Keep in mind these charts are almost useless if you're trying to determine how much the typical millennial or gen x person has compared to boomers.
I'd go as far as to say it's misleading at best to portray "The kids are alright" and that "Gen X and millennial heirs are starting from a position of strength", when the charts used to back that up are based on net worth per capita, a very poor metric to use for this. They might as well say "A small portion of the kids, that happen to be in the top ~10%, are alright".
>baby boomers are sitting on at least $93 trillion in assets
> $36 trillion in baby boomer wealth will pass to Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years after subtracting liabilities, excluding the top 1 percent of households (the outliers in how they spend their wealth)
Why the fuck would you be allowed to include top 1% in first number but not second? They are outliers, yes, so what?
80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see a cent of it. Coupled with AI taking everyone's job, the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots.
That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.
It’s not. If you have older parents today, you can do the math on what activities they’re doing and quickly determine that you’re never going to see a cent from them. My friends all report the same.
I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
"Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described".
This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
> Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain access to enough safe, affordable, and nutritious food to live a healthy life. It means people do not know where their next meal will come from or cannot buy enough healthy food because they lack money or other resources
Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
I think youre confusing "defacto" job loss and "replacement" job loss.
Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability.
Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load.
Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
And that isn't how or why layoffs are happening as someone who has made those calls.
AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”.
You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest.
If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it.
You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment.
It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on.
But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person.
Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers.
Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
This isn't how property tax works in many places (assuming you're talking about supply/demand constraint reasons and not individual property development, e.g. apartment building). There is an overall assessment being raised by the entity (e.g., county), and it is divided pro rata across property owners. In this system, if everyone's property goes up 10x, the amount they pay individually stays exactly the same.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold.
This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
It's similar where I am - a bank and a realtor might say a home is worth .5M but the tax man still assesses it at around 115K.
I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
Curiously, most homeowners, even recent ones, vote against changing that, because nominal value of the tax would go up for everyone, so we have the status quo.
But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax
If the entire city goes up
10x (without corresponding general inflation), you’ll likely find the tax rate goes down because most places tax property to fund government and few places would quickly swell the city budget by 10x.
I was equally stunt, but get this : Visa wants to know how much people are going to spend using their services. This is not a sound socio-economic analysis of the wealth transfer. I think overall few people read this type of report.
Instead, it gives insight on a phenomenon that is expected to be an "event". They show that it's going to be gradual, that it already started. Maybe it is a way to inform potential investors in Visa ? Maybe it is a report intended for the business side customers (i.e. commerces) ? I don't know.
Plus, it gives an interesting insight on how the "_real_" economy is still a topic of research where every discourse seem to be on financial performances. I found it interesting after having a repulsed reaction to what I considered a grossly irrelevant account of socio-economic dynamics of the so called "great wealth transfer" (horrible name), like you.
Despite TFA coming from Visa, of all places, I found it to be a read worthy of my time. Basically, inheritances might not be as large as one might suspect, and the all that "inheritance spending lift" might already be happening (my parents are blowing my inheritance).
I might take issue with the conclusion at the very bottom that GenX and Millenials are ahead of Boomers on a capital per-capita basis. That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable. So it's not like the "kids" are necessarily spending their money on the fabled avocado toast (a dish this Boomer enjoys very much, thank you).
In many places you couldn't even buy "starter houses" like they had anymore. They wouldn't meet modern building codes. When people do manage to buy a house, it will likely be a nicer one.
It may look nicer, and have more features, but it's probably not built any better. Older homes were built with copper plumbing, plaster walls, solid hardwood floors, wood trim, and plywood subfloors, roof deck, and sheathing.
New homes use PVC or PEX pipes, drywall, OSB (basically glued-up wood chips) instead of plywood, laminate floors, and plastic or styrene trim.
The only things really better today are insulation and wiring.
> Also, I've noticed newer houses (2000s-present) are airier and have more natural light compared to older (pre-90s) houses.
This depends a bit more on the specific era of the home, rather than just being pre-90s, but it's particularly present in 1970s housing stock. The energy crisis led to a style of home design that favored small windows (energy efficient windows weren't yet really a thing, or at least not widely available at affordable prices) with lower ceilings. After the energy crisis through the 80s things started opening up again, and then improvements in insulation and windows (for two specific features) and improved efficiency in AC units led to a further opening up of home designs (with larger windows, higher ceilings) through the 90s and to today.
At least in part, that's because the positional status of "many places" has changed dramatically. We have a growing population with a high degree of internal mobility. That means that places don't stay in a fixed position on the product lineup. Santa Clara County today isn't Santa Clara County in 1990. It's more akin to what Beverly Hills or the Gold Coast were in 1990.
It is a very good read. And my only difference in option is that I think Visa of all places would be very knowledgeable about spending and where it all goes.
They have an absolutely vast amount of information about how money flows in the economy, and an interest in finding out where it will flow in the future, and when.
> That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable.
I think my fellow millennials are overlooking something in our complaints about housing prices, which is that the positional status of neighborhoods doesn't stay constant. There's a good chance that the neighborhood you fondly remember growing up in was much less desirable in relative terms than it is today.
My wife and I, for example, bought a house 10 years ago. In that time, the value has easily doubled, growing far faster than wages or inflation. But it's also a completely different product today. 10 years ago, we were young parents willing to make a lot of compromises to get a house on the water. Pre-COVID, the commute was 1:15 minutes each way, 5 days a week. The house next door was a tear-down with a tree growing in the living room. The other houses on the street were small cottages from the 1920s. Today, half of them have been torn down, rebuilt, and filled with more affluent neighbors.
If my kids grow up and say, "I have a professional job, why can't I afford a house like you guys did?" A big part of the answer is: we couldn't have afforded to live in their neighborhood at your age. We bought our house in a completely different neighborhood.
When certain people are convinced that all wealth and success are only achieved through exploitation, then it's easy to lack empathy and consideration for anyone more wealthy or successful than them.
What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.
>plant to do a Skip gen trip?
I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there. Thats how you can tell what social class you were born into.
I had a school friend whom's grandparents were one of these in the list it seems. The bought him a 3bed/bath house in the suburbs. He proceeded to do coke for the next 10 years and be a burnout,.but all good because he still has a nice house to live in while being a detriment to society. Yeah I'm bitter so what?
> I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there
It's defined in the paragraph above the image you misquoted:
> Skip-generation trips, where grandparents travel with grandchildren without their parents, are a clear example of how the wealth transfer is not just about money. These trips turn wealth into time together, shared memories and a way to pass down values across generations.
I've seen a lot of people do can put refinances instead of paying the house off. I recall one friend looked at the deed on the new house he bought (10 years ago) for 250k. The previous sale was for 90k, but we could see every refinance over the years, they owed 235k when it was sold. Probably lived a nice life in between with nice vacations but no savings.
> What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage?
If you have a low-interest mortgage then it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off any faster than you have to. I know many people that carry a mortgage they could easily pay down but choose not to purely on financial optimization grounds.
Yes as long as you actually invest the money you would otherwise be using to pay down the mortgage into something that has a higher return than the mortgage is costing you. This isn't difficult to do, but a lot of people don't do that, they just spend the money.
My parents are not boomers (they're Gen X), but kept their marginal mortgage because the capital they would have used to fully pay off the mortgage could be better deployed in a mixture of investments.
A lot of households have done something similar.
Additionally, not all households bought their first house in their 20s - plenty of households did so in their 30s and 40s.
> They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere
And during that era, you had double digit interest rates [0]
Gen X and millennials are ahead of boomers on per capita wealth at the same age
This runs counter to the popular media narrative of poor millennials, but it makes sense. Millennials rose a tailwind of surging stock prices since the '09 bottom, fat white-collar salaries (such as in tech, consulting, finance), and surging home pries, buoyed by cheap mortgages from 2010-2022 thanks to 14 years of near-zero interest rates.
Even when taking into account student loan debt, white-collar workers still earn much more compared to in the 70s-early 2000s. 6 figure salaries for white-collar jobs were uncommon even in the early 2000s whereas they are commonplace today.
$100k is and was a historically high salary, especially when millennials were entering the job market (~1999-2018). Inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars, that's $132-200k. Median adult full-time income is $60-72k.
I think every generation would self-report that they had it pretty tough.
I remember my (Boomer) school teacher parents sitting at the kitchen table with an LED calculator adding up their bills and making sure they could make ends meet or getting blocks of government cheese for some reason (that made great grilled cheese, BTW).
Was it 10% easier for them than Millennials? Maybe. Was it 50% or 100% easier? I don’t think so.
Everything that can be done is being done to ensure that white-collar labor transitions from skilled workers to low-cost fungible operators of AI. Even if no further jobs are lost it will be a massive hit to the average salary.
Why do you think it will be low cost operation rather than highly paid specialized talent (but only very few of them)?
If AI becomes a widespread job displacer, I think we’re going to see an amplification of the value of talent. If you think there’s 2x or 10x talent now, you might find there’s 10x or 50x talent with AI.
I think it's reasonable to expect amplification but I am not sure how reasonable it would be to expect sustainable amplification. I feel that AI removes the meaning from work and with that gone we eventually start loosing the talent.
Keep in mind these charts are almost useless if you're trying to determine how much the typical millennial or gen x person has compared to boomers.
I'd go as far as to say it's misleading at best to portray "The kids are alright" and that "Gen X and millennial heirs are starting from a position of strength", when the charts used to back that up are based on net worth per capita, a very poor metric to use for this. They might as well say "A small portion of the kids, that happen to be in the top ~10%, are alright".
>baby boomers are sitting on at least $93 trillion in assets
> $36 trillion in baby boomer wealth will pass to Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years after subtracting liabilities, excluding the top 1 percent of households (the outliers in how they spend their wealth)
Why the fuck would you be allowed to include top 1% in first number but not second? They are outliers, yes, so what?
80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see a cent of it. Coupled with AI taking everyone's job, the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots.
Isn't that already happening and has happened? This news is a decade late. Last decade we could've said "in the next few years"
That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.
Bold assessment.
It’s not. If you have older parents today, you can do the math on what activities they’re doing and quickly determine that you’re never going to see a cent from them. My friends all report the same.
I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described.
And there's a reason why trust and wealth planning has becoming increasingly common.
And while I am optimistic about AI's capabilities and am by no means an AI Luddite, assuming AI will take all jobs in the near future is ludicrous.
"Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described".
This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
We do not have tens of millions of hungry people unless you're including being a bit peckish before lunch time.
USDA says that 13.7% of US households experienced food insecurity in 2024 [0]. Extrapolate that against population and you get 47 million people.
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
EDIT since I can't reply to irish-coffee for some reason: nobody said literally starving, OP said experiencing hunger or deprivation.
> Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain access to enough safe, affordable, and nutritious food to live a healthy life. It means people do not know where their next meal will come from or cannot buy enough healthy food because they lack money or other resources
Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
I think youre confusing "defacto" job loss and "replacement" job loss.
Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability.
Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load.
Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
And that isn't how or why layoffs are happening as someone who has made those calls.
AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
[dead]
> siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises)
This has been happening for a while already.
> the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is mostly where we are already.
Agree that before the boomers can pass money to their children, our corporate overlords will find a way to hoover that money into their vaults.
Don't think AI will take everyone's job and is actually orthogonal to this entire issue.
[dead]
not wrong
I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”.
You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest.
If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it.
You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment.
It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on.
But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person.
Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers.
Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
This isn't how property tax works in many places (assuming you're talking about supply/demand constraint reasons and not individual property development, e.g. apartment building). There is an overall assessment being raised by the entity (e.g., county), and it is divided pro rata across property owners. In this system, if everyone's property goes up 10x, the amount they pay individually stays exactly the same.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold.
This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
It's similar where I am - a bank and a realtor might say a home is worth .5M but the tax man still assesses it at around 115K.
I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
Curiously, most homeowners, even recent ones, vote against changing that, because nominal value of the tax would go up for everyone, so we have the status quo.
But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax
If the entire city goes up 10x (without corresponding general inflation), you’ll likely find the tax rate goes down because most places tax property to fund government and few places would quickly swell the city budget by 10x.
> I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening.
It would have if they had paid off their mortgages instead of borrowing against equity, refinancing and taking equity out, etc.
If you still owe 70-80% of your house to the bank when you retire, it's not really an asset.
This whole premise is bullshit.
They include the 1% in the wealth calculation, and then exclude it from the wealth transfer to say "see how much taxation is happening?"
If you don't want to include the 1% in the second number, don't include it in the first number.
I was equally stunt, but get this : Visa wants to know how much people are going to spend using their services. This is not a sound socio-economic analysis of the wealth transfer. I think overall few people read this type of report.
Instead, it gives insight on a phenomenon that is expected to be an "event". They show that it's going to be gradual, that it already started. Maybe it is a way to inform potential investors in Visa ? Maybe it is a report intended for the business side customers (i.e. commerces) ? I don't know.
Plus, it gives an interesting insight on how the "_real_" economy is still a topic of research where every discourse seem to be on financial performances. I found it interesting after having a repulsed reaction to what I considered a grossly irrelevant account of socio-economic dynamics of the so called "great wealth transfer" (horrible name), like you.
They also hold disproportionate wealth. It is absurd to arbitrarily exclude them.
Despite TFA coming from Visa, of all places, I found it to be a read worthy of my time. Basically, inheritances might not be as large as one might suspect, and the all that "inheritance spending lift" might already be happening (my parents are blowing my inheritance).
I might take issue with the conclusion at the very bottom that GenX and Millenials are ahead of Boomers on a capital per-capita basis. That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable. So it's not like the "kids" are necessarily spending their money on the fabled avocado toast (a dish this Boomer enjoys very much, thank you).
In many places you couldn't even buy "starter houses" like they had anymore. They wouldn't meet modern building codes. When people do manage to buy a house, it will likely be a nicer one.
It may look nicer, and have more features, but it's probably not built any better. Older homes were built with copper plumbing, plaster walls, solid hardwood floors, wood trim, and plywood subfloors, roof deck, and sheathing.
New homes use PVC or PEX pipes, drywall, OSB (basically glued-up wood chips) instead of plywood, laminate floors, and plastic or styrene trim.
The only things really better today are insulation and wiring.
The new building methods and materials are genuinely better.
(Criticizing OSB and glazing plywood is crazy. They're both just composite wood products. OSB is totally fine for what it's used for.)
In California, a big difference is earthquake retrofitting. Older houses often aren't retrofit until sale, and retrofitting is expensive.
Also, I've noticed newer houses (2000s-present) are airier and have more natural light compared to older (pre-90s) houses.
> Also, I've noticed newer houses (2000s-present) are airier and have more natural light compared to older (pre-90s) houses.
This depends a bit more on the specific era of the home, rather than just being pre-90s, but it's particularly present in 1970s housing stock. The energy crisis led to a style of home design that favored small windows (energy efficient windows weren't yet really a thing, or at least not widely available at affordable prices) with lower ceilings. After the energy crisis through the 80s things started opening up again, and then improvements in insulation and windows (for two specific features) and improved efficiency in AC units led to a further opening up of home designs (with larger windows, higher ceilings) through the 90s and to today.
Yeah, go back to 1950s or earlier and you are into the pre-AC era, houses had big windows, big covered porches, and higher ceilings.
Newer CA homes also tend to do better in fires.
At least in part, that's because the positional status of "many places" has changed dramatically. We have a growing population with a high degree of internal mobility. That means that places don't stay in a fixed position on the product lineup. Santa Clara County today isn't Santa Clara County in 1990. It's more akin to what Beverly Hills or the Gold Coast were in 1990.
It is a very good read. And my only difference in option is that I think Visa of all places would be very knowledgeable about spending and where it all goes.
They have an absolutely vast amount of information about how money flows in the economy, and an interest in finding out where it will flow in the future, and when.
They have the data but I wouldn't trust their analysis of it unless they release all the raw data which would be to the benefit of their competitors.
> That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable.
I think my fellow millennials are overlooking something in our complaints about housing prices, which is that the positional status of neighborhoods doesn't stay constant. There's a good chance that the neighborhood you fondly remember growing up in was much less desirable in relative terms than it is today.
My wife and I, for example, bought a house 10 years ago. In that time, the value has easily doubled, growing far faster than wages or inflation. But it's also a completely different product today. 10 years ago, we were young parents willing to make a lot of compromises to get a house on the water. Pre-COVID, the commute was 1:15 minutes each way, 5 days a week. The house next door was a tear-down with a tree growing in the living room. The other houses on the street were small cottages from the 1920s. Today, half of them have been torn down, rebuilt, and filled with more affluent neighbors.
If my kids grow up and say, "I have a professional job, why can't I afford a house like you guys did?" A big part of the answer is: we couldn't have afforded to live in their neighborhood at your age. We bought our house in a completely different neighborhood.
"my parents are blowing my inheritance". Really? It is their money, not yours. I think you mean, "my parents are spending down their savings."
I meant when I wrote. I just might not have meant it as seriously as you seem to think.
I read that as an observation rather than commentary on who the money belongs to.
don’t think of it as a setback, imagine the opportunity
Ag, so it’s not really “eat the rich” but “eat the boomers”.
The article says the exact opposite.
Wealth isn't with boomers: it is with rich boomers, pointing the high mortgage and debt that a lot of boomers have.
And they explain that the wealth is going to stay and be kept by these rich families (which will invest and not spend).
Read about revolutionaries, they really don’t care who they eat. Be prepared to be involuntarily labeled a boomer
When certain people are convinced that all wealth and success are only achieved through exploitation, then it's easy to lack empathy and consideration for anyone more wealthy or successful than them.
it only takes a concerted group to convince the rest (I'm talking about history not virtue).
What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.
>plant to do a Skip gen trip?
I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there. Thats how you can tell what social class you were born into.
I had a school friend whom's grandparents were one of these in the list it seems. The bought him a 3bed/bath house in the suburbs. He proceeded to do coke for the next 10 years and be a burnout,.but all good because he still has a nice house to live in while being a detriment to society. Yeah I'm bitter so what?
> >plant to do a Skip gen trip?
> I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there
It's defined in the paragraph above the image you misquoted:
> Skip-generation trips, where grandparents travel with grandchildren without their parents, are a clear example of how the wealth transfer is not just about money. These trips turn wealth into time together, shared memories and a way to pass down values across generations.
I've seen a lot of people do can put refinances instead of paying the house off. I recall one friend looked at the deed on the new house he bought (10 years ago) for 250k. The previous sale was for 90k, but we could see every refinance over the years, they owed 235k when it was sold. Probably lived a nice life in between with nice vacations but no savings.
One reason is older homes need repairs. Furnaces, roofs, windows, etc. What to do when faced with $20k in repairs? Borrow it.
Maybe they all got houses when the monthly payments were affordable.
> What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage?
If you have a low-interest mortgage then it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off any faster than you have to. I know many people that carry a mortgage they could easily pay down but choose not to purely on financial optimization grounds.
Yes as long as you actually invest the money you would otherwise be using to pay down the mortgage into something that has a higher return than the mortgage is costing you. This isn't difficult to do, but a lot of people don't do that, they just spend the money.
My parents are not boomers (they're Gen X), but kept their marginal mortgage because the capital they would have used to fully pay off the mortgage could be better deployed in a mixture of investments.
A lot of households have done something similar.
Additionally, not all households bought their first house in their 20s - plenty of households did so in their 30s and 40s.
> They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere
And during that era, you had double digit interest rates [0]
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338105/volcker-shock-in...
Gen X and millennials are ahead of boomers on per capita wealth at the same age
This runs counter to the popular media narrative of poor millennials, but it makes sense. Millennials rose a tailwind of surging stock prices since the '09 bottom, fat white-collar salaries (such as in tech, consulting, finance), and surging home pries, buoyed by cheap mortgages from 2010-2022 thanks to 14 years of near-zero interest rates.
Even when taking into account student loan debt, white-collar workers still earn much more compared to in the 70s-early 2000s. 6 figure salaries for white-collar jobs were uncommon even in the early 2000s whereas they are commonplace today.
Let's not assume that 6 figure salary is close to 999,999. In reality it's closer to 100,001.
And when you factor in inflation and increased housing cost the comparison starts to differ greatly.
Millennials have it pretty tough.
$100k is and was a historically high salary, especially when millennials were entering the job market (~1999-2018). Inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars, that's $132-200k. Median adult full-time income is $60-72k.
I think every generation would self-report that they had it pretty tough.
I remember my (Boomer) school teacher parents sitting at the kitchen table with an LED calculator adding up their bills and making sure they could make ends meet or getting blocks of government cheese for some reason (that made great grilled cheese, BTW).
Was it 10% easier for them than Millennials? Maybe. Was it 50% or 100% easier? I don’t think so.
Everything that can be done is being done to ensure that white-collar labor transitions from skilled workers to low-cost fungible operators of AI. Even if no further jobs are lost it will be a massive hit to the average salary.
Why do you think it will be low cost operation rather than highly paid specialized talent (but only very few of them)?
If AI becomes a widespread job displacer, I think we’re going to see an amplification of the value of talent. If you think there’s 2x or 10x talent now, you might find there’s 10x or 50x talent with AI.
I think it's reasonable to expect amplification but I am not sure how reasonable it would be to expect sustainable amplification. I feel that AI removes the meaning from work and with that gone we eventually start loosing the talent.
And 0 talent by 10 ( or even 50 ) is a fucking 0!
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