Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood but all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents (with one exception).
All either studied hard in school and went on to get a degree or left school at 18 and apprenticed in a trade or got specific qualifications.
I read so much about declining wealth and how each generation is worse off that I have to assume I’m in a lucky bubble because it’s not the case for me.
None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.
I feel like software has been an outlier here for a decade; the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply (semi-smart people can work hard, learn a technical skill, find a job in their field, pay off their loans, make more than their parents, afford a house, and have a comfortable personal life and relatively fulfilling work life)
Everything I've heard from the rest of the economy is that this model is dead
Fair question, it’s a mix: IT admin, manufacturing project manager, primary school teacher, tree surgeon, mortgage advisor, doctor, something in finance, secondary school teacher, plumber, software developer, power electronics engineer, charity sector project lead
Okay, so a lot of ~£40k a year salaries (outside of medicine and finance) to afford a £400k house when your parents might have had a £20k salary to afford an £80k house? There's a real disparity when you consider what they did too. If your parents are anything like mine, they were in the pub 4 days a week, drinking and eating with friends. I can managed that just a few times a month. Wealth compared to income from my experience is significantly lower by .lost metrics.
Maybe you have an exceptional friend group because .. outside of your anecdata .. the statistically average salaries for many of those professions over large sample sets is below the median in the us and they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly
>they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly
In the US? Real Disposable Personal Income has been growing very consistently over time [1]. The rate of growth did stagnate between 2000 and 2013 but the trend has been remarkably consistent.
it claims that the average person has 50k usd in disposable yearly income - there's no way that's after housing and other non optional expenses have been accounted for.
using this measurement, if wages go up 5% but rent goes up 50%, it would still look as if people have more money to spend than before.
Certain industries now are at a point where they are paid a ton. Jobs like the trades, piloting boats or planes, that sort of thing. Your schedule might look a bit irregular, but the path to say a quarter a million a year is far more realistic today for someone who is a pilot vs someone who takes a white collar job.
That phenomenon was not always apparent. Growing up, I was told specifically to avoid those sorts of jobs and go for white collar, informed by a generation where those sorts of jobs were a lot more dangerous and less compensated. In some companies over the last century we went from say building floors of modestly paid draftsmen and a few highly paid white collar classes managing them to floors of modestly paid white collar people fiddling with excel and a few highly paid certified engineers doing the actual technical work. The dynamic has changed.
It also depends on who your parents are. My parents at my age were poor working class. We had a much smaller house (800 sq ft), used cheap cars, cheaper clothing, etc... My dad spent a lot of time fixing our cars (I don't even try), fixing plumbing issues, and we rarely ate out (and never DoorDash'ed!). I was lucky to get some quarters to go to the local arcade to play Pac Man.
My point -- even being slightly lower middle class now would feel like a good jump over my parents. That's just pointing out that comparisons to parental income is very relative.
"the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply"
Which economy? In the US, healthcare, public schools in some states, and B2B sales come to mind as decent jobs. But I agree with the general sentiment - there do not seem to be great choices that support a nice life. Quite a few of my friend have to work multiple jobs or double shifts to make it work.
Most healthcare jobs don’t pay particularly well. The inefficiency is going to pay the salaries of medical transcriptionists, people handling billing inside insurance and in healthcare facilities etc. Things that aren’t improving outcomes are ultimately why healthcare is expensive in the US.
Just for comparison the minimum wage nationwide in Feb 1, 1968 was 1.60$/hour that’s ~14.61$/hour when adjusted for inflation. Median household income in 1968 was 8,600$ or ~$78,504.90 inflation adjusted and that was mostly single income.
That’s the higher end of medicine, orderlies are making 16$/h. People on ambulances are often making 17$/h. Some nurses make ok money, but starting salary for a school nurse is 20$/h and median school nurse is making 30$/h...
Granted I understand what you mean, but it’s kind of like saying managers make good money while ignoring all the shift managers at fast food joints.
Can we summarize it that 'easy' or 'low skilled' jobs aren't payed better today comparing with the past? Not surprising taking into account demand and population. More worrying is that high-skilled jobs aren't rewording. As for equality.. welcome to USSR, you see how it ended. Now only a few Arabs states have greater inequality.
I wouldn’t call working an ambulance as easy by any metric.
As to inequality, we’ve made this much worse intentionally via things like a tax code that massively favors high income earners. It’s not even that this tradeoff has increased GDP growth or anything the country was growing faster with higher tax rates on corporations and dividends.
Even just theoretically it’s suboptimal because jobs catering to or trying to extract money from high income people don’t lend themselves to automation. Long term everyone rich or poor has been worse off.
> You have no clue about the collapse of the USSR.
I lived through it. We can talk a lot about, but the fact is equality doesn't work. Maximum it gets to is everyone equally poor. And as a result of it there are no startups. You need middle class for this and motivation. Government controlled and own monopolies is also the result of equality. Nobody else has the resources. So commies had to create the economy, few bigger things are easier to manage. Managers aren't interested in risk taking, it's not worth it. Finally everything stalled and fell far behind the rest of the world. There were bright spots, but that's it. Like North Korea today can build missiles and not much else.
Just look around. Probably only Cuba and North Korea are still in true socialism. In both there is a small super-rich class and the rest is, yes, equally poor. Super-rich are pretending to be poor too and invent theories to keep the rest under control. BTW, I'm not sure Cuba still has strong ideology today.
Just as a factual matter I think everyone can agree with these three statements:
The USSR didn’t actually have economic equality.
The US has drastically lower tax rates for capital gains.
Finally, arguing for equal taxation isn’t arguing for equal pay.
As to my actual argument, I’m saying economic growth is slowed through the economic inefficiency resulting from unequal taxation. The point of economics is to make goods and services people want and capitalism achieves this through investments and exchanges of money. But distorting that feedback loop through taxes unequal taxes on individuals or companies is a distortion. Invest in the wrong things and economic growth stalls.
> The USSR didn’t actually have economic equality.
More or less it had. Except for privileged commie bosses everyone poor. "Rich" had cars (!) Having noticeable business was prohibited. Selling own potatoes on flea market, or growing chicken and pigs was fine.
> The US has drastically lower tax rates for capital gains.
In Mass. it's 10% to begin with.
> I’m saying economic growth is slowed through the economic inefficiency resulting from unequal taxation.
Not sure about this. Do you have examples when equal taxation helps?
> Except for privileged commie bosses everyone poor.
By modern standards dirt poor, but by historic standards it becomes more nuanced economically if not socially. Most of the world was just shockingly poor until very recently.
As to equality the economy isn’t just the legal economy. A cop accepts a bribe is making more than a clean cop and greasing the wheels of bureaucracy was really common as was a rather extensive black market fed by production being diverted etc. It’s quite consistent how effectively people learn to leverage what they have to get what they want.
> Do you have examples where equal taxation helps.
You can look at tax rates vs long term GDP growth and see trends but economic growth isn’t clear cut. The best example is cases where tax breaks for the wealthy has been harmful is the UK which is still doing alright but had massive advantages from it’s early industrialization and colonies that it quite effectively squandered.
Why wouldn't the required skill level increase though? I think it's expected that as a society specializes it becomes more and more difficult to get ahead if you're producing goods or services at the lowest level of specialization. With education getting better and technology improving, it's impossible to make rote jobs be economically feasible for anything other than robots.
Yes, you and I are outliers and so are many people here.
Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds.
But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet.
Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either.
As someone in the US that’s bounced in and out of tech, including some longish stints in blue collar jobs, it honestly blows my mind that the tech scene is so all-encompassing that many in it feel like it is representative of… anything else. I’m not talking about the tech libertarian types that think any impediment to the ultra rich vacuuming up everyone else’s wealth is tantamount to dictatorship. I’m talking about the typical happy path developer (I shy away from saying average because all us developers are above-average developers) that went to college for comp sci right after high school pretty quickly secured a junior role for maybe 6x-9x the (ridiculous) Federal Poverty Level.
To be clear: I’m not saying they’re bad people or anything— most people think their experiences are more representative than they are. But, from outside, some of the assumptions software folks make about the world just seem utterly ridiculous. Consider that on average, junior developers make more money than a first year medical resident that has a PhD in perhaps the highest demand field in the US and works shifts of 16-30 hours with many consistently logging 80 hours per week, and occasionally end up working much more. Ask that medical resident what a really bad day, and a really bad week at work looks like for them and ask a developer with the same amount of post-school experience the same question, and then consider how much more school it took… and then ask that same question to an aircraft mechanic, a chef with a culinary degree, a construction worker, a public defender, a commercial fisherman, a firefighter, a nurse… the software industry is more than an aberration — it’s a different planet. The kind of shit I’ve seen developers say they’re going to “pivot to” if the software industry falls apart is, frankly, flabbergasting. If we see the sort of sustained job losses some fear in software, there are going to be a whole lot of people learning some extremely bitter, difficult truths about the world outside.
I’m not saying we all didn’t and don’t work hard to get where we are — it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world. It’s easy to see your own contributions to your success and miss the industry and market scaffolding you could stand on to get what you did.
> it’s just that what developers get vs what’s expected of us and what we had to do to get there is very different than what it is for almost the entire rest of the working world
It's about margins. Software has the 2nd highest margins of any sector (highest is High Finance), so it's easy to pay competitively in software compared to other fields.
Right. There’s obviously a totally valid market-based reason for it, and I am absolutely not implying that developers should receive less of that than they do. However, its an external factor which gives many developers a very skewed understanding of how much work most people expend for the amount of money they receive and agency they get at work, and how much they’re worth as workers outside of the software world with roughly the same amount of ambition and effort. Compared to most industries, software companies coddled developers and really tried to trump up the mystique of the great hacker genius. While particularly apparent in the restaurant industry, developers thinking they’ve ‘solved’ an unrelated business they’ve got no experience in using their genius software brain or assume they can simply transfer their existing skills to a new field is pretty common. I encountered one developer who thought they’d simply pivot to crime to keep their family comfortable, which is hilarious. The beginning of a career in crime is long and full of petty bullshit crimes that pay very little because you don’t have the wisdom to not get caught doing more serious crimes, and you don’t have the network to support you doing things like getting unregistered guns, fencing, etc. What I wouldn’t pay to see that guy walk into a bar in a rough part of town, order a craft beer, and try to debate the sketchiest people he saw about why he’d make a trustworthy partner in crime.
I'm just saying the only reason SWEs (and IBs) get paid the big bucks is primarily because of market economics, even if plenty of other high stress roles (eg. Nursing, EMT, Teaching) get paid a relative pittance.
I think a lot of us members of the tech industry need to cut down on our hubris and respect other industries and jobs, and understand that we are cogs inasmuch as anyone else.
Much more recently to be honest. The bottom only fell in MechE fields (Automotive, Aerospace, Defense) in the 1990s, but if global tensions continue, it might be a good time to be a MechE.
That’s right. Things are changing and it’s going to be a really tough pill to swallow for a lot of people that only think they understand what work looks like for nearly everyone else in the world.
Ask the nurses how much they got for severance when steward health closed. Or what my severance was when I got laid off in 2009 working as a fine dining line cook as a culinary school graduate. Or the career concept artists replaced by AI. Add all three up, throw in 4 bucks, and you can buy yourself a coffee at Starbucks. And all of their salaries were a hell of a lot lower, even in the exact same housing markets. Hell you might be able to add all three up and still be in the neighborhood of junior developer.
The dev world’s baseline for what constitutes good treatment, bad treatment, and fairness from employers, an acceptable amount of disposable income, acceptable housing expenses, etc. is completely detached from the rest of the working world. Now that the demand is dramatically changing, that will probably also dramatically change, and that’s going to be rough. If it does, maybe it will recover. It has before, but this seems like a much more significant change.
I'm a little surprised by this. While I'm better off than my parents I went into a much more highly paying field (software engineer vs teacher/social worker.) If I did a similar job to them I would have no hope of ever affording a similar house to them.
They were part of a generation that benefited from enormous house price appreciation due to a combination of falling interest rates went from almost 15% down to under 5% (this is about 3x on its own) and the fall in house building which drove up prices and rents generally.
This effect is somewhat less pronounced outside of southern England.
You make a good point about higher paying fields in the younger generations. While there is a spread of occupations that I replied to another commenter with you may have hit on something. Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations.
Thinking of one (not me) it’s delivery driver -> enlisted service -> mid level finance (not London)
> Nearly everyone has an occupation in a higher paying field than their parents/grandparents and everyone is dual income whereas, I assume, this was less so in the previous generations.
That is unarguably true of our parents' and grandparents' generations, but I don't think it is as true of people of my age or younger (born in early 1980s.)
There was a huge expansion of higher skilled jobs after the war with large numbers of people moving into the middle classes. For me and everyone I know our mothers (born 1950s) worked. We all grew up in dual income families.
My great-grandfather was a miner. His son, my grandfather enlisted in the forces during the war, seems to have been recognised as being technically apt and worked with radar, became an officer and in the early 1960s left to be a manager at an engineering company.
His daughter, my mum, became a teacher (first in family to go to college) and his son did not go to college but became an IT manager (married a teacher). All of us grandchildren went to university but basically have similar jobs to our parents' generation.
Several of my siblings and cousins own houses but they got help from parents or partners' parents and mostly bought outside the south east. Renting a flat in London as a fairly highly paid IT contractor I had to pay six months up front because my parents didn't earn enough to be guarantors.
Boomers benefited from a ton. Significantly cheaper housing, education, healthcare, childcare, groceries, cars, gas. Even when adjusted for inflation. Employment was significantly easier to get, especially without degrees, and those easier to get jobs paid relatively much more in terms of the ratio of income to cost of living.
I have a very different experience. I did all the right things, more or less, got into a good field with a secure job in the broader tech industry, and indeed I make very good money.
Despite this, I can not afford to buy the house I grew up in; a 3 bedroom SFH with a decent sized yard and a pool, around 1400 square feet, 45 minutes away from downtown without traffic in a hot real estate market. My father was able to purchase this home as a tradesman with 4 kids, being the only parent who worked outside the home.
Same. Though my dad was also a software engineer, but he was just never good at negotiating raises. My wife and I both work and we could maybe swing the price of the house I grew up in, but the mortgage would be roughly the same as our rent now currently.
Similar case for my wife. Her parents bought in 2000 with a combined household salary of less than mine alone. The mortgage would be twice our monthly rent. Fortunately we stand to inherit that house, which sort of proves the article's point.
> None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.
I have a similar sample, all middle class in their 30's. The only ones who have bought houses have been given significant assistance from their parents, now none of them are poor by any stretch, but few have any significant assets.
Well things worked out for you and they have worked out for me as well. For a long time I have this arrogance expressed privately usually to myself or very close people that it is all due to hard work, diligence, thrift that I reached where I am today.
But lately after reading and observing around quite a bit I come to realize due to being ended up in a fast growing sector at least a minimum level of success was guaranteed. I see same thing at my company where a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me and growth was much faster than compare to when I joined in mid 2000s.
They can talk down to me just like I can talk down to more juniors about value of hard work, drive and so on. However, joining a growing sector early was best thing career wise. No amount of hard work will help if one is starting at a middling IT job in middling company in 2025 like I did in 2005.
> a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me
Not refuting your point but there is a selection bias here. You are in contact with people who did in fact achieve VP or higher levels. Lots more also joined the industry 10 or 20 years before you and burned out, failed, hated it, got fired, whatever. The people who succeeded may not be particularly exceptional in terms of talent, brainpower, innovative thinking, etc, (lots was luck, or being in the right place at the right time, surely) but it's also not true that everyone they worked with back then became a big success.
Well, and even the company matters. I was in IT since post-grad school (with a bit of engineering earlier). But with dot-bomb, a company that struggled through and then 2008, I was only in an "OK" position. It was really the period post 2010 that set things up a lot better.
Indeed. For me 2010-11 was when I got a full-time job as compared to contracting (small time) which was big jump for me in terms of job quality and money. Interesting enough I met many people who joined Amazon in same time frame and earning about 50% more than me in straight first job that I earned after with 8-10 years of experience. So yeah company part is important.
I wouldn't even say it was work quality; the job I had for a good period really set me up for my ultimate full-time job and I mostly liked it. But that ultimate job was a public company and even if not FAANG level comp, set me up pretty well and provided the leverage to make investments that were pretty solid during that very good period.
You're not an outlier. If you look at US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, it's higher than ever. If you then look at the median personal income, also adjusted for inflation (i.e. the middle class), you see the same trend.
There's a lot of doom and gloom but it doesn't seem consistent with the data.
There's a weird tendency to zoom in on particular data points that paint a particularly negative story and leave out the rest. For example, we look at housing and will say that its prices outpaced inflation. And that's true, sort of. But it's also completely untrue. For example, if I look at my own situation compared to my parents: I have a 1.5% interest rate on my mortgage, my parents paid 15%. Homes are now about 50-75% bigger than my parents' generation, on average. And the average home is shared by 33% fewer people than my parents' generation. So the cost to rent the money to buy a certain area of home for 1 person, i.e. housing costs, has actually gone down, despite the average price of a house having gone up.
In all fairness I wouldn't want to trade with the average person in past generations.
Romanticizing the past while at the same time having an apocalyptic view of the future, while I don't know if it is a human thing to do, it is certainly a western thing to do.
I think about how much is it worth for me to work remote vs working at the same factory for 40 years like my father. Some people pretend like this is just a given in the modern world and basically worthless. In reality, it is hard to put a price tag on because the difference is so valuable to me. I actually could have been the 4th generation working at a flour mill if I had wanted. Even if the flour mill paid double what it does, my life is so much more grand than what that would have been, it isn't even close.
So you're saying that on average if you can afford to buy a house, it's bigger and better than it used to be, but also that the fraction of people who can afford to do that is stagnating or declining.
My dad migrated to London in the 70s and bought his first property in London around age 26. He didn't have a degree but did get a professional qualification.
I ended up getting a good degree at a top uni and started my career at Amazon but definitely couldn't have amassed the necessary amount for a down payment for a place in London by the time I was 26.
By the time my dad was 35 he had two kids and my mum was a full time mum.
This doesn't sound remotely close to the reality of my numerous banking, lawyer, accountant, engineering and doctor friends.
The only people I know who are remotely close to being able to own a property in London and have only one breadwinner work in hedge funds.
You can't compare London from back then to London today though. In terms of its place among cities around the world, it's a different place now.
There certainly would have been locations where your dad would not have been able to afford property, and conversely there certainly are places where you can afford property.
Point being, things change, but this anecdote doesn't illustrate that you're worse off than a previous generation.
Of my friends only one set lives in London and I have no idea how they afford it, one or both of them must be on silly money and it’s pretty clear most of the money must go into the mortgage. I started my career is a very cheap part of the UK so I sort of have to carve London out of any generalisations I make.
Sure maybe there was some inertia from the benevolent bettering institutions of the New Deal that have given a chance to Americans.
I just think you'd have to be so willfully in denial as to miss the darkness we are descending into. To miss how bitterly the GOP and the wealthy are building empires of lies and bespoke manufactured realities to make up down and left right, to cover for horrible treacherous actions against the possibility of the individual, stacking the deck for empire and inherited wealth. (And Dems are frequently unwilling to bite the donor class that makes winning elections possible, after the courts have obstructed democratic funding reforms.) Are actively opposing the possibility of people doing good for themselves & the world.
I strongly recommend folks go read one of the darkest periods of America, before enough was enough
Adam Hochschild's American Midnight (2022) tells an amazing story of a circa-WW1 state that had radicalized against people, that had been totally overrun by well monied powers. Of Hoover using the full power of the police state to surveil as Ralph Van Demand had done during the Philippines civil war, of of the postal service run by someone using it for information control, of American Defense vigilanism.
Its not a tale of what happened next, how that broke, just a long amazing story of how dark America got, how badly the state was an extension of capital and power, and how deeply it subverted the individual, the union, any attempt for everyday humans to make any claim to life liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
We face today not quite such amassed power, but a completely warped infosphere where these bespoke realities create lifestyle beliefs where people are on board with incredible trains of lies crafting false enemies, supporting the opposite of the signalling they claim. Its different than dark; the world today is overloaded by hell's din, by monsters of abuse, doing their worst to harm us for greed and for the possibility of undoing the good of the world.
In the US, my anecdotes seem to show that things have stayed neutral or declined slightly. It seems harder to get a decent job than our parents. It seems that fewer of us have bought homes, or delayed buying due to financial reasons. Seems like more of us are working multiple jobs too. I think the aggregate measures showed real income only trending up slightly over the past couple generations.
I'm in the same position as you, but I see myself as rather lucky. I worked very hard but I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. And I happened to be interested in a lucrative career path.
> I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship.
That's a typical confirmation bias: you worked hard and got successful, so you're tempted to think that it's because you worked hard. Some don't work hard and get successful, many work hard and don't get successful.
The one thing that you clearly can't rule out is luck. Tell people in Gaza that if they work hard they will end up in a situation similar as yours...
It's related because you said "you can't rule out luck" which is basically casting doubt on the whole idea of hard work having an impact on success. Well, no reasonable person would say hard work guarantees success, or that all success is luck. The truth is luck and serendipity affect all outcomes, but to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes is an insidiously disempowering perspective.
Sorry, to me it looks like a lot of words that say nothing.
Obviously, if you don't do, you don't do.
> to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes
I'm not doing that at all. I am not saying that the effort put into achieving something is worth nothing. What I am saying is that whenever someone is successful, it means that they have been incredibly lucky (and on top of that they worked a lot, maybe). Whenever they compare themselves to someone else who also worked hard but was not successful, the first conclusion to make is that this someone else was not as lucky.
But the first thing that happens when someone gets successful is that they forget how lucky they are, and just start talking about merit. My point is just that whenever you talk about merit, just remember that you were not born in a poor family in a war zone, and that does not make you more deserving.
How can you compare these experiences to a greater upward mobility which does not exist? You don’t have a baseline for comparison. What if you had 2x more leisure time with the same fiscal wealth? What if you had easier access to healthcare?
The argument in your case is you should actually be _much_ better off than you are without this massive wealth transfer.
That’s part of the challenge in the populous understanding this issue. Many people are better off than their parents, but for being the richest country in the world most people should be far better off.
Very anecdotal. You can't just look at yourself and your circle (which is similar to yourself) and extrapolate to the general population. Also most people in HN are in Tech which did well in the last 15-20 years comparing to other fields.
Some of it might be declining costs of everything apart form limited resources (like housing).
Perhaps you generation is better off than their parents were in terms of everything except real estate. But their parents are also better off now than they used to be when they were their age, because everything (except housing) is much cheaper (relatively) than it used to be thanks to optimizations in production and economies of scale of last 5 decades.
> Perhaps my friends and I are outliers, none of us inherited any wealth or were given trust funds or lump sums when hitting adulthood
> all of us are better off than our parents at the same age and their parents are better off than their parents
These are conflicting statements. Your group are all beneficiaries of generational wealth by this description. Maybe it isn’t as overt as a trust fund, but you definitely inherited wealth and opportunity from your parents.
It's hard to understand what you're saying here. Being better off than your parents implies that you are a beneficiary of generational wealth? Connect the dots for us.
OP described a group of families that accrued wealth over 3 generations "without inheriting any wealth". Assuming they weren't orphaned at birth, each generation definitely benefited from the fruits of the previous generation. Even without an overt handout like a trust fund, we still inherit wealth from our ancestors (eg: housing, health care, education, credit, social networks, etc). In this case, the "handout" would have been their upbringing. They feel "the system is working" because of this, but not everyone in the system has an ancestry like this.
So by your definition, anyone who isn't an orphan is a beneficiary of generational wealth? In fact, even orphans are, because they inherited genes, weren't left to die, etc.? I suppose that is a definition, but it doesn't seem like a useful one, especially in the context of this conversation. Or maybe I've just misunderstood you?
Ah, I was wondering too but my reply button was gone, yes I would say we’ll be net > 0 around the same time as you age wise. If we hadn’t had to renovate a 60s property we’d possibly be there already but UK housing stock needs work sadly.
Same here, but we are in a very similar boat in our voyage through socioeconomic statuses (though I'm in Ohio River Valley US). I may be fooled by the discourse that [Xennials/Oregon Trail gen/Gen Y/Elder Millennials], but we supposedly saved more, delayed gratification, planned more, and worked more than even Gen Z (who, don't get me wrong, have it worse because of undercompensation vs purchasing power and sheer hopelessness).
In which case you were able to save a deposit within 6 years of graduating? When i was at that stage my outgoings (rent, food, council tax, car, insurance) were probably 90% of my salary.
Yep. A good friend of mine grew up to a very poor immigrant family, both him and his sister got full rides to good schools because of grades, and at age 30 bought a house in NJ with a very good school with 4 kids after saving non stop and living with his parents and taking care of them.
The system works fine if you don't need nonstop luxuries
It’s really incredible how much people feel entitled to in the us. And by entitled, I mean they spend money on these things because it’s beneath them to think they shouldn’t have said experience or thing.
All either studied hard in school and went on to get a degree or left school at 18 and apprenticed in a trade or got specific qualifications.
I read so much about declining wealth and how each generation is worse off that I have to assume I’m in a lucky bubble because it’s not the case for me.
None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.