We’re spending the kids inheritance

[Tuppenceabaggy]

Does anyone find it weird when parents/older people say this and so proudly?

Ive heard a few times people saying they sacrificed everything for their kids, now it’s their time…is this a bit selfish/odd? Children don’t ask to be born, do they.

Now i’m a parent, I just find my parents and some others way of doing things quite odd.

My dad worked in a good job and Dm was a sahm. I had a part time job since I was 14, if I wanted something, I had to pay for it (except clothes treats out of Christmas and birthday money) I paid for all my own driving lessons (I had a lot and it cost a fortune) I bought my own car and paid insurance etc, Dh and I got our mortgage ourselves with no help.

Now I have Dd, there’s not a lot of spare cash to go around, but I will have a savings account in the event of going to uni (if she chooses to) helping with driving lessons and first car and hopefully a little help with a first home (provided we can try our best to save for this)

I don’t want my parents money, i’m
happy to see them spend it on themselves and enjoy it a bit, but it’s just not how I see my life, everything I think about is for Dd first.

Is this just a generational thing?

She knows that. Apparently it didn’t matter when basic rate tax and NI were 42% because that was feck all too. Facts are so inconvenient.

Apparently the OP thinks it’s rather selfish of them. The irony! 🙄

Interesting, I don’t know if it’s generational in my experience though. My GPs definitely helped my parents with a lotttt of financial things (way into adulthood, they still wanted to when elderly!) and mother helped me with a lot including property purchase, driving, cars etc, and I will do the same.

This is true, the 80's were grim, as I already posted, I lost my job when I got pregnant (as did many women). I can remember my employer telling me that they didn't think that mothers should work! There was mass unemployment, it hit the 3 million mark under Thatcher. It was very tough trying to get a job. Every generation faces challenges and hardship, there has never been a time when everyone lived in a land of milk and honey. I agree that things today are very challenging for young people and it appalls me that both rents and mortgages are crippling.

The difference is between 'i'm spending my money on a holiday' ok, have a nice time. (Don't mention my circumstances since irrelevant)
And my parents 'I'm spending your inheritance on a holiday' ok, but are you asking permission, is this a joint decision, you have brought up my projected future income but are not inviting any discussion.

That is why the Skiing joke is actual horrible and leaves a bitter memory.

Why do posters continually ignore the mortgage as a percentage of income point? And then talk about others being deliberately obtuse?!

Because it’s inconvenient and negates their argument.

Even when I had my daughter in 1990 I had no entitlement to any maternity leave or maternity pay as I was only working 18 hours/week (I had 2 other children). I had the choice of losing my job or going back to work when she was 5 weeks old. I was working in education and she was born at the end of July and I went back to work in September. No financial help towards childcare either.

Would you prefer the banks did what the did in the 80s and lent you money they knew you wouldn't be able to repay and took the house off you after one missed payment?

I have no doubt you work hard. I haven't said you don't. But boomers in the 70s and 80s weren't exactly sitting on their arses watching the cash roll in for doing bugger all.

I'm sorry you'll never own a house. Neither will many of the boomers and early gen x who got stuck in the negative equity trap or stung by endowment mis-sales.

When you are not owning your house after working hard, there will of course be people who do own their houses and didn't work as hard in your generation, just like there are in the boomer generation.

There will also be people who own their houses and worked their damn backsides off for them, just like in the boomer generation.

Nobody gifted my boomer parents their modest lifestyle and their small bungalow in the North East. I know that, because I was there growing up when times were hard. When.my mother cleaned to make ends meet because despite popular opinion, not all boomers had parents living nearby offering unlimited childcare and there was fuck all else available so she needed a job she could take me with her on.

When I was at school and she got an FT job in an office, there were no flexible working hours. If I was sick, she had to tell them she was ill, because there was no allowance for time off with kids. She left me on my own once to go into work. There was no other option.

I don't begrudge that woman a pound of what they have now because I know it wasn't all some lucky life lottery. Women weren't all at home cooking dinner whilst papa earned enough for two, like so many on this site imagined, but it was a lot harder for women in the workforce than it is now.

In the year of my birth in the 70s, there was no mandated maternity leave. When it came in in 1975, it was still only for 6 weeks and only if you had been employed for two years. Women were forced into being SAHPs whether they could afford to or not because options were limited. No wonder so many of us were left alone in a way that horrifies most parents today.

I don't want to minimise your hardship. I'm just sick of people minimising theirs.

Sadly, still missing the point…

Was the average earner expected to buy a house though? Or was home ownership skewed by access to social housing?

It’s interesting / difficult to talk to my parents about this. My mum will acknowledge that she is from a ‘lucky’ generation, in terms of house prices, jobs for life, generous pensions, free uni education etc. But she’s also convinced that if young people just gave up their yoga classes, take away coffees and IKEA shopping habits, they would able to attain the same wealth and assets that she and my dad did 🙄. To her, these represent the absolute height of indulgence.

I'm a millennial but I'm not offended by that because it's not true for me. If boomers are offended by what people say about them, I'd think it's because they're telling them the truth.

Common sense at last.

I'm not offended by what people say about boomers. I'm irked by it because it's absolute nonsense to say that everybody the same age is the same. I'd be equally irked by people generalising about teenagers, 20-30-year-olds, centenarians etc etc. It's lazy stereotyping and a sign of a total absence of critical thinking.

The anger over generational property inequity is quite evident on this thread.

It’s good to remind the younger generation that they benefit from progress in employment rights and social welfare programs that their parents didn’t have. My mother couldn’t have dreamed of the opportunity to take a year off work to enjoy and raise her kids in the way that I did.

Each generation has its own set of struggles and triumphs, there’s nothing new about this. Being angry and resentful of another’s advantages is unhealthy.

I feel as if I'm banging my head against a brick wall here, which is not productive, but yet again - your friends and your parents' friends - a self-selecting sample - are not necessarily typical of everybody else their age. I was born in the early 1960s and thinking back to my childhood it was fairly typical that mothers were at home with the children when they were young but I can think of hardly any of my schoolfriends whose mothers weren't working at least part-time once they were at secondary school, and usually well before that. There were some very affluent girls at my school whose mothers may not have worked, but they were very much in a minority. Your circle must have been very different.

She's not completely wrong though is she?
Maybe not as much but certainly a house deposit.

Coffee and lunch £10 a day
= 50 x 47 weeks ( allowing for AL) = 2350
Yoga -£15 a week = 15 x 52 =780
£3130
3 years of yoga at home in front of YouTube and taking coffee and lunch to work = 9390
A couple doing this together =18780

Still get coffee, lunch and yoga!
Didn't even include 🥑 in that 😉

In view of this thread can you answer the following questions: Did you earn your boomer parents' money? Did you inherit their inheritance from their parents? Were you there during the boomer period of growing up? If your response to all these questions is 'No', then you have no say in how they spend their money. It is none of your business, you have no say. Learn this lesson and learn it well.

Yes, I would actually prefer that. That way I wouldn't be wasting my money on someone else's property whilst living in constant depressing insecurity in case the landlords have other plans, all this with no chance of home ownership, ever.

I'd rather borrow and make the place my home and enjoy it while I can - and actually I would work harder to keep it.

Anyway, it's not happening, neither for me nor for my children.

I had no maternity leave either in the 2000s as I was self employed (much more people are these days) so this hasn't got any better either.

My boomer parents would do anything for their children btw (and they did) so I'm not too sure it's a generational thing. Probably cultural or personal. People from Mediterranean cultures for example are very different in this respect, it's absolutely normal for them to continue helping their adult DC and anything else would be viewed as cold, unloving and egotistical.

My parents were born straight after the war so I don't think life was easy for all boomers. The generation though is 1946-1964, and there are drastically different historical periods within it.

I'm not bashing boomers, I'm just saying the whole system is rotten and future generations are even more screwed than we are. Rubbing it in is really bad taste.

So anyone with "boomer" parents expects to be left a wad of money as their birth right. Well, count yourselves fucking lucky you've got something to inherit. This is probably the first generation of ordinary working class people who can seriously expect to inherit 6 figure sums. The rest of us had to make it on our own, like finding a job and a bedsit at 17. Excuse me whilst I cry into my gin you sanctimonious, entitled bunch of brats.

Well, I don't disagree with your final paragraph at all.

My mother is notoriously tight with her money and love for that matter. Apart, from the money she spends on herself which I don't resent. She's mortgage free, has over 400K in savings and has a £2k monthly pension (from my dad).

When we discuss the future, she's outraged that she'll need have to sell her house to fund nursing care if needed. It blos my mind. She's not worked for over 40years, has drawn a state pension for 20+ years and expects the state to fund her nursing care in the future. Despite being rich.

Lucky for you that you won’t have to pick up that responsibility!

In the 80s 90s people would have spent similar at the pub or chippy and put money in the church collection plate on a Sunday. Given problems of loneliness and obesity it's not good to spend nothing.