15 ms·

This is interesting to me because (as a 30 year old) it never occurred to me that I would be more prosperous than my parents. I'd like to be, of course, but it

by untog 11y ago

This is interesting to me because (as a 30 year old) it never occurred to me that I would be more prosperous than my parents. I'd like to be, of course, but it seems alien to me that there was an era where that was all but guaranteed. It doesn't matter, except that it explains where a lot of this older generation's resentment of "the youth" comes from - they haven't faced the situation we face, so the only way they can make sense of us not succeeding is that we're simply not trying. When that generation is a large voting bloc, that poses a problem. (That said, I suspect most of us HN readers will not be poorer than their parents. Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust, after all, so factor that in when reading responses on here)

Scarblac 11y ago
I'm 40 and way poorer than my babyboomer parents. My savings got wiped out in a housing market crash in 2008, they have made over half a million euro in their lives just from their houses becoming worth more over time. They've also both had work most of their adult life, and their pensions funds have always done well on the stock market, whereas my wife has been without a job since the financial crisis hit and government in the Netherlands went in austerity mode.
- laotzu 11y ago
  May I ask what your savings were in that caused them to be be wiped out in 2008? I would have to guess retirement funds invested in mutual funds which were invested in the housing bubble?
  - Scarblac 11y ago
    We bought a house for 300k, about 60k of it our savings and 240k mortgage. In the next two years, the value of the house went down by 60k. To be honest that wasn't _all_ our savings, and they were already spent on the house of course, but it was a financial loss equal to most of our original savings.
    - esteth 11y ago
      If the house was your primary residence, and not an investment instrument, you didn't really "lose" anything - other property is now also cheaper, and you always need somewhere to live. Sure, you're paying more than you would have if you waited, but you were happy to pay XXXXUSD per month to have somewhere to live, and your relative mobility has actually increased if we assume that the housing market fell by a flat percentage.
      - Scarblac 11y ago
        Assuming that I will always move on to another own house, and not a rented one.
        logfromblammo 11y ago
        I'm never buying again. If they want me to sink 30 years of my life into monthly payments, I'm going to need a job that will last for at least 30 years of steady paychecks. And I don't believe those actually exist any more. Also, I no longer trust the justice system to protect my rights as a property owner. Having been primed by software-based DRM to not want to buy something unless I can truly own it, I find that land property in the US is often heavily encumbered with covenants, regulations, local ordinances, mortgage terms, and recurring taxes, to the point where it feels like paying rent and signing a lease feels less restrictive.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Takes all kinds. I bought my place after 20 years of payments, on a dozen different jobs. Had savings, so 'between jobs' didn't impact mortgage payments. And I'm out in the county, where if they have zoning rules, there sure as heck aren't any inspectors. So I do as I please. Feels pretty unencumbered to me!
        logfromblammo 11y ago
        I have been burnt twice on home ownership, and didn't enjoy the pain. Other people will have different experiences. I do know for certain that I will never sign another mortgage for as long as I live. Those lenders can go FOADIAF.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    simply owning a recently-purchased house in an affected real estate market could have caused that. if you couldn't cover mortgage due to job loss or a rate hike, you were forced out and lost the money. doubly so if you were also invested in financial markets. a lot of people lost a lot of money. meanwhile, parents' mortgage is from the 1980s or 1990s and easily affordable in today's money, even if their nominal market value takes a slump, the mortgage is easily covered and the rebound in values 3-4 years later will put you far ahead again. if you were smart enough to hold steady or even double-down when the financial markets were down, well then you're even richer today. it was essentially a transfer of wealth from one generation to well-positioned members of the previous generation, and of course bankers/traders. but it wasn't a conspiracy... some people are just better positioned for and better able to see a massive market shift like that. i personally lost some (not that much) money during that time, and my parents gained money. ultimately their money is my money so i'm fortunate in that regard, but the same exact thing happened to me. i did everything 'right', including saving and investing, and still got somewhat shafted personally due to a combination of extrinsic market forces and personal decisions.
- adventured 11y ago
  Isn't the Netherlands government spending higher as a portion of GDP today than it was ten years ago? Is it primarily an issue of where they're spending the money?
  - Scarblac 11y ago
    Cost of healthcare is going up all the time, social security as well. My wife was a municipal civil servant and they have to make cuts.
    - adventured 11y ago
      How does the healthcare system work in the Netherlands? I'm entirely unfamiliar with it. Is it more similar to Germany / Switzerland, or closer to the UK model?
      - stuxnet79 11y ago
        Looks to me from a simple Wikipedia search that the Netherlands follows the Bismarck Model (Germany, Switzerland) rather than the Beveridge Model. UK's NHS is one of a kind. Not a lot of countries have or can afford to have the same type of healthcare system as UK.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Similar story here. I cashed out a lot of stocks to make a down payment on a house. Then I had to move to a different city to find work, and lost everything I ever put into the house. I timed the market just right to lose everything, because my other options were to lose more than that. I have had more employers in 15 years of work than both of my parents accumulated over a combined total of nearly 80 years. I have never, ever been promoted within the same company, but I have been summarily tossed to the curb for no individually-attributable reason--along with several of my office-mates--a total of four times. I have a lot of envy for what the Baby Boomer generation already got, and in combination with the condescending attitude they have (in aggregate) towards the younger generations, it fuels a lot of resentment. Their formula of education plus hard work equals success has not been even remotely accurate for me. Education plus hard work equals screw you, buddy, because I already got mine. Enjoy your layoffs and unaffordable housing and tuition increases well in excess of inflation and slashed employer-granted benefits and mountains of political debt, because your parents have decided to sell their house at 20x what they paid for it, buy a plush RV, and split their well-funded retirement between any convenient US state and Snowbirdland, Mexico. And what really kills me is that I have never seen anyone from my parents' generation working particularly hard. Maybe they did all that before I was born, and just coasted along afterward? Maybe I don't really know what hard work looks like? Well, anyway, thanks for all the inter-generational tension, Boomers. We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone.
  - cpursley 11y ago
    > We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone. That and we can't afford to have our own kids...
  - Robin_Message 11y ago
    Genuine question: why not rent out the house whilst you were in the other city? That would have probably covered the mortgage and got you out of the dip until you could either move back, or the market had picked up again and you could sell without loss.
Nimeo 11y ago
>Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust. For me tech will make you either much poorer or much richer than your parents.
- untog 11y ago
  If you don't spend your time working for risky startups you can pretty much guarantee it'll make you rich. Google isn't going to be able to take back that large salary they pay you.
  - tostitos1979 11y ago
    Yes .. but you'll spend a great amount of it trying to buy that 3 million dollar house in Mountain View. I am not disagreeing with your premise. But I think one can have a better standard of living in a cheaper area far away from tech centers.
dkonofalski 11y ago
Keep in mind, though, that tech also has a much faster life-cycle than most professions of the day. We're already seeing large drops in average salary for many tech positions. The average developer salary today is not even close to what a similarly "skilled" profession was even 20 years ago. Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago, but that's taken from a study that compared population sizes in the US to job percentages in the population. Yesterday's electrician is today's developer and they're not paid similarly at all.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  > Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago i've got some perhaps surprising news for you, my young friend... 20 years ago was 1995. sure we didn't have broadband and fancypants angular.js but i'm pretty certain developers were around waaaay back during web 1.0 (to use a turn of phrase).
  - dkonofalski 11y ago
    Ahhh, crap. I'm old. Are you trying to suggest that 20 years ago wasn't the 1970's?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      I was a software developer in the 1970s, too :-) I wrote a cartridge game for Mattel Intellivision, for example.
    - Graham24 11y ago
      Ahhh, crap. I'm old. Are you trying to suggest that 20 years ago wasn't the 1960's?
    - 100timesthis 11y ago
      it used to be!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- refurb 11y ago
  Inflation since 1980 is 290%. Your average tech worker makes, what? $150K per year? That would equal $51K per year in 1980. Median household income in 1980 was $16K. Your dad had a pretty awesome salary for being a laborer.
  - jamespo 11y ago
    that is not your average tech worker salary
  - nkrisc 11y ago
    Maybe average for a senior manager or director.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    I think $150K is only the average salary of a tech worker if you are a advertisement for hired.com
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Information_Technology_%28IT%29_Services/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Information_Tec... Working from those numbers, the bus driver math still doesn't work.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - maratd 11y ago
    > Your average tech worker makes, what? $150K per year? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=average+salary+software+engineer http://lmgtfy.com/?q=average+salary+software+engineer
    - 11y ago
6stringmerc 11y ago
Not kidding here, but one of the most helpful things my Dad ever told me as a teenager was "You probably won't have the same standard of living as we've had while you were growing up" because he made good money in a specialized, unionized profession. He saw, first-hand, how his employment and skills were being cheapened not by competition, but by globalization mentalities, which, in his words (paraphrased) "Isn't about bringing them up, but bringing our standard of living down." Oh, and his ever present suspicion of "management" which, history eventually proved true, wanted to take money from his profession and give it to themselves and "investors" - which did happen (I won't go into details but it was staggering). It was through these discussions and sharing of perspective - just one man's view of the world - that I was taught to value health, happiness, and appreciate a life not defined by the materialism that could've been a real sink-hole for me if I'd tried to achieve even greater "status" than he did. Just to put a last bit of context on it, every five years of so my parents would think about getting a used Corvette convertible, but they could never justify what seemed like such a wasteful purchase...by comparison, my Dad drove a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup, purchased new, babied as a second vehicle, until eventually selling it with 80,000 miles on it for 3x the book value sometime around 2010. I'm a big-time car guy and have dreamed of a Lamborghini Countach since forever. But now, having lived in the "real world" for over a decade, I'm just happy to have a nice 4-banger Toyota with good air conidtioning, tinted windows that gets 30 mpg when I keep my foot out of it. Looking at 2008, all I can think about is how greed is a terrible, toxic basis for a value system.
- snickerdoodles 11y ago
  Your parents seem pragmatic, and it's great that they've passed it along to you. My wife and I have tried to instill in our children too that it's not what you own, but what owns you.
- harryh 11y ago
  The earning power of the emerging asian middle class has doubled in the last 20 years. If that's not "bringing them up" then what is?
  - 6stringmerc 11y ago
jbssm 11y ago
There is very little to think about here. World GDP/World population is ever increasing. As such it should be obvious that sons have a better life than parents except in the presence of: 1- local conflict or 2- in the presence of a class that amasses of an unfair amount of resources. We are clearly in situation no. 2 and these are exactly the periods in history where revolutions start. When the rich get so greedy they make people's quality of life decrease in a broad scale they invariably are tamed by violent uprisings. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+population&lk=4&num=2 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...
cafard 11y ago
Boomer here. 1. I was not particularly well off in my 20s, nor were quite a few of my friends. Yes, the ones who went to law school did pretty well. To be sure, student debt was a vastly smaller problem them. 2. A large number of the people I deal with, and who are within five years of my age either way, are parents of young adults in the work force. There may be occasional bemusement by the younger generation's expectations, but I don't see much resentment. 3. Most of the boomers barely made it into the long economic expansion that followed WW II (though on the other hand you can say we owe our existence to it). You could see things getting tighter and tougher by the beginning of the 1970s. The consumer goods we could afford were a lot shinier and nicer than what our parents had, but the economic security was harder to come by.

by untog 11y ago

Scarblac 11y ago

I'm 40 and way poorer than my babyboomer parents. My savings got wiped out in a housing market crash in 2008, they have made over half a million euro in their lives just from their houses becoming worth more over time. They've also both had work most of their adult life, and their pensions funds have always done well on the stock market, whereas my wife has been without a job since the financial crisis hit and government in the Netherlands went in austerity mode.

laotzu 11y ago
May I ask what your savings were in that caused them to be be wiped out in 2008? I would have to guess retirement funds invested in mutual funds which were invested in the housing bubble?
- Scarblac 11y ago
  We bought a house for 300k, about 60k of it our savings and 240k mortgage. In the next two years, the value of the house went down by 60k. To be honest that wasn't _all_ our savings, and they were already spent on the house of course, but it was a financial loss equal to most of our original savings.
  - esteth 11y ago
    If the house was your primary residence, and not an investment instrument, you didn't really "lose" anything - other property is now also cheaper, and you always need somewhere to live. Sure, you're paying more than you would have if you waited, but you were happy to pay XXXXUSD per month to have somewhere to live, and your relative mobility has actually increased if we assume that the housing market fell by a flat percentage.
    - Scarblac 11y ago
      Assuming that I will always move on to another own house, and not a rented one.
      - logfromblammo 11y ago
        I'm never buying again. If they want me to sink 30 years of my life into monthly payments, I'm going to need a job that will last for at least 30 years of steady paychecks. And I don't believe those actually exist any more. Also, I no longer trust the justice system to protect my rights as a property owner. Having been primed by software-based DRM to not want to buy something unless I can truly own it, I find that land property in the US is often heavily encumbered with covenants, regulations, local ordinances, mortgage terms, and recurring taxes, to the point where it feels like paying rent and signing a lease feels less restrictive.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Takes all kinds. I bought my place after 20 years of payments, on a dozen different jobs. Had savings, so 'between jobs' didn't impact mortgage payments. And I'm out in the county, where if they have zoning rules, there sure as heck aren't any inspectors. So I do as I please. Feels pretty unencumbered to me!
        logfromblammo 11y ago
        I have been burnt twice on home ownership, and didn't enjoy the pain. Other people will have different experiences. I do know for certain that I will never sign another mortgage for as long as I live. Those lenders can go FOADIAF.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  simply owning a recently-purchased house in an affected real estate market could have caused that. if you couldn't cover mortgage due to job loss or a rate hike, you were forced out and lost the money. doubly so if you were also invested in financial markets. a lot of people lost a lot of money. meanwhile, parents' mortgage is from the 1980s or 1990s and easily affordable in today's money, even if their nominal market value takes a slump, the mortgage is easily covered and the rebound in values 3-4 years later will put you far ahead again. if you were smart enough to hold steady or even double-down when the financial markets were down, well then you're even richer today. it was essentially a transfer of wealth from one generation to well-positioned members of the previous generation, and of course bankers/traders. but it wasn't a conspiracy... some people are just better positioned for and better able to see a massive market shift like that. i personally lost some (not that much) money during that time, and my parents gained money. ultimately their money is my money so i'm fortunate in that regard, but the same exact thing happened to me. i did everything 'right', including saving and investing, and still got somewhat shafted personally due to a combination of extrinsic market forces and personal decisions.
adventured 11y ago
Isn't the Netherlands government spending higher as a portion of GDP today than it was ten years ago? Is it primarily an issue of where they're spending the money?
- Scarblac 11y ago
  Cost of healthcare is going up all the time, social security as well. My wife was a municipal civil servant and they have to make cuts.
  - adventured 11y ago
    How does the healthcare system work in the Netherlands? I'm entirely unfamiliar with it. Is it more similar to Germany / Switzerland, or closer to the UK model?
    - stuxnet79 11y ago
      Looks to me from a simple Wikipedia search that the Netherlands follows the Bismarck Model (Germany, Switzerland) rather than the Beveridge Model. UK's NHS is one of a kind. Not a lot of countries have or can afford to have the same type of healthcare system as UK.
logfromblammo 11y ago
Similar story here. I cashed out a lot of stocks to make a down payment on a house. Then I had to move to a different city to find work, and lost everything I ever put into the house. I timed the market just right to lose everything, because my other options were to lose more than that. I have had more employers in 15 years of work than both of my parents accumulated over a combined total of nearly 80 years. I have never, ever been promoted within the same company, but I have been summarily tossed to the curb for no individually-attributable reason--along with several of my office-mates--a total of four times. I have a lot of envy for what the Baby Boomer generation already got, and in combination with the condescending attitude they have (in aggregate) towards the younger generations, it fuels a lot of resentment. Their formula of education plus hard work equals success has not been even remotely accurate for me. Education plus hard work equals screw you, buddy, because I already got mine. Enjoy your layoffs and unaffordable housing and tuition increases well in excess of inflation and slashed employer-granted benefits and mountains of political debt, because your parents have decided to sell their house at 20x what they paid for it, buy a plush RV, and split their well-funded retirement between any convenient US state and Snowbirdland, Mexico. And what really kills me is that I have never seen anyone from my parents' generation working particularly hard. Maybe they did all that before I was born, and just coasted along afterward? Maybe I don't really know what hard work looks like? Well, anyway, thanks for all the inter-generational tension, Boomers. We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone.
- cpursley 11y ago
  > We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone. That and we can't afford to have our own kids...
- Robin_Message 11y ago
  Genuine question: why not rent out the house whilst you were in the other city? That would have probably covered the mortgage and got you out of the dip until you could either move back, or the market had picked up again and you could sell without loss.

Nimeo 11y ago

>Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust. For me tech will make you either much poorer or much richer than your parents.

untog 11y ago
If you don't spend your time working for risky startups you can pretty much guarantee it'll make you rich. Google isn't going to be able to take back that large salary they pay you.
- tostitos1979 11y ago
  Yes .. but you'll spend a great amount of it trying to buy that 3 million dollar house in Mountain View. I am not disagreeing with your premise. But I think one can have a better standard of living in a cheaper area far away from tech centers.

dkonofalski 11y ago

Keep in mind, though, that tech also has a much faster life-cycle than most professions of the day. We're already seeing large drops in average salary for many tech positions. The average developer salary today is not even close to what a similarly "skilled" profession was even 20 years ago. Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago, but that's taken from a study that compared population sizes in the US to job percentages in the population. Yesterday's electrician is today's developer and they're not paid similarly at all.

beachstartup 11y ago
> Now, obviously developers didn't exist 20 years ago i've got some perhaps surprising news for you, my young friend... 20 years ago was 1995. sure we didn't have broadband and fancypants angular.js but i'm pretty certain developers were around waaaay back during web 1.0 (to use a turn of phrase).
- dkonofalski 11y ago
  Ahhh, crap. I'm old. Are you trying to suggest that 20 years ago wasn't the 1970's?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I was a software developer in the 1970s, too :-) I wrote a cartridge game for Mattel Intellivision, for example.
  - Graham24 11y ago
    Ahhh, crap. I'm old. Are you trying to suggest that 20 years ago wasn't the 1960's?
  - 100timesthis 11y ago
    it used to be!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

refurb 11y ago
Inflation since 1980 is 290%. Your average tech worker makes, what? $150K per year? That would equal $51K per year in 1980. Median household income in 1980 was $16K. Your dad had a pretty awesome salary for being a laborer.
- jamespo 11y ago
  that is not your average tech worker salary
- nkrisc 11y ago
  Maybe average for a senior manager or director.
- afarrell 11y ago
  I think $150K is only the average salary of a tech worker if you are a advertisement for hired.com
- cryoshon 11y ago
  http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Information_Technology_%28IT%29_Services/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Information_Tec... Working from those numbers, the bus driver math still doesn't work.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- maratd 11y ago
  > Your average tech worker makes, what? $150K per year? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=average+salary+software+engineer http://lmgtfy.com/?q=average+salary+software+engineer
  - 11y ago

6stringmerc 11y ago

Not kidding here, but one of the most helpful things my Dad ever told me as a teenager was "You probably won't have the same standard of living as we've had while you were growing up" because he made good money in a specialized, unionized profession. He saw, first-hand, how his employment and skills were being cheapened not by competition, but by globalization mentalities, which, in his words (paraphrased) "Isn't about bringing them up, but bringing our standard of living down." Oh, and his ever present suspicion of "management" which, history eventually proved true, wanted to take money from his profession and give it to themselves and "investors" - which did happen (I won't go into details but it was staggering). It was through these discussions and sharing of perspective - just one man's view of the world - that I was taught to value health, happiness, and appreciate a life not defined by the materialism that could've been a real sink-hole for me if I'd tried to achieve even greater "status" than he did. Just to put a last bit of context on it, every five years of so my parents would think about getting a used Corvette convertible, but they could never justify what seemed like such a wasteful purchase...by comparison, my Dad drove a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup, purchased new, babied as a second vehicle, until eventually selling it with 80,000 miles on it for 3x the book value sometime around 2010. I'm a big-time car guy and have dreamed of a Lamborghini Countach since forever. But now, having lived in the "real world" for over a decade, I'm just happy to have a nice 4-banger Toyota with good air conidtioning, tinted windows that gets 30 mpg when I keep my foot out of it. Looking at 2008, all I can think about is how greed is a terrible, toxic basis for a value system.

snickerdoodles 11y ago
Your parents seem pragmatic, and it's great that they've passed it along to you. My wife and I have tried to instill in our children too that it's not what you own, but what owns you.
harryh 11y ago
The earning power of the emerging asian middle class has doubled in the last 20 years. If that's not "bringing them up" then what is?
- 6stringmerc 11y ago

jbssm 11y ago

There is very little to think about here. World GDP/World population is ever increasing. As such it should be obvious that sons have a better life than parents except in the presence of: 1- local conflict or 2- in the presence of a class that amasses of an unfair amount of resources. We are clearly in situation no. 2 and these are exactly the periods in history where revolutions start. When the rich get so greedy they make people's quality of life decrease in a broad scale they invariably are tamed by violent uprisings. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+population&lk=4&num=2 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...

cafard 11y ago

Boomer here. 1. I was not particularly well off in my 20s, nor were quite a few of my friends. Yes, the ones who went to law school did pretty well. To be sure, student debt was a vastly smaller problem them. 2. A large number of the people I deal with, and who are within five years of my age either way, are parents of young adults in the work force. There may be occasional bemusement by the younger generation's expectations, but I don't see much resentment. 3. Most of the boomers barely made it into the long economic expansion that followed WW II (though on the other hand you can say we owe our existence to it). You could see things getting tighter and tougher by the beginning of the 1970s. The consumer goods we could afford were a lot shinier and nicer than what our parents had, but the economic security was harder to come by.