1% of the U.S. population holds >31% of the country’s wealth. Is it any wonder so many of the rest of us are broke?
What retirements? What savings?
I’m 50 so not a boomer but I have no retirement savings. Zero. I do have adult children still living at home though.
Does the $200 left in my savings account after paying hospital bills count?
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You sound like somebody who had an incredibly fortunate childhood and you don’t understand anything about people who actually had to work to get where they are.
You claim that your parents didn’t support you but they paid your college. It sounds like you got supported a lot.
The people who really had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are people like me. I quit a full ride scholarship to go back home and get a job to support my father and family after he broke his back at work and it took two years before his disability paid out.
From there I was destitute and I’ve had to work my way back up to a point where I can afford to pay college out of pocket by myself while also affording all of my other expenses (like purchasing a house, and supporting my own family as an adult.) I’ve had to make serious sacrifices in my life.
You really should be less judgmental about other people because you sound ignorant when you make those comments.
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You started you adult life with education and without being indebted for 20 years? You are a privileged one. That’s just how it is. I am too. That’s just life, but you should have the honesty to recognise that most people don’t have this privilege. They can’t be conservative and plan their life because they don’t have the education or the resources (social or monetary) to do it.
I like to give people more credit than that. No one needs a formal education to make a budget or emergency fund. Having good examples going up helps significantly. But even without that, the internet, or a library, is an amazing resource to learn this kind of thing, where maybe someone can learn so they can teach it to their kids and stop the cycle. If we collectively throw up our hands and say no one can do anything about what they were born into and there is no upward mobility over the generations… then things can only get worse, because we’ve artificially closed off a main path for improvement.
This is basically what my dad did, and what someone along the lines had to do in every family tree with some level of “privilege”. People can be this person on their own family tree. It doesn’t mean they’ll go from broke to billionaire in one step; that’s not the goal. The goal would just be to start creating some stability and solid footing so if/when some shit happens there is a little cushion and people aren’t at the whims of the currently government to try and save them, as that’s never going to happen. And to create some education and habits around this finances in the home, as most schools are teaching this stuff.
You are oblivious to reality. There’s nothing to do with you, you are blind. Hopefully one day you’ll discover social sciences and you will learn some facts about your society.
Ok. Have fun waiting for the government to magically fix everything. You’re children’s children’s children will still be waiting.
Actually, I was thinking about what I said and that was way more harsh than I should speak to anyone.
I apologize for acting like a jerk. I appreciate what you said and hope you have a good day.
I was being far too sensitive, and that’s on me.
It’s all good. I hope things turn around for you. I hope you have a good day as well.
Bless your heart
Uphill in the snow barefoot both ways, and so on…
Quick question, what percentage of jobs in America do you think pay below a living wage?
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The bare minimum before falling into poverty.
Say you’re a single parent. Say you have to take medication for your mental health, say you have ADHD and can’t work without it. And your job doesn’t provide health insurance. Say your job pays less than minimum wage. There are entire industries that avoid minimum wage legislation in the United States. Say your parents are minorities and have spent the entirety of their lives in a country legally discriminating against them in governance, finances, employment, housing, Healthcare, transportation, education, and in social programs meant to help the poor.
You have no fallback. You are only ever offered debt that you can never return, and eventually they offer you nothing. You can’t afford even a single bedroom apartment. You pick between feeding your children and taking your meds. And if you can’t take your meds you can’t work. You spend every single day perched precariously on a knife edge, one single Healthcare bill or car repair bill away from homelessness starvation and death.
These people are real. There is no possible financial adaption that will alleviate this situation. And if we count up all the people unfairly treated in this society, if we track everyone and see the way all disenfranchised oppressed people suffer injustice - it becomes immediately apparent that the vast majority of the working class is in a perpetual state of near homelessness barely scraping by even as they slave themselves away for the interests of corporations who have proven time and time again they see human life itself as worthwhile only in its ability to generate capital.
Wrong way to see it, yeah the boomers are rich but a lot of Gen X are broke as shit too. Kids cost money, and with the direction the economy is going, it is just the sad reality we face.
I am extremely thankful for the help my parents have given me, my dad was broke as hell for most of my childhood despite working his ass off, and this was pre-2009 recession, the recession made it worse and it is only recent he is starting to get a real foothold on finances.
Grow the fuck up.
Millennials are between 25 and 40 years old now and you guys are still blaming “the system”?!
You guys ARE the system, at this point in time.
For fucks sakes, you should be well past the age of being in college and should have many years (nearing a couple of decades at this point in time for the older millennials) into the work force. You are also the single largest voting bloc, but you don’t exercise that power so even though Boomers are now a smaller group, they out-vote you by a wide margin making them more important. You still haven’t connected the dots that those who vote the most get the most attention from politicians?? There’s a reason why the rec center has a broken AC, but the senior bus has those expensive, cushy seats.
If you are still blaming anyone for your failures in life, you should be blaming yourselves. If the world isn’t the way you want, then get off your asses and be the change that you want to see. You are the largest generation, but you still act like a tiny minority group. Obama was in his mid 30s when he was elected to the Senate, and in his mid-to-late 40s when he was elected President. Yet as of 2 years ago, Millennials only represented about 6% of Congress. Are you expecting those seats to just be handed to you? Because that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.
You guys are still acting like you’re some powerless 16 years old and still need to beg your mom to borrow the car on Friday night. Hell, even older Zoomers are in their mid 20s at this point in time and have little excuse for their woes.
You sound more nieve than a preschooler. Another boomer aka elder todler trying to pretend their greed didn’t destroy this country and the planet. Why don’t you learn to read before you die instead of hoarding everything? Your dumbass generation made this country far too corrupt for voting to do shit at this point. The worse part is how fucking dumb most of you are.
The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate’s median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th and 62.4 in the 115th.
My Y daughter is doing well, maybe it will be shitty for her to buy a house or condo but she can. My Z one, yeah, I’m helping her, paying stuff here and there like groceries, microwave, etc, she’s in her own flat and all and is not too bad but still, rent is 40% of her earning. It’s ok to help your kids.
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What?
If you have 1 child born in 1995 and another born in 1999, then your children are of two separate generations.
In the literal sense, yes, but not in the context of marketing cohorts, which are usually based on birth date ranges and are used to group members of society who experience similar pressures and exhibit similar behaviors. Gen Y/Millennial and Gen Z are marketing terms, so it’s possible for a parent to have a child in each.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I was trying to be funny but it totally missed the mark and fell flat. Oh well 🤷♂️ I do think it would be nice if we didn’t find ourselves referring to our social constructs in terms of marketing cohorts.
Should have ended with an /s
After Trump, it has become impossible to tell if someone is joking or serious.
Indeed I will surely remember next time! Thanks for the reminder 😅
There’s also us zillenials born between 1990 - 1996. The defining feature is that we’re old enough that we were alive during 9/11 but were too young to understand the way it changed society at the time. Our formative years also occurred during both pre and post internet being everywhere.
it is okay to help but at the same time it sucks you have to do that because life is so economically insecure now that adult children cannot survive without that help.
In my own situation, my partner has a 25-year-old son who has autism and cannot be financially independent. We finance his $2,200 apartment (which is standard cost in our expensive city) because on his own he’ll never be able to do that . This will directly impact our own finances for the foreseeable future.
I absolutely agree! It’s not a competition, we are all living in the same world with the same problems.
Families are at the centre of any society. Families function best when they help each other out. Parents are meant to sacrifice to help their children, just as their adult children should sacrifice later in life to help them.
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Nope this is Lemmy we hate kids here just like Reddit.
christ, I was really hoping to get away from that garbage.
I have seen absolutely nowhere near the same hostility people on Reddit have towards children and their parents.
Seems like you’re pulling shit out your arse to cause a rile.
Wrong. This place is going to turn into an antikid circlejerk in no time. There are already childfree and kidsarefuckingstupid communities.
Have the elites who tell us we “never want to work” thought about lowering the rent below $3k at times? Even below 2k? Because we can’t work or do shit with no actual place to live.
But then they might have to work… Oh the humanity.
We have a lot to be mad at property owners for right now. Their lobbying and bullshittery is part of why so many people have to go back into the office and have so few protections against it. If we’re not pointlessly wasting time commuting to the office their properties won’t be worth as much! Won’t somebody think of the poor landlords?? 😔😔
I have no savings for retirement. Every spare penny I invest in the success of my family, mostly my own kids. I don’t need to go to Florida and hang out playing golf.
This is organized gaslighting. Dont get caught up in it.
Times are though, gotta bring home the bread somehow. It’s your duty to click on the article and rage share it so that the economy doesn’t collapse…
I’ve gotten tired of this whole “everyone from this generation thinks the same, acts the same, is poor/wealthy”, etc bullshit. The coincidence of your birthday doesn’t automatically identify you.
No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of “people who’s education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic.” Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn’t experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There’s absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn’t inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn’t live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they’d ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn’t share those experiences don’t have.
Late Gen X with a Gen Z kid here, not contributing nearly as much to my retirement as I should be because I’m supporting her through college (without loans). We inherited this shit and we’re sacrificing ourselves for the sake of our kids. I don’t know who’s to blame, but we’ve been dealing with this shit our whole lives. Don’t blame us; we’re trying to help
Doing the same thing with my older son now. We are paying cash for his college so he doesn’t start out under a mound of debt like we did. It took over 10 years for us to dig out from under that load and start building assets.
My wife is 45 and we didn’t get her loans paid off until two years ago. And we only we were only able to do that because we sold our house at the absolute height of the COVID real estate market. She didn’t even have post-grad; just a bachelor’s
At least you can help your kids. My older daughter is going through college on loans which I don’t advocate but it is her choice. I can’t even keep my cars running.
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You may be underestimating how expensive college is. I earned a full ride and worked three part time jobs in college. I am still paying off loans. A full ride doesn’t cover rent, food, transportation, lab fees, textbooks, school supplies, toiletries… Whatever expenses you have right now, those are the expenses kids in college have, they’re just spending so much time on homework and in class, they can’t earn enough to cover them at the time, and that gets you into trouble. If you aren’t lucky enough to have a full ride, and your only options are predatory loans because you don’t qualify for grants- that’s what gets almost all into deep trouble.
I don’t see how any of this is in conflict with my comment. Not treating loans like a blank check, and still being diligent and intentional about finding a cheap place to live, splitting the cost with roommate, not going out to eat a lot, having a budget, and generally watching what you spend to spend less, means there is less to pay off at the end.
Some people treat loan money like it grows on trees, because it basically does, and don’t think about the reality of having to pay off those extras until it’s too late and they’re under a mountain of debt.
Even with a full ride, the school makes a difference, as different areas will have more affordable student housing than others.
Even within a school, two people going to the same school, getting the same major, and spend dramatically differently based on lifestyle.
I think it’s funny that you think less college debt boils down to finding a “cheap” place to live with the current astronomical prices, going out to eat too much, and that people don’t have roommates. I’ll give you that those 18 to, say, 24 probably don’t have the best budgeting skills. But this comment comes across like those people telling to stop buying Starbucks and avocado toast.
I’m not saying that will make someone avoid all debt or anything, but if they can leave college with 10-20% less debt due to more frugal choices, they’ll be a lot better off. Less money spent is less money that needs to be paid back, and less money accruing interest.
How is trying to avoid needless spending when all that spending is being done with debt a controversial statement? Rent isn’t like the occasional coffee, it’s a major expense that can have a huge impact on the rest of a person’s budget, especially when adding up 4 years of it. If you can save $300/month on rent, that’s $14k you don’t have to try and pay back later, while also paying the rent for your current place. Shit adds up. That’s all I’m saying. You people are touchy.
reaping what one sows comes to mind
or the classic ‘well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions!’
Of course, we can’t blame boomers for poor decisions or tell them to skip that avocado toast. Clearly they must continue to suck the remaining resources from life so that they have something to bring to the afterlife when they finally croak.
The whole avocado thing really betrays a failure in the thinking of the people behind it. Some places some times avocados are absurdly expensive. Other places and times they are as cheap as any other random vegetable. To not realise that requires having no awareness at all of the importance of seasonal and ideally local produce. If you want to budget competently you need to pay attention to what is good value near you and when. Not understanding that time and location affects the price of fresh perishable foods makes you entirely unqualified to condescendingly tell people they are budgeting their food shopping poorly. All they know is that they spend $10 an avocado so therefore anyone else buying them must be irresponsibly spending just as much.
Not your fault but “They built a terrible system” is wrong too. If your parents were congressmen or business owners, you might have a point, but the actual affect the average person has on the system is negligible. The rich and powerful were going to destroy it.
That’s why it doesn’t really matter who sits in the presidential chair, bad laws still get made, and only the absolute worst get repealed, because they all overall agree with the direction of the country, it consolidates their power when they get it. People think “Things will get better under Biden” should really have been saying “Things won’t get as bad as fast.” because that’s more accurate.
Come on son, we worked hard and ruined the economy and the climate and the nature, now be a good boy and pay for our retirement.
Exactly this, it’s not even the fucked up economy state that scares me the most, it’s the state of ecology that may make the place uninhabited in the pretty near future 😢
