My wife and I are saving so as to help our children onto the property ladder when the time comes. Something our parents are surprised by since they never felt the need. They had been offered 105% mortgages and, even considering the double-digit interest rates of the eighties, have since seen astonishing levels of ‘investment return’ on their homes that both sets were property millionaires by their late forties. Meanwhile we continue to service the mortgage on our long-outgrown terraced house knowing that we literally couldn’t even borrow the money for - let alone afford the repayments of - the standard of housing we were ourselves raised in.
My wife and I are saving so as to improve our children's standards of living. Something our parents are surprised by since they have had cheap credit available for decades. This means they look in with bemusement at the 16- and 18-year-old cars that we drive and our annual holidays to North Wales. Something they never had to worry about with generous company car packages and sizeable disposable incomes. Meanwhile we feel guilty when describing our childhood holidays to Greek islands, on cruise ships, across Italy… to our children who have never left the country.
My wife and I are saving so as to help our children to pay for university - should they wish to go. Something our parents are surprised by because they didn’t have to consider the cost of education. Of course, in their day, they didn’t pay tuition fees and had a grant for their living costs. Meanwhile we continue to service our still-five-figure (each!) student debt nearly 15 years since we graduated.
My wife and I are saving so as to retire by the time we’re 70. Something our parents are surprised by because they were able to comfortably (thank you very much) retire in their fifties on their inheritances, BTL income, and healthy company DB/private pensions with the state pension coming in at 65/66. Meanwhile we continue to throw whatever we can into our own occupational pensions and read regularly that the state pension may be a means-tested benefit by the time we reach pensionable age.
I could go on. But I won’t. While I sometimes feel (when I’m feeling particularly mean-spirited) that if you were born in the 1950s and 1960s - to a family with a modicum of privilege - and are not now a paper millionaire that you must either be a halfwit or a mug… pointing fingers at generations before or after doesn’t really serve any purpose.
For context, we were born in the late 1980s. We are smack-bang-in-the-middle Millennials. We are also in professional occupations that twenty-thirty years ago used to pay a feckload more than they do now. For that matter, we have considerably higher earnings (relative to the national median) than our parents did at the same age. Yet we are privileged. Like any other Brit under the age of 80, we have not experienced war. Like any other Brit under the age of 80, we have grown up in the care of the Welfare State with universal healthcare, secondary education etc.
Edit: One thing we do see among other families our own age is the impact of family financial support. We have not received anything from our sets - having both moved out at 18 - and don’t anticipate receiving any inheritance in later life. But those who receive a ‘hand up’ in adulthood really are at a considerable advantage - no matter the age. I keep coming back round to the notion that this whole ‘generation x have it so easy’ notion is a fallacy.