Stop blaming Pensioners

As someone has said, different times and different expectations. I just let any comments bemoaning the ‘better off’, whether that’s pensioners or any other group, wash over me.

Doodledog

I have to say I don't understand why someone should work 18 hours and get their money made up with credits. It seems a slap in the face to those who put in the hours and do a full time job, but I do think the system encourages people to do it.

Agreed. A flawed system.

Work or don't, but credits for able body non-workers is not a proper answer, imo. I've never worked outside our home, and certainly never expected credits to provide for us and our family.

Jaxjacky

As someone has said, different times and different expectations. I just let any comments bemoaning the ‘better off’, whether that’s pensioners or any other group, wash over me.

Indeed.

No worry one way or other - given time things work out, imo.

Things work put - what over choice is there? But there are resentments. I don't go in for it myself as there is no point, but different generations do have different experiences.

All the same, a rich person will always have a better life than a poor one, whenever they live, and IMO this is what people should focus on - resent the inequality we have now, regardless of whether the people who came before or after you appear to have an easier time of it. Obviously, that's not what the government wants us to do, of course.

I may be mistaken, but I believe it was Cummings' 'nudge unit' which came up with the concept of generational inequality'. People love having someone to blame, so of course it caught on, and his involvement says it all, I think.

Well said Doodledog.

Wow! So well put.
I worked before and after school Saturday in a shop and Sunday paper round. Started work the week after o level exams. Husband started apprenticeship at 16 on a pittance. We saved bought a house and when children came along he worked all hours God sent. I've worked full time since kids at school, fostered for 16 years and not for a wage, that didn't exist then. We did it for love for caring. Worked the last 26 years full time to be told at 60 I wasn't getting my pension or my bus pass. Husband has an autoimmune disease and still works several days a week manually. We had no fancy holidays but our children were well fed dressed clean played with warm and most importantly loved.
Youngsters are at school till 18 then university and a lot have everything they need and expect.
Cut off date for fuel allowance 25th Sept ,guess what my birthdays after that,so once again lose out.
I'm not going to feel guilty when I eventually get the allowance. Watch this space they will probably cancel it before my 67th birthday.
So once again well said

I think the point Doodledog is making is that government policy should address the inequalities in society, and not encourage division based on envy between generations, among other things, in order to divert attention from the government’s inaction.

Ours is a divided society and as long as we all blame each other for our problems the government is off the hook.

Delila

I think the point Doodledog is making is that government policy should address the inequalities in society, and not encourage division based on envy between generations, among other things, in order to divert attention from the government’s inaction.

Ours is a divided society and as long as we all blame each other for our problems the government is off the hook.

I agree. And it's a valid point.

However, there will always be those who pay more interest on homes as rates change, have fewer or more children, receive legacies, attend better uni, etc. What helps level, fairly to all?

As another poster has commented, who will benefit from the super houses that evidently we all live in, as pensioners? Not us, unless we downsize dramatically, pay a staggering amount of tax and costs to do so, and then spend the balance. It will be the generation of complainers who get the proceeds. My current home is worth fifty times the cost of the house we bought when we married - but we have never benefitted from increasing prices, just sold and bought within the current range of house prices at the time.

If I thought for one moment that my DC were complainers, I'd downsize to a small flat, go on a world cruise or three and start choosing a luxurious care home.
Thankfully, they aren't.
But we still might have to spend all our wealth 🤔 on a care home. Who knows what the future holds?

Exactly LovesBach My AS moved back home to live with me and sometimes brings up this subject, which is annoying, I try to change the subject quickly. Must point out next time what you've said, as he will be inheriting from me along with his sister, so he has benefited from the profits of house price rises, through me.

I agree that the complainers (some of them, anyway) have often benefited from the things they accuse 'boomers' of getting unfairly. If their parents/grandparents had a house in a nicer place with a comparatively lower mortgage, this will have freed up money for them to be brought up with a higher standard of living than they would have had in a grotty place with no spare money to take them on holidays abroad, or buy the private tuition that helped them get the exam grades to take them to a 'good' university. Similarly, if their parents were from families which could only afford for them to go to university because it was free, the AC will have benefited from having parents in professional jobs and with a generally positive attitude to education.

They are comparing themselves with 'boomers' at their stage of life, but not taking into account that their parents/grandparents are unlikely to have had as comfortable a childhood as they did, and that it is because of the rise in social mobility in the 60s that their parents/grandparents had grammar schools and were able to get degrees. Would they rather that hadn't happened, and that they had been born into traditional working class families (as most of their parents would have been) with the privations that they will have suffered?

There is a lot of cognitive dissonance, and a lack of the perspective needed to realise that resenting the generation that had an 'easier' time than their own is pointless, as it is largely because of that 'privilege' that they are now comparing themselves against a middle class that they probably would never had joined had their parents (or maybe grandparents) not had those advantages.

Also, those in the 'established' middle class (ie with ancestors who have had professional jobs going back three or more generations) will still be better off than most other groups because of inheritance, contacts and cultural capital.

A simple comparison of house prices against salaries is too simplistic.

The 'intergenerational war' is simply Tory propaganda to divert us from what they haven't been doing to improve the lot of everyone, old and young alike - the NHS, cost of living, energy bills, house prices, lack of Council houses, etc.

Yes, that’s what I was getting at upthread.

The Intergenerational Foundation was set up by co-founders Ashley Seager, Ed Howker, Shiv Malik and Angus Hanton in 2011.
They claim their mission is to promote intergenerational fairness and protect the interests of younger and future generations across all areas of policy

Since they were formed, there seems to be an increase in bitterness between the generations.
Coincidence? Perhaps

But Angus Hanton has come across as someone who resents retired people staying in their empty-nest homes (his own parents' house is worth a couple of million£ but he seems to have no suggestions about where these older people might move to.

Well, I got two official letters on the same day. One from DWP telling me I am getting £500 for Winter Fuel Payment, the other from HRMC telling me I owe them £498 in underpaid tax! Easy come, easy go!

Well we could join all those first time buyers queuing to buy one and two bedroom properties, but I am not sure that would help much - just drive up the price of smaller properties.

What about all those younger single people in family properties? DD currently lives alone in a three bedroomed house. She has always been single so chose to buy and live in a house with three bedrooms.

She is currently looking at a 5 bedroomed 3 storey house. The idea being that the two bedrooms on the living room floor will be come a home office, she works from home a lot, and a craft room. She is an inveterate crafter. Kirsty Allsopp is a mere beginner compared with her.

I do not hear anyone from the Intergenerational Foundation fulminating against younger single people living in family sized accommodation.

Indeed Monica, my first son is married with no children. He is living in his third property having each time upsized. He has just had a large extension built on to this house which has increased the value and the size considerably. He says the best place to keep money is in property. His brother has two houses, one in Surrey to enable him to get to work in London easily when he has to be in town. The other is in a village near to us and is used at weekends, and sometimes school holidays. Both houses have been considerably improved since purchase. Both sons and our daughter benefited, as Doodledog says, by the fact that we were the first generation in our families, to go on to higher education and that we therefore valued education, and expected our children to go on to university themselves. One set of my grandparents were comfortably off, but the other set were very poor. In four generations we have gone from an unskilled railway man (the poor grandad) to a financial director, a barrister, and a doctor. I think that’s what Doodledog is saying.

maddyone my first son is married with no children. He is living in his third property having each time upsized. He has just had a large extension built on to this house which has increased the value and the size considerably. He says the best place to keep money is in property. His brother has two houses, one in Surrey to enable him to get to work in London easily when he has to be in town. The other is in a village near to us and is used at weekends, and sometimes school holidays. Both houses have been considerably improved since purchase.

Agreed. Leveraging savings and assets.

Buying small properties to let is also leveraging assets.

Our children have followed along, doing the same. We've no education only a 'work your socks off ' mentality, not sure how education enters.

It come into it because people compare what they see as like with like. So if their parents were in professional jobs and had bought a house by the age of 35, and they have similar qualifications but are struggling to get promoted and house prices are too high, they blame the previous generation for ‘having it easy’.

What they don’t take into account is that yes, their parents/grandparents probably did have an easier time as graduates were rarer and house prices lower, but also it is to a large extent because of that blip in social mobility that they are graduates themselves and haven’t left school at 15 to do a manual job as a few generations ago they would have done. They are having it easier too. Maybe not easier than the early ‘boomers’ (later ones had comprehensives, mass unemployment and rising inflation when they were young adults) but almost always easier than the generations before. Add in a possible inheritance (which the ‘boomers’ probably didn’t have) and there is little to complain about really.

In 1967 we were spending a weekend visiting my ma in law to be. She was chatting about some tension in a neighbours family rooted in what she called envy. Her words were ‘the trouble with young people is they expect to begin where their parents finish’. Simplistic maybe but I suspect she’d be saying the same thing now. We were newly engaged and never did work out if she included us in her generalisation.

the trouble with young people is they expect to begin where their parents finish

This comment brings to mind a youngish couple I know. Married for about 10 years, two young children. They moved into a brand new detached, four bedroom property with a couple of bathrooms on a very nice development when they married.

To me, this would have been their ‘forever home’, at least until the children had left home.

But no, another prestigious small development has now been built, nor far from where they lived. So they have now bought there, and moved into a 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom property.

This was just before the hike in interest rates, so I hope the extra bedrooms are worth it.

Some years ago when the Intergenerational Foundation brought out its first report on older people living in houses with a lot of unused bedrooms we had a Q&A session on GN with the author, and I asked him for his definition of a bedroom. He said a bedroom was any room someone called a bedroom

And there was his error because many of us use 'bedrooms' for all kinds of other uses. So someone in a three bedroomed family house whose children were grown-up and gone might well use one room as a home gym, craft room, study, yet would still describe the room as a 'bedroom'

As I said up thread, my single daughter wants to buy a 3 storey house described as having 5 bedrooms, but she intends to turn the 2 'bedrooms' on the same floor as the living room into living rooms, so for her it will be come a 3 living roomed, 3 bedroomed house. But were she to sell it the estate agent would again describe it as having 5 bedrooms.

I would add looking round the range of houses being built in our area - and there are thousands of them, we are a high growth area, by far the majority of them are family homes from 3 bed terraces, to vast quantities of 4/5bed detached. It is not family homes we are lacking. It is smaller 1 and 2 bedroomed properties and pushing older people out of big properties to compete with first time buyers for starter properties, is only going to ake that problem worse.

The whole point of buying a home rather than renting one is that when you get older and stop earning you don't have to pay rent. It is security in older age.

That is why younger people take out mortgages too. To expect older people to spend decades paying for a house then hand it over at the end is unreasonable - why would we do that? And is tat what younger people expect they will do in their turn? We have a four bedroom house, and only two of us live here, but we have two adult children who visit and need somewhere to sleep. We hope to have grandchildren too one day, and I imagine they will come with their parents when they visit. How would that work if we had a studio flat?

We don't always use all the bedrooms (see the decluttering thread ) but we definitely utilise all the downstairs space. We have two reception rooms and tend to spend the day in different spaces doing different things, meeting for lunch and both popping in and out of the kitchen. I would hate to have to share daytime space with Mr Dog's music, radio, TV, or have to keep quiet as he is working or reading etc. He would feel the same, and I don't want him interrupting me if I'm busy either.

To get the downstairs space we need a reasonably sized house. Very few 2 bed houses would give us the space we need - it's just the way houses are designed. In the UK it is bedrooms that are used to describe houses - elsewhere it is square metreage, or the number of rooms in general. For some reason in the UK we describe a typical house as a 3 bed semi, when elsewhere in the world it would be marketed as a 7 roomed house with X sq metres. The only type of house that isn't described in terms of number of bedrooms is a 'two up and two down'. Even bungalows where rooms can be used flexibly to suit the needs of the owners are described in terms of the number of bedrooms.

As M0nica says, it's not as though there are unlimited numbers of small properties anyway.