What evidence do you have that most Boomer parents aren’t helping their children?
P.S. Just so we’re crystal clear, “helping” does not mean “supporting” one’s grown, able-bodied kids.
Disclaimer: I know Canada alot better than I know the US.
Here, boomers are sitting on a lot of accumulated wealth (same as the US), so much so that there is both a ton of money shifting from boomers to their kids, mostly to help them with housing downpayments, and there is also a ton of money that is not shifting from boomers to their kids, partly ecause the boomers don’t think their kids deserve it and partly because a lot of rich boomers’ kids are actually doing just fine because they had every advantage growing up and are doing pretty well on average without additional help.
As I tell people all the time, there are 15 million households in Canada, so you can find thousands of examples of every kind of behavior. It’s better to rely on agnostic data and studies where you can. I try to get all my info from Stats Can on stuff like this.
My parents love me in the way that they can so I am lucky in that sense. I’m not really that bitter but let me give you a recent example that pisses me off.
HVAC dies in my house about a month ago. Needs to basically be fully replaced. My system is older than I am inside the house and almost 30 years old on the outside unit. I don’t have 10k in cash to pay for a HVAC replacement. I can finance it for some amount of interest that is irrelevant. Instead I(I recognize I am lucky to have the opportunity to even do this) call my parents and ask for a 0% loan and tell them i will pay it back asap. They tell me this is a lot of money and say no. Meanwhile I know they have large amounts of money sitting around earning next to nothing. It makes me feel like I’m a piece of shit and failure for even asking and honestly I think in their minds they think they are teaching me a lesson about finances.
To be fair they have no actual responsibility to give me money. I just would handle it differently if I was the parent lucky enough to be in that situation. I mean the above scenario doesn’t really hurt me in any meaningful way shape or form but I do think that is a common mentality among my friends parents who are boomers.
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I don’t have any, but I never made that claim. You are the one who made a claim.
This is almost certainly the case.
The boomer financial lessons are so enraging precisely because they collectively refuse to acknowledge that maybe things were a little easier when college was $500, every interaction with the health care system wasn’t a threat of bankruptcy and a starter home was actually affordable on one middle class income. It’s always just “meh work hard hurr durr value of a dollar.”
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Well yes, but this is where I get a lot of my politics news and views so I make do.
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Ya I had one of these moments this week. My wife and I got whatever recent Covid variant is going around and have been laid up for pretty much the last week. She takes her blood pressure yesterday and it is 190/120 or something horrible and has a numb arm. So she goes to urgent care. Urgent care tells her they aren’t able to treat her with that BP and that she should go to the ER. Then she tries to come home to lay down to see if it goes down because she feels bad about the $400 co-pay plus whatever the actual visit costs. I tell her she should go anyways if she thinks she should. BP does not go down and she eventually goes to ER where they tell her she has Covid and give her a couple scripts for BP meds. Total cost is surely 1k+ for those few seconds. It isn’t the end of the world but calculating the financial cost to go to the hospital when your vitals are in the stroke risk range is insanity.
All that to say that wasn’t the situation in 1996 when my dad was my age.
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My personal/family experience is nothing like this. Sample size, right, but I don’t see anyone else itt going off anything other than their personal experience.
Fair but what else do we know. It’s all anecdotal evidence which is why I was asking chesspain if he had any evidence boomers were subsidizing their kids lives in most situations.
He could be going off his clientele (therapist?)
Of course that’s a biased sample, but still
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I’m pretty lucky that my evangelical Christian parents who still live in a deep red part of the south aren’t Trumpers. They’ve helped me from time to time, most notably by paying for the part of college not covered by scholarship. I haven’t needed a ton of other help from them because I’ve been very lucky financially. But still nice to know they are there to help if needed.
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First, I don’t think I buy that most booners are assholes to their kids. And second, boomers aren’t the reason an egregious generational wealth gap exists. They were just the last ones thru the door of the American dream
The problem is billionaires. Not retired folks going out dancing and enjoying their retirement imo
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I assume she has refused your attempts to pay her back.
[quote=“WichitaDM, post:354, topic:4597, full:true”] I was asking chesspain if he had any evidence boomers were subsidizing their kids lives in most situations.
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We just went through this not more than 15 minutes ago. Please reread the prior posts.
There are 756 billionaires in the US. The problem isn’t an entire generation, but it’s not just those 756 people either.
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She’s told me not to worry about it. It’ll just come back to me eventually anyway.
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A big part of the problem is that rich people are (generally) pretty selfish and also have an outsized amount of power.
One could theorize that rich people are on average no more selfish than anyone else would be if they became that rich. But I think the way things work here is that being very selfish gives you an edge in becoming rich in the first place and that selfless people are more likely to pursue paths that don’t lead to riches.
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Those 756 people control something like 14% of the total wealth. They also control our laws and regulations while bending them grotesquely in their favor and away from the working class
I feel pretty fine calling billionaires the problem. Much more so than grandma and grandpa going skydiving on their retirement savings
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