Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.
For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”
But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.
She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?
Good post, but we really need to get out of the generational thinking.
I know rich and poor boomers. I know rich and poor millenials, and gen X/Z.
It’s a class struggle. Always has been.
Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.
Yes, there is racism, ageism, sexism. We should debate those things and improve, but we can’t let those things divide us politically.
And since I’m ranting, let me end with a solution. We need to find themes that help all of us.
So perhaps we should say: for example, everyone with less than $1M in wealth gets a $20K tax deduction.
Who could oppose that? It doesn’t benefit home owners vs. renters. It doesn’t benefit students vs. retirees. It doesn’t benefit city dwellers vs. rural. Or white vs. black.
But it does benefit the class who owns nothing and gives them a better chance to own something.
As long as you a) have a robust enforcement mechanism (otherwise it will just be another PPP scenario), and b) offset that tax break with new taxes on the wealthy.
Electoral reform is needed to do away with First Past The Post voting so people can be free to vote outside the two party system with no spoiler effect.
As I said somewhere else, it is not that boomers are rich. It’s just
allmost rich are boomers.TIL Taylor Swift and Elon Musk are boomers.
Replaced all with most.
That’s better.
But most rich people are old, that’s not new.
That’s just how wealth accumulation and inheritance works.
That’s the thing. “It’s a class struggle. Always has been.”