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- Hacker News
- 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.
by malfist - They also hold disproportionate wealth. It is absurd to arbitrarily exclude them.by loeg
- 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.
by vinaigrette - Ag, so it’s not really “eat the rich” but “eat the boomers”.
- Read about revolutionaries, they really don’t care who they eat. Be prepared to be involuntarily labeled a boomerby tonymet
- 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).
- >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?
- This is an article about how the 99% will spend all their money and their children will not inherit money. The 1% will not spend all their money. They are not who the article is about.by HWR_14
- 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.
by paulpauper - 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.
by nullorempty - 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.
- don’t think of it as a setback, imagine the opportunityby tonymet
- 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).
by mikestew - > 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.
by rayiner - "my parents are blowing my inheritance". Really? It is their money, not yours. I think you mean, "my parents are spending down their savings."by mae3x
- 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.
by epistasis - 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.by skybrian
- 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?
by citizenpaul - >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.
These are the same people who sold the industrial economy to east asia because pollution, as if we don't all share the same space rock. Inability to think long term or several steps ahead is kind of their thing.
- > 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.
- My in-laws never had the money to save for retirement, so they got suckered into a reverse mortgage in Florida. They saw it as a way to have some spending money in their old age, but now that they've spent it and they're upside down it's a prison. They want to move to another area, closer to family, but they have no equity, and so no means to get a new place.
I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.
by shaftway - Maybe they all got houses when the monthly payments were affordable.by inigyou
- 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...
by alephnerd - One reason is older homes need repairs. Furnaces, roofs, windows, etc. What to do when faced with $20k in repairs? Borrow it.by hasbot
- 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.by bluGill
- > >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.
by Jtsummers - 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.
- Why is it that every time I see the term "baby boomers" used here, it looks like a slur? Is it just ageism or did they do exceptionally terrible things?by hotelsacher
- Siphoning money out of…? Really?
What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else?
The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.
by RickJWagner - 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.
by alephnerd