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> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they

> It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish. Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. They had 40+ years to work and save. If they did it right, that will put them in a better position than a 20 year old... just like that 20 years old should be in a better position when they are in their 60s. It would be pretty disheartening if people in their 20s saw that it just gets worse.

Avicebron 3mo ago
Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..
- flohofwoe 3mo ago
  Buying a house in their 20s... are you serious? If true and not just an urban myth, that must have been a US specific thing, maybe caused by the exceptional situation of the US coming out as the biggest winner of WW2. Anywhere else in the world you could be lucky to even move out of your parent's rented flat in your 20s ;) PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
  - singingtoday 3mo ago
    I don't buy that because China has very high home ownership rates. So it can be done. Even today.
    - flohofwoe 3mo ago
      China is arguably currently also in an exceptional situation though. The question is how long that lasts. The next generation or the one after will most likely also complain that their parents were much better off when they were young ;)
  - archonis 3mo ago
    Working class parents in their 20s in the USA could afford to buy their own homes well into the 2000s. Some got burned by cyclical factors, high interest, etc...; but many still achieved sustained lifetime home ownership.
  - simmerup 3mo ago
    I guess you’re not British either then?
    - flohofwoe 3mo ago
      German, of course ;) The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
      - psd1 3mo ago
        The usual distinction between rent and mortgage is that your housing costs build equity when you are paying off your mortgage. Either way, your salary vanishes, but if you pay off the mortgage then you own a six-figure asset. What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.
  - amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
    Possibly. I bought my first house in my 20s in the US, this would have been in 1980s. I remember the 12.5% interest on the mortgage.
    - memcg 3mo ago
      We bought our house in 1982 with a 15.5% mortgage rate, refinanced to 11.25 in 1985, then 8.5 in 1987.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    It was a US-specific thing created by massive post-war infrastructure investment (read: suburban sprawl) and cheap automobiles. This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    Not just US - UK, Canada, Australia, etc.
  - jorgeBanana 3mo ago
    [dead]
- thinkingemote 3mo ago
  You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s. I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
  - dachworker 3mo ago
    My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      What the house is worth today is a lot of luck. I just looked at the house my parents built in 1978. It last sold for $225k in 2019.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - anon27589421275 3mo ago
      How is this totally random personal anecdote relevant to this incredibly complicated, large scale societal discussion?
  - trollbridge 3mo ago
    It should be noted the house my parents bought in their early 40s was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, with no air conditioning. The school district was so-so, the lot wasn't very big, and the economy in that city at the time was declining. Most young people wouldn't be too interested in that today. (Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
    - mindslight 3mo ago
      So many comments eager to dismiss the message with the same old refrains. Refrains that were directly addressed in the article.
- standardUser 3mo ago
  Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.
  - ctoth 3mo ago
    What factors? Why are they unlikely to come about again? How do we make them come about again? You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time" I, for one, completely disagree.
    - zeven7 3mo ago
      They burned non-renewable resources at an unsustainable pace, like nothing ever seen before in history, resources that took millions of years for the Earth to produce, gone in a century, to make themselves wealthy - among other things.
      - danaris 3mo ago
        But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles. We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources. No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
    - eudamoniac 3mo ago
      The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.
- yesco 3mo ago
  I purchased a house within commuting distance of Boston in my mid 20s, back in 2022. Didn't need PMI, the mortgage terms weren't unreasonable to me (fixed 5% interest), and the monthly payments for utilities plus the loan are still well within my means. It's even got an attached garage. I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning. In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway. To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
  - telchior 3mo ago
    According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.
  - BobaFloutist 3mo ago
    > the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
thewebguyd 3mo ago
It’s not hard to see why people find that unfair or whatever though. It’s complete disillusionment with the “dream.” Why is our society/economy structured in such a way that we spend our youthful years struggling and only get to enjoy the fruits when we are older? It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early.
- flohofwoe 3mo ago
  > It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early. Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)
  - Aarostotle 3mo ago
    Funny. The FIRE people I’ve spoken to have an attitude of “if I’m going to do it, I may as well go all-in.”
  - SpaceNoodled 3mo ago
    Yes, but at a much younger "older." Just working within the broken system for a potentially less-bad outcome.
  - vkou 3mo ago
    > spend the youthful years struggling This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.
PxldLtd 3mo ago
"If they did it right" is a bearing a lot of weight there. The window of "getting it right" has shrunk over the last 40 years and it's delusional to argue otherwise. People like myself are comparing themselves to their parents at the same age. My dad had me at my exact age now, had bought a house, could raise a family on his singular wage. That is non-existent now in my part of the country.
tayo42 3mo ago
This article isn't about 20 year olds. Millennials are 30 to 40s
ofjcihen 3mo ago
Well, anecdote, but I’ll chime in. I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course). My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s. And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities. Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc. The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.
bradleyjg 3mo ago
> Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon. Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them. As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  The barrier to entry for investments used to be pretty high. Most people felt limited to what their employers offered. Even as access started getting easier, the knowledge was still difficult to get. Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon. Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.
  - bradleyjg 3mo ago
    Yes, the finger pointing can and does go in many directions. Meanwhile the observed pattern is the boomers (actual boomers) get the golden path and every other generation doesn’t. Maybe they were uniquely virtuous and wise. Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 70 year olds are now.
    - bryanlarsen 3mo ago
      I'd definitely take the other side of that bet. Xennials are significantly richer today than boomers were 25 years ago, generally own their house and have a 401K or similar. Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults. Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.
      - bradleyjg 3mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-Shiller_index#/media/File:Case-Shiller_Index,_1890-8.2025.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-Shiller_index#/media/File... If you bought at exactly the right second of the crash, houses were where they were at the peak of the late 80s bubble.
jimbokun 3mo ago
Yes but the article also cites that the average age for home ownership has gone way up, houses cost far more relative to median income than before, rent is more expensive, and cultural changes requiring two income families and paid childcare have driven up child care costs.
jancsika 3mo ago
> While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish. That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article. Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k. Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle. Edit: clarifications
JKCalhoun 3mo ago
Sure. But my excuse for denying my children would be that I also struggled at their age—zero handouts from either parent. But I also think that attitude is a load of shit. Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time). Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college. But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later. It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall. I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc. (It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)
- abeppu 3mo ago
  In the early 2000s I saw a gubernatorial candidate talking to an audience of over achieving high school students and when asked about what he would do to make college more affordable. He told a story about how he waited tables to pay for college. Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period. Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.
doom2 3mo ago
The problem is that someone in their 20s can't even envision a realistic path to where people in their 60s are. And for me personally, being somewhere between the two, I think I'm mostly doing things "right" and still am not optimistic I'll get to where my parents are. I don't even think I'll see all of the money I've paid into Social Security back, given the political rumblings about "reforming" that program. Which is to say that I can see why younger people might feel hard done by.
eudamoniac 3mo ago
Idk the numbers on this but I much more often hear "It's hard to see my parents living so lavishly while they're struggling." Apparently boomers are not big on saving for retirement or living within their means.

Avicebron 3mo ago

Well a lot of those now 60 year olds were buying houses and land in their 20s-30s..

flohofwoe 3mo ago
Buying a house in their 20s... are you serious? If true and not just an urban myth, that must have been a US specific thing, maybe caused by the exceptional situation of the US coming out as the biggest winner of WW2. Anywhere else in the world you could be lucky to even move out of your parent's rented flat in your 20s ;) PS: also, what's the obsession of young people with home ownership
- singingtoday 3mo ago
  I don't buy that because China has very high home ownership rates. So it can be done. Even today.
  - flohofwoe 3mo ago
    China is arguably currently also in an exceptional situation though. The question is how long that lasts. The next generation or the one after will most likely also complain that their parents were much better off when they were young ;)
- archonis 3mo ago
  Working class parents in their 20s in the USA could afford to buy their own homes well into the 2000s. Some got burned by cyclical factors, high interest, etc...; but many still achieved sustained lifetime home ownership.
- simmerup 3mo ago
  I guess you’re not British either then?
  - flohofwoe 3mo ago
    German, of course ;) The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.
    - psd1 3mo ago
      The usual distinction between rent and mortgage is that your housing costs build equity when you are paying off your mortgage. Either way, your salary vanishes, but if you pay off the mortgage then you own a six-figure asset. What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
  Possibly. I bought my first house in my 20s in the US, this would have been in 1980s. I remember the 12.5% interest on the mortgage.
  - memcg 3mo ago
    We bought our house in 1982 with a 15.5% mortgage rate, refinanced to 11.25 in 1985, then 8.5 in 1987.
- estearum 3mo ago
  It was a US-specific thing created by massive post-war infrastructure investment (read: suburban sprawl) and cheap automobiles. This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  Not just US - UK, Canada, Australia, etc.
- jorgeBanana 3mo ago
  [dead]
thinkingemote 3mo ago
You might want to qualify this with start to buy a house and get a mortgage and then pay off when older than 20s-30s. I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!
- dachworker 3mo ago
  My parents bought their house cash. No they were not high earners and not even median income earners. Yes the house is now worth close to a million dollars.
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    What the house is worth today is a lot of luck. I just looked at the house my parents built in 1978. It last sold for $225k in 2019.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - anon27589421275 3mo ago
    How is this totally random personal anecdote relevant to this incredibly complicated, large scale societal discussion?
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  It should be noted the house my parents bought in their early 40s was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, with no air conditioning. The school district was so-so, the lot wasn't very big, and the economy in that city at the time was declining. Most young people wouldn't be too interested in that today. (Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)
  - mindslight 3mo ago
    So many comments eager to dismiss the message with the same old refrains. Refrains that were directly addressed in the article.
standardUser 3mo ago
Those 60-year-olds existed in a brief and exceptional moment of wealth creation brought about by factors that are unlikely to happen again in ours or our children's lifetime. The problem being that the American ethos decided to pretend that brief moment was normal and sustainable.
- ctoth 3mo ago
  What factors? Why are they unlikely to come about again? How do we make them come about again? You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time" I, for one, completely disagree.
  - zeven7 3mo ago
    They burned non-renewable resources at an unsustainable pace, like nothing ever seen before in history, resources that took millions of years for the Earth to produce, gone in a century, to make themselves wealthy - among other things.
    - danaris 3mo ago
      But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles. We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources. No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.
  - eudamoniac 3mo ago
    The factors of millions of men (workers) dying in war while the country itself was untouched, and all of Europe being bombed, leading to cheap land, increased demand for labor, and a powerful dollar. We just have to nuke Europe and cull a bit of our own people too and we'll be in the golden age again. Or we have to get used to it.
yesco 3mo ago
I purchased a house within commuting distance of Boston in my mid 20s, back in 2022. Didn't need PMI, the mortgage terms weren't unreasonable to me (fixed 5% interest), and the monthly payments for utilities plus the loan are still well within my means. It's even got an attached garage. I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning. In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway. To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
- telchior 3mo ago
  According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.
- BobaFloutist 3mo ago
  > the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.

thewebguyd 3mo ago

It’s not hard to see why people find that unfair or whatever though. It’s complete disillusionment with the “dream.” Why is our society/economy structured in such a way that we spend our youthful years struggling and only get to enjoy the fruits when we are older? It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early.

flohofwoe 3mo ago
> It’s why FIRE is so appealing to some, you get to get out early. Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)
- Aarostotle 3mo ago
  Funny. The FIRE people I’ve spoken to have an attitude of “if I’m going to do it, I may as well go all-in.”
- SpaceNoodled 3mo ago
  Yes, but at a much younger "older." Just working within the broken system for a potentially less-bad outcome.
- vkou 3mo ago
  > spend the youthful years struggling This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.

PxldLtd 3mo ago

"If they did it right" is a bearing a lot of weight there. The window of "getting it right" has shrunk over the last 40 years and it's delusional to argue otherwise. People like myself are comparing themselves to their parents at the same age. My dad had me at my exact age now, had bought a house, could raise a family on his singular wage. That is non-existent now in my part of the country.

tayo42 3mo ago

This article isn't about 20 year olds. Millennials are 30 to 40s

ofjcihen 3mo ago

Well, anecdote, but I’ll chime in. I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course). My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s. And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities. Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc. The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.

bradleyjg 3mo ago

> Someone in their 60s is supposed to be doing better than someone in their 20s. That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon. Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them. As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.

al_borland 3mo ago
The barrier to entry for investments used to be pretty high. Most people felt limited to what their employers offered. Even as access started getting easier, the knowledge was still difficult to get. Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon. Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.
- bradleyjg 3mo ago
  Yes, the finger pointing can and does go in many directions. Meanwhile the observed pattern is the boomers (actual boomers) get the golden path and every other generation doesn’t. Maybe they were uniquely virtuous and wise. Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 70 year olds are now.
  - bryanlarsen 3mo ago
    I'd definitely take the other side of that bet. Xennials are significantly richer today than boomers were 25 years ago, generally own their house and have a 401K or similar. Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults. Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.
    - bradleyjg 3mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-Shiller_index#/media/File:Case-Shiller_Index,_1890-8.2025.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-Shiller_index#/media/File... If you bought at exactly the right second of the crash, houses were where they were at the peak of the late 80s bubble.

jimbokun 3mo ago

Yes but the article also cites that the average age for home ownership has gone way up, houses cost far more relative to median income than before, rent is more expensive, and cultural changes requiring two income families and paid childcare have driven up child care costs.

jancsika 3mo ago

> While I won't deny there are some problems currently, I think people comparing where they start to where others end is a huge mistake and leads to a lot of unnecessary anguish. That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article. Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k. Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle. Edit: clarifications

JKCalhoun 3mo ago

Sure. But my excuse for denying my children would be that I also struggled at their age—zero handouts from either parent. But I also think that attitude is a load of shit. Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time). Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college. But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later. It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall. I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc. (It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)

abeppu 3mo ago
In the early 2000s I saw a gubernatorial candidate talking to an audience of over achieving high school students and when asked about what he would do to make college more affordable. He told a story about how he waited tables to pay for college. Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period. Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.

doom2 3mo ago

The problem is that someone in their 20s can't even envision a realistic path to where people in their 60s are. And for me personally, being somewhere between the two, I think I'm mostly doing things "right" and still am not optimistic I'll get to where my parents are. I don't even think I'll see all of the money I've paid into Social Security back, given the political rumblings about "reforming" that program. Which is to say that I can see why younger people might feel hard done by.

eudamoniac 3mo ago

Idk the numbers on this but I much more often hear "It's hard to see my parents living so lavishly while they're struggling." Apparently boomers are not big on saving for retirement or living within their means.