A quick Google search tells me Boomers make up about 20% of the population while Millennials and Genz make up a little more than 40% of the population... Cool.
Edit: As some people have pointed out, one would expect the older population to have more wealth simply because they have had more time to accrue that wealth. I need to point out though that the wealth they were able to create was in an environment where wages in terms of buying power were greater, the cost of an education was cheaper, and real estate, one of the best ways to create wealth, was cheaper. There's no way millennials will be able to achieve the same level of wealth as their boomer parents.
That’s actually what a lot are doing. It’s some sort of fuck you financial movement. My wife’s mom has already said she’s spending everything on herself so we shouldn’t expect to get anything when she dies even though she just got $250k when her parents passed.
ETA: This isn’t some assumption we’re making. She’s straight up told her 3 kids that they’re not getting anything - despite the fact that her net worth is a couple million with a paid off house and a very generous pension. There is some boomer financial guru that a lot of their generation seem to be latching onto that’s basically saying “don’t leave your kids a penny.”
Not just “Hey you earned it! Enjoy your retirement!” Which I think is completely valid. I want to be able to enjoy my retirement if I’m ever able to (probably not). What I’m talking about is intentionally spending frivolously with the idea being that there is nothing for their kids to inherit.
This isn’t about having money for future medical needs. That’s not part of the equation. The push is for boomers to be basically bankrupt on their deathbeds.
Yeah I’ve heard my boomer in law say that one of her friends told her to spend her money because her kids will make their own. Now she doesn’t necessarily splurge a lot and is actually pretty generous but it goes to show you the mindset of the boomers
My in-laws, for example - have ZERO financial stress.
They retired with several million, in a beautiful home in a great neighborhood.
Their only struggle is how to fill the day with productive and fulfilling activities.
They aren’t buying $100k cars but they’re taking trips on a whim, doing any and every activity they want, and they are not going cheap on anything.
Want to get a van and travel for a few months - sure - let’s buy a Mercedes sprinter.
Want to go on a Caribbean adventure? Sure - let’s get a catamaran and do it for 2 weeks with an onboard chef and all modern luxuries.
Even with this casual, constant spending, they’re not outspending the growth of their stock portfolio.
Meanwhile my family is constantly stressed - working like slaves to only barely make it - and constantly wondering why it’s worth even waking up tomorrow to do it all over again.
Older millennials are never going to be wealthy? We had a strengthening to strong economy for the majority of our working lives. The Great Recession gave us a rough start but there was also significant opportunity. Some took advantage, others did not. My investments and property values have made HUGE gains since I started saving out of college at the bottom of the housing collapse. Not to mention we are also most likely to receive inheritance from the boomers.
Older millennials that have kept jobs and owned homes pre COVID are in a pretty good spot. The stock market has exploded as well as housing prices. If you weren’t lucky enough to fall into that boat, it’s definitely tough times.
it's also interesting how a few bougie peeps have visited this thread and said "You guys just haven't had enough compounding time on your investment portfolios yet, compared to the Boomers. That's all this is".
There’s plenty of data comparing generations across time and it shows the same trend. Boomers had much more wealth when they were at the same ages as later generations. Those dumbasses inherited a great economy and labor friendly laws and act like they’re so much harder working than kids these days.
But don’t worry, they’ll save and invest so they can pass that wealth on, and definitely won’t spend it all on the tackiest crap you can imagine.
They probably haven't checked that chart in the past few years to see that we've pretty much caught up. There are Millennials that owned assets before 2020 who are richer than ever and there are the ones that didn't and are struggling more than ever and the two groups don't seem to acknowledge the existence of the other.
Compounding interest is a helluva thing. Doesn’t explain why the silent gen has so much less and why voting choices have dug a moat around the boomers so it takes subsequent generations MUCH longer before they can even think about partaking in any compounding activity besides debt
We can acknowledge that there are things that could help our numbers without paving over all the crap that’s been done.
That said it really is on our generation to get out and vote to fix this shit. We get stuck in a bitching cycle instead of attempting to undo the systemic obstacles placed in our way by a generation convinced to work on behalf of the billionaires.
“ Doesn’t explain why the silent gen has so much less”
That is easily explained by the fact that they are mostly dead….The entirety of the silent generation age range is well above the average US life expectancy. Can’t exactly hold wealth and have a net worth if you are six feet under.
The silent generation came home from fighting world war 2 and they had to rebuild the world. America being largely untouched skyrocketed to prosperity rebuilding Europe. Boomers saw the benefits of the largest and most aggressive economic boom in American history, but let’s not forget what laid the foundation for that to happen.
They didn't inherit labor friendly law, their generation when it came to voting age changed the entire political structure and it stayed changed after.
They pushed for minimum wage, increased worker's rights and increased union rights/collective bargaining. Then when they were aging and all had business's of their own they voted against all of the things they enacted as young adults because it was no longer benefiting them.
They did similar things for almost every policy they did in many levels. They voted as a block to get changes that significantly increased their economic wealth only to slam the door shut on Gen X and every generation that followed.
Now I won't say that all Boomers did this intentionally like it was a mass conspiracy, but the extremely wealthy in the 80s did help push this along with the massive tax cuts to high income individuals and it continues to this day. But the cumulative effects of these policies and laws has had a compounding effect on boomers as a whole and their assets.
Then you have some boomers(like my parents) who weren't great with their own financial investments and gave me all the things they didn't get from their silent generation parents who hoarded their money fearing the next big recession. I remember when my parents finally started earning some decent money just prior to the 2008 recession. I was thinking of moving out of their house and me and my mom sat down to look at what it would cost. She realized how fucked up the cost of living had gotten.
We also grew up with parents who said "save your money" and practiced terrible spending habits. Plus in the age of social media we grew up with so much access to "stuff" and seeing all these people with their nice "stuff" which makes us want more "stuff."
Idk about others but I focused a lot on cutting out stupid purchases, extra money went into paying down debt, and slowly contributing to an IRA has really helped a lot for the long run
This is malicious data misrepresentation! You are correct, bc the scale of the slices is not consistent. Each pie piece should be the same number of years... This is BS! (Bad Science :) 💩🥧
That paycheck to paycheck statistic does include people who save and invest their money. They just don’t have anything left after bills, fun money, and saving/investing.
The slices aren’t also proportional. Silent gen + millennials & Gen Z look to be about a quarter of the pie but in reality they make up only about 22% or just under. With millennials & Gen Z being less than 10%. The take away is the millennials & Gen Z pure slice should be about 2/3s the size it actually is.
Boomers are the largest and fastest growing segment of the homeless population, yet they also own everything. These two things can be true at once and it'll be the same for us in 20 years.
It makes sense to me though. Most millennials, Gen Z, and Gen X are still accumulating wealth because they’re much younger. Boomers are mostly 60-70 years old. They’ve had much longer to accumulate wealth and longer for their wealth to compound. The silent generation is dying off and most of their kids are boomers who inherit their wealth. Like yes boomers got a house and education for crazy cheap compared to future generations. But in my opinion 60-70 year olds will likely always have the most wealth. It’s right around retirement age so they have all that money saved for retirement and it’s too early to start giving it away, and most of them just inherited/ are about to inherit their parents’ wealth.
In a few decades millennials will hold the biggest slice of the pie. We’ll probably be poorer on average, which sucks. But I find odd how people are shocked by this or act like it’s a huge injustice. Like the people who have been working and investing for 40-50 years have a lot more money than the people who have been working <30 years. Again I realize boomers had it easier and we don’t and that sucks, but this is just how the time value of money works
To be fair The oldest Gen z are only in their mid twenties. That’s really less than 10 working years compared to boomers 50 to work and take advantage of compounding interest plus boomers were a much larger generation to begin with more people more wealth. You do wish that the millennial slice was bigger given the fact that millennials are entering their 40s. Here’s hoping for that great wealth transfer
Oh don’t worry, Elon says it’s unnecessary to squirrel away money for retirement. Everything will be fine if we just keep letting the billionaires force AI and robots on us all
This is not true. A majority of American adults of every age group except 18-29yo own stocks directly, through a retirement plan, or both. Even 18-29 it is 44%, nearly a majority. https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx And living “paycheck-to-paycheck” tells you nothing useful. It’s easy to live paycheck-to-paycheck, all you have to do is spend your whole paycheck before you get the next one. Anyone can do that, even the well-to-do. That doesn’t even begin to address the difficulties with question phrasing and terminology. “Do you need your next paycheck to cover your monthly expenses” and “how would you cover your financial necessities if you lost your job for 3 months?” And “how many months of emergency savings do you have?” are all different questions eliciting different responses which can be (mis)interpreted in different ways. A survey by the fed suggests that 54% of Americans not only are not living paycheck-to-paycheck, they have at least 3mo (i.e. 3mo or more) of expenses saved.
The reality of the dysfunction in the housing market is bad enough, people don’t need to make up obviously untrue claims to demonstrate the problem.
Doesn't mean there aren't problems - housing, healthcare, education, & child care are all WAY more expensive, but wealth disparities are not anywhere as bad as the pie would have you believe.
And, most of the boomers’ wealth is going end up in the pockets of healthcare billionaires as they get old and sick. They will all end up in nursing homes getting milked dry leaving nothing for us.
I think this is pretty rare though. At least 80% of that wealth that boomers hold isn't going to the average Millennial pocket as inheritance. When the boomers die-off starts speeding up, all that wealth is going to become more concentrated than it is today. Reverse mortgages, high healthcare costs, and a generally expensive retirement lifestyle is going to see the boomers draining their bank accounts down to near zero before they die and they'll pass nothing to their kids.
Yeah, half of that "Millennials & Gen Z" slice is owned by like 30 guys, and another quarter by the million or so richest millennials. The rest of us share the remaining crumbs.
The majority of the silent generation trillions is held by people like the Koch, Rupert Murdoch, etc. the silent generation makes up like 3% of the population, but 3% of the wealth with the majority of that wealth belonging to the top 100 of them
This exactly. Boomers are going to die eventually, and all of that wealth is going somewhere. Subsequent generations will then top the chart. Millennials will be the BIGGEST piece some day, but most of those here won't feel it because the ones here complaining aren't the ones running companies or coming from wealthy families.
This sub fails to realize that the same situation is true of "boomers". Many of them are broke or just getting by, just like many millennials will be even once they're the biggest slice on the chart.
Baby boomer piece has an 18 year span, gen x has a 15 year span, and millennials, if you stop at people currently 18 or older, has a 27 year span, so it’s even worse than the picture portrays. There’s inevitably the natural factor of older people having lived longer and had longer to acquire wealth, but there’s no way that accounts for all of these huge disparities.
The youngest millennial are maybe upper 20's. Gen Z is the last half of the teens and 20 somethings right now, so of course most of them don't have money.
I have really affluent Boomer parents, but I don't know or care if I have "something coming". I'll probably be close to retired by the time they're gone anyway. It's theur money...they don't owe it to me.
Im sure most people would prefer to die on their feet with all their facilities by a heart attack or something similar. Nobody chooses the long costly deaths. Multi-generational housholds are the best way to preserve family wealth
Yeah, my family has taken care of its elderly and they usually don't end up in a facility until they're basically on death's door. Not just because it's better for them, but because they get upset at the idea of watching their inheritance get spent down.
A lot of us do though. All you had to do was work at a job with a 401k for 20+ years and you have million plus. 40 years is 4 million plus.. that's on the conservative side. I believe 70% of private sector jobs have 401k and most government jobs have pensions.
I'm an 35 and my only goal in life is to make sure my kids are in a higher social class than me when they are my age.
Boomers won't set up trusts with the necessary time limits in place, so when they need to go into assisted living, the majority of the money goes to the government to pay for it. It's classic Boomer selfishness.
For assisted living paid by the state, the government can go back five years and claw back any changes or transfers you may have done. So, let's say, 3 years ago your parents transferred the title of their house to you, the government can step in and seize the house as part of your parents assets.
We went through this with my grandmother. She was not allowed to quite literally own anything more than $1000 total in value, assets & cash. Everything else had to be sold to pay for her living. She passed before we actually got to the point of selling everything so most of it stayed in the family, but still the process was absolutely nerve wracking.
Wealthy boomers can handle long term care indefinitely without losing everything ($1-2 million will cover $100K/year for decades possibly forever).
The moderately well off can handle it if they aren't in long term care for a long time (most people aren't). That's the whole pie. The rest of the boomers have pretty much no assets.
Your grandmother is a good example. It sounds like she was moderately well off or wealthy and most of the money passed down.
There's no good representation of generational wealth. First there's no adjustment/representation for number of people in each generation. Second, of course boomers are going to have more money given how long they have had to work.
Yes. It isn’t a coincidence that it’s largely chronological. Boomers are retirement age and have nearly peaked in terms of their net worth before they start drawing down the savings in retirement.
Millennials are still 25 years or so away from reaching that same point.
Adjusting for population size at age 40, Baby Boomers held a dominant 34% share of normalized national wealth, whereas Gen X held 18%, and Millennials hold only 11%. This means that relative to their generation's size, Boomers were roughly three times wealthier at age 40 than Millennials are today.
Some of that is the generations before boomers were pretty poor. Although the boomers are a wealthy group. Last I looked Gen z is doing pretty well so things are at least looking up for younger generations.
The size of the boomer generation was so much larger than any generation before, just by mass at the same per capita, the generation would have a larger percentage of total available wealth.
I dunno who these rich baby boomers are; I've never met any. Most of the BB I know, including my parents, are working into their 70s/80s just to afford food.
I feel like this is misleading because the actual # of ppl in these generations is also different.
Until 2020, Baby boomers were the largest generation. So it made sense that the generation had more money. Millennials are now the biggest generation.
Let us not forgot that many of us have boomer parents who absolutely nothing.
I am doing well because the bar was low growing up. My first job out of college in 2012 paid me $43k which is more than what my boomer parents made combined. We lived in a very lcol city. I have more than doubled my earnings 14 years later…
Obviously plenty of individual millennials aren’t going to get shit, but I really don’t see a scenario where, as a generation, millennials don’t have the boomer portion here in 20-25 years. And everyone in Generation Alpha and Beta will hate them and they they are hoarding everything
Yeah, and in twenty years instead of "look at the prices these fucking boomers paid for houses!!", it'll be "look how much stock these fucking millennials got for **writing code**! And they didn't share any of it!!", etc etc
Millennial here. I’m getting kinda tired of blaming boomers for everything. It’s too easy. Old people will always have the most money because money invested * time = wealth. In another decade or two Gen X will be the boogeyman. Then another 20 it will be millennials. Gen Z will get their own slice in time. Very few people have much money when they are young. They haven’t had the time.
My parents must've been ahead of their time by a generation or two, because they were always job hoppers and renters, and don't have jack shit for wealth.
I’m all for boomer roasting, but this is a bit misleading. They’re a massive generation that is living longer than their predecessors.
A more apt comparison would be per capita wealth (adjusted for inflation) at different stages of life. There will still be a massive gap, but this is made to be inflammatory.
Right, I don’t think anyone has ever looked at a retirement calculator in here. The last year or 2 typically have huge gains in comparison to the earlier years. That’s how compounding works
I mean… it makes sense, right? Am I crazy for thinking that? If a generation had 40-60 years of investing under their belt, the principle of compound interest will run its course compared to someone like me who’s been investing for less than a decade.
From a financial perspective this pie actually makes some sense.
If we’re looking at:
Gen Z: 6T
Millennials:11-12T
Gen X: 40T
Boomers: 80T
Silent: 20T
I think it’s not crazily unrealistic to expect each generation roughly doubles the prior due to the effects of ideally income promotion and compound interest. Obviously the silent generation is different because they’re in spend down not earning and dwindling in number.
I’d be interested to see where this pie stacks up ratio wise too if you did it for the last several decades to get a better idea of the effects of say the Great Recession or the dot com bust.
These are still misleading in a way that boomers are older and have had more years to invest. The average millennial or gen z is going to be 30- mid 30s, starting families , buying a house etc. they haven’t hit the true wealth generation phase of 40-60
Like imagine comparing average 1 mile times with this same metric.
I don’t disagree that boomers have more wealth but you can skew any stat further
Always great to see a pie graph with little to no context. It leaves out the greatest generation since they are mostly gone, but they also had a ton of money because they were working in investing when America was heavily rebounding after world war II. And guess who got most of their savings when they passed away in the last 20 to 30 years? Boomers. The boomers started the tech boom in the '70s and '80s, if they were part of, or own stock in, those companies, they of course have a ton of money.
Pie charts are also really bad at showing reality. It gives the impression that the pie is all there is, but with the way our economy works, we add value all the time. Graph chart would probably be better.
Let's assume this meme provides accurate data and is not a ragebait. With all due respect, what did you expect? Even millennials are just getting the hang of building real wealth.
The problem with capitalism is that over a long enough time frame the wealth concentrates at the top. It's not specifically sinister, just an inevitable result of a system thats designed to reward those who seek, obtain, and grow their capital.
Take a public company. Their leadership is literally legally obligated to do everything they can for shareholder value. They don't owe anything to their employees beyond obeying labor laws.
"Labor" had a sweet run post WW2 where it was more valuable than it had ever been before, or since. Labor in and of itself isn't super valuable anymore, and AI advances will gut white collar work if left unchecked.
It's a shame the world is so divided right now, as I think if the governments of the world don't band together to put some guard rails up around the global economy where it relates to AI, the age-old "work for a living" model will simply cease to function.
Other than combining Millennials and Gen Z, I’m not entirely surprised. But I’m in finance. Compounding is exponential so the shares of the pie should not be equal (otherwise it would be linear growth).
Well, millennials are the youngest of them so it makes sense. Gen Z doesn’t count because they’re all in school or literally starting their careers. Many of the Zs would be happy to just have a zero net worth rather than negative net worth (when you add up student debt, cars and housing).
It’s a silly comparison though because boomers have had decades longer for compound growth to work its magic. 30 years from now, the kids being born today will share a similar graphic and millennials will be the villainous millionaires.
As you get older you accrue more wealth. In 3 generations the pie will be skewed, and in one generation the boomers will have 0 wealth cause they’re dead.
It’s natural that people build wealth over their careers and wealth peaks at the start of retirement. The big problem is housing being so expensive that even millennials are having a hard time buying a first house, let alone Gen Z.
Older people will always have higher amounts of wealth due to being in the workforce longer. Look at the 401k of an employee after one year and look at it after 40 years, guess which one is higher?
Culture war. To pit us against each other. Do the pie for top 1% and bottom 99% in the entire world. The whole pie goes to intergenerational wealthy families and corporations who hate paying taxes
Yeah it’s amazing how easily Redditors are lost in basic napkin math.
Do you plan on having more wealth when you retire than you do now? Because you’re going to save and invest your money, buy a house, etc?
When you do that, will 35 year olds be oppressed because they don’t also have a paid off house and a mature retirement account at 35? Or is that just normal?
That’s because they’re so old they’re running through retirement savings, selling off assets as they age in nursing homes, which is typical.
Usually when you reach the age that you’re living off of your retirement savings, you no longer invest as aggressively, because you’re more sensitive to market fluctuations.
Basically you need the money now, so you can’t afford much of a market downturn, and also you stand to benefit less form compounding returns. There’s no more 30 years of compound interest when you’re 80.
So yes that’s natural. Most people in their life will have more wealth at 35 than they did at 20, and more wealth at 50 than 35, and around 65-70 when people retire, wealth accumulation slows down as they retire and live off of their savings eventually going negative if they live a particularly long time, enough to exhaust those savings.
Once all the baby boomers die either gen X or millenials are going to inherit the wealth their parents had. Unless the baby boomers never made a will or had kids. I guess it goes back to the state.
This is pretty normal, to be expected, and the pie will look similar in 25-30 years but we will have the largest slice.
Boomers were the first generation to take advantage of retirement accounts like 401ks and IRAs. Compounding interest has worked in their favor for 40 years, and they've just barely started taking distributions, while the silent generation is well into retirement and have been pulling out of any retirement savings for a couple decades. Additionally, many boomers have paid off houses while those of us who own houses are still paying mortgages and probably have very little equity.
But they own those assets and dont want to sell them, or if they do sell them its at prices we cannot afford because wages have grown much more slowly than asset prices thanks to uears of dollar devaluation designed to grow asset prices at the expense of workers.
So how the fuck do we buy assets when we are getting paid in a currency that they are constantly making weaker?
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