I’ll be the first to admit I had a privileged childhood because of how good my boomer parents had it in the primes of their careers… Becoming a non-boomer adult tho was a sobering journey.
I’ll use my parents as an example. Both born between 1945-1949. Both college educated. Both worked around 30 years and retired in their 50s. Before he passed, my dad had a pension that paid him over $100K per year. My mom has a pension that pays her over $125K a year and she’s collecting social security and Medicare.
I have no idea what their income was when they worked, but they paid $50K for their house in 1980. We had a new car every 2 years staggered (4 years per parent) for my entire childhood. My mom has “gifted” her every-4-year-car to some grandchild for the last 20 years or so.
We went on vacations to Disney world or on a cruise or on some ridiculous national journey EVERY year during our childhood.
All of my siblings and myself had our college room and board paid for by our parents. Some of us had scholarships some didn’t. The ones who didn’t had tuition covered by Mom and Dad.
My mom would get Christmas bonuses every year to the tune of $10-30K her entire career. This is in the late 80s and 90s. Think about how much shit $30K buys back then. Every fucking year she’d get something around this amount.
They paid for 4 fucking weddings. Just wrote a check like it was nothing. Cash in the bank. No financing.
They did all this shit and still were able to retire in THEIR FIFTIES… LULZ…
Growing up in the 80s was an amazing time if you had college-educated parents with good careers. My dad was an Army Officer and later a Civil Servant and my mom was a CPA. Nothing fancy - typical middle class career choices.
I’d argue this was the norm (or at least close to the norm) for two middle class working parents in the 80s and 90s. I had friends who had worse situations and I had friends who we all thought were from rich families. Most middle class folks in my generation don’t get to do that stuff for their kids or for themselves. It’s fucking brutal just trying to invest money for retirement, much less take a vacation every few years. There’s no fucking way I can just “cover” the college tuition of my kid, and I damn sure can’t afford my own house if I had to buy it again now at this point. I’m guessing I make more money per year than both my parents ever did, but adjusted for inflation I’d argue I make about the same as they did - only I can’t afford all the shit they could afford… and FWIW, I’ve been paying into social security for over 25 years! Will I even see that money?
Now those same people, if they’re alive, won’t move out of their fucking houses for less than a 1000% profit on what they paid - meanwhile they’re still enjoying some pension (that doesn’t exist for current workers) and have been enjoying it for 2-3 decades sitting on their asses…
I love my boomer parents and friends, but I respectfully disagree that they aren’t the problem. I’ll agree they’re not the entire problem…
Despite making less income than current workers, Boomers had orders of magnitude more spending power than we have and that’s not even debatable. And younger generations not only don’t have that spending power but are now having to deal with those same mother fuckers trying to become millionaires on a single real estate transaction.
The ancillary argument about spending power biases my POV and maybe I’m pulling a thin line to connect that with the whacky status quo real estate market, I’ll admit that - but I still don’t think I’m wrong about boomers and their real estate mentality. Nobody after them will ever net the profits they are currently netting. Nobody. And what makes it so frustrating is that it’s all so unnecessary. It’s just pure greed. It’s fucked.
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