Why do people think Boomers had it so good?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Boomers always point to housing interest rates because it's the only metric that they can bring up to show hard financial times. College was basically free.
Retirement was taken care of for you as long as you punched in on time. All you had to pay for was a house and whatever your hobbies were.

But the resentment is much more about how public policy supported middle class people through Boomers' youth and early professional lives, they benefited from those policies, and then voted in landslides to reverse them and allow all the wealth to be hoarded at the top of the distribution chart so that they could save 3% on their personal taxes. Then when their kids and grandkids get out of college and look around like "how exactly am I supposed to save for retirement *and* my kids' college *and* a down payment??" Boomers' reaction is to pretend like those very real and overwhelming concerns are symptoms of entitlement and a result of Millennials' personal choices like toast toppings and not Boomers' decades of selfish votes.

Since you asked.

Medical insurance was a lot better back then too (except for the pre-existing conditions part). My parents' employers paid a much higher percentage of the insurance premium and their plans were much better too.

[Anonymous]

Because they own all the single family houses or they strategically buy single family houses for their adult offspring to live in while pretending that they bought the houses with no help.

That’s what the last buyer’s agent I interviewed told me, anyway. He closes a lot of deals so I figure he knows what he’s talking about…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The oldest boomers were getting their first job and getting married in early to mid 60s. The 1970s were hard for working families. I am old enough to remember thinking the lines at gas stations and grocery stores were normal. I remember living in a house, but didn't think it was odd that the rooms weren't furnished for years, and "shopping" at garage sales to find a bed. My dad build my desk out of found materials. We wore clothes re-made out of material scavenged from Goodwill clothing. We made our curtains, grew and canned food, kids were sent on "adventures" into the woods to forage for berries, crab apples, and mushrooms. And we were privileged. We knew we were not poor, as my parents had good white collar jobs, and we lived in a nice middle class neighborhood, but all the money went into that home ownership, food, and gas so my parents could carpool to work. We were mostly latch key feral kids in our neighborhood (my mom was a non-contract teacher (so not pension eligible) so everyone ended up at our house after school); no one had nannies or after care or camps or club sports. No one went to restaurants. Vacation was camping (using Dad's old GI gear). No one had or needed multiple cars or electronics or giant metal mugs or fancy tennis shoes or cable TV or the myriad other things we think of today as "necessities." There was no extra money to be saving from age 22 on, and no, these boomers didn't have pensions either.

Is that how your white collar life is right now? Would you be willing to live that way to get the house of your dreams? Because that's what a lot of Boomers did.

I think the people who complain about Boomers must come from truly wealthy and privileged families. Further to a PP's pension story, my uncles retired with healthy pensions too, until the companies let the pension funds go bankrupt and left them with literally nothing to live on (pre-1974 PBGC). They and their wives did not go golfing, they went job hunting in their late 60s-early 70s. Not everyone had it as easy as your family. And not a lot of jobs had pensions in the first place.

Sure, a lot of Boomers had to work hard and sacrifice in their early years. Still I know so many that are able to retire at 60-65 after having only normal middle class jobs, with even a single earner family, thanks to pensions and massive real estate gains.

And they were able to do that with 3+ kids while we're crunching the numbers on whether we can afford more than one given costs of daycare and college and the need for both parents to work 50+ hours.

I STG, I never think about how good Boomers had it until someone comes on this board trying to insist that actually, they had it the hardest! It doesn't consume my days or anything. But PPP, please don't try to rope us into cosigning some hardscrabble boomer fantasy based on them "getting married and starting families in the early 60s" (when they were 15?) and then finding all of their food in the woods. They cut down all the woods, FFS.

[Anonymous]

Health insurance is a good point, too. HDHPs and PPOs are touted like some type of wealth building policy, but they are not. I just finished paying 8k OOP for healthcare with a PPO that costs 5K/year for a family. All in network doctors, employer provided insurance from a national company. In years where none of us become severely sick or injured, our premiums subside Boomer coworkers on prescriptions and in need of continued care who don’t retire until they are 70 or older.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's a hard insight issue and the tricky part is that it's impossible to know if the comparison is fair because not enough time has passed.

Yes Boomers dealt with Vietnam, stagflation, and much more restrictive banking policies that made home ownership more challenging. However that turned around and Boomers then enjoyed perhaps the single most prosperous two decades in the US during their prime earning years. The homes the bought in the early 80s with 12% interest rates and that they had to scrimp and save for to qualify at all, doubled, then ,tripled, then quadrupled in value. Their salaries also increased by multiples. The stock market exploded and they wound up on the ground floor of that rocket.

So yes, in 1982, boomers as a generation were struggling. But in 2024 they are not. They have immense wealth, plus social security is still solvent and medicare is actually functioning better than ever thanks to work on prescription drug prices and supplemental plans. They made it.

Millennials have different challenges. Yes mortgage rates are lower and the rules around mortgages are looser (though not quite as loose as they used to be and that's a good thing). Millennials have more debt starting out thanks to education costs, and unlike boomers they have zero faith their own children will be able to self-fund college. The economy is stronger but the job market is more competitive thanks to globalization and American workers must compete with more highly qualified workers.

Maybe it will all work out like it did for boomers. I hope so! One challenge millennials face is that they continue to lack political power as the political landscape remains dominated by Boomers with a continued focus on Boomer concerns. Key millennial issues (cost of college and cost of housing) still lack consensus and addressing them has been an uphill battle.

To top it off, when millennials advocate for policies that would relieve these key pressures, they are called entitled and whiny and told "hey boomers had high mortgage rates and it was hard to even qualify." But this ignores the fact that *those circumstances changed because they were bad.* Policies shifted to make it easier to buy a home and boomers profited wildly from it. The reason mortgage rules were relaxed and rates brought down over time was not dome gift to millennials. These were policies intended to help boomers. And they did.

This only applies to the privileged class. My boomer mom lives in the house we were born in and has a life you can't complain about, she does get social security and medicare, but none of the bolded benefitted her, a teacher in a middle class neighborhood where the housing has not doubled in value relative to inflation. The housing crisis, where so many people lost their homes -- a huge portion of them were boomers. Boomer home ownership fell by more than 10 percentage points and did not recover. And only half of home owning boomers owned their houses outright when the mortgage crisis hit; many have fallen behind on payments and are still at risk of losing their homes, leaving many without the housing wealth they were counting on for retirement. Some Millennials may not be able to afford to buy them, but some Boomers cannot afford to keep them either. And they can't make up for the losses over time with years to work and increase earnings. Don't forget that many of those who did see housing increases also had to live off of that equity because they had no pensions or savings, didn't work for companies with 401K plans, don't own stock, didn't have protected healthcare for most of their lives, etc. (see, e.g., the new thing for boomers called reverse mortgages). Some Boomers benefitted from the boom, but not everyone. Not by a long shot. Much of your post is only about the wealthier Boomers.

[Anonymous]

Money that my parents were able to save for retirement, vacations, or just regular old savings goes into my kids 529s because parents today have to save from conception to afford college. My parents went for a nominal fee. Mine cost a bit more, but I went to a flagship and they were able to pay tuition without dipping into savings and I could afford living expenses with a part time job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Health insurance is a good point, too. HDHPs and PPOs are touted like some type of wealth building policy, but they are not. I just finished paying 8k OOP for healthcare with a PPO that costs 5K/year for a family. All in network doctors, employer provided insurance from a national company. In years where none of us become severely sick or injured, our premiums subside Boomer coworkers on prescriptions and in need of continued care who don’t retire until they are 70 or older.

When Boomers were your age, they were being bankrupted by health care because they were dropped from coverage as soon as they needed it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Health insurance is a good point, too. HDHPs and PPOs are touted like some type of wealth building policy, but they are not. I just finished paying 8k OOP for healthcare with a PPO that costs 5K/year for a family. All in network doctors, employer provided insurance from a national company. In years where none of us become severely sick or injured, our premiums subside Boomer coworkers on prescriptions and in need of continued care who don’t retire until they are 70 or older.

When Boomers were your age, they were being bankrupted by health care because they were dropped from coverage as soon as they needed it.

That never happened with employer sponsored plans

[Anonymous]

Help this old man out here. Yes, we bought a house in the 80s (with a 12% mortgage) and it has appreciated tremendously since then. So we sell it and get a windfall. Then what? The so-called windfall is not enough to buy another house, even a small one. And the rental at senior living / assisted living facilities is way out of line. And we should know how corrupt those places are. So we decide to stay here until we drop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's a hard insight issue and the tricky part is that it's impossible to know if the comparison is fair because not enough time has passed.

Yes Boomers dealt with Vietnam, stagflation, and much more restrictive banking policies that made home ownership more challenging. However that turned around and Boomers then enjoyed perhaps the single most prosperous two decades in the US during their prime earning years. The homes the bought in the early 80s with 12% interest rates and that they had to scrimp and save for to qualify at all, doubled, then ,tripled, then quadrupled in value. Their salaries also increased by multiples. The stock market exploded and they wound up on the ground floor of that rocket.

So yes, in 1982, boomers as a generation were struggling. But in 2024 they are not. They have immense wealth, plus social security is still solvent and medicare is actually functioning better than ever thanks to work on prescription drug prices and supplemental plans. They made it.

Millennials have different challenges. Yes mortgage rates are lower and the rules around mortgages are looser (though not quite as loose as they used to be and that's a good thing). Millennials have more debt starting out thanks to education costs, and unlike boomers they have zero faith their own children will be able to self-fund college. The economy is stronger but the job market is more competitive thanks to globalization and American workers must compete with more highly qualified workers.

Maybe it will all work out like it did for boomers. I hope so! One challenge millennials face is that they continue to lack political power as the political landscape remains dominated by Boomers with a continued focus on Boomer concerns. Key millennial issues (cost of college and cost of housing) still lack consensus and addressing them has been an uphill battle.

To top it off, when millennials advocate for policies that would relieve these key pressures, they are called entitled and whiny and told "hey boomers had high mortgage rates and it was hard to even qualify." But this ignores the fact that *those circumstances changed because they were bad.* Policies shifted to make it easier to buy a home and boomers profited wildly from it. The reason mortgage rules were relaxed and rates brought down over time was not dome gift to millennials. These were policies intended to help boomers. And they did.

This only applies to the privileged class. My boomer mom lives in the house we were born in and has a life you can't complain about, she does get social security and medicare, but none of the bolded benefitted her, a teacher in a middle class neighborhood where the housing has not doubled in value relative to inflation. The housing crisis, where so many people lost their homes -- a huge portion of them were boomers. Boomer home ownership fell by more than 10 percentage points and did not recover. And only half of home owning boomers owned their houses outright when the mortgage crisis hit; many have fallen behind on payments and are still at risk of losing their homes, leaving many without the housing wealth they were counting on for retirement. Some Millennials may not be able to afford to buy them, but some Boomers cannot afford to keep them either. And they can't make up for the losses over time with years to work and increase earnings. Don't forget that many of those who did see housing increases also had to live off of that equity because they had no pensions or savings, didn't work for companies with 401K plans, don't own stock, didn't have protected healthcare for most of their lives, etc. (see, e.g., the new thing for boomers called reverse mortgages). Some Boomers benefitted from the boom, but not everyone. Not by a long shot. Much of your post is only about the wealthier Boomers.

There are lots and lots of Boomers that can’t afford to subsidize their grown offspring’s housing but they do it anyway. Ask any realtor. It’s not a privilege to make a dumb financial decision but what can you do? Some people don’t do the math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The oldest boomers were getting their first job and getting married in early to mid 60s. The 1970s were hard for working families. I am old enough to remember thinking the lines at gas stations and grocery stores were normal. I remember living in a house, but didn't think it was odd that the rooms weren't furnished for years, and "shopping" at garage sales to find a bed. My dad build my desk out of found materials. We wore clothes re-made out of material scavenged from Goodwill clothing. We made our curtains, grew and canned food, kids were sent on "adventures" into the woods to forage for berries, crab apples, and mushrooms. And we were privileged. We knew we were not poor, as my parents had good white collar jobs, and we lived in a nice middle class neighborhood, but all the money went into that home ownership, food, and gas so my parents could carpool to work. We were mostly latch key feral kids in our neighborhood (my mom was a non-contract teacher (so not pension eligible) so everyone ended up at our house after school); no one had nannies or after care or camps or club sports. No one went to restaurants. Vacation was camping (using Dad's old GI gear). No one had or needed multiple cars or electronics or giant metal mugs or fancy tennis shoes or cable TV or the myriad other things we think of today as "necessities." There was no extra money to be saving from age 22 on, and no, these boomers didn't have pensions either.

Is that how your white collar life is right now? Would you be willing to live that way to get the house of your dreams? Because that's what a lot of Boomers did.

I think the people who complain about Boomers must come from truly wealthy and privileged families. Further to a PP's pension story, my uncles retired with healthy pensions too, until the companies let the pension funds go bankrupt and left them with literally nothing to live on (pre-1974 PBGC). They and their wives did not go golfing, they went job hunting in their late 60s-early 70s. Not everyone had it as easy as your family. And not a lot of jobs had pensions in the first place.

Sure, a lot of Boomers had to work hard and sacrifice in their early years. Still I know so many that are able to retire at 60-65 after having only normal middle class jobs, with even a single earner family, thanks to pensions and massive real estate gains.

And they were able to do that with 3+ kids while we're crunching the numbers on whether we can afford more than one given costs of daycare and college and the need for both parents to work 50+ hours.

I STG, I never think about how good Boomers had it until someone comes on this board trying to insist that actually, they had it the hardest! It doesn't consume my days or anything. But PPP, please don't try to rope us into cosigning some hardscrabble boomer fantasy based on them "getting married and starting families in the early 60s" (when they were 15?) and then finding all of their food in the woods. They cut down all the woods, FFS.

That was literally my life. And the woods are still there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Help this old man out here. Yes, we bought a house in the 80s (with a 12% mortgage) and it has appreciated tremendously since then. So we sell it and get a windfall. Then what? The so-called windfall is not enough to buy another house, even a small one. And the rental at senior living / assisted living facilities is way out of line. And we should know how corrupt those places are. So we decide to stay here until we drop.

You bought at 12% for a low price because of that 12%. You should have refinanced multiple times to cut the interest rate which should have given you an extremely low mortgage payment. That money had had 40 years to grow

[Anonymous]

You could have 1 person working, multiole kids. And still own a house and pay college tuition by working summers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's a hard insight issue and the tricky part is that it's impossible to know if the comparison is fair because not enough time has passed.

Yes Boomers dealt with Vietnam, stagflation, and much more restrictive banking policies that made home ownership more challenging. However that turned around and Boomers then enjoyed perhaps the single most prosperous two decades in the US during their prime earning years. The homes the bought in the early 80s with 12% interest rates and that they had to scrimp and save for to qualify at all, doubled, then ,tripled, then quadrupled in value. Their salaries also increased by multiples. The stock market exploded and they wound up on the ground floor of that rocket.

So yes, in 1982, boomers as a generation were struggling. But in 2024 they are not. They have immense wealth, plus social security is still solvent and medicare is actually functioning better than ever thanks to work on prescription drug prices and supplemental plans. They made it.

Millennials have different challenges. Yes mortgage rates are lower and the rules around mortgages are looser (though not quite as loose as they used to be and that's a good thing). Millennials have more debt starting out thanks to education costs, and unlike boomers they have zero faith their own children will be able to self-fund college. The economy is stronger but the job market is more competitive thanks to globalization and American workers must compete with more highly qualified workers.

Maybe it will all work out like it did for boomers. I hope so! One challenge millennials face is that they continue to lack political power as the political landscape remains dominated by Boomers with a continued focus on Boomer concerns. Key millennial issues (cost of college and cost of housing) still lack consensus and addressing them has been an uphill battle.

To top it off, when millennials advocate for policies that would relieve these key pressures, they are called entitled and whiny and told "hey boomers had high mortgage rates and it was hard to even qualify." But this ignores the fact that *those circumstances changed because they were bad.* Policies shifted to make it easier to buy a home and boomers profited wildly from it. The reason mortgage rules were relaxed and rates brought down over time was not dome gift to millennials. These were policies intended to help boomers. And they did.

This only applies to the privileged class. My boomer mom lives in the house we were born in and has a life you can't complain about, she does get social security and medicare, but none of the bolded benefitted her, a teacher in a middle class neighborhood where the housing has not doubled in value relative to inflation. The housing crisis, where so many people lost their homes -- a huge portion of them were boomers. Boomer home ownership fell by more than 10 percentage points and did not recover. And only half of home owning boomers owned their houses outright when the mortgage crisis hit; many have fallen behind on payments and are still at risk of losing their homes, leaving many without the housing wealth they were counting on for retirement. Some Millennials may not be able to afford to buy them, but some Boomers cannot afford to keep them either. And they can't make up for the losses over time with years to work and increase earnings. Don't forget that many of those who did see housing increases also had to live off of that equity because they had no pensions or savings, didn't work for companies with 401K plans, don't own stock, didn't have protected healthcare for most of their lives, etc. (see, e.g., the new thing for boomers called reverse mortgages). Some Boomers benefitted from the boom, but not everyone. Not by a long shot. Much of your post is only about the wealthier Boomers.

Wealthy, white boomers. PP’s description doesn’t apply to my AA’s family of origin.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's a hard insight issue and the tricky part is that it's impossible to know if the comparison is fair because not enough time has passed.

Yes Boomers dealt with Vietnam, stagflation, and much more restrictive banking policies that made home ownership more challenging. However that turned around and Boomers then enjoyed perhaps the single most prosperous two decades in the US during their prime earning years. The homes the bought in the early 80s with 12% interest rates and that they had to scrimp and save for to qualify at all, doubled, then ,tripled, then quadrupled in value. Their salaries also increased by multiples. The stock market exploded and they wound up on the ground floor of that rocket.

So yes, in 1982, boomers as a generation were struggling. But in 2024 they are not. They have immense wealth, plus social security is still solvent and medicare is actually functioning better than ever thanks to work on prescription drug prices and supplemental plans. They made it.

Millennials have different challenges. Yes mortgage rates are lower and the rules around mortgages are looser (though not quite as loose as they used to be and that's a good thing). Millennials have more debt starting out thanks to education costs, and unlike boomers they have zero faith their own children will be able to self-fund college. The economy is stronger but the job market is more competitive thanks to globalization and American workers must compete with more highly qualified workers.

Maybe it will all work out like it did for boomers. I hope so! One challenge millennials face is that they continue to lack political power as the political landscape remains dominated by Boomers with a continued focus on Boomer concerns. Key millennial issues (cost of college and cost of housing) still lack consensus and addressing them has been an uphill battle.

To top it off, when millennials advocate for policies that would relieve these key pressures, they are called entitled and whiny and told "hey boomers had high mortgage rates and it was hard to even qualify." But this ignores the fact that *those circumstances changed because they were bad.* Policies shifted to make it easier to buy a home and boomers profited wildly from it. The reason mortgage rules were relaxed and rates brought down over time was not dome gift to millennials. These were policies intended to help boomers. And they did.

This only applies to the privileged class. My boomer mom lives in the house we were born in and has a life you can't complain about, she does get social security and medicare, but none of the bolded benefitted her, a teacher in a middle class neighborhood where the housing has not doubled in value relative to inflation. The housing crisis, where so many people lost their homes -- a huge portion of them were boomers. Boomer home ownership fell by more than 10 percentage points and did not recover. And only half of home owning boomers owned their houses outright when the mortgage crisis hit; many have fallen behind on payments and are still at risk of losing their homes, leaving many without the housing wealth they were counting on for retirement. Some Millennials may not be able to afford to buy them, but some Boomers cannot afford to keep them either. And they can't make up for the losses over time with years to work and increase earnings. Don't forget that many of those who did see housing increases also had to live off of that equity because they had no pensions or savings, didn't work for companies with 401K plans, don't own stock, didn't have protected healthcare for most of their lives, etc. (see, e.g., the new thing for boomers called reverse mortgages). Some Boomers benefitted from the boom, but not everyone. Not by a long shot. Much of your post is only about the wealthier Boomers.

Hmmm I am the PP and I was actually think explicitly of my mother in law when I wrote this. Teacher who graduated from public college with no debt and then taught for 30 years in a small town. Retired and owns her house outright which is now worth 6x what she bought it for (bought for 19k in 1981 and now worth a little over 120k). Her kids both went to college in the 90s and it wasn't free but it was manageable with a little bit of aid (Pell grants and some merit funding) and a couple small loans (my DH had to pay off 5k in loans when he graduated). Her pension plus social security more than cover her costs and she has an excess of about 4k per month that she can't spend. She take two big trips a year including one trip abroad. She couldn't travel this year because her dog is getting old and she doesn't want to leave him so instead she bought a new car for cash just because. Inflation hasn't impacted her much because she has more money than she needs and really limited expenses.

I don't begrudge her any of this. She worked hard for 30 years and is not some entitled or spendthrit person. Her pension and savings spare us having to support her too. But I also do not think her life is accessible to us or our kids. We can't do what she did and expect the same results. We make way more money than she ever did and we bought out house with a 3% interest rate. But we have to save for college -- it's not optional. And we don't have pensions coming. To achieve her lifestyle in our retirement we have to save like mad. We only had one kid because we worried about skyrocketing college costs and we don't want to force our kids to take out loans for educations that will cost (literally) 10x what our own college educations cost. Our mortgage sucks up 40% of our income and we live in a modest two bedroom home in an okay neighborhood with mediocre schools. In order to have the security of her pension we will need to save $3m in retirement accounts (I've done the math). And that's assuming we move to a much lower cost of living area after we retire (we cannot do that now because our jobs are tied to major metropolitan areas). She retired at 52. We are hoping to retire by 65.