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.
Rent is basically the same (median rent was 23.3% of median income in 2025, 23.1% in 1985).
Food and clothing are significantly cheaper.
White goods are way cheaper.
All technology is way cheaper.
Airline tickets are way cheaper.
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
That's a weird statistic that doesn't really capture the difference of wealth for people today compared to 40 years ago. Having less percentage of total wealth today does not mean they have less wealth than people 40 years ago, if wealth in general has gone up across the board.
I mean, tbh it makes sense that baby boomers would hold more of the wealth when many of the previous generation were killed in war, and they benefited most from the post-war boom. Plus I think one of the key things is the high rates of marriage. Dual income households of course will have an easier time buying a house than single income households. If you would prefer to make it hard for women to be single again we can probably make things much closer to how it was for boomers.
yeah, because a house counts as wealth, and because most people were getting married and starting two income households young, it was easier for them to get a house and therefore wealth at an earlier age. But if you have evidence that median income and wealth was also higher for single individuals I would be curious to see that
it was easier for them to get a house and therefore wealth at an earlier age
OMG, the myth-making is incredible.
30 year-fixed mortgage rates from 1980 to 2000 averaged 10.28%, with several years above 16%. Today, it is ~7%.
In 1980, the avg annual income for the bottom 90% was ~$9000 which is equal to ~$30,000 today adjusted for inflation. Today, the avg income for the same bottom 90% is $47,000, which is a ~$17,000 increase over inflation.
In 1980, the top marginal income tax rate for a 90th-percentile single filer was ~54%. Today it is ~24%.
This means that people are earning more money today AND keeping more of their income, with the cost of mortgages being substantially more affordable.
Irrelevant - dual income households were only 50-60% then vs 70-80% now. If anything that just backs up my point.
Dual-Income vs. Single-Income Trends
Metric / Feature 1989 / Late 1980s Today (2026 Data)
Prevalence of Dual-Income Roughly 50%–60% of households Over 70% to 80%+ of working families; over half of two-parent homes have both working full-time
Single-Earner Homemaker Model Common and viable for single-paycheck survival Shrunk to a minority (around 23% of households)
Primary Driver Expanding female labor force participation / career choice Financial necessity; over 8 in 10 parents cite cost-of-living survival
30 year-fixed mortgage rates from 1980 to 2000 averaged 10.28%, with several years above 16%. Today, it is ~7%.
In 1980, the avg annual income for the bottom 90% was ~$9000 which is equal to ~$30,000 today adjusted for inflation. Today, the avg income for the same bottom 90% is $47,000, which is a ~$17,000 increase over inflation.
In 1980, the top marginal income tax rate for a 90th-percentile single filer was ~54%. Today it is ~24%.
People are earning more money today AND keeping more of their income, with the cost of mortgages being substantially more affordable. I don't understand what about this makes it harder to build wealth.
• In 1985: The median home price was about $84,300 and the median household income was $23,620 (a price-to-income ratio of about 3.6x).
• In 2006: During the peak of the housing bubble, ratios spiked past 7.0x before the 2008 market correction.
People are earning more nominally but keeping less because more is going to housing costs, healthcare and other costs and because inflation has outpaced basic needs while education costs have crippled young people’s abilities to set themselves up early on. Total factor productivity has continued on since the 70s but wages haven’t kept up with it because the wealthiest are getting all the gains because their tax rates have gone down so much.
Your overall point that housing is more affordable is completely incorrect.
This represents a 30.6% increase from 1985 (your number 3.6)
HOWEVER
1985 Average new single-family home size: 1,785 sq. ft.
2025 Average new single-family home size: 2,378 sq. ft.
This is an increase of 33.2% in home size over 1985
Your data above from 2006 isn't an intellectually-honest example. We all know that the subprime mortgage market inflation was the result of unprecedented, systemic banking fraud. Let's keep it apples to apples.
Lol, you can't just hand-wave "irrelevant" just because a fact is inconvenient to your narrative. The fact is, the inflation-adjusted average price of single-family homes has decreased proportionately to their average size.
1985 median home cost (in 2025 dollars): $263,065
1985 fixed 30-year mortgage rate: 10.09%
Total cost of home (in 2025 dollars): $837,395.43
2025 median home cost (in 2025 dollars): $414,300
2025 fixed 30-year mortgage rate: 6.61%
Total cost of home (in 2025 dollars): $953,532.19
A homebuyer in 2025 is paying only 13.87% more inflation-adjusted money for a house vs. 1985 while getting a house that is 33.2% bigger.
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...
Doesn't that chart just show that things consistently got better for boomers as they got older? Things are supposed to get easier as you get older (e.g., get better job, make more money, etc.). Every other generation on that chart is worse off at age 55 than the boomers and they had some big upward spike at some point.
And the data shown for millenials and GenZ makes it appear it will be way worse for them if the trends on the chart continue as they get older.
That chart shows that Boomers had it really good after about 40 years of age - but from ages 25-35 they were spending a higher percentage of their income on mortgage than any generation other than Gen Z.
So life got consistently better/easier for them over their lifetime whereas it got worse for every other generation. And this only reflects homeowners.
This chart ignores that Gen X to Gen Z were older in general when purchasing their first home. In 1981, the median age of first time homebuyers was 29. Now it's 38-40. By age 30, 42% of Millenials owned homes compared to 51% of Boomers, and the percentage is going down with each generation. So it makes sense that the chart started off higher for Boomers since a larger percentage of them buying homes at a younger age (when you tend to have lower salary). There were just way less Millenials even buying homes at age 30 than Boomers.
That chart also suggests that boomers either had increases in salary over their lifetime or lowered real estate over their lifetime (i.e., the consistent negative trend). This trend doesn't hold for any other generation.
I dont understand why its not enough for boomers to have had all the advantages they did, tear out the rug from under them, but THEN feel the need to gaslight everyone into thinking they actually had it tougher, and actually the economy is really great today bc the dow is 50k....
I saw from another comment about their dad having to buy used tires as an example of “struggling” I do that now and I have a (low) six figure income and no house lol.
thats klarna ass logic. spreading something you cant afford over longer amounts of time as justification doesnt address the unaffordability. thats like saying a 50 year mortgage is a solution to high housing prices.
If you really cant see that, its kinda obvious why we inherited 40 trillion of debt then
no? My parents were a wreck in their 30's and 40's because their mortgage was half their take home pay. It took them until their late 40's to get comfortable paying off their mortgage and that took career climbing and refinancing.
They were figuring out just like the rest of us. Just because hind sight shows that they had better macro economic land scape doesn't mean the micro economics of personal finance were some how easier. My dad worked multiple jobs. My grandparents did too. And when you're trying to keep the lights on and kids fed and maintain sanity between working two jobs, you don't really have time to invest in Google or ebay or whatever shit people point at on a chart to say "see, look how easy boomers had it!"
Me too - it certainly wasn't easy for my parents. There was very little left over after the kids were looked after and the bills were paid. They both worked full time as professionals, had a modest house and used cars. They went 'without' wayyyy more than people do nowadays who claim to be struggling. No, it doesn't invalidate the fact that life is very expensive, that opportunities are dwindling in many areas and it is really difficult to get your foot in the door wrt things like housing. Having said that, many of you people have no idea how hard it all was for every generation/ different times and struggles. There's that line from that Mike and the Mechanics song 'every generation, blames the one before'
The bottom line is more about wealth distribution.
The Bronx was historically a place for the exploited workers of NYC. The lower class working for Pennies.
The fact is that we are all bemoaning the rise of the elephant distribution curve.
In the post war era: the distribution curve was at its most equal in recorded history for Americans.
The middle class took home a pretty big chunk of that economic pie.
There was still poverty, there was still inequalities (in some places more than others); but with strong socialist taxes on the rich and corporations and workers won rights from the first part of the 20th century, and no offshoring threatening workers bargaining power: things were better for the median American than ever before and ever since.
The elephant in the room; and on the chart happened with the rise of the trunk of the elephant on that chart. The wealth controlled by the bell curve of distribution flattened; and the top 1 and 10 percent started accumulation exponentially more money than the rest of us.
People aren’t mad at boomers. People are mad at the rich who are stealing from everyone everyday. Not just in America: they are stealing from everyone in the entire flipping world.
So you are correct! There was struggle in the past. There was struggle for your parents and yourself that isn’t mentioned when people bemoan how everything was better before. Yet, this is because we still could have been better even then. We were not done becoming more equal or in building a better system.
We need to pick up the pieces from the fight of those who came before.
He didn't say there wasn't failures in their generation too. Just that the percentage of more asset healthy people in the boomer generation is quite steep compared to most others.
Lol all that writing to miss the point. Saying that the slaves didn't get rich off of slavery doesn't mean the master didn't. You're punching sideways.
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u/Ziplockmoneybags 19h ago
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.