As a boomer myself I find some of your statements perplexing and one-sided. When you talk about boomers hoarding wealth and clinging to more than they will ever need, are you talking about the 1%? Because a huge problem we are facing as a country, together with your valid argument that young people are facing a much more difficult environment than their parents, is that most Americans don't have enough retirement savings to survive, meaning that their "savings" will evaporate while still having many more years to live, and just when they will require expensive health care interventions like surgeries, assisted living and hospice care. In fact, 63% of Americans between 50-54 have zero (as in $0, zilch, nada) saved for retirement. When I look at friends in my cohort, I don't see many that fit your caricature of the greedy, self-absorbed boomer. Most of them are still working, and are planning to work well into their seventies and even eighties, in large part because they *are* helping their kids even at the risk of becoming insolvent themselves, and with no guarantees that their kids are going to be able (or even willing) to take care of them when they are old, sick and poor.
Yeah look not talking about people who can barely care for themselves, I'm speaking mostly to families which have the resources to help their kids and don't. Click first link in this story to see what sparked this discussion, a family worth 10M that wasn't helping their kids seems odd. This ethos is inculcated in many
You have created a straw man by extrapolating a 1% situation to all of society. How does that yield a helpful conversation? What I see with my own two eyes is too many young adults who are woefully emotionally unprepared for real life. Why is that? It is because they were coddled all their years and they bought into the lie that when they turned 20something it would be their turn to ride the prosperity train, simply because it was their turn.
I have several 20something year old kids. I supported them going to school and making sure they had opportunity to work, such as by providing a means of transportation. They have taken advantage of that. They have established their financial independence. At the same time I see peers and their adult children are under-employed or even unemployed and living off their parents. You tell me, how do children gain financial independence? It is by having the proper support, not by demanding their parents take care of them!
I have seen this story personally with people I know who are very responsible and the parents do not assist at all, but could. It is just odd this ethos is in the population at all.
I was thinking the same as Mario when reading this article. I am 63, raising a 3 year old granddaughter and recently widowed. I understand your reply to Mario that this was written about a very wealthy family that wouldn’t help their children but the majority of Americans are not in that boat. Most boomers are worried about their future because it has become generally accepted that their children will not be taking care of them in their old age. The Asian families you pointed out would never put their grandparents or parents in institutional care.
Young people aren’t having children because they think they have to have everything they see their parents have and thousands in the bank for college. Most boomers had their children young and did the best they could and sacrificed the big house, the second car, and raised the children to work hard in school so they could get scholarships for college and took out student loans to help later if they could.
Your article was interesting but there’s always two sides, at least, and I don’t think it fairly represented what is happening in most families in America.
I, too, am a boomer. I'm a "first wave" boomer, and have been retired for 10 years. My wife and I have a daughter.
We always were employed and had good salaries. We invested a lot, too. Our daughter was born when I was 49.5.
When she was born, or just before, I reviewed the course of my life as objectively as I could to see where parental help would have benefitted me the most, but also to see where it might have stifled my own need to become self-reliant. At this point in life I believe that I erred a bit on over-providing such that she does not, at 27, have a fully realistic picture of what the employer/employee relationship is. She has about 85% of it right, but still clings to an idea that there are certain things that employers *should* be doing, simply because, well, it would be "better for society" if they did.
She tends to conflate the mission of a non-profit with a for-profit entity. She is gradually evolving out of this, but started from a woefully unrealistic set of assumption--ironically derived from her elite east coast liberal arts college that cost ~400K to send her there..
But yeah, we paid approx 800K on K-undergrad *tuition* at select schools. This was to purchase the best skill set combined with the best "credentialing" we could afford, hoping to ease her way into the workforce--which it did. We further intend to find a way to help her into a piece of residential real estate that will put her on an easily sustainable upward trajectory that will (hopefully) be fairly well insulated from bad times, and limited only by her own motivation to advance herself.
Now you know our situation, and this is a lot like the one you ascribe to "wealthy" parents who do not help their kids get ahead by, apparently, *giving* them some of the family's wealth--because that's who it belongs to: the *family*.
Tax laws are such that if a family's assets are, say 10M, and they want to pass significant portions to their offspring--to whom they fervently desire to pass *ALL* of their advantages so as to make it easier for them to far exceed their parents--the current tax structures will strip away as much as 40% if this wealth transfer is not done with careful planning. It could be even worse than that.
Now sure, of course you, as the kid, would be pleased to have 6M at your immediate disposal--as ill-advised as that would have been had *I* received 6M when I was 30, e.g.,--but I'm the custodian of the full amount, I know ways to pass the full 10M, but it requires that you will not get the full amount--just little dribbles and trifles like helping you to buy as house, maybe pay for your kid's education.
The catch (for you) is that if you can wait until we die--maybe you'll be 40-50--you can get all that remains, and for us, I'm still actively working to make the amount >10M, so maybe it will be a lot more.
To accomplish this we create a living trust, and when we die, there's an asset basis step up that allows cap gains to be reset to zero at the time of transfer of ownership. In effect, if I pass a 3M stock portfolio and 5M of rental RE at death, our daughter can sell all of these immediately and pay no cap gains, at all.
Things like this come into play and from your end it looks like miserly hoarding, and from ours it's a way to give you the very best, the *most*.
Admit it: you just want that Porsche *now*, don't you? ;^)
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing man that no one is coming to save him. No man is an island. Modernity seems to have forgotten that.
First: flip side to this… adults now feel nearly zero obligation/expectation to settle near home. We leave the nest and scatter to wherever there is - geographically/politically/economically/romantically - the best opportunity, and that’s a huge advantage over prior generations. That has got to contribute to parents feeling less obliged to financially subsidize, when they’re interacting with the grandkids primarily via the cold screens of Zoom and FaceTime.
Second, my late parents never accumulated much wealth. There just wasn’t an option for them to bail us out of mortgages and student loans. So no feelings were hurt over this. Seems this whole controversy may boil down to those eloquent words a wise man said: “Mo[re] money, mo[re] problems.”
What gets me is the original American “rugged individualism” ideal was taking care of the people who matter no matter what life threw at you. It was never supposed to be “screw you, I got what I need.”
I read Elizabeth Warren's, book All Your Worth, a while back and it has a similar message. He approach is that your personal budget should allocate 50% to needs, 20% to savings, and the other 30% is for living - travel, date nights, concerts, good wine, whatever. The idea of enjoying life is built right into the budget, doesn't matter if you are 25 and just starting out, or 55.
My wife's cancer about 8 years ago is what really kicked us in the ass to change though. Sold the McMansion and moved to a much smaller rental, moved to a lower cost of living area, and just totally rearranged our life around having more time to enjoy it. It took us 7 years to get around to buying another home, a small townhouse, and that only because explosive growth caught up to us in Richmond VA and I wanted to stabilize our shelter expense.
My parents are not “those boomers” - they never had a financial plan, they are not wealthy, and I think I first outearned my dad in my 30s.
But my wife and I have always done almost everything ourselves. My parents let us crash with them twice when things we did didn’t work out. It was…challenging, but I am still grateful for it. My mom also helped watch our oldest daughter when my wife had to go back to work because we were just not making enough, and she was a baby.
But beyond that, we never had much in the way of babysitting help, or even offers to that end. We have juggled work, entrepreneurship, finances, childcare, education…and finally got to a point where we just started to move to places we liked, even if we didn’t know anyone, because we just felt alone anyway.
When I was pretty successful (something that I lost and am trying to get back), I noticed that my kids took a lot for granted. You want to give your kids a better life than you had. I grew up on the poor end of middle class/upper end of poverty. We never had money for anything. Never got new clothes, never went out for dinner, never went on vacations, never had new cars, etc. My wife grew up with immigrant parents who had money but lived poor in many respects. She grew up in the trailer park they owned, which wasn’t awesome.
So we gave our kids the best we could of everything, and now I’m worried because they all seem to lack ambition. They are so comfortable at home they don’t have that fire in their bellies to go get jobs, or figure out careers, or whatever. And they’re used to very nice things, so when we’re struggling, like we have been for the past year or two, it’s hard for them to get that we can’t do all the things we used to.
I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I think you have to be careful how much you help your kids monetarily, or you become like an ATM, and you take something away from their own potential. But if they’re struggling and you can make things a little easier, I’d do that if I could evaluate things case by case.
I think wealth destroys a lot of families, though, and as much as I want to build it, I’m really wary of it. It’s actually really important to know what it means to struggle, because it makes you stronger. It teaches you how resourceful you are. It helps you to appreciate the value of both work and money. I don’t love that I’m writing all day and taking shit jobs at night and or on my off days to just try to scrape the rent together when I used to make a comfortable multi-six figure living, but it is what it is. Every day I’m going through it I’m realizing that I had become comfortable and complacent. When I’m out delivering Uber Eats or shopping at Target for some girl who is on her period and doesn’t go out (last night’s adventure) or trying to get the 26 year old manager at the Amazon delivery contractor to get me onboarded so I can deliver packages for $20/hour, it’s humbling. But it makes you hungry to build something awesome and never forget what it’s like to be where I am right now.
You don’t want to intentionally make your kids suffer, but suffering really does build character (as long as it doesn’t bury you). I’ve never been able to figure out the right balance.
I see this ethos playing out on the societal level as well in America. While the corporate C-suite and 1% hoard more revenue and wealth than ever before, any semblance of a middle class is left with less and less. We talk about jobs in insanely oversimplified metrics like volume, but average household income and the quality and stability of those jobs continues to trend downward. Layoffs, especially in the tech industry, almost seem like a source of pride at this point. Ruthlessness and relentless cost cutting are conflated with strong leadership, while leadership is quick to blame everyone else but themselves when something goes wrong. Consumers will become more weary and cash strapped over time due to this conditioning, and we’ll wonder why the economy isn’t thriving and people aren’t having kids. The irony is— as much as rugged individualists rejoice in the idea of going it alone, not giving back, and increasingly replacing humans with energy-sucking AI as if it’s an accomplishment, they need a functioning, thriving society to exist in order to continue profiting. It’s a lose-lose situation both on the familial and societal level.
Boomers. Millennials. The words are provocative.Why? Political divisiveness alongside algorithmic evil. So sad these groups have been pitted against one another by the media. Ugh. Family - good to know that word is trending positively. You make a good case for the very wealthy to help their children financially during childbearing years but overall your piece will be received as divisive simply because you used the word boomer. Not your fault.
Die with Zero is such a good book. I recommend it to everyone. Gave it to my mom and it changed our entire family’s lives because it shifted her attitudes in such a positive way. Great gift for anyone and everyone.
I completely agree with all of this. It's tough to talk to older people about this though. As you alluded to, they just say the younger generation is entitled. Too many TV's in the house, a new phone every 2 years, a dozen internet subscriptions, etc. The crazy part is that all that combined is just a drop in the bucket compared to what it costs to have children or buy that dream house our parents bought back in their day. Ahh well, we could complain but nobody would listen anyways. 😁
You aren't reacting to a real trend, you're reacting to Twitter engagement bait. A record number of young adults live with their parents, which would not happen if parents didn't want to support your kids.
I used to love Twitter too, but you have to be careful now. It doesn't represent real people anymore. Elon pays for engagement, so everyone manufacturers engagement.
The original post was from Reddit and I also shared a personal and related story in my Tweet. It's a perfectly cromulent discussion to have. I honestly didn't think it would go this viral, but plenty of reasonable comments were in the mix on this subject in addition to some people who might have a one-sided view here. This is def an important generational discussion I've had with friends offline too. You are right it's not representative of *everyone* (let's assume 25% of baby boomers have the wealth to do this, the AI spat out that number) but definitely not no one.
I received many replies to this particular email (well above average!) from people who felt this one. It's likely difficult to fully capture well in survey data etc but another thing *many* surveys suggest is young people are indeed struggling and feel without much support (particularly financial). Something Jeff Bezos once said is when the anecdotes and the data tell different things, the anecdotes are probably true (prob butchering that). Regardless of how much this trend is real or not, and even if we're only speaking to a small % of parents/people, I do think supporting family is important, if able, before people are too old to benefit from this.
As a boomer myself I find some of your statements perplexing and one-sided. When you talk about boomers hoarding wealth and clinging to more than they will ever need, are you talking about the 1%? Because a huge problem we are facing as a country, together with your valid argument that young people are facing a much more difficult environment than their parents, is that most Americans don't have enough retirement savings to survive, meaning that their "savings" will evaporate while still having many more years to live, and just when they will require expensive health care interventions like surgeries, assisted living and hospice care. In fact, 63% of Americans between 50-54 have zero (as in $0, zilch, nada) saved for retirement. When I look at friends in my cohort, I don't see many that fit your caricature of the greedy, self-absorbed boomer. Most of them are still working, and are planning to work well into their seventies and even eighties, in large part because they *are* helping their kids even at the risk of becoming insolvent themselves, and with no guarantees that their kids are going to be able (or even willing) to take care of them when they are old, sick and poor.
Yeah look not talking about people who can barely care for themselves, I'm speaking mostly to families which have the resources to help their kids and don't. Click first link in this story to see what sparked this discussion, a family worth 10M that wasn't helping their kids seems odd. This ethos is inculcated in many
You have created a straw man by extrapolating a 1% situation to all of society. How does that yield a helpful conversation? What I see with my own two eyes is too many young adults who are woefully emotionally unprepared for real life. Why is that? It is because they were coddled all their years and they bought into the lie that when they turned 20something it would be their turn to ride the prosperity train, simply because it was their turn.
I have several 20something year old kids. I supported them going to school and making sure they had opportunity to work, such as by providing a means of transportation. They have taken advantage of that. They have established their financial independence. At the same time I see peers and their adult children are under-employed or even unemployed and living off their parents. You tell me, how do children gain financial independence? It is by having the proper support, not by demanding their parents take care of them!
I have seen this story personally with people I know who are very responsible and the parents do not assist at all, but could. It is just odd this ethos is in the population at all.
I was thinking the same as Mario when reading this article. I am 63, raising a 3 year old granddaughter and recently widowed. I understand your reply to Mario that this was written about a very wealthy family that wouldn’t help their children but the majority of Americans are not in that boat. Most boomers are worried about their future because it has become generally accepted that their children will not be taking care of them in their old age. The Asian families you pointed out would never put their grandparents or parents in institutional care.
Young people aren’t having children because they think they have to have everything they see their parents have and thousands in the bank for college. Most boomers had their children young and did the best they could and sacrificed the big house, the second car, and raised the children to work hard in school so they could get scholarships for college and took out student loans to help later if they could.
Your article was interesting but there’s always two sides, at least, and I don’t think it fairly represented what is happening in most families in America.
Let's take a look at another angle.
I, too, am a boomer. I'm a "first wave" boomer, and have been retired for 10 years. My wife and I have a daughter.
We always were employed and had good salaries. We invested a lot, too. Our daughter was born when I was 49.5.
When she was born, or just before, I reviewed the course of my life as objectively as I could to see where parental help would have benefitted me the most, but also to see where it might have stifled my own need to become self-reliant. At this point in life I believe that I erred a bit on over-providing such that she does not, at 27, have a fully realistic picture of what the employer/employee relationship is. She has about 85% of it right, but still clings to an idea that there are certain things that employers *should* be doing, simply because, well, it would be "better for society" if they did.
She tends to conflate the mission of a non-profit with a for-profit entity. She is gradually evolving out of this, but started from a woefully unrealistic set of assumption--ironically derived from her elite east coast liberal arts college that cost ~400K to send her there..
But yeah, we paid approx 800K on K-undergrad *tuition* at select schools. This was to purchase the best skill set combined with the best "credentialing" we could afford, hoping to ease her way into the workforce--which it did. We further intend to find a way to help her into a piece of residential real estate that will put her on an easily sustainable upward trajectory that will (hopefully) be fairly well insulated from bad times, and limited only by her own motivation to advance herself.
Now you know our situation, and this is a lot like the one you ascribe to "wealthy" parents who do not help their kids get ahead by, apparently, *giving* them some of the family's wealth--because that's who it belongs to: the *family*.
Tax laws are such that if a family's assets are, say 10M, and they want to pass significant portions to their offspring--to whom they fervently desire to pass *ALL* of their advantages so as to make it easier for them to far exceed their parents--the current tax structures will strip away as much as 40% if this wealth transfer is not done with careful planning. It could be even worse than that.
Now sure, of course you, as the kid, would be pleased to have 6M at your immediate disposal--as ill-advised as that would have been had *I* received 6M when I was 30, e.g.,--but I'm the custodian of the full amount, I know ways to pass the full 10M, but it requires that you will not get the full amount--just little dribbles and trifles like helping you to buy as house, maybe pay for your kid's education.
The catch (for you) is that if you can wait until we die--maybe you'll be 40-50--you can get all that remains, and for us, I'm still actively working to make the amount >10M, so maybe it will be a lot more.
To accomplish this we create a living trust, and when we die, there's an asset basis step up that allows cap gains to be reset to zero at the time of transfer of ownership. In effect, if I pass a 3M stock portfolio and 5M of rental RE at death, our daughter can sell all of these immediately and pay no cap gains, at all.
Things like this come into play and from your end it looks like miserly hoarding, and from ours it's a way to give you the very best, the *most*.
Admit it: you just want that Porsche *now*, don't you? ;^)
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing man that no one is coming to save him. No man is an island. Modernity seems to have forgotten that.
Good article here. Couple of my observations…
First: flip side to this… adults now feel nearly zero obligation/expectation to settle near home. We leave the nest and scatter to wherever there is - geographically/politically/economically/romantically - the best opportunity, and that’s a huge advantage over prior generations. That has got to contribute to parents feeling less obliged to financially subsidize, when they’re interacting with the grandkids primarily via the cold screens of Zoom and FaceTime.
Second, my late parents never accumulated much wealth. There just wasn’t an option for them to bail us out of mortgages and student loans. So no feelings were hurt over this. Seems this whole controversy may boil down to those eloquent words a wise man said: “Mo[re] money, mo[re] problems.”
What gets me is the original American “rugged individualism” ideal was taking care of the people who matter no matter what life threw at you. It was never supposed to be “screw you, I got what I need.”
Yes - put on your oxygen mask, then help others. Don't just sit there mocking. Low status, honestly
I read Elizabeth Warren's, book All Your Worth, a while back and it has a similar message. He approach is that your personal budget should allocate 50% to needs, 20% to savings, and the other 30% is for living - travel, date nights, concerts, good wine, whatever. The idea of enjoying life is built right into the budget, doesn't matter if you are 25 and just starting out, or 55.
My wife's cancer about 8 years ago is what really kicked us in the ass to change though. Sold the McMansion and moved to a much smaller rental, moved to a lower cost of living area, and just totally rearranged our life around having more time to enjoy it. It took us 7 years to get around to buying another home, a small townhouse, and that only because explosive growth caught up to us in Richmond VA and I wanted to stabilize our shelter expense.
It’s interesting.
I’m 47. Been married 21 years. Have 8 kids.
My parents are not “those boomers” - they never had a financial plan, they are not wealthy, and I think I first outearned my dad in my 30s.
But my wife and I have always done almost everything ourselves. My parents let us crash with them twice when things we did didn’t work out. It was…challenging, but I am still grateful for it. My mom also helped watch our oldest daughter when my wife had to go back to work because we were just not making enough, and she was a baby.
But beyond that, we never had much in the way of babysitting help, or even offers to that end. We have juggled work, entrepreneurship, finances, childcare, education…and finally got to a point where we just started to move to places we liked, even if we didn’t know anyone, because we just felt alone anyway.
When I was pretty successful (something that I lost and am trying to get back), I noticed that my kids took a lot for granted. You want to give your kids a better life than you had. I grew up on the poor end of middle class/upper end of poverty. We never had money for anything. Never got new clothes, never went out for dinner, never went on vacations, never had new cars, etc. My wife grew up with immigrant parents who had money but lived poor in many respects. She grew up in the trailer park they owned, which wasn’t awesome.
So we gave our kids the best we could of everything, and now I’m worried because they all seem to lack ambition. They are so comfortable at home they don’t have that fire in their bellies to go get jobs, or figure out careers, or whatever. And they’re used to very nice things, so when we’re struggling, like we have been for the past year or two, it’s hard for them to get that we can’t do all the things we used to.
I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I think you have to be careful how much you help your kids monetarily, or you become like an ATM, and you take something away from their own potential. But if they’re struggling and you can make things a little easier, I’d do that if I could evaluate things case by case.
I think wealth destroys a lot of families, though, and as much as I want to build it, I’m really wary of it. It’s actually really important to know what it means to struggle, because it makes you stronger. It teaches you how resourceful you are. It helps you to appreciate the value of both work and money. I don’t love that I’m writing all day and taking shit jobs at night and or on my off days to just try to scrape the rent together when I used to make a comfortable multi-six figure living, but it is what it is. Every day I’m going through it I’m realizing that I had become comfortable and complacent. When I’m out delivering Uber Eats or shopping at Target for some girl who is on her period and doesn’t go out (last night’s adventure) or trying to get the 26 year old manager at the Amazon delivery contractor to get me onboarded so I can deliver packages for $20/hour, it’s humbling. But it makes you hungry to build something awesome and never forget what it’s like to be where I am right now.
You don’t want to intentionally make your kids suffer, but suffering really does build character (as long as it doesn’t bury you). I’ve never been able to figure out the right balance.
Love this comment, thanks for sharing your story Steve
I see this ethos playing out on the societal level as well in America. While the corporate C-suite and 1% hoard more revenue and wealth than ever before, any semblance of a middle class is left with less and less. We talk about jobs in insanely oversimplified metrics like volume, but average household income and the quality and stability of those jobs continues to trend downward. Layoffs, especially in the tech industry, almost seem like a source of pride at this point. Ruthlessness and relentless cost cutting are conflated with strong leadership, while leadership is quick to blame everyone else but themselves when something goes wrong. Consumers will become more weary and cash strapped over time due to this conditioning, and we’ll wonder why the economy isn’t thriving and people aren’t having kids. The irony is— as much as rugged individualists rejoice in the idea of going it alone, not giving back, and increasingly replacing humans with energy-sucking AI as if it’s an accomplishment, they need a functioning, thriving society to exist in order to continue profiting. It’s a lose-lose situation both on the familial and societal level.
Boomers. Millennials. The words are provocative.Why? Political divisiveness alongside algorithmic evil. So sad these groups have been pitted against one another by the media. Ugh. Family - good to know that word is trending positively. You make a good case for the very wealthy to help their children financially during childbearing years but overall your piece will be received as divisive simply because you used the word boomer. Not your fault.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on this
Die with Zero is such a good book. I recommend it to everyone. Gave it to my mom and it changed our entire family’s lives because it shifted her attitudes in such a positive way. Great gift for anyone and everyone.
I completely agree with all of this. It's tough to talk to older people about this though. As you alluded to, they just say the younger generation is entitled. Too many TV's in the house, a new phone every 2 years, a dozen internet subscriptions, etc. The crazy part is that all that combined is just a drop in the bucket compared to what it costs to have children or buy that dream house our parents bought back in their day. Ahh well, we could complain but nobody would listen anyways. 😁
“No one is coming to save you” should not be true, your family should always be there."
^ No one IS coming to save you, that's exactly why your family should always be there
yes!
Really great post!
I 1000% agree. Lucky to have great parents and in-laws bucking this bad trend.
I will check out the book, thank you for this important message!
You aren't reacting to a real trend, you're reacting to Twitter engagement bait. A record number of young adults live with their parents, which would not happen if parents didn't want to support your kids.
I used to love Twitter too, but you have to be careful now. It doesn't represent real people anymore. Elon pays for engagement, so everyone manufacturers engagement.
The original post was from Reddit and I also shared a personal and related story in my Tweet. It's a perfectly cromulent discussion to have. I honestly didn't think it would go this viral, but plenty of reasonable comments were in the mix on this subject in addition to some people who might have a one-sided view here. This is def an important generational discussion I've had with friends offline too. You are right it's not representative of *everyone* (let's assume 25% of baby boomers have the wealth to do this, the AI spat out that number) but definitely not no one.
Anecdotes don't make it a trend! In fact, the trend is in the other direction. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/01/25/parents-young-adult-children-and-the-transition-to-adulthood/
I received many replies to this particular email (well above average!) from people who felt this one. It's likely difficult to fully capture well in survey data etc but another thing *many* surveys suggest is young people are indeed struggling and feel without much support (particularly financial). Something Jeff Bezos once said is when the anecdotes and the data tell different things, the anecdotes are probably true (prob butchering that). Regardless of how much this trend is real or not, and even if we're only speaking to a small % of parents/people, I do think supporting family is important, if able, before people are too old to benefit from this.