More on housing
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/generation-x-forgotten-keeping-country-running/
“Now aged between 45 and 60, they were too young to benefit from lucrative final salary pensions, but too old for auto-enrolment to make much of a difference. Their best years were blighted by financial crises, just as house prices soared out of reach.”
“The 2008 financial crisis hit Gen X right around the time they were turning 30, souring dreams of homeownership for many. Housing affordability, defined as the ratio between house prices to annual earnings, had been rising throughout the decade, but plummeted as the world went into recession and borrowing became more difficult.”
Jobs- “When Evans left school in the 1980s, the future looked uncertain. All around him in South Yorkshire, steel mines and factories were closing. Opportunities were scarce.”
“It was devastating,” Evans says. “I drifted between low-paid jobs. I recovered pool tables and even did a stint in an abattoir. You had to take the work because there was no work.”
Even now, Evans would struggle to describe his work history as resembling a career. He was born too early to be swept into university by Sir Tony Blair’s pledge to make half of young people graduates. “To be honest, I feel like I missed out,” he says.
The working lives of many Gen Xers, whether or not they were university educated, were devastated by financial crashes, the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and in Evans’s case, deindustrialisation.”
“Official figures show that by the middle of their working lives, Gen X begin to stagnate financially. Over the 10 years following graduation, their average disposable income grew by 72.6pc, but over the next decade, taking them to middle-age, this figure plummeted to 5.5pc.
Even millennials are faring better in this regard. It is yet to be seen how theirs and Generation Z’s earnings will perform later in life, but income growth for late-career Gen Xers is a mere 9.6pc, compared to 35.8pc for boomers and 57.5pc for those born in the 1940s.”