is a fair division of labour between them, nor make judgements about why their DF bought himself a mountain bike in 2030 rather than adding another £5k onto their house deposit.

🚨🚨Public service announcement 🚨🚨
Whatever your opinion on physical possessions, there are a few things we can and should all do right now. Because tomorrow we could get hit by a bus. Make sure you list all bank and savings accounts, pensions, life insurance. Ideally go one step further with phone log ins (lots in the news about families being unable to access phones of the deceased), have Facebook set up with your nominated person. There's probably a load more but that's the list off the top of my head. We would have been absolutely up the creek when DF died if he hadn't left a spreadsheet. He was forever opening new ISAs to get the best rates and we have to deal with 23 accounts (none with much in them, but that's a different matter!).

Went to uni in the early 90s from a poor background and had to work 3 jobs????
Not buying it.

Went to uni in the early 90s from a poor background and had to work 3 jobs????
Not buying it.

Went to uni in the early 90s from a not-poor backgound but with parents who refused to contribute.
Does no-one actually read any more?

Very good advice. When my Dad died it helped enormously that he and my Mum have always kept their filing in excellent order. They have also kept their financial affairs very simple, which was a bonus.

When I say additional pension I mean in addition to the state pension.

I’ve been paying into my employer, fully funded pension since I was 26. Current retirees get a final salary pension worth £30k a year (on top of state). My projected output from the very same scheme (no longer final salary for me, of course), is around £10k or less per year, and my projected retirement date to get that is 70 IF I contribute for the entire rest of that time.

A £400 teachers’ pension per month on top of the state pension is actually very good!

All of this is not “boomer bashing”. It’s by way of trying to correct some of these cultural myths that circulate about different generations and the economic imbalances between them. It’s a fact that the big boomer voting bloc and cultural dominance for the last 40 years has led to a lot of mythologising that isn’t borne out by the facts.

I dunno about not buying it, but you certainly haven’t read it. The OP didn’t say they were poor when she went to uni. She said they refused to contribute. They then went on to pay for her brother to go.

I dunno about not buying it, but you certainly haven’t read it.

It baffles me that someone posts what is clearly a very sad, serious thread about something deeply affecting them, and someone rocks up thinking it's appropriate to not even bother reading their posts properly before making a pointlessly unpleasant comment.

I mean, why?

Unfulfilled lives I reckon.

I feel so sorry for you OP and I feel angry at your parents for favouring your brother in every aspect of his life whilst you struggled and was left completely unsupported.

Sadly, I hear of these tales time and time again, only for the magnitude of the favouritism coming to light in times of death when private documents are discovered.

If they have passed, have you had sight of the Will? The reason I ask is it's ok you putting in the graft clearing all their tat only for them to assign EVERYTHING to their golden child. Awful, but it has happened to extended family members of mine who have been left completely blindsided by the outcome.

Ive had a similar experience when my folks died. My mum was a bit of a hoarder - old exercises and reports from her life and ours. Birthday cards, photos, magazines, holiday brochures, newspapers. Some of the more personal things bring up lots of memories. It can be quite an exhauasting and emotional period of time as unexpected and deep seated memories from 45 year ago resurface when you see things not seen for years. It does make you reconsider your childhood with adult eyes, and modern eyes of more advanced understanding of treating people equally. You are totally justified in your feelings. It is also probably quite good to work through them. Re all the historical rationing books etc - these are precious. I hope you are keeping them. If you want to get rid I would use them as a teaching resource - potentaially local schools may value them also. Best of luck sorting through all the things and memories x

The big boomer voting bloc? You see, once again you're suggesting that all of us born between 1945 and 1964, or whenever the end date was, all voted in a body. We didn't. I live in an Inner London borough which has been solidly Labour for decades. I don't know anybody there who admits to voting Tory. This is how it was in the 80s as well as now. Clearly things were different elsewhere in the UK, just as now.

A £400 teachers’ pension per month on top of the state pension is actually very good! Really? If my Mum had been divorced or widowed and had had to live on this, she would have been entitled to benefits. I couldn't agree more that there's a crisis in this country over unaffordable housing, social care, pensions and education. Let's address that and not demonise a whole generation for things that many of them weren't responsible for and in fact protested against.

Clearing out DF’s bungalow. Mum died seven years earlier. Evacuated to Norfolk and this year went there on holiday and read about Peter Scott.
Remembered Mum had one of his pictures an original possibly purchased when we were evacuated there.
Dont know what happened to it but it is valuable now. Also an original Eric Revilious and think taken by Dad’s friend and again didn’t know its value.
A quick check on the internet was not available in 2002.

@Wooky073 About your finding "old exercises and reports from her life and ours. Birthday cards, photos, magazines, holiday brochures, newspapers. Some of the more personal things bring up lots of memories." Can I ask, do you wish she had cleared those herself, or did you find the personal things of interest despite the emotional associations? I can see that the brochures and magazines etc could just be recycled.

It absolutely is boomer bashing, but I very much doubt you will recognise that. Your earlier posts were fantastic. Very factual, very interesting. Your later posts seemed bitter and full of conjecture such as your “fact” about the “big boomer voting bloc”.

(And totally off topic of the thread, but if you can then consider moving to a different pension provision. You would only have to contribute £80 per month pre-tax to beat the return you are getting on your current scheme.)

You’re not understanding why the voting bloc was significant. It means that regardless of political party, there were lots of things that boomers en masse didn’t like and so were never touched in public policy regardless of party.

Some examples: serious reports have been warning about housing asset overvaluation and the care and pensions time bombs since the early 2000s, including the need to collapse the housing bubble, to not overburden younger generations with student debt, and to address the fact that silent generation and boomers did not want to pay for their care or pay more tax to fund it - these issues have all been repeatedly kicked into the long grass because time and again they did not play well with the older voting blocs who outnumbered the young.

It’s a fiscal fact that the the boomer generation has and will taken out more from the welfare state en masse than they put in - estimated at around 20% more than they contributed - and that there is not enough demographic numbers coming up to provide the tax funding going forward. But instead of trying to adjust this dynamic, both Labour and the Tories/Coalition took the route of kicking the can down the road for future governments to deal with. Immigration to increase the working-age population was one proposed solution; but both parties attempted to use vehicles like quantitative easing and help to buy in order to protect the value of the older generations’ assets by stealth inflation of the money supply. This automatically passed the economic buck to younger workers as it preserved inflated property values at the expense of future demographics.

At the same time, both parties ignored recommendations made repeatedly (eg by the Adair Turner report and others) that pensions would need to be reduced, triple lock removed, housing assets taxed and silent gen and boomers would need to use their assets to pay for care and healthcare instead of expecting to get it from the state. But no party would touch this reality, because it was electoral suicide with the over-50s for decades.

So here we end up, with a bulge of older population disproportionately hoarding economic resources, housing and financial assets, whilst expecting smaller numbers of following generations to pay for these AND to pay the higher taxes needed to sustain their need for the NHS/social care. It isn’t sustainable. No party has been willing to grapple with it and the problem has been known about for decades.

(You are aware of course that pensions - state or private - are not saved up but are paid out by the current workers for the current generation of retirees?)

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/business/baby-boomers-are-major-welfare-winners-report-924960

The report this is based on:
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2018/02/Generational-welfare.pdf

But the figures are also well-confirmed elsewhere, eg by the Office for National Statistics.

Why don’t you read some of the research on this, instead of complaining you don’t like what I’m saying? These are actually facts. You can look at the U.K. demographics, income and asset levels provided by the ONS and these issues have been exhaustively discussed in public policy for nearly three decade now, including the Turner report on pensions from the 2000s and lots of others. See:

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2018/02/Generational-welfare.pdf

No, I can’t move pension as I’m in a sector-specific employer scheme with very high employer contributions that wouldn’t be matched elsewhere. It actually is one of the best ones left out there, and still it will be hugely disfavourable for anyone who entered it after around 2003. Just one example of the huge pensions time bomb that was known about by all political parties, yet not addressed because it was not a vote-winner with the over-50s.

Absolutely spot on. Far too few people get this.

I’ve done plenty of research. Admittedly not nearly as much as you which is why I found your earlier posts so fascinating.

I totally understand that you don’t see your own bias, but it does come through. Anyway, I’ll leave it there as I can’t imagine for a moment that you will change your mind. If you did want an unbiased opinion try running your posts through an AI to check for tone.

Crikey - anyone who uses an AI can’t know much about research! Blooming Nora. Just so you know, AI is one of the most “biased” tools out there - it merely reflects the bias of its training data: that’s how AI works.

I develop them. I guess you have more than just the one bias 😂

More reading:

https://ifs.org.uk/news/major-new-pensions-review-warns-substantial-risks-finances-future-generations-pensioners

www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/21/cruises-golf-and-private-health-how-baby-boomer-spending-has-kept-uk-inflation-stubbornly-high

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/the-system-has-worked-for-boomers-at-every-stage-of-their-lives/

This last article by David Willetts who knew exactly what was going on and still contributed to it with university tuition fees! All the parties have known all along what they were doing - left and right.

Hah - if you developed them you’d never suggest anyone emulate their tone!

“When today’s older people were young there was more spending on benefits and services for families and the basic pension was just linked to prices. Now this generation is older, family benefits are cut and instead pensions increase by the triple lock. Benefits for families fell by £375 below inflation / year in the decade up to Covid whereas benefits for pensioners rose by £510 on top of inflation.

The system has worked for the Boomers at every stage of their lives because Boomers are a big politically powerful generation – after all this is the generation choosing the next Prime Minister. And as this large generation grows old that increases pressures for more spending on pensions and the health service. It is hard to see any Government resisting those demographic pressures so we have to expect older people to help fund this growth in the welfare state through the taxes they pay – it is absurd that they don’t pay National Insurance on their earnings for example.

It is a very similar story for company pensions. The original company pension promise depended on the performance of investments. But then all the political parties voted for policies to make company pensions worth much more with some inflation protection and rights for early leavers and spouses. Those are nice things to have. But overall they made company pensions more expensive and companies responded by closing them to new members – they became a once-off special offer for the post-war generation. Now young people are working hard to generate the revenues to plug deficits in their employer’s company scheme that they themselves are not allowed to join.

The Boomers have done well on housing too. Lots of houses were built after the war and then council house sales spread home ownership. But there has been no similar effort to provide houses for the younger generation and they have much higher housing costs as a result. Moreover as private rented accommodation is smaller they occupy physically less living space than young adults used to.

It is this combination of state pensions and company pensions and housing which has pushed the incomes of the typical pensioners after housing costs up above the typical family. There are of course poor pensioners as well to whom we have a particular obligation but even the poorest 20pc of pensioners have higher living standards than the poorest 20pc of working age families.

The living standards of many younger people have not increased since the financial crash of 2008. And that is not because they are living extravagantly – above all it is older people who are eating out and travelling more. House prices have not gone up just because homeowners scrimped and saved to build a conservatory. It is also because national policies from tough planning rules to quantitative easing have caused assets to shoot up in value relative to national income and most of those assets belong to older people.

The good news is that we do all care for other generations. Young people want granny to live comfortably. And many parents and grandparents worry whether the younger generation are going to have the same opportunities in life we have enjoyed and want to see better chances for them. We are all in this together.”

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/the-system-has-worked-for-boomers-at-every-stage-of-their-lives/