Babyboomers: £220,000 in debt

Just "reported" your post anno to make sure those in GNHQ don't miss your excellent suggestion.
Moving more civil service jobs out of london into areas where office jobs are badly needed would be a good thing I think. In a place like Swansea for instance what are the main sources of employment other than tourism/leisure/retail? Health, education, 2 universities and the DVLA.

Thanks, Jess. My blood ran cold when i saw my name and 'reported' at the start of your post! However I then read the rest of it!

Re Anas useful link "Tue 11-Mar-14 11:52:47"

"According to the ILC-UK's research, the average household wealth of the over 50s is £541,000, including private and personal pensions, property, financial assets, valuables and deposit savings. This wealth more than halves by the time the household reaches 80."

Well if that is correct some b****r else has a lot of my share.
These figures have the same problem as the " averaged out" figures of food waste in households.

It it totally misleading to quote such "average" figures. Averaging out such figures does not give any picture of how evenly that money is distributed in the baby boomer generation. There are numbers of the extremely rich whose asset values appear to raise the average asset value of the majority.

The only meaningful figures would be those that that showed how many BBoomers were in each of a range of asset valuation brackets

This nice little graph is shows this better. It is not specifically about baby boomers but it highlights the problem of averaging.

bellacaledonia.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/ons-total-wealth-distribution.png

The wealthiest 10% own 40% of the overall wealth.

averages are so misleading
although the following data is out of date it may recognise that the income of the retired is very varied and single pensioners are not that well-off particularly those over 75.
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pensions/pension-trends/chapter-11--pensioner-income-and-expenditure--2012-edition-/art-pt2012ch11.html#tab-Income

Seasider, I do not know why so many people are worried about immigration when so many job losses have been and are occurring through these 'backdoor' operations! Jobs have been and continue to be out-sourced overseas and jobs continue to be lost in the UK. It is extremely worrying.

Not sure who set up the Intergenerational Foundation, but it seems to have a lot of supporters, presumably in Generation Y, who seem to be resentful of so-called 'baby boomers' and do seem to have a sense of entitlement which I do not believe we had. What many of us had, being brought up in post-war austerity, was an ambition to do better for ourselves, even if that was simple aspirations. When I was very young my ambitions were for a car and a telephone! As I grew up, my ambition was certainly not to get my hands on anything my parents had worked for, the thought never occurred to me.

I do agree about the misleading nature of averages.

However that applies also to the average salary which I believe is around £25,000 and on which calculations are often based. Many people don't earn anywhere near that.

Well if it is an average (as in the "mean" - add them all together and divide by the number of people) then the majority will indeed earn less, because a few people are earning many multiples more than £25k and they drag the average up.

If you take 10 people, one of whom earns £100,000 a year, and nine of whom earn £9,000 a year, the average annual pay of those ten people is £19,000.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

A better figure to use is the median, which gives the central figure in the distribution, rather than the traditional average. With the median we would know that 50% of the population have incomes below a certain figure and 50% above.

I think benefit calculations use average household income rather than average individual incomes. So a family with 2 people both earning £12,500 would have a household income of £25,000.

Looking at the number of people with large annual incomes, only 410,000 earned more than £100,000 and of those only about 120,000 earned more than £200,000. Given that there are over 26 million tax payers, only 1.5% earn over £100,000 there income will have very little effect on overall averages.

Thank you, *Kat, for being so on the ball and securing Angus Hanton fo the web chat. It looks as if he won't have an easy ride - at least, I hope not.

Do you know what? I think we ought to have a Q& A with Flickety B. she knows much more than so many of the mouthy types who sound off in the media.

Well done anno for your excellent suggestion, JessM for passing it on & GNHQ for taking it up. This kind of action makes GN so much more worthwhile.

MiceElf - I agree with you about FlicketyB's post;
But I also think that what she says is known to politicians and media, but they deliberately distort the facts.

Wasn't it David Willetts who set the ball rolling on this anti-generational stance?

Maybe we should be sending a GN 'paper' to No 10 too. The someone can tell us to "Calm down, dearies & best get off to Bingo"

.. or set up a GN Think Tank - we have so many brilliant brains & far more experience than the people in IGF but they'd say that was unfair to the young too.

Gadabout, brilliant suggestions.

Is that the David Willetts MP whose nickname is 'Two Brains' because he is supposedly so clever?

miceElf, thank you kindly! problem is I am/was a business economist and I still have this irritating habit of trying to check facts and look for precise definitions and - as someone once told me - I am deeply subversive.

However re-reading my previous post, my proof reading is appalling and spelling/grammar errors that should have been corrected remain uncorrected.