“Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill every time.”
Supposedly that’s an ancient Greek proverb. I don’t know if it is, but if it’s been around that long, there might be something to it.
Anyway, there’s a common perception that old people are taking advantage of young people. And they’re whining again. Heck, they’re always whining. The young’uns, I mean, about Boomers having more money than them.
Of course we do. It’s simple math. If you’ve been working 5 years, and making $50,000 a year, you’ve earned $250,000 in your lifetime. If we’ve been working 40 years, making $35,000 a year, we’ve made $1,400,000 in our lifetimes. It’s not fair!
If we don’t owe student debt, it’s because we paid it off. If we have more savings, it’s because we’ve been setting aside money for many years. If we own our homes, we probably spent 30 years paying them off. So, of course we have less debt and more savings, and cheaper housing (it’s not free, because we still have to pay taxes, utilities, and insurance), because we’ve been around longer. It’s not fair!
CNN just came out with a story (here) that says, “Baby Boomers are living it up,” compared to young Americans, who “are struggling just to keep up.” You bet we are! After a lifetime of hard work and setting aside for old age, we want to have a little fun before we’re dead, which for us is just around the corner.
The CNN article also says, “Older Americans are ramping up spending as they benefit from a spike in Social Security payments. Starting in January, Social Security recipients received an 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment, the biggest increase since 1981. That increase — caused directly by high inflation — is boosting the average retirees’ monthly payments by an estimated $146.”
Yeah, but guess what, if we’re living on $20,150 a year, our expenses are up by $146 a month, so if we’re splurging it’s not coming from our Social Security raise. And while young’uns are saddled with student debt, they don’t have our prescription drug expenses.
It may come as a shock to Millennials that Boomers were young once, too. I know it’s hard to imagine, so a picture might help (right).
Even more shocking, when we were young we complained incessantly about old people having all the money. If we were lucky, when they passed on, we inherited their money, or at least the part of it they didn’t spend on RVs, travel, and nursing homes.
And when we pass on, today’s whining Millennials will inherit our money, or at least the part of it we didn’t spend on cruises, travel, and nursing homes.
And they probably will spend it on space tourism, terrestrial travel, and nursing homes.
You know, I feel kinda stupid now about some of the things I said about old people who are dead now, but that was more years ago than I want to talk about, and I haven’t talked like that since I got my inheritance.
Related article: Read here what researchers say about generational stereotypes.