To feel resentment that my parents are so well off

[Lissm]

I know I will get flamed for this...
My parents are in their early 70s. My father worked in a factory in a low skilled job and was made redundant when he was 56, and retired on a full pension. My mother worked on and off as a cashier and stopped working at 57.

They have a house which must be worth close to £800k, purchased for £40k, and £200k+ in savings and investments. They are able to save at least £1k each month.

We have worked just as hard as they have but we will never have their sort of financial security. We have 6 months of savings and that's it.

I feel so angry that this has happened - not at them but at the situation.

I thought every subsequent generation would at least enjoy the same standard of living. I dread to think what is going to happen to my children.

Exactly! My car doesn't cost £700 a month to run. It's an abomination

The comments about contouring sets and holidays.. come on now, I used to work in marks and Spencer’s food and it was overwhelmingly the older generation doing their food shops in there. Most of my friends parents and my own go on regular cruises and breaks too
Just because pensioners don’t buy what young people do, it doesn’t mean they are carefully budgeting every penny
i hate the notion that boomers are better off because they don’t buy things unlike the frivolity of today. It’s just not true.

Our midwife/ district nurse rode from village to village on bike. Her equipment was strapped on the back in a case.

What a disgusting feeling to feel resentful of your parents. They raised you. Did you not educate yourself and do better for yourself? And what’s the point of being angry at the situation?
you could always leave the country. That’s what we did and came to the UK. Our quality of life is far better here.
I can’t imagine being angry at my Dp’s for choices I made.
Youre bitter at them for having so little in the greater scheme of things. You made your choices.

This obsession/ addiction of everyone walking around carrying coffees makes us old ones laugh.

You could save at least 1000 a year by just stopping that.

Snow, you were lucky.

We had no shoes and used to walk both ways through red hot molten lava.

Sheffield was different in those days.

People's recollections vary. And people always have spent money on crap they don't need since the dawn of time. Boomers included.

The only real objective way of measuring rather than peoples often somewhat fanciful recollections is the average price of something relative to wages and in this respect housing (which is the main source of anger for a lot of people) is a lot more expensive than it was pre 1980.

used to walk both ways through red hot molten lava.

😁 😁 😁

You’re missing the point. Boomers DIDN’T spend on luxury goods when they were younger adults. Indeed, most of those things didn’t even exist in those days! They have led very austere lives in comparison so why the hell should they begrudged a few treats from M&S in their later years?

Whereas the average 20-30 year old these days will have a much more luxurious lifestyle and upbringing than their parents had at a similar age, but many fail to recognise and appreciate that.

I was recently chatting to MIL about where she lived during her stint in London as a nurse - she lived in a flat in South Kensington that was way beyond their means. We asked how she and her fellow nurse flatmate afforded it. “By not eating”. She said that if they ever went out they would share a cup of coffee or a bowl of pasta. (They did seem to have a lot of male friends coming into London to buy them a square meal!). They would hitchhike a lot as well.

So while I agree that the biggest issue is housing, it’s undeniable that boomers scrimped. The silent generation definitely did as well.

Both statements can be true.

I think "austerity" was forced on them through lack of availability of goods, rather than a saintly choice. In this respect you've got a good case to argue whether it was actually austerity or not.

Each generation can only really live in the world that exists. And if that world doesn't include lots of consumer stuff, then they can't buy lots of stuff.

I think it is reasonable to expect each generation to have a better quality of life than the last. Sometimes this is not possible in certain aspects. But in the case of things like housing it certainly is possible. It's just that successive governments have chosen not to do it, and bestow fortunes on people that bought and retained property pre-2000 instead of making quality low cost housing available to all.

I was a student in the 90s. We shared rooms in shit housing, we ate shit food - 20p noodles and happy shopper bread. We wore second-hand clothing - before it was called vintage. We didn't turn the heating on - we travelled long distances home by bus. No one had a gym membership or a car gifted to them on their 18th! We camped - I don't think I stayed in a hotel till I was in my 20s. When we worked, it wasn't much better - no minimum wage, we were paid peanuts.

When I met dh in 1999, he was giving his parents £250/month to help them out - they weren't even spending it, they were saving it for a rainy day. My siblings were also subsidising my parents, chipping in to new cars, kitchen etc - not because they were skint but to give back to say thank you for raising us.

It all seems to be going the other way now - with the "I didn't ask to be born" and in the case of one of my friend's single ds (35) "You had me, so you are financially responsible for me for ever!" - fuck me, that young man needs a good kick up the arse!

I think "austerity" was forced on them through lack of availability of goods, rather than a saintly choice.

It was forced on us by lack of money. There was plenty to spend money on in the 70s and 80s for those who had it. Most of us didn’t. Some of the housing threads here are hilarious - someone will post a link to a beautiful, slightly tired house and a whole host of posters will respond that it would need £100k upwards to “bring it up to modern standards”. I’ve seen posts stating that replacing a kitchen and bathrooms is par for the course when moving house. My parents never replaced either in the entirety of their 50+ years of home ownership.

Maybe ‘austere’ was the wrong choice of word. How about we just say “they had a shit life”? rather than argue over semantics.

My boomer DM has had a shit life. I would love nothing more than for her to be comfortable in her old age. I wish she could enjoy cruises and I certainly wouldn’t be resentful of her because I’d have hated her life of handwashing, having the dinner on the table for 6 o’clock, boiling nappies, and being completely controlled by a domineering husband. If she won the lottery I wouldn’t be jealous, I’d be over the moon for her.

Well if that is true I think my point still stands. You can't be austere if you have no money and/or there is nothing to buy.

Austerity to me is about actually making a choice.

Choosing not to spend money you haven't got is clearly nonsense.

I think you’ve lost the plot a bit. You’re not making any sense now.

Why are you assuming the people who are saying £100k needs to be spent to bring it up to standard are young though? Just as likely they're retired as any other age groups

They’re really not. Nobody among the large group of retirees I know would replace a perfectly good kitchen and bathrooms as a matter of course.

Every generation has a shit life in some respects. I'm pretty sure boomers had a better life than the generation before them and so on, probably for a long time. It might have a hiccup every now and then, but generally life for people has been getting better over time at least over the last century or so.

A lot of older people if you ask whether life was better years ago they will tell you it was, which is hardly consistent with "shit". That is partially due to the fact that for remote events most people tend to remember the positives and forget the negatives.

For me the issue is more whether the path we are on is sustainable. At the moment we are in a situation where a disproportiate amount of property wealth is concentrated in the old. This leads to two effects. One, that mainly the middle class birth rates are dropping as a result of inability to afford suitable housing. This is at a time when we actually need more younger people, not less. It's causing a demographic crisis and a career crisis, which to some degree the government is attempting to fix by importing people from outside.

The other is that it severely affects social mobility, as the generally people who are able to afford housing are people who have family housing wealth, either they bought before rising prices or have inherited housing wealth through their family.

Fair enough. Both my parents and my in-laws have done so though. Parents inherited from grandparents. Totally remodelled EVERYTHING. in-laws inherited from their parents, sold that and bought a massive house. Completely remodelled the whole thing. So i'd stick with my view that it's just as likely to be retired as any other group.

And both sets are in their 70s.

Understandable if they were replacing old kitchens and bathrooms. I’m talking about unnecessary work but I guess you’ll insist on having the last word. 🤷‍♀️

Don't be an envious prat. Life has always hard for the majority of the population throughout history. Your parents grew up in an unusual period of economic growth because wwii devastated the continent. Prosperity was also fueled by enormous leaps in productivity owing to technology advances.
But now we are back to business as usual.

It's not about "having the last word" really. Just pointing out what you're saying is a generalisation that I haven't seen. And my parents FWIW didn't need to replace everything as my gran had only lived in the bungalow she left for about 4 years. She was an amazing woman who moved house at the age of 91, and then put in a new kitchen and bathroom at that point. So all was good and pretty new just not to their taste.
In-laws wanted to make their house bigger so knocked through into garage and re-did whole of downstairs.
This is all fair enough. They all love their homes now which is great. But you can't claim that retirees don't waste money on "unnecessary" new kitchens etc and it must be the younger crowd. There just isn't any evidence for that statement.

We had to buy a house 45 miles from where we both worked because we could not afford to live any closer.

Me and DH used to travel together by car even though he started work two and a half hours earlier than me. We could never have afforded 2 cars nor for one of us to get the train. Not long after we got our first house the mortgage rate went up and up and up and up. We were living on beans on toast in order to pay the mortgage.

Of course some people today are hard up but many are not. My neighbour moans and groans about what a struggle it is to pay his rent, bills etc. He buys 4 energy drinks a day! How much is that costing him? He also smokes. Maybe stop wasting money on completely unnecessary things that may well kill you and you could afford your bills

Anyway, the AIBU was AIBU unreasonable to resent that my parents are so well off ?

IMO you should resent the successive governments that have led to the country being in such a state that has led to this. Not your parents who simply have played the game as best they could (and probably had a fair amount of luck in the process).

And probably at least be happy that you have a chance in the future that you might inherit their wealth to continue the cycle with you and your own children, which is a lot more of a chance than some others have.