Generational wealth differences

[KeenGreen]

My first AIBU so let’s see what I’m in for!

First to make clear none of the problems now are the fault of previous generations. It is not a blame game!!

So AIBU to be frustrated with the rhetoric that todays generations of young families have it no harder than previous generations in terms of wealth and they just need to be more frugal to have the same standard of living??

I am sick of hearing the idea that older generations. So called boomers (for the record I don’t like this term) didn’t have it easier than younger generations.

I am 38 I have worked since I was 16, lived independently since 17. Put myself through university all the way through to PhD. My husband is 39 works in a school as support staff (LSA) and takes up circa £1200 a month. He has a degree.
I work in a university and earn just under £50K before tax so our household income is probably about £65K not the lowest by any stretch but enough for us to struggle to balance costs. We claim child benefit but otherwise no extra help.
Husband only works term time of course, but that means he’s around for our child during holidays.

We have one DC age 5, and can’t afford any more.
Our closest family lives over 2 hours away, so we have no family support with childcare or help if there is a sick day or anything.

We have a mortgaged small semi detached 1930s house with 3 bedrooms, It needs a lot of work but we haven’t been able to do much because of time and money. Current mortgage fix ends in 2026 and I expect our mortgage repayments to go up by about 50% extra £300 a month.

We pay off student loans and my pension contributions are also high.
I took only 6 months maternity leave because I couldn’t afford to go to half pay for long and not into no pay at all.

My husband had virtually nothing in his workplace pension because of low earnings.
Mine is keep being devalued because of sector changes and it’s definitely not the best pension in education. (Teachers pensions are better).
I can’t even imagine what it will be like to try and live off my workplace pension alone and I would have to go all the way up to retirement age which I can’t imagine myself doing in a stressful job.

Retirement age for us is currently 68, that means we have 30 more years.
But with the way things are going I have no hope that there will be a state pension at all for us, or the age will be pushed even higher, so will probably be dead! Despite the fact I will have been paying in with tax national insurance for 50 plus years by that point.

I just feel frustrated about this idea that I hear people say that our generation just needs to work harder, or get better paid jobs etc because it’s not that easy. We both work hard in the education sector. Enjoy our jobs for the most part and find them fulfilling albeit stressful at times!

Like I said not about blaming previous generations for the picture we are in, but I don’t like the rhetoric of ‘well interest rates went up to 15% in my day’ etc when house prices were so much lower in proportion to wages and the cost of living right now and inflation over the last 10 years shows wages haven’t increased in line with this.

ps I know we are not the most hard done by! But still feel the pinch and we certain don’t live an extravagant lifestyle!

Haven't RTFT but those who are asking who says things like this, listen to yesterday's episode of Any Answers on R4.

As a 30-something I find it extremely depressing, and if I'm not careful I can end up in a downward spiral of wondering what the point of anything is.

Equally depressing is the huge wealth gap between those who inherit and those who don't. A friend recently inherited £200k from her grandmother. The money was left to her mum but her mum passed it on to her. It's not even a 'well I'd rather they were still alive' situation because friend wasn't close to her grandmother and hadn't seen her in about 15 years. Another head start is being able to live with parents while saving up, which not everyone can do.

I really should know better at my advanced age to react to the daily "Kick the Boomer" thread.🤦🏻‍♀️

(even though I'm too young to be one )

I love my godson to bits. They are millennials and he and his W work hard. They rent, Last time I ask him if they were ready to buy, his literal answer was "Sure, give me 1.5 million Au dollars and I'll buy"

They go on holiday overseas every year. They have several small trips a year with friends. Their eldest daughter attends a private Catholic school. They change phones every 2 years.....and everything goes on the credit card.

His standard of living is way beyond what I had at his age. But he still thinks he's got it tough because he can't buy the property he wants.

We've told him to buy an apartment and tighten the expenses to pay it as soon as possible and create the equity to buy the house he wants.

He doesn't get it. They have great incomes and don't understand why they should be tightening their belt.

And this, unfortunately, is the problem with many millennials. They have no idea how to save.

If the roles were reversed and the earnings were the other way around would there be this much push back on it? Especially with a young child?

Yes, if one partner worked for (practically) pocket money and wouldn't do anything to maximise his earning power but at the same time you feel hard done by. If you were happy with your current financial situation and lifestyle, that would be an entirely different matter.

He would not be able to live independently without you on that wage so you are effectively carrying him. Whilst I agree you may have worked hard to do the 'right' thing, it seems to me he's had a much easier ride of it.

I'm a Boomer and a WASPI woman. Just imagine back then.. no paternity leave, my DH had just one day off when I had my first DC. It was down to your boss what time you had off.
One of my friends has just had a GC... between her DD and son in law, they are more or less having nearly a year off, with shared parental leave. It was much harder back then for various reasons.
No parent/child parking spaces either!

I fully accept that the salary multiplier to buy a property has changed from when I bought my first flat. It’s a fact. House price inflation has caused huge issues.

But there was still house price inflation in my late parents era as well. It required two teachers salaries for them to buy their property and absolutely nothing of today’s luxuries.

But I do think you aren’t addressing the issue here in that your DH is affording himself an absolute luxury of working in a role that is obviously valuable, but he has a desire for no stress, no working himself up the career ladder to different pay grades and stepping outside his comfort zone along the way. This comes at a financial cost.

You say you need various rooms plastered. Why can’t he learn how to do this in school holidays, weekends etc? Why can’t he learn some DIY skills as there’s enough courses on this.

Yes there are generational differences, but resilience and unrealistic expectations definitely play a part as well. My full time working teacher parents did all their DIY. My partner does all ours whilst getting the 5.48am train to London and is home for 7.30pm.

Yes, try it sometime.

I agree with your initial post overall, however maybe a difference was the the older generations were maximising their earning potential, ie not have chosen to stay in a lower paid position to avoid more stress/pressure? I’m not saying it was right, but it could partly explain the difference.

Actually, I see it rather differently. Far from there being 'nearly always an SAHP', in my experience, what there actually nearly always was was the option to leave your youngest in the care of your oldest, the neighbour, the teen down the road or on their own in a way you'd never imagine doing now.

It was far more the norm for my generation (gen x) to be 'latchkey kids' at primary school age than I think it is for children of the same age today, not least because schools are much more interested.

I work as a TA in the younger end of Primary school. We know who is picking the kids up, if that changes the parents need to tell us, we check the children going out of the door are met by an adult we recognise, or who identifies themselves as the designated collector.

None of that happened when I was that age. I walked home on my own, let myself in to an empty house and the school knew nothing about it. Nobody asked. At the Primary school I work at, the only 7 year old who walks home alone had written consent from his parents to do it and said parent stated there was someone home when he got there.

But I do think you aren’t addressing the issue here in that your DH is affording himself an absolute luxury of working in a role that is obviously valuable, but he has a desire for no stress, no working himself up the career ladder to different pay grades and stepping outside his comfort zone along the way. This comes at a financial cost.

And it's a benefit for the child to have a parent that means they don't have to be shoved into childcare from 8am to 6pm their whole life.

What we are doing to kids nowadays is awful

‘well interest rates went up to 15% in my day’

Since 1975, some 50 years ago, the Bank of England interest rate was 15% or higher for a grand total of 14 months.

I only got paid in full for the first 6 weeks too (two thirds pay for the last 8 weeks.)

Most women I know have a full YEAR off now, after having a baby. (Full pay for the first 6 months, then it drops to two thirds for the rest of the time.

@LikeWhoUsesTypewritersAnyway that is not the norm though. Many people only get 90% off their earnings for the first 6 weeks & then it drops to stat. Very few people get full pay for 6 months and stat mat pay doesn't exist for 52weeks.

Ill save my empathy for Gen z Thanks

Yes this is very true. I was certainly a latchkey child at primary school. I used to get home and watch tv from 4 until 6.30. I had an older brother who came home about 5 so I had an hour on my own.

I agree with your initial post overall, however maybe a difference was the the older generations were maximising their earning potential, ie not have chosen to stay in a lower paid position to avoid more stress/pressure?

That's not true

"In 1991–92 just 3.5% of UK adults paid the 40% higher rate of income tax. By 2022–23 11% were paying higher rates,"

"As a result, while in the 1990s essentially no nurses and just 5–6% of teachers paid higher-rate tax, income tax thresholds failing to keep up with average wages means that by 2027–28 more than one in eight nurses and one in four teachers are set to be higher-rate taxpayers."

Part of the growth now is due to frozen bands but nonetheless there weren't hordes of workers maximising their earning potential in the past.

Good for you, if only it wasn't a finite thing. Honestly this mindset is one of the reasons the country is in a pathetic state its in.

People are misunderstanding what "maximising your earning potental" means. It doesn't mean that everyone should go and apply for £100k jobs in finance, it means earning as much as you are able with your skills and time.

Havent read all of thread since my last look in yet and it’s a busy one, but this stands out.

What you forgot to add is “it means earning as much as you are able with your skills and time and local job market, allowing that some of us are priced out of regions where we planned our work lives years, or even, given the turbulence, months ago.

To be fair to the boomers, although the narratives here presented do sound like the boomers of 20 years ago when things changed, I don’t think a lot of the entitled narrative and refusal to face change now is coming from them. I think a lot of it mostly coming from bored troublemakers and a bit of bad-faith political game playing from various groups. Most do recognise that times have changed, now that even the well-off are feeling the pinch. I hope so anyway.

Learning to plaster isn't something you can master over just one weekend. It’s a bit of a misguided notion. The skilled individuals who built the infrastructure and facilities we rely on didn’t acquire their expertise in a matter of days.

Resilience is common among people, yet it’s interesting to note that many can't recognize that the pensioner generation holds more wealth than any other. Instead of embracing humility, some seem to think it’s a reflection of others being lazy. This reflects a certain bootstrap mentality that can be quite pervasive.

@WaryCrow I used to think that but after being on her and listening to radio/talk shows etc I think many don't get it. I also used to find it odd that's there were so many "boomer" posters on here and questioned whether they were posting in good faith. However I've come to realise when you look at other threads that the average age of the MNs user is much older than the media image suggests.

No it's not the reason this country is in this state. It's in this state due to selfishess and greed.

Why do people always say ‘I’ll have been in the workforce for 51 years/50+ years by the time I get to state pension’
Yes- we all will babe. By the time millenials get to state pension age we will have been in the workforce at least 50 years plus have started work £20k plus in debt. It’s not impressive to have been in the workforce your whole working life that’s just life?

Same here, except I had an older sister who got home at 4:30 from secondary school (long bus journey). I used to get the special occasions only ice cream out of the freezer, wash the bowl up with the breakfast things (my after school chores) and dry it up before she got back so nobody knew.

Parentification was rife in those days. I remember being ill when my sister came home and her running down the street with me in her arms to the doctors.

It wasn't all SAHPs and apple-cheeked Grandmas with time on their hands just down the road.

You sound incredibly bitter and angry @BeGoldHedgehog Time to stop blaming others because your life hasn't turned out the way you wanted it to.

> Today 13:11
For some reason Gen Z often blame Boomers for their financial woes. Why don't Gen Z live like most Boomers did when younger: no cars, no phones, no subscriptions, no eating out, no foreign holidays etc etc. Give up all that and they'll soon be much better off financially.
THIS! ^
Many Gen Z and Millennials moan and gripe that they are soooo poor and can't afford anything, but yeah, they do have a lot more luxuries than the babyboomers ever had.

Did you have a colour television in the 1970s? That would have cost the equivalent of more than £3,000 in today's money. Even a black/white would have cost around £1,000 in today's money. There were luxuries before and they cost a lot. A washing machine from the 1970s would cost about £1,000 in today's money.
But an average house would be around £70,000 in today's money.

It's getting hard to even exist without some kind of internet access, including claiming benefits for the poorest.

We skimmed a bedroom with a kit from b&q. It looks only marginally worse than the kitchen we paid £££ for a professional to do. It's really not that hard to do a passable job.