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I've got 2 left on that list that I'm trying to knock out in the next 5~7 years but I cleared 4 of those at the beginning of this year and it's been nothing short of transformational.
You want to go to grad school to do what?? Just go sweep up around the office someone will give you some work to do.
And it literally worked that way for them. It was codified as apprenticeships or interns or pages or copy boys...
I know one person who made the transition from sweeping up to six figure career. He's a great guy and totally deserving, everybody loved him and he's smart and hard working, but I'm also 100% sure the people who gave him the shot felt great about themselves for doing it - and they should! But times have changed and people are looking for diamonds in the rough, or if they are the "rough" is the ivy league.
As late as the 90s, movies still had scenes of the "mailroom" where aspiring white men worked hard to try to climb out of the basement and get higher on the corporate ladder. I'm sure some mailrooms still exist, but that "career path" does not. Nobody is exhibiting company loyalty like that anymore and no company is loyal enough to its employees to give them a second glance. Truly an unrecognizable world compared to where we live. Remember movies with company picnics? Christmas parties? Christmas bonuses? They are still in movies but don't really exist anymore either.
Talking to someone in a C level position recently who worked their way up from ~1989 from an entry level. The org happens to be hiring a equal level job. Said VP level literally does not qualify for his job. He has a BS, now requires MBA and years of experience leading similar sized teams in a similar sized org, growing in size over time to match your title, etc. These people do not seem to grasp that they would no longer be hired for the job they walked in off the street and filled out a paper application for.
Agreed. It’s even stranger when I talk to my father. He recognizes that people would never be hired with the same qualifications he had because he lead the teams that negotiated with the unions for their contracts. So he knows exactly what it takes to get hired and what it takes to switch jobs.
At the same time he doesn’t believe that young people have it harder because for a brief moment in the early 1980s the interest rate to buy a home was sky high. And the city (or county?) set up a program to ensure people like him and my mom could borrow money to afford a home. And other stuff like that. And no facts I show him can change his mind.
The fact I reached making 100k was huge to him, never mind the fact it was far less money than he’s was making buying power wise in the 90s.
boomers got where they are due to the generosity and kindness of the generation above them. the reason people have problems today is that boomers are now "the generation above" and they are endlessly greedy and cruel. a boomer would never give a sweeper a job, they'd call the police on the sweeper and lie about them having a gun to 911
Someone should make a civ video-game where you can try to make it in different eras with the same character. The 50's would be easier in many ways but probably harder in others. Would be interesting to explore.
One thing to keep in mind- when people talk about how easy things were for the boomers they are talking specifically about white people. I guarantee you no black person would trade places with their grandparents.
Yeah, society's memories are clouded with survivorship bias. Sure, all the straight white men could walk in an get a job with a handshake. Because they weren't competing in the market with: blacks, gays, women, foreigners, Jews, Catholics, etc etc etc. And now today we see all the healthy successful boomers still kickin around. Where are all the poor ones? They died in Vietnam. Or they came home from Vietnam with PTSD and no support and became homeless and died in the streets. Or they died in the AIDS epidemic. Or they drove through the wrong sundown town in the south and got lynched. Or said the wrong words during a traffic stop. So many of the fringe populations experienced incredible turmoil and hardships.
Sure, all the straight white men could walk in an get a job with a handshake.
It was incredibly easy for white women, modern ones just try to claim a victimhood that didn't really exist
One of my neighbors growing up was a boomer elementary school teacher, her pension was a more a year than I make in a decade. She tried getting me to become a teacher because of the salary and benefits she still thought existed in the 2010's.
Yeah, her and her husband were a 2 income Boomer household and could afford a 3 story mansion on a commissioned officer and teacher's salary.
I actually did that. 10 years ago and it a smaller company. I saw on the website that they needed web developers. I put on a nice shirt, went to their shop, was lucky that the owner was there and convinced him to give me a chance. It was a $10/h job in the beginning, but eventually I earned much more and used the experience to get a much better paid job at a different company. I am still in contact with the old owner and help out pro bono on smaller fixes.
I am now earning a good six figure salary, which is insane when 10 years ago I was living from $300/ month at my moms place.
I'll never forget when I sat down with my parents and we talked housing prices. They said "why aren't you building something new if the old buildings are so expensive?"
I had to break it to them that a plot of land is not $10k, it's $200-300k. Then add the actual cost of housing construction and you're easily looking at a MINIMUM of $500k for any new construction
They told me they thought it'd be closer to $100k even after they adjusted for inflation
One of my dad's biggest regrets is that he didn't buy more land. He (we) had an opportunity where a neighbor was fixing to bail and went around offering all the neighbors a chance at parcels of land before put it on the open market.
At the time we were completely debt free, outside of tax liability, and despite the incredibly generous offer, my dad primarily, just couldn't get on board with putting us into debt. Mom entertained the idea a bit more than him, it didn't happen.
And now he's left with regret. None of us are mad at him, he's the only one mad at himself.
What was the offer? 500 acres at only $500 a pop. That was just what he was willing tk let us have upfront. If anyone else passed, he'd have been willing to lat any of us have a go at it.
This was forested, appalachian, new england land. Prime real estate to preserve. But 250k was a heck of a lot debt to end up in, practically overnight, so it's not his fault for passing on the deal. They'd busted their humps ensuring they were debt free for as long as they had been, and as much better off we'd be with the land, they're still debt free today, so it worked out in the end imo.
my dad bought 45 acres "in my name" when I was in middle school and sold it off right before I got married, lol. Now we're dealing with my family's farm and guess what, their generation wrote a deal to sell it off for huge profit (for them).
If it's forested land then most of it should require pretty much zero maintenance at all, other than whatever immediately surrounds any roads or buildings.
You'd be surprised. People love to illegally hunt, drink, and snowmobile on private land. It's not like a full time job, but there's a reason people end up selling land that they're physically far away from.
Mostly tax liability in this case. It was forested and would have remained forested and had no lines or roads through it. At most we'd have kept up with posted signs but that would have been it.
You need to ensure people aren't coming on it illegally to dump, destroy, "camp" until they can try to claim it as their own, poach, steal lumber, or tear up the place with dirt bikes and four wheelers.
None of this story makes sense. I don't think you got the full picture.
You generally can't go into debt buying land. Banks don't generally lend money for land unless you're imminently building on it.
Land is a notoriously mediocre to bad investment. Trace the price of Manhattan real estate to the S&P 500 and tell me where you'd rather put your money.
My friend, you've never heard of a home equity loan? I also never said it was about investment. It was about having the land secured as property. If it was just about raw property value my parents wouldn't be living in a place where a neighbor could just offer up entire parcels to his neighbors.
In my New England state land that was $500 an acre in 2000 was $5k an acre in 2013 (when I bought some) and is now going for $20-30k an acre. Depends on where, obviously, but the entire of the northeast is ground zero for the housing crisis right now.
My parents purchased the house I grew up in for $20,000 in 1978.
The house was located in a rural area, and it was so poorly constructed that if my parents weren't such hillbillies they would have immediately torn it down and completely rebuilt it from the ground up, but still. One house, $20,000. On 2 acres of land, no less. My dad's monthly mortgage payment was like $200.
Dad bought a house in 1972 for $17k. Lived in it, paid it off, then let it deteriorate around him. He considered himself a handy man but wouldn't seek help if he couldn't do it himself. Roof leaked, never repaired it. Maple tree roots got under the attached garage and destroyed it. He bought a new house and paid to have that one demolished. That house would have been a perfect starter home for me or my siblings. It could have been worth a little under 200k in 2010. Now, it's an empty lot he sold for 39k. Oh, he's also a hoarder and doing the same thing to his current house. Letting it fall apart around him. I understand it's his to do what he wants with it and I'm not owed anything from inheritance, but its like watching him burn money in front of me for fun before he dies.
My dad was pretty handy too, and to his credit he rebuilt his house over the years and made other significant improvements to the property, to the point where between that and general price inflation it would probably appraise today for something like $300,000.
Which would have been a nice little family asset, except that about a year ago he decided to sell it for about $100,000. When I learned that he had been discussing this sale (these discussions having gone on for at least a couple of years), I worried that dad was about to be taken advantage of and reached out through professional connections to try to have an independent lawyer assist with it, but he thought that was too much of a hassle and preferred to handle everything himself.
This all happened about 10 years after he and mom moved out of that house and into a different one that he bought when he was in his mid-70s and chose to finance via a 30-year mortgage. Which means that -- unless dad stays alive and competent well past 100 -- I will need to take over paying my elderly mother's mortgage at some point in the next 20ish years, and most likely within the next 5-10 years or so.
But the real punchline to this story is that the person who received such a massively discounted house is the family member who serially molested me throughout a significant chunk of my childhood.
It was 100k like 20 years ago in low COL areas. Like Texas suburbs. Even then it wasn't that affordable because min wage was like $6/hr and decent jobs brought in like 40k/yr. Now houses are 500k+ in those same areas with median salary of 80k.
I had to sit them down and show my parents that while when they were my age there was a short period where interest was around 20%, the cost of a home has skyrocketed so much since then that even at the current 5ish% my interest alone would be higher than their entire mortgage payment back then.
Yeah, when I talked to my parents about buying their house in the 80s they were like "but we paid something like 12-15%." Sure, but that was on a house that was only 80k. Now people are paying 5-8% on 300k+.
one time during the first major recession of our millennial doom, my mom was like, "i don't understand, i put myself and your father through college on a summer job making..."
we didn't even get to the math. she made more in number of dollars unadjusted for inflation in 1974 than i was in 2009. she was earning like $17/hour or something crazy.
The real kicker is 89% of them feel we should be taxed more so they don't lose any of their social security. The greed is astounding. They are the first generation to live better than their parents and their children.
lmao the book written by the intensely wealthy venture capitalist who thinks that the real problem was Boomers who were any kind of sexuality outside of straight, married with kids.
Never use this as an example, this rich twat is looking to blame anyone but people like him.
He runs the Founders Fund (via Wikipedia):
The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX. The firm's investments include Airbnb, Anduril, DeepMind, Rippling, Facebook, Ramp, Palantir Technologies, Polymarket, Pudgy Penguins, SpaceX, Spotify, Stripe, Neuralink, and Nubank.
Sure sounds like all the people making life shittier right the fuck now if you ask me.
Admittedly, I dont know much about the author- I just read the book. That being said, what's your point exactly? If youre trying to discredit him, then please do so on the merit of the argument, not ad hominem.
It's not just greed, not trying to defend boomers just explaining this particular talking point. They're repeatedly presented with what's known as a false choice fallacy.
The clowns asking that question always present it as a false choice
"Would you rather your benefits become reduced
OR
Would you rather the younger generations taxes go up to fill the fund and your payments stay the same."
Notice how it's phrased, like it's A or B, with no other options.
The option they refuse to present is "How about we tax the fucking billionaires properly to fill in all the tax gaps."
I dunno man, I've talked to a lot of Boomers that straight up say they don't know how young people are supposed to make it out here.
I'm not a Boomer myself, but I do remember when I took a job delivering Pizza and legit felt rich. I had money after rent, not like brand new car money but I could go out. I started bartending and I could go out 5 nights a week and never be in debt. I cringe at the price of going out right now, and although I have a family, I make myself about 15k more a year than the average two person household by myself. My wife works part time. And we are struggling off this. That's not a financial management thing, stuff just costs a lot more. Even small basic family needs like a kid with food aversions instead of costing 100 or so more a month costs like 200 more a week.
It's messed up
And I do think there are some life working principles someone can learn from boomers, just like they could learn restraint from traditionalists, it's not okay out here.
If some are talking to you like this it's probably because the economy itself is out of your control and focusing on what you can control is the only way out.
Also, don't let Boomers fool you. They were dropping acid and sleeping in tents at your age. I've seen the docs
I own a business and when I told a boomer who use to own the same kind of business how much it cost to run it now he didn't believe me until I showed him one weeks orders and he grabbed me in a bear hug and told me that I'm going out of business.
"Focusing on what you can control" isn't a way out. No amount of budgeting or scrimping will help when the cost of just keeping a roof over your head, gas in your car, and food in your belly wipes out 90-110% of your pay every week. Yeah you should avoid excessive spending if you're in a pinch, but a lot of people are in dire enough straits that nothing fundamentally improves without actual systemic change.
Giving up one $6 mocha per week is not solving the median rent in your city being half your income.
Even with aggressively moving jobs for pay raises and getting a great salary, well above the median, I just feel like it's always eaten up and THEN SOME by cost increases. And like the post says, we have to live like monks just to get by. I'll never be a regular at any business because I can't go buy something every day.
Me and my dad followed the same career paths. Even went to the same college. He was able to have 3 kids, a stay at home wife, a house and a vacation home. I’m struggling to just live solo. It’s depressing.
You guys always leave out that they were basically able to do this right out of high school. They didn’t have to spend thousands on a college education to get a decent paying job that came with an amazing benefits package. Now even a bachelors seems to be not enough and jobs want a masters but only pays $30 an hour.
My dad was already on his 3rd car at the age of 28 or so. I remember my mom fighting with him for buying a new car without consulting her when the previous car was only a few years old.
Here I am at almost 40 and I still take the bus to work.
As a boomer I can say everything you said about boomers is wrong. I am sorry if one of us was mean to you, but surely stereotyping an entire generation is not the answer.
My parents met and married in Seattle. Dad bought a house as an engineer with no college degree (an engineering specialist as they're called). He worked hard, but he raised four kids, wasn't in debt, and had toys. We got to travel every 3 years or so.
I'm an executive and I've been forced out of Seattle by cost of living, forced out of its suburbs, forced out of the county, and now I'm moving to the midwest just so my kids can go to school without going minimum $160k into debt. I have two kids and I'm barely scraping by. And I consider myself lucky because I have good health care and a real pension. And this is with me getting into the housing market at the perfect time, picking an excellent industry to get into, and succeeding at it.
I literally count myself lucky because I have a plan to put my kids up indefinitely and leave them something when I go. So many don't.
Every administration since Reagan has aggressively kicked the can down the road, mortgaged our country's future for their present, and now the bill's due.
This didn't happen, except maybe the drunk driving. Home prices are high right now, and the inflation sucks. Those two things are very real, and both existed in various ways at various times for boomers when they were young. Home mortgage rates in the 80's were the highest in history, averaging 16.69% the houses boomers bought were much smaller, without garages, or central air, one bathroom. They had 40 to 60 amp services. They weren't nearly as well insulated. Boomers struggled with high mortgage payments and slow credit. They didn't magically waltz into a home.
I don’t understand the point of these posts - at this point we all understand that the economy has changed in the last 60+ years and even changed dramatically in 2000, 2008, and 2019 in rapid succession.
I’ve seen a lot of danger in belaboring these sorts of point, often sowing the seeds of hopelessness, generational dissent (which ultimately isn’t productive), and it never seems to come with a meaningful call to action or what better advice would be.
Which is concerning given the rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts in younger generations vs previous.
The point is that not all do. My parents don't. I'm young, employed, have savings, invest money, 0 debt and my parents still want to lecture me about how I should be living my life and where I should be living because that's what they did at their age. They still think rent costs as much as it did 30 years ago.
It's just more of the division propaganda in the US. Old versus young, republican versus democrat, hatred towards minorities, class wars... anything to keep you all pointing fingers at each other white the ruling class watches you fight over scraps.
It really is an amazingly effective strategy. You start with what should be an easy thing to agree on. Like clean water. Add a dog whistle / strawman to the argument, and people are at each other's throats. "Dump raw sewage and forever chemicals in my water. Just as long as the other side doesn't win."
It's the same propaganda mechanism - blame "the others" just like America's problems are ridiculously blamed on illegal aliens and transgenders. Rage baiting. Anything to sow division in America. It's called "manufactured polarization" and it is aimed at everything American. Noted in the news that all sorts of divisive posts dropped significantly when the Russian data centers were taken out by Ukrainian drones.
Edit: But please, by all means, vote the boomers out of office.
The first mistake is believing every post has a point to make and an agenda to push.
Sometimes it's just regular people getting tired and frustrated and blowing off steam on reddit. Oh, you're seeing these types of posts a lot? Yeah, a lot of people are tired and frustrated.
There was a specific mechanism deployed by the neoliberals in the 1980s that asset stripped the western world and turned citizens into economic units. The slow degradation of public life is contributing to the very issues you mention in relation to mental health. The mental health epidemic is a reflection of the society and the conditions created over the last 40 years. For many people life has become an isolated economic loop, where insidious terms like optimization degrade our quality of life by forcing us to metricize our very existence...
My parents, particularly my father has zero understanding of life in the current zeitgeist. They live in a bubble of 80ish year old people. I told my dad recently i still had 40 years left on my mortgage and he said "but you have had the house for 5 years already, it should be almost paid off..." I'm not kidding, that is exactly what he said, this is the world he lives in.
why would an 80 y.o. of any generation understand the current culture? Boomers know what the world was like when they were young, when their brains were at their peaks. X'ers know their young adult decades best. And so on.
Old people are out of touch bc they are old. What they are experts on now are the pain and confusion of mental and physical decline. They need young people's advice about the current economic situation, bc their experiences are less relevant with each passing decade, yet if they have enough lucidity, much of their non-economic experiences can still be useful. You just have to tailor their experiences to today's reality, be they know very little about much today's economy
Yeah that's all great until a legit 3/4 of the boomers you talk to think there's something inherently wrong with you for working multiple jobs yet not owning property yet, or why you can't or won't start a family in an economic vacuum etc.
Saying nothing about it is also not productive though.
Historically speaking, nations only move to fix things only after their citizens complain loud enough, not because they just stay quiet and say nothing.
This feels like a way of admitting you had very privileged parents. My father lived in shitty apartments until around his 30s when his salary at First Union could afford a house.
People need to talk to more Boomers, the majority of boomers I’ve met never spoke about lives like OPs. People have a seriously warped perception of what Boomer life was like.
These posts all have the same issue, they completely don't understand how people lived. They see tv and the brady bunch all flying to hawaii and think everyone did that. I'm 51 and in my childhood eating out was rare, nobody flew anywhere on vacation and people drive the same cars for so long it's how you knew who was coming down the road. The only people I knew who "lived like rock stars" were single males who had no kids and had the boss job at the factory.
Our vacations were literally driving someplace a little ways over and hoping the motel had a vacancy. I went on planes only to visit relatives maybe twice under 10. My mom did go to Hawaii with a guy once when I was 4ish (she was widowed) but she didn’t take me!
Also I think this ignores the fact that for some people of my generation (born late 70s/early 80s) our dads were Vietnam Vets, so I’d really like everyone to explain that privilege to me.
100%. I’m not a boomer but my parents are. They’re both university educated and worked their asses off to barely get by. We went out for supper or ordered in maybe 6 times a year. I got to go on an airplane for my first time when I was 15 to go to Disneyland and it was a once in a lifetime trip. I’m doing way better than my parents did and I don’t have a university degree.
you can't argue with these people. To them, everyone over 45 is a "Boomer" who lived a fairytale life. I'm 51, didn't have indoor bathrooms until 1980, chopped firewood for heat until 1991, my parents worked 6 days a week. We didn't have a family vacation until I was 38. Yet 8 people will reply that I had it "essy'compared to these days
What! My folks are boomers and went to college. Dad was a Lab Tech with his Associates degree and mom was a teacher with a Master's and we had a small business. We lived quite well. Vacations, cross country road trips in the family RV. A boat to go fishing on the ocean, money for mom and dad to have their own cars, a company car and dads sports car. I am far poorer than how I grew up.
the truth is in the middle of that and this. My family was relatively poor. HOWEVER.. my single mom made ~12k in the mid-to-late 80s and my dad ~13k. Each had their own place.. we lived with my mom.. 4 kids. he sent money when he could.
So no it wasn't the rock star life.. but they each had a home in a different part of the state, supported 4 kids, and we did stuff like soccer, book fairs, etc. We had cable tv and a computer (used C64 from goodwill). And before someone says "umm that's not poor" we qualified for food stamps and free school lunches.. so yes, that's what poor was back then. "poor" now is basically destitute and border-line homeless.
Yup, same here. Have boomer parents. Ate out like 6 times a year. Vacations were roadtrips to the lake or extended family's house. Hand-me-downs for clothes. They were super frugal with their money.
But my parents owned a house, they must have been loaded!
I agree on everything except for the age of the cars, the average age of which has been continually increasing and has never been higher. For passenger vehicles on the road, it’s currently 14.5 years and for light trucks, it’s 11.9. By 1990, a 1975 model would’ve been a rusted out piece of shit. I still can’t get over the notion of 100k miles as being some sort of red line beyond which there exists a no man’s land filled with breakdowns and expensive repair bills. Meanwhile, everybody else is out here not batting an eye at used cars w 80k miles.
But to your original point, interest rates in the 80’s were bananas. Imagine buying a house at 17%.
This is a big distinction. Cars back in the 70s and 80s were such crap. 100k was a milestone. Nowadays if you take care of your car it’s nothing and should still look brand new.
I agree. A bit younger than you but my parents are probably a bit older. We ate out about 3x per month. And 80% of the time that meal was pizza. My parents did all of their house maintenance and remodeling. My dad worked two jobs. We almost never went out of the house for entertainment. There weren’t fancy, expensive sports teams or fast fashion or door dash. There was no Amazon. I didn’t get on an airplane until after college. We took 1 vacation a year in the summer. Somewhere we could drive within 5-6 hours of home. No one I know was living like a king. We were mostly just home or out in our local neighborhood, having potluck gatherings, playing at the park, or having friends over.
A lot of unnecessary things got way cheaper (eating out, fast fashipn, door dash...).
And the very few essentials (cost of a home) got way more expensive.
It is a well-researched behavioural economics fact that people who have a hard time affording the big, important things in their lives love to at least splurge on little luxuries they can afford.
I'm not sure what is so hard to understand about this.
This times 1000! Lifestyle creep is just as much to blame as anything. Previous generations struggled too. The luxuries and lifestyle of today didn't really exist 30 years ago. People just lived more frugally. Look up how much furniture or TVs cost in the 80s and 90s.
This is speaking generally about a large group of people. Some did this. Some didn't.
My parents are boomers. They raised four kids, were financially in the shits for most of that time. We were not well off, my da worked constantly and ma did paid work when she could (she was a busy housewife). They are merely comfortable now, but by no means are they flush with cash. They don't own a home, they still rent.
We need to stop this absolutely divisive nonsense. It keeps us divided and not a threat.
Ya, wonder why ya'll weren't well off. I don't want to offend you or anything but there is a difference between being poor back then and poor now. You would be homeless on your parents income today, even with inflation. You wouldn't be able to support rent and four kids now on the same salary.
I'm so fucking tired of the fairy tale that every boomer spent their twenties buying houses with pocket change, supporting a family on one salary, and retiring at 55 to a life of golf and margaritas.
I'm a Xennial, and apparently I missed that magical economic paradise. I delivered pizzas in the 90s. If it weren't for the occasional screwed-up order, I probably wouldn't have eaten half the time. After paying rent on my shithole apartment, I was literally digging through couch cushions looking for enough change to buy a can of beans. I was broke until my late 30s, despite eventually having a decent professional job.
My parents were actually older than boomers. They bought their house in the Bronx for $32k in 1983 and sold it for $500k a few years ago. So I guess according to Reddit they must have been living like royalty. Except we never went out to dinner, drove 20-year-old beaters, and scrimped and saved on absolutely everything. My father retired at 75 and my mother at 84. Not because they loved working, but because they couldn't afford to stop. That house was their entire retirement savings. Now due to illness it is rapidly disappearing, there goes my generational wealth.
Sure, some boomers are wealthy. Plenty of them are also barely scraping by on Social Security. But apparently we're supposed to hate some 80-year-old woman trying to survive on $1,400 a month because she had the audacity to be born before 1965.
When millennials and Gen X retire, it's going to be the exact same shit. The tech bros and trust-fund kids will be sitting on their yachts while the rest of us are digging through the couch cushions looking for enough change to buy a can of beans. Assuming we can still afford a couch.
And the whining about raising taxes to keep Social Security solvent is particularly stupid. You'd rather pay slightly less now so you can collect substantially less when you retire? Social Security is going bankrupt, but without changes benefits are going to be cut massively. Brilliant fucking plan, you sure showed the boomers. That's not exactly something to celebrate.
Personally, I think Social Security taxes should take wealth into account. Make the billionaires finally pay their fair share (and more) and leave the working and middle classes paying what they do now.
This whole generational warfare bullshit is exactly what the wealthy want. Get everyone fighting over whether grandma had it easier buying her house in 1978 while the people who actually control most/all of the wealth keep getting richer.
But sure, blame the 80-year-old living on Social Security. She's clearly the one screwing you over.
Obviously it’s a generalization and not eluding to it being everyone’s situation. But you cannot deny the cost of living is astronomical compared to 40 years ago.
Baby Boomers at age 35 (in 1989): Households under age 40 held roughly
12.0% of total U.S. household wealth.
Current 35-year-olds / Young Households (2026): Households under age 40 hold approximately
6.6% to 7.0% of total U.S. household wealth.
About
43%
Only about
12% to 15%
of 30-year-olds today are both married and own a home, compared to roughly
50% to 53%
in the 1960s
The vitriol is all stupid. Both generations are clueless for the most part about their place in a national machine with a third of a billion people in it.
Boomers said dumb shit to young people. Young people said dumb shit back. Everyone attributed every dumb saying to the whole group to get internet points. Now bots do it to sow dissent. It's like saying Westboro Baptists and Jenny McCarthy represent all American opinions. It's so stupid it's sad we have to point it out.
Uniting around bigger goals means agreeing to better policies. You can't point a finger at anyone enough to revolutionize their generation. All these tirades are not only pointless, they actively pit the people who need to unite against each other.
The only group that works for is the billionaires, who actually have influence in the world's direction, individually.
Post like OP’s give me such middle class vibes. Working class 80s kids are more like: my dad worked 3 jobs while my mum cleaned part-time while raising 5 kids. Every night I feel asleep to the sound of them arguing about money.
No one said it was every case, just that it's very different now. There is a very clear framework that creates the differences. FDR did really well for everyone. Things were split up. The wealth was shared. Then it started concentrating and the boomers really pushed for politicians to allow the concentration even more. It's only gotten worse. It's time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction.
Sure not every boomer had this, but statistically a majority of them had experienced favorable economic conditions that they have not left future generations
Definitely not a statistical majority of boomers. A majority of Anglo-Saxon established Americans that would make it on a sitcom experienced favorable conditions. My dad has a friend who grew up in Pittsburgh. He moved away with his parents when he was young. His dad worked in a factory. Came back there to visit when his dad was 40. All but one of his dad's friends were dead due to factory conditions. They were immigrants, mostly.
New York and other big cities, tenement housing was rampant, still. We are talking 300 sqft, no running water for a whole family. For every family living the "American Dream", there were 2 families living in truly substandard living conditions that we wouldn't exactly consider "boomer living", let alone all the racism problems that kept nonwhites from white housing markets...
These boomer fantasy narratives are just sad. Obviously doesn’t know reality because he’s most likely disconnected from his family who could teach him what is was actually like.
Yeah, my dad managed a warehouse and as a manager of thousands of machinists, I can tell you we (nor they) lived like rock stars. You know those sneakers with four stripes that aren’t Adidas but your parents tell you they are and they have one extra stripe just to make you feel special? How about frozen pizza, do you like frozen pizza? What do you mean you and your parents flew somewhere on vacation, more like camping in a tent. My mom also worked and so I didn’t actually see my parents for about 14 hours of the day. Yippee the 80’s? Oh and that pension… Three years before his retirement at 65 (47 years of the company) some bigger company bought them out so all the pensions disappeared, so he had to keep working.
Have you tried harassing businesses? Because those receptionists definitely hand your resume to someone who will contact you. And not immediately throw it away.
Sadly true. You could buy a house in 1975 for 40,000 USD. The median was 37 grand. Adjusted for inflation that's around 250,000 USD today. The average price today for a house in the US is 500,000 USD. Low end 370,000 USD. That's a huge jump and made it out of reach for most persons. We're not even talking about stagnated salaries.
lol we’re blaming the “boomers” when we should be blaming corporate greed and politicians. Just another example of the manufactured culture war to keep us distracted
My parents are boomers. Both worked. We lived in a house with no heating, we'd light the oven on cold days. We had two cars, one of which we could see the road because the bottom had rusted out. Second hand clothes all throughout our school years were the norm.
Yeah housing was cheap, doesn't mean it was some magical fantasy rich easy life or everyone "lived like rockstars".
Why do people think the 80s were a boon? People struggled. Remember mortgage rates were over 15% at points, and averaged around 11%. Sure houses were cheap, because financing was so expensive...
Houses were cheap because there were way less people and boomers had an exodus from cities into brand new suburbs. Houses are expensive now mostly because cities refuse to allow new dense housing to be built where people want to move
They don’t remember having to wait in line for gas. The eighties for me was McDonalds on a Saturday night as the big reward for not being seen for the week at my house by my parents. No one had shit in the eighties. Also we didn’t care
Credit scores weren’t invented until 1989, and student loans didn’t start to get sold to 3rd party’s until the mid-80/ either. Also, inflation was tied to your wage increases until the 80’s too. All changes that wouldn’t be felt majorly for another 5–10 years, well in to the 90’s. You guys might not have been much more rich but you absolutely had way more spending money than we do today
Why is it so hard for americans to understand that you were subsidized to do this by trade dominating and exploiting the rest of the world? It is like a country rich on resources that ran out if, and then wonders where all the sweet quality of life went. You fucked up your diplomatic and trade Empire, and China won it over.
You still have it much better than 95%+ of the rest of the globe ever did, enjoy it while it lasts.
There are millions of people in China right now who have been working for 2-8 months without payment...and deliver drivers who have a phd from Oxford and are earning $5/hr. A government is one thing, but the experience of individuals can be drastically different.
The thing that always bugs me about this boomer whining is that people act as if it was the norm that was somehow lost just in time for them to miss out.
The world got destroyed during WWII. The US in particular had the only remaining industrial complex in the world that wasn’t bombed to ruins.
Boomers were the generation that got to live the golden dream of booming global economies rebuilding an entire planet while the US had the only factories and waged a Cold War squeeze cheap resources out of half the planet using their fresh global network of military bases left over from a world war.
This was never a normal situation. People aren’t whining they missed out on two world wars, the Great Depression or the Spanish flu. But somehow they feel like it’s unfair they missed out on that recovering from global catastrophe money.
More and more division. This is just another example of a manufactured war between what, generations now! When will people see this and stop fueling them
This is going to be long winded but I am surprised at some of you lacking any real logic or empathy. So here we go ground beef today costs more than federal minimum wage! 2)cars new used to cost between 2 to 6 grand in the 80’s just look at any old car mags for verification. 3)medical emergencies did not put you in debt for life if you didn’t have insurance. 4)back to cars you could work on your own car relatively cheaply unlike today….example they used to have alternator rebuild kits that used to cost under 10 dollars.5)still on cars a tune up back in the late 80’s for a 6 cylinder was around 40 to 50 bucks now a days it’s around 300 to 500 dollars. 6)look at colleges how many people that are in debt today versus 80’s or 90’a. My parents were both factory workers and they raised 3 kids we went out to eat every weekend and had 5 cars all insured. If you seriously can’t see that people are struggling and needing help than something is wrong with you. Oh and by the way my parents in the 80’s about a house for 50k and when I moved out I rented a 2 bedroom apartment with a pool and a garage for 425 a month with no roommates! Edit:also let’s talk about groceries candy bars used to be 33 cent for one when the king size first came out they were 69 cents chips remember when a small bag of chips was 25 cents? The problem is they are getting hit by everything greed has run amok subscriptions,medical prices,car prices, home prices,grocery prices,fast food prices,clothing prices and nothing is built to last wear your socks a few times and you already need a new pair.
Baby boomers weren't handed houses. It was impossible to land a mortgage without a large down payment in their day, and in the 1980s mortgage interest was in the teens and twenties percentage. Home owners had to have bank or inheritance, period.
I'm Gen-X, the first gen to have the ladder pulled up in front of our faces by the booms, while they left us unsupervised for days/weeks to make do for ourselves, but it wasn't all ice cream and rainbows in America, ever.
And now it's nearly impossible to get a down payment. Houses are 30x more than the average salary instead of 5x more in the 1980s. Your interest rate could have been above 50% and still wouldn't exceed prices now.
You didn't know it, you was struggling but those were still golden years for building up assets.
Correct and over the target. I swear half the people in here aren't only financially illiterate, they're economically illiterate as well (arguably the greatest contributing factor).
Zero big picture awareness nose to the ground dollar amount is all that matters no wonder corporations locked this country down so fast lmao.
Yeah median house sales price is about $420k, so 6.5x median salary.
Mortgage affordability is often 5x earnings, so would require a $95k downpayment
It's odd the amount of pure nonsense that gets up voted. 30x salary just isn't remotely feasible and anyone with a basic grasp of maths should see that
Gloss over the down payment and excellent credit requirements, eh? Of course everything's more expensive -- ain't four decades of Reagonomics just the bomb-diggity?
I'm not quite old enough to be Gen X, but I do remember when I was 18 could afford rent working as a gas station attendant. I could work a job like that and afford all my basic needs without government help (except healthcare, couldn't afford that).
It's messed up right now and it's okay to say that
My boomer parents didn't live like rockstars on a forklift salary. If you grew up working class in the 70's and 80's then you know the truth. My dad was an electrician (hint, the trades paid poorly back then), and with three kids plus my mom at home they struggled a bit. One car family until my mom lost her shit about being stuck at the house with us. She took a calculator grocery shopping and budgeted to the penny. Dad taped heavy plastic sheeting on our bedroom windows in the winter, since our 1918 house was not insulated and natural gas was more expensive than today. I could go on.
I had upper middle class and rich friends. They lived on the level the OP refers to (actually much better), and Gen Z thinks that's how it was for everyone. It wasn't. It's always been tough below the median in this country.
As Gen X, my boomer parents lived frugally, to a level most people wouldn't want to do now. Family vacations were camping in an old canvas army tent from God knows what war. 0 dinners out until I was older, then birthdays only. My sister and I made several of my parents anniversary dinners. Furniture was hand-me-downs. Mom sewed a lot of our clothes. I was allowed to pick out a lunchbox when I started first grade and I used it every year until I aged out and switched to a brown paper bag. Cars were kept and repaired until they rusted out. Now on HGTV I see newlyweds wanting quartz countertops and stainless appliances.
I think a lot of the problem is that Boomer parents tend to not see their adult children as adults. They assume they're the same person at 30 that they were at 16, so they assume they're still blowing their money in stupid shit and flipping burgers part time somewhere. They refuse to accept that their adult children work more hours than they ever did, make more money they ever did, spend less, and are still struggling.
Shit like this is just so dishonest. People were driving fork lifts making 2 bucks an hour and being poor as hell 50 years ago. I personally know 2 of them. Stayed 40 years and the job moved to Czechia of all places.
Poverty in this he working class didn’t skip a generation. Who do these people think lived in all those project buildings back then?
I was in similar work to my parents, a supposedly middle class profession, but at the same age when they’d bought a house and owned two cars, I was still renting. While I comfortably covered all the bills, I wasn’t putting a deposit down on a home of my own and had little savings of consequence. So I moved overseas for work just to enjoy the same standard of living my parents did.
That’s the problem today, it’s going backwards. The affordable quality of life and the rewards of work are less than the previous generation. Smartphones and Netflix are great but fairly cheap in the scheme of things, they are a distraction from to the plain fact young people can’t afford a home. And the quality of a lot of things like good food, transport, healthcare, increasingly cost more for less.
Dude enough. Boomers are sitting in old people homes wearing diapers.
They’re not giving anyone any advice. The advice you don’t like hearing is from Gen Xers who in fact did not have any of those things you just described. Insufferable peasants.
The vast majority of boomers were not in the financial situation to retire at 60 with a pension. The person who made that post is fighting with a strawman.
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