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.
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
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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.