The great baby-boomer retirement wave is upon us. According to Census Bureau data, 44% of boomers are at retirement age and millions more are soon to join them. By 2030, the largest generation to enter retirement will all be older than 65.
The general assumption is that boomers will have a comfortable retirement. Coasting on their accumulated wealth from three decades as America’s dominant economic force, boomers will sail off into their golden years to sip on margaritas on cruises and luxuriate in their well-appointed homes. After all, Federal Reserve data shows that while the 56 million Americans over 65 make up just 17% of the population, they hold more than half of America’s wealth — $96.4 trillion.
But there’s a flaw in the narrative of a sunny boomer retirement: A lot of older Americans are not set up for their later years. Yes, many members of the generation are loaded, but many more are not. Like every age cohort, there’s significant wealth inequality among retirees — and it’s gotten worse in the past decade. Despite holding more than half of the nation’s wealth, many boomers don’t have enough money to cover the costs of long-term care, and 43% of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings at all in 2022. That year, 30% of people over 65 were economically insecure, meaning they made less than $27,180 for a single person. And since younger boomers are less financially prepared for retirement than their older boomer siblings, the problem is bound to get worse.
As boomers continue to age out of the workforce, it’s going to put strain on the healthcare system, government programs, and the economy. That means more young people are going to be financially responsible for their parents, more government spending will be allocated to older folks, and economic growth could slow.
Why can’t they just stop eating Avocado toast?
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By a majority, the poorer demographic of boomers voted for them, though. That trend increased as they continued to age.
If we get their voting records and fund only the ones who voted with any empathy for their fellow humans, maybe we can talk.
On a tangent: While we are at it, let’s not allow healthcare for the ones that rejected science and vocally supported those who supported violence against healthcare workers. Maybe some consequences for the Me Generation for once?
Yup, even if you’re a poor retiring boomer you don’t deserve a social safety net if you spent your whole life committed to destroying it. Conservative boomers who are the large majority of boomers voted in the conservative assholes explicitly to gut the “new deal” that their parents put in place for them. “I got mine” was their motto, well now live in it.
You should get the retirement you voted for all your life. Show me your blue voting record and you can have a social safety net.
You’re telling the wrong generation to have empathy. Stop victim blaming. It’s disgusting.
You’re wrong. All but one state voted for Reagan the first time. This was absolutely a multi-generational thing.
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Nice attempt to redirect the conversation, but that didn’t work. Boomers as a rule voted for Reagan and his platform of hate. They voted for his made up “Welfare Queen”. They voted to get rid of pensions. They voted to get rid of unions. They did all these things because THEY didn’t think that THEY needed them anymore. An entire generation of narcissists ruined and continues to ruin the world.
You don’t have to believe me, but my boomer parents agree. To quote my Baby Boomer father, “Boomers destroyed the world”.
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I’m convinced ageism (and to a lesser extent religious discrimination) is the last true bastion of bigotry. You’re not allowed to be homophobic, transphobic, or racist on the internet anymore. But if you call someone evil for the crime of being of voting age when Reagan got elected? No problemo.
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Mostly to me it’s just really funny. Like it’s also really sad, that’s true, but it’s also funny, because of almost how incredibly stupid and shortsighted it is. Like, what does everyone think is gonna happen in 50 or 60 years? All the zoomers and millenials perpetuating this shit are just gonna get blamed equally by all of gen alpha and beta for deflecting all the blame onto boomers, and having done nothing to prevent, or even turn back, say, climate change. Or microplastics, or maybe like, if they’re really on the level, all of gen alpha will really get on their parents case for being absentee parents that abandoned them to a horrible digital wasteland via ipad.
Like unless we gain empathy, and, beyond that, understanding, as to why each generation acted the way they did, unless we gain that insight and historical context, we’re just gonna keep treading water, as every new generation has to figure out everything by themselves, and can never learn from the mistakes of their progenitors. You don’t even need to like boomers, or boomer culture, or really even like, morally approve of why they did the things they did, you just need to understand how they justified it, and what they were thinking at the time. But people don’t wanna do that, instead it’s just easier to blame the olds.
Preach brother
The real villains here are the absurdly rich. Especially those who find ways to pay less in taxes.
The top 1% are the problem.
Tax the rich.
Even as people starve, they’ll defend those absurdly rich folk because one day it’ll be them starving people out!
I hate this “I got mine”/“I’ll get mine” attitude. If I were wealthy, I’d gladly pay higher taxes to support social programs. Shouldn’t that be the whole point of accumulating wealth - to be able to give back? It should be hard-coded into the very structure of society.
And it was a certain generation who decided to do teaching the rich. The ones who want to take digital security for themselves and scrap it for the rest of us
I was told this could be all fixed by pulling up your bootstraps and a firm handshake.
Also no more starbucks and avocado toast. Easy.
Boomers drink used motor oil and eat asbestos toast. It’s called moxie, kid.
Look, there was a generation between Boomers and Gen X and the fact that they’re now just lumped in together is ridiculous. They’re called Boomers because they were born during the baby boom immediately following WWII. That boom did not last 20 years. Actual Boomers have been retired for a decade.
Gen X, always forgotten. Fuckin latchkey kids to the end.
I think a lot of us grew to prefer it that way.
There’s a lot to be said for being able to blend into a crowd and be forgotten. You sure can get away with a lot more, anyway.
This comment has given me far more food for thought than the first skim.
Yes, you’re correct. There is more.
Being content with being part of the crowd and being comfortable with your own identity in a way that you don’t need externalise it, because ultimately the validation that you receive can only come from you, because it won’t come from anywhere else. Someone else will claim the credit anyway.
Being comfortable not being noticed.
Just getting on with it. Work, life, pleasure, marriage, parenthood, careers, it’s probably not going to get any better, it’s probably going to be blamed on you anyway, just get on with it and hope no-one asks too many questions.
Find a nice quiet spot out of the wind for a snooze, knock off work at 4pm, quiet life with no surprises etc.
Someone born in 1950 was only 64 10 years ago. There are plenty of older boomers that have been waiting to retire into their 70s.
Elevated birth rates lasted at the very least until the late 1950s. It was more than just a few years.
The last boomers haven’t. The youngest ones will be 60 this year. There are still tons of them in the workforce.
No, that’s what I’m saying. Those turning 60 this year are not Boomers. They are the generation that came between Boomers and GenX. Yeah, even this Wikipedia article lumps them in with Boomers, but they weren’t considered Boomers as they were coming of age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones They shouldn’t be now, either. Ask any of them if they consider themselves Boomers.
I’m not sure it changes this conversation to argue about that. The usual demographic description of Boomers is those born up to 1964. If we define the Jones cohort, this just splits that in half, and that article gave an ending date 1965. I’m not sure how it matters to this conversation.
My older brother was born in 1965 and would be pissed off if anyone called him a boomer. We should do that
I was born in 1962 and I consider myself a Boomer. I have a friend born in 1961 who considers himself GenX. It’s life circumstances and attitude that determine where you fit.
Also, everybody please remember all these generational labels are made-up bullshit and vast generalizations that might be useful for some meta-analysis of trends, but they’re less than useless when it comes to understanding individual behavior.
Like I taught my kids, the minute you start thinking all people in “Group Whatever” are alike, you lose.
Ironically I think they are referred to as the silent generation. I’m genx my parents are boomers and older brother is silent generation. I think.
Silent generation precedes the boomers.
Ah sorry, thanks for the correction.
While generally right here.
they have not been retired for nearly a decade. THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN. but they’ve been holding on. How many companies have fossils still leading them?
as someone in my 40’s, just before millenials. We were lost because there’s simply no way up the ladder to places the boomers refused to vacate. doesn’t matter how educated, experienced many of us were, There was a ceiling. We were told “hold your turn. boomers will retire soon”… they’re in their 70’s and 80’s now. My parents included (Thankfully with us). But they’re all STILL TRYING TO WORK!
My parents at least DID retire Mostly. MY dad still does some work because to the boomers, work was living. they really knew nothing else.
problem is now the combination of Covid and age, and many of them legit dying while still working, we’ve got a clusterfuck of an economic problem (here in Canada, we’re already experiencing this wave). Immigration, Local resources, and infrastructure is just simply not setup for the mass wave of retirees going straight into either homes, or the ground. We can’t import people fast enough to fill all the jobs, and the faster we import them, we can’t build homes fast enough to keep the housing in check.
have to get ahead of this 10 years ago sadly. We’re too late and we’ll all be playing reactionary for the next 20 years in regards to the shifting demographcs.
The boomers started retiring 20 years ago. What they’re doing now is dying.
“Can I live with you?” I remember my Dad joking. I said, “Maybe you should have thought of that when you kicked me out when I finished high school.”
My father has Parkinson’s and my mother, who was his primary caregiver, passed a few months ago. They went from being comfortable with their finances and having a small, but nice home, to my father now going into a nursing home and likely lose everything he owns because of how expensive nursing care is. We are looking at $7k a month with zero assistance from Medicare and he has enough money that he doesn’t qualify for Medicaid but will burn through all his assets in just a short time. It’s ridiculous that people work hard and save and it’s all gone in a flash.
Let the debt die with him. Get that house into a trust, or out of his name however you can. Don’t let greedy corporations steal the generational wealth he worked hard for and surely wants to pass on, and not have taken away by the health care industry. A few grand on lawyers and accountants now will save you hundreds of thousands down the line.
Your father needs to put his assets into a trust ASAP then. Once he divests through the trust he will qualify for Medicaid. It’s unfortunate that we need to jump through these hoops, but it is what it is.
I’ve seen it go both ways. Things are so much better for the kids when assets are in a trust. Without it, I’ve seen people lose everything. Don’t give the dirty debt collectors a dime.
Sorry to hear about that. This is one reason why I wonder if it’s even worth saving for the future. Live the best life you can in your prime years and then let the pieces fall where they may in the end. You’ll qualify for more programs if you didn’t bother saving anyway.
If you’re 40 or under it isn’t worth saving. Retirement is a Myth for Millennials onward. Unless we get UBI, everything is going to go tits up anyway.
This feels like a self fulfilling prophecy
If you’re 40 or under it isn’t worth saving.
That is precisely the best time to save and invest.
How does giving everyone a UBI solve that we can’t afford to pay the old pensions now? Gonna tax the UBI to pay for it?
Think of it as the circle of life. It’s basically what powered the Boomers–all those freeways and suburb projects put money in their pockets. You give UBI and you drastically reduce homelessness, allowing more people to participate in the economy. Those with good incomes won’t notice the UBI but for those without, it will save their lives.
that’s called “crippling national debt”
Yet it has worked wonders everywhere it has been tried. Don’t mix up your hatred for taxes with the viability of public programs.
Yeah…I’m not American. “Works wonders everywhere it’s been tried” is a bit of an exaggeration, I’ve seen how this sort of thing goes.
Dunno your country’s specifics, but in the U.S., the eventual social security deficits could be completely resolved by removing the caps on social security contributions.
UBI could be payed for by a radically progressive tax structure similar to the U.S. tax structure in the 1950s.
I’ve looked that structure up before, it only worked if you paid yourself. They just plowed all the money straight back into business expenses or acquisition.
In the U.S., the difference between average and median income is ~$25k/yr, so, if my logic is correct, it should theoretically be possible to have an UBI of $25k/yr (which would bring the average income on top of UBI down to around the median).
Well, I’ll give you this. Most communists don’t actually admit they want to drag everyone down to their level. The honesty is refreshing. That’s not sarcasm, this is rare as hell.
You’ve been given some horrible advice. That or you’re just not very smart.
If you believe the same retirement options that were available for boomers is realistically available for younger people, I have a 401k to sell you and a Social Security check is in the mail.
Without significant changes to the way we handle our economy no amount of savings now will make up for the shit that’s coming.
That being said, it should be noted I have a good paying job, I have a 401k, I have investments and none of that is going to carry any of us through to the retirement expectations that we’re being sold.
If you’re under 40, between automation and climate change, shit is going to get real very quickly.
Assuming those programs still exist by the time you get to that point.
If the oligarchs continue to get their way, those programs will disappear. It doesn’t serve them to have a class of people whose labor or income they can’t exploit.
Because the system isn’t designed to work for even the upper middle class, or even the comfortably independently wealthy. The system is designed to continue diverting all of that hard work’s rewards towards the wealthiest tier of wealthy.
Nobody is safe from this vampirism, not even those who would call themselves rich. As it is, wealth will always siphon down to the parasites at the bottom. We’ve all been fooled into thinking we’re at the bottom of a pyramid (or, if you’re lucky, somewhere in the middle), but it’s really just a funnel, sucking everything down to a single point.
Maybe boomers will finally stop blocking the healthcare reforms that they will desperately need. If they can turn off TV news long enough to see their own problems instead of the made-up problems they are trained to focus on.
I think that, more likely, they’ll plump up healthcare services for only themselves. Boomers don’t vote against big government social services for everyone, they only oppose it when it’s not for themselves. That’s why both Republicans and Democrats defend Social Security and medicare for the elderly. Even DeSantis is campaigning on defending SS.
Hit the Pause Button on Medicare for a couple of years. Literally pay nothing. And a lot of our old people problem will disappear.
The whole point is that it’s not really an old person problem. It’s a poor person problem.
We rag on the boomer generation for sponging up all the wealth for themselves, but what gets lost is that this was also at the expense of large swathes of less fortunate boomers. They weren’t just hoarding from other generations, they were hoarding from their fellow boomers. The exploitation class did not discriminate by age.
So the top two hundred net worth individuals have amassed 30% of us wealth and boomers hold half the wealth. No wonder young people are suffering…
I think the point is that those two hundred are Boomers. The rest of the boomers are broke.
Yeah it’s easy to get mad at boomers. It’s also easy to forget that medicare and social security are under attack. The divisionthat matters isn’t between generations, it’s between the rich and the poor.
Boomers voted to gut the services they need now.
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This is occurring specifically because of the choices they collectively made.
It’s hard to be sympathetic.
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Since I agree with you, I’m interested in your opinion of where a potential cut-off point would be. Say X% of people between the ages 18 and 25 get into a car crash yearly, when is it okay to assume that because you are between 18 and 25 you shouldn’t be allowed to drive? Is it when X = 75, lower/higher or is there never a point for you and you’d still prefer to judge an individual?
Not that it has any relevance to the rest of this thread, but that’s exactly why some states require people over a certain age (say 75) to retest for their drivers license. So you assess the individual while looking at data on the whole group.
Same could be said about this broader topic. It’s unfair to lump an entire group together like this. It would be like saying that since most young people don’t vote in elections, we should just disregard that entire block of voters.
It’s always a class war, anything else is a distraction.
economic growth slowing? sounds like an ok situation to me.
Growth is literally destroying the habitable planet, the mindset of growth needs to stop.
Growth slowing is fine when your economic system doesn’t require infinite growth. If we’re looking for shrinkage we need to change economic systems… Which I’m personally all for
Those lazy boomers just don’t wanna work any more, my generation (millenial) has at least two jobs and shares a apt with 6 other people. Or why don’t they just learn to code?
After all, Federal Reserve data shows that while the 56 million Americans over 65 make up just 17% of the population, they hold more than half of America’s wealth — $96.4 trillion.
How is that wealth distributed? What do you wanna bet it’s REALLY skewed towards rich people hoarding like old dragons? What’s the median, not average, wealth of the boomers?
You didn’t read the article…this is covered in a table.
Oh, I stopped before then, thanks for mentioning it!
I see income distribution. Is there wealth distribution? I don’t see it. They’re not the same. they can be pretty disconnected.
Like net worth? Yes.
Here’s an article which includes a chart of median income by age.
https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/median-salary-by-age/#age
Income isn’t the same as wealth though. For extreme wealth, income often isn’t even the biggest factor.
Tax the wealthy more, they won’t lose any quality of life whatsoever, and the money they extorted from their fellow humans gets paid back to support them in their old age.
This isn’t actually a hard problem to solve if you take greed out of the equation.
It’s still going to be a hard problem to solve, even though we should raise taxes on the elites.
When there are more old people in retirement than young people at work, it’s impossible for each old person to get the care they need. This pulls more workers out of other economic functions to help take care of these people which just further exacerbates the supply shortage.
Furthermore, most of our economy is built off ““innovation””, which is typically done by people in their 20s-30s. This generation is going to be limited by this extra work of being care caretakers, and the costs of innovation are going to be higher…
Consider all this, then add Taiwan just voted for independence, so China is likely to be more antagonist towards the west, so costs of simple manufacturing or complex manufacturing of consumer goods are also going to skyrocket
The next 7 years are going to be very interesting
Taiwan didn’t just vote for Independence, they elected the China-skeptical candidate for President. It wasn’t some Brexit-esque national referendum on Independence.
I don’t think it’s correct to assume that the labour market will move into old age care just because more workers will be needed. Personally, there’s no amount of money that you could offer me to get me into that line of work.
As I understand it, there’s already a shortage of workers in that field. Increasing demand might draw more as the money (theoretically) increases, but being short staffed adds even more difficulty to the work, so burnout might be high enough to counteract that.
In short, I think a lot of boomers will suffer as they need care, and it’s possible it’ll also affect younger generations.
You underestimate the stupidity of boomers, they’d rather vote to increase SS taxes for the younger generation than to realize they’ve been Stockholm syndromed their entire life.
In my country, 2030 is foreseen as the year the public retirement plan administration system will collapse due to this.
Dismantling public healthcare is a solution our government is already going for to the detriment of everyone (unfortunately) but public retirement plans cannot be changed retroactively to any extent, they are reducing the highest pensions and blocking the rest of them (inflation will de facto lower even the blocked ones) while at the same time increasing the retirement age progressively but still it isn’t enough.
We’re doomed, no matter how much blood and tears.
What country is that?
I’m ashamed to tell because people will start yelling… but it’s in my bio.
I am on Lemmy so it maybe shows a lot less than it does on other instances or platforms? In any case I can assume that it’s itally based in the “.it”
Cancer and death wiped out my parents’ shit. And apparently several financial crises are all it takes for a small business owner to give up their decades-old life insurance policy to afford food and utilities.
Isn’t it crazy to think that if they had moved to any other modern country, they wouldn’t have lost a dime from cancer.
Fuck when you put it that way.
My dad would have been a boomer. Guy did have the advantage of entering the workforce during a time when it was still not only possible but even normal to expect to hold the same job for decades, but that and a kid who cared about him were about all he ever had to his name. And then he lost the job too.
He fought hard as shit, but with zero legs up and several of them permanently down, he never managed anything resembling the life he (or anyone else) hoped for, and after he died, the palliative nurse told his remaining family he was better off.
Being born in a lucky generation makes it easier, but it doesn’t guarantee one has it easy. It’s not an age group, it’s a behavior. Not that we aren’t already in the Find Out stage, for that to matter. But the fewer people under the impression all the bad people are going to die out, the better.
Ironically I think lots of people who condem the entire Boomer generation as a whole would also understand the term White Privilege and understand that it doesn’t guarantee a better life for everyone in that group.
Perhaps if people saw this as more of a “Boomer Privilege” in that this generation had better odds, but not a guarantee that they would be financially secure.
