The boomers ate all the avocados
A thread to discuss intergenerational opinions.
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Actually, probably beside the point, but I rarely eat avocados.
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I like them in a salsa or guacamole but only on occasion. The smashed avocado and poached egg on sourdough thing is anathema to me. Oh and their environmental footprint is disastrous!
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I thought they'd eaten all the big houses and pensions? Apparently thread aren't any left.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
The Boomers or the avocados??
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Could use a well peeled avocado shell as shelter. given one poster's alleged size, it might solve his housing issue.
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Boomers, obviously. Did you not know that they are to blame for all of the problems in the world?
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
I object to the size of the seed in avocados 🥑 look!
It's proportional madness.
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And mangoes.
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A good third of them are seed.
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Declining home ownership is the most prominent worry about younger generations, and the changes are indeed large. So far millennial families are only half as likely to own their home by age 30 as baby boomers were by the same age.
An even bigger reduction in access to social housing means that four-in-ten millennial families at age 30 live in the private rented sector, four times the rate for baby boomers when they were the same age. This rise in private renting means that young adults face greater housing insecurity than previous generations did. They are compromising on quality and convenience too. Adults aged under 45 have slightly less space than they did two decades ago, whereas over 45s have more. And young adults are commuting longer distances: millennials are on track to spend 64 more hours commuting in the year they turn 40 than the baby boomers did at that age.
While home ownership falls take most of the headlines, an even greater problem threatening day-to-day living standards is the pressure that housing costs put on family finances. Millennials are spending an average of almost a quarter of their income on housing, up from an average of just 8 per cent among the silent generation at the same age.
These generational shifts are likely to persist. Even a repeat of the best economic conditions of recent decades would result in millennials only catching up with the home ownership rates of generation X by the age of 45, and still falling far short of baby boomer rates. Fast-growing inheritances that are set to double in the coming two decades will help some beyond this age. But they are much less likely to benefit the almost half of 20-35-year-old non-home owners whose parents do not own either.
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That 8% of income on housing figure really doesn't sound right.
The commuting figure works out to be about 16 minutes a day, so 8 minutes each way.
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Things like this annoy me:
"This rise in private renting means that young adults face greater housing insecurity than previous generations did."
Presumably they mean that the preceding two? generations did? Go back to the time when the Boomers were kids and I suspect it would be worse than the current generation faces (unless a part of the report that isn't in the quote is specifically comparing just Boomers, Gen X and Millennials.
Also, on the commuting issue, I certainly didn't have the option for home or hybrid working for most of my career and I doubt many Boomers had that chance at all (which is why some seem to struggle to understand how it is possible now). It also isn't really their fault that the working world changed, a lot of them would have got caught up in that. My dad worked in our home town, as did most of my friends' parents, until I was about 10. After that he started having to travel 10 miles each way by bus that ran once an hour despite often doing 12 hour days, 7 days a week at one point. He eventually had to learn to drive as the buses didn't run early or late enough for the hours he was doing and then had other jobs that were about 20 miles away.
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Pensioner incomes have performed strongly in this century: median pensioner incomes are now higher than median working-age incomes after housing costs. There are headwinds to maintaining this performance for future retirees, however. That is because private sector membership of generous ‘defined benefit’ pensions, for those around age 35, halved for employees born in the early 1980s compared to those born around 1970. ‘Automatic enrolment’ of employees into less generous ‘defined contribution’ pensions does, however, mean that younger cohorts have higher overall pension scheme membership rates than predecessors did at each age.
If more favourable economic conditions returned (and under a simplified assumption of constant investment returns), auto-enrolment plus the move to a flat-rate State Pension mean future pensioners could achieve broadly similar outcomes to recent retirees on average. However, there are very big risks around these outcomes for younger generations that those currently retiring have not been exposed to.
Risks include the rate and timing of investment returns. A 1 percentage point decline in investment returns in each remaining year of working life would reduce retirement incomes for millennial men born 1984-86 by 8 per cent, well below the outcomes enjoyed by recent retirees. In the defined benefit system it was firms that bore this investment risk rather than individuals. The shift to defined contribution pensions plus new ‘pension freedoms’ mean people are increasingly having to individually plan for the wide variation in how long they might live. And unlike defined benefit pensions, defined contribution ones rarely provide protection from inflation during retirement, meaning future pensioners will be increasingly exposed to price shocks.
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Bringing together these trends, disposable incomes – the best measure of current living standards – are no higher for millennials who have reached age 30 than they were for generation X at that age. In contrast, older baby boomers have maintained significant income improvements on the silent generation, continuing the pattern of generational progress that was the norm across the age range in the second half of the 20th century.
Our pattern of large historical generation-on-generation gains followed by stagnation or actual income falls – and also declining home ownership rates – marks the UK out in comparison to other advanced economies. We have avoided the truly awful post-crisis outcomes for young adults in parts of Southern Europe, but the scale of our reversal relative to past experience of growth is more marked. Only Spain has experienced a comparable generational ‘boom and bust’ in both incomes and housing in living memory.
Popular narratives sometimes imply that measuring incomes misses some of what is really going on, with millennials losing out, in truth, because of their excessive spending. But the evidence on spending reinforces the wider findings: in 2001, 25-34-year-olds were consuming the same as 55-64-year-olds; they are now spending 15 per cent less.
While incomes faltered following the financial crisis, total household wealth has grown rapidly throughout the 21st century. Despite this, wealth is only higher for those born before the 1960s compared to predecessors at the same age. This is because unexpected house price and pension windfalls largely benefit older cohorts with existing wealth. These windfalls are unlikely to be repeated in future.
A look at income and wealth also highlights just how large differences within generations are. Intra-generational income inequalities have been higher for generation X and the millennials than for the preceding generations at each age, and absolute wealth gaps within cohorts are growing. Inheritances will get bigger in the coming decades, but with already-wealthy millennials set to inherit more than four times as much as those with no property wealth, they risk amplifying existing wealth gaps. Today’s intergenerational differences could create deeper intra-generational gaps in future.
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The problem is Rick, that so much of what you present as 'fact' actually isn't, and therefore undermines everything else. How can you make a correct conclusion if you are basing it on errors?
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Times change. C'est la vie (or 'Zatz life' as they say in France).
No world wars (yet), greater access to HE (it was only 10% when I went), far greater access to information & interconnectivity, far cheaper international travelling, longer life expectancy, more advanced healthcare, cheaper bikes, better food, more TV channels, etc.
Sorry, RC, it's not to say that things aren't wrong with the world for younger people these days, but your jaundiced-coloured glasses are wearisome.
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Apologies. I probably shouldn't have looked in here if I didn't want to hear the complaints.
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I mean, this stuff is researched and produced by professionals. In this instance, a think-tank focused on improving living standards of the low to middle income. They have no horse in my generational beef.
I feel the bulk of your objections are reactionary as they don't align with your own experience or intuition, so you say things like "this seems way off". I mean, feel free to dig out the stats that prove otherwise, but just saying "that doesn't sound right" isn't the resounding deconstruction of the evidence the argument is based on that you think it is.
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Blame Maggie for selling off the social housing and all subsequent leaders for not building. Don't blame boomers.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
"The value of your investment can go down as well as up." Largely depends on the world economy and luck.
DB pensions are the outlier, not the base.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
We might just have to accept that us boomers are the anomaly - benefitting from both the post-war boom (but not having gone through a war) and getting to be pensioners with better life expectancy before the post-war bubble burst.
Strikes me that there are too many interrelated structures that it would be almost be impossible to dismantle (pensions relying on investment in the housing market, for instance, or withdrawing housing benefit that has had the effect of pushing up rental values).
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I'll blame whoever encourages NIMBY housebuilding blocking. It's the housing supply that's the problem. Not whether the council or private individuals own them.
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"Despite this, wealth is only higher for those born before the 1960s compared to predecessors at the same age. This is because unexpected house price and pension windfalls largely benefit older cohorts with existing wealth. These windfalls are unlikely to be repeated in future.Despite this, wealth is only higher for those born before the 1960s compared to predecessors at the same age. This is because unexpected house price and pension windfalls largely benefit older cohorts with existing wealth. These windfalls are unlikely to be repeated in future."
As per my previous post, there was an outlier short period. Basically anyone between 65 and 98 was lucky, everyone else is in much the same boat. Anyone older than 98 probably had to go to war so swings and roundabouts.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
"Tough luck we got lucky" isn't the argument you think it is. Honestly.
What do the generation with the privilege to have that luck want to do to help others?
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Agree about the NIMBYism, but lack of an alternative model of housing leaves everyone at the mercy of the 'free' market. I think I've mentioned it elsewhere, but it's one reason I support Nationwide, as it offers an alternative model to non-mutual banking. I'm sure the non-mutual bankers would be happy if it failed.
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About as much as you want to help the pensioners without DB pensions.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Not all NIMBYs are boomers. In fact, the number of boomers is in continual decline.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0
