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!

We all know it's tough out there.

However, you have a PhD, and your dh has a degree, why are you both earning so little?

You both have potential to earn more. Is dh a TA? Why doesnt he do the teaching qualification and become a teacher?

Absolute bullshit to lay it on the door of immigration. A fools game. Look at where all the money has gone.

Having to aspire to earn more all the time is a right wing attitude- a left wing answer to this problem is that people should remunerated fairly and with a decent living wage and pension for all types of jobs that are actually useful to society. But you are right, recognising that we live in a capitalist system where that isn't going to happen doesn't make you a right wing person. I do think we should be daring to think that society could be organised differently and more equitably though and that people who are nurses, TAs, nursery workers, delivery workers etc etc should be able to have a decent standard of living.

This is very true. I'm one of the dreaded boomers and we had no idea what other people had in their houses, what their holidays were like, what they were buying etc. We only had immediate friends and family to compare ourselves to. All of whom were in the same boat as us.

Telt! FS… Only Judy can Judge us 🤣

So I agree it is much harder to ‘get on’ nowadays, primarily due to the ridiculous costs of housing.

You would expect a certain quality of life with a top ~20% wage but… that doesn’t go so far when housing costs and childcare are included.

However - your DH earns less than minimum wage. A household income of £65k with a child is considered low, which is probably why it feels very difficult.

Your income probably does not reflect your expectations given level of education etc.

If you both earned close to £50k, life would probably feel a lot more comfortable.

Not a boomer ,but my cousin and DH are.Both worked FT in well paid jobs no DC.Have a comfortable lifestyle .However her hubby is not well .Also our friend is ill with Parkinsons .I think young people often dont appreciate good health and energy levels .Aside from that life wasnt a picnic then either! high interest rates,job insecurity and food prices were high.Whichever generation you need a good job .Can your DH train as a Teacher or similar £1200 pm is low for anyone esp a uni graduate

Echoing others, with his qualifications, your husband needs to train to be a teacher.

But surely you don't have children until you've bought a house? I owned property (mortgaged) for 10 years before I could afford a child.

No family in a 3 bed semi can really afford to have one partner working part time.

Your only hope is to downsize to a flat/small 2 bed once your child has gone to uni

My point about starting position was that it's flawed to form conclusions about generational wealth inequalities if you don't look outside your bubble of middle class adult in the SE, who was born to middle class boomers and enjoyed a privileged upbringing. I'm WC, gen X, and I don't know a single person my age who is not better off than their parents. For every boomer couple who bought a cheap house in the SE that's now worth a million, where mum could SAH if she chose, there are plenty of others where both patents worked in blue collar jobs and will never own a brick to their name. Their children (like me) are often better off.

This is an aside to the OP’s questions but reading all the replies that suggested her husband in particular should maximise his earning potential really struck me. I absolutely understand the sense of the suggestion in this context i.e. as a way for one family to improve their situation, but really, suggesting that people leave all those low paid jobs to do something better is problematic isn’t it? Are we really blithely saying well nobody can afford to be eg a TA or a carer, so they should quit? What then happens to the people who are relying on those essential roles being performed? Perhaps the posters making those suggestions also support minimum wage reform etc., but I just think it’s really startling to make those comments without any reference to the wider impact / consequences.

This is an extremely good way of putting it

what a life that would be if everyone did it - we don't need teaching asistants, cleaners, road menders and so on - just bankers! Loadsamoney!!

Alternatively we could strive to create a more equal and balanced society where everyone has time and funds to care for their family.

Another 100% agree. It's no point whining about older people, Maisie has cracked it. Too many people read and believe the shite on FB and other social media. They don't have to think as their thoughts are spoon fed to them, even if it drills down to being total bollocks.
Other have blamed this government, the tories and so many previous governments before that. There have always been problems that the every day Joe and Jane in the street has no control over.
As for some of you banging on about your future inheritances, I guess that some of those will come about as a result of your parents / relatives having had the right to buy. If that offends you so much don't accept the money if /when if comes to you.
Just get on MN and whinge, no doubt you have parents / grandparents in the boomer generation, so not only do you insult strangers who can't always defend themselves, you insult your own family who might be leaving you money.

It’s scandalous really that a TA or carer job can’t really help support a family even where there are two earners. Very sad

It was certainly easier to buy houses for our parents' generation, in terms of housing costs relative to wages, IF they bought in the 70s and early 80s.

My parents bought my childhood home in London for around £100k in the late 90s and sold it twenty years later for £700k. That kind of inflation of house prices relative to wages has made property ownership much harder for our generation.

I also think though that it was a different time with different expectations. My parents left school at 15 and went straight into work. They married at 20 and were able to buy their first house in London for a few grand, but considering the wages they were on, that was years of hard saving and doing very little in terms of leisure. My parents only ever went on holiday in the UK, and going to a restaurant for a meal was for special occasions only. The weren't constantly buying new clothes, new cars, going on foreign holidays, getting takeaways, etc. They lived frugally because the focus was on being able to put a roof over their heads. I think that lifestyle of spending very little on yourself and your leisure is something our generation has never adopted and so we spend a lot of money on crap that our parents would have saved instead.

I think it's significant as well that for our parents' generation, it was unusual to go to university, and if you did, you went for free. Starting out on adult life in huge amounts of educational debt just didn't exist as a concept, and that has put subsequent generations at a disadvantage, where the expectation is that you will go to university and just accept that you'll rack up about £80k of debt you'll be paying back every month for twenty odd years.

However, I think you (the OP) need to recognise that both you and your husband have been educated to an advanced level and yet have chosen to take low paying jobs. Your husband is a part time TA. That is a job that pays a low wage because it doesn't require more than minimal qualifications, and he's not working full time. He could earn more in a different job if he wanted to, using the qualifications he does have, but he clearly doesn't want to. I don't think that's anyone else's fault. It's the same with you - you have a PhD and yet you're on a fairly low salary for someone at your stage of life with your qualifications. You enjoy your job and you've made the choice to do it despite the low salary compared to the years of work you've put in to get the required qualification. So that's the choice you've made and you can't blame anyone else for it.

FYI, I earn more than both you and your husband combined as a secondary school teacher, and I'm the same age as you. So if you really want to get on, you both might consider retraining. I've got a mortgage free flat in central London and a great pension. I would have loved to do a PhD and teach at university instead, but I did the sums and realised I'd always earn more as a secondary school teacher than a university lecturer. The pay in HE is shocking.

Many posters on the property threads on here with large houses, huge kitchens, expensive Quooker taps and perfect rooms don't appear to be 'boomers' as they usually have children that all need to be sitting at the large kitchen islands being family like. Small tatty kitchens and houses are generally mocked.

I’m 57 so I think that makes me an elderly GenX and not quite a boomer.

i totally agree with you. The generation before me, and people my age to a lesser extent, had free education, relatively cheap housing and stable jobs.

My Dad was a teacher, mum was a SAHM, and we lived in a 3 bed semi in a decent area. There’s no way on earth a single teachers salary could buy that house now. If property prices had kept pace with wages, young people would be a lot better off and there’d be much less of an imbalance of generational wealth.

This is interesting! And the exact opposite to what I have seen but I accept I am in that SE bubble you describe. My generation (I'm late 40s) is definitely worse off doing the same middle class job (teaching) that one of my parents did. The value of my dad's salary in terms of property and ability to support a family was slightly less than double what mine is for the same job at the same level, 30 years later.

It sounds like you both have company / work pensions only .
Why haven't you started private pensions if you are worried about retirement .

PS I have to take issue with previous posts about your DH’s low wage. TA/LSAs do a difficult and very necessary job, and should be much better paid than they are.

this post was spurned on really by a BBC article and the comments on it saying older generations had it harder etc.

I agree that each generation has its challenges but I find it frustrating the idea I saw posted many times that younger generation doesn’t have it harder.

I’ve seen my pension value drop while my contributions increase for instance. Whereas my older colleagues who are nearer retirement or have retired now are benefitted from when it was valued higher.

YABU I’m afraid. What we witnessed in the last 50 years (huge growth and social mobility) was an unprecedented, one generational anomaly. It’s unlikely to be repeated.

Every generation has had it very hard, in different ways. Previous generations were blighted by grinding poverty, high infant mortality and diseases like polio and TB, to say nothing of how rife infections were before antibiotics.

We still enjoy the highest standard of living ever. All things considered, you and your DH are not badly off.

Inflation is high, and good wages don’t go as far as they used to. Yes, you’re right to want and strive for more, but this is the fault in part of politicians choices (quantitative easing, low house building, austerity) and socio-economic changes beyond our control.

I wouldn’t resent the generation or two above. I wouldn’t have wanted my grandmother’s childhood of growing up in depression era Liverpool in an overcrowded tenement.

No, it’s not either or, but as a 39 year old mother of one who only recently got on the housing ladder myself, I still count myself fortunate in comparison.

They are struggling to manage the basics that's why!