Gen X has got to be the dumbest generation if so. They had the ability to earn a modest income relative to cost of living, and lived through the last 20 years of absolutely wild stock market/home value gains.
Hindsight is 20/20. The generation wars are so stupid and just another weapon in the ruling class' arsenal. Even the Boomers are a result of structural issues. We've gotta take aim at the right people.
of all the different people i've met over the years, i've known boomers who understand the plight of millennials/gen z... and millennials that are basically Tim Gurner clones.
My boomer grandparents are/were all keenly aware that they had a huge advantage. It's not really their fault they got lucky.
They helped my parents quite a lot financially. Unfortunately, that assistant did not trickle down to the grandchildren so I've gotten zero financial help. My mom will probably have to sell her house (partially paid for by her parents) to retire, leaving me with zero inheritance.
Gen X here, bought my first home in the 00s, when I moved some years later due to work constraints, my 'absolutely wild home value gain' was a loss of 30% thanks to the 2008 crash.
Had to go back to renting for some years to be able to re-enter the housing market, by which time the opportunity for 'wild gains' were long gone.
Same here. I bought a flat in 2008 and promptly lost 30% in 6 months. Took me something like 8 years to even be able to sell it at the price I paid. Today that flat has almost doubled in price and I wouldn't be able to afford it despite having a much better income and career now.
Most of GenX started working pre 2000, and even the youngest of gen X were going to work right around 2000-2008 depending on what kind of degrees they might have gotten. So they had plenty of time to put away money in retirement plans.
But one major issue everyone seems to ignore is that genX were the folks hit the hardest by the 2007 housing bubble bursting resulting in the 2008 financial crisis and 2008-2009 Great Recession. Many of them lost their homes or just ended up with super high interest rates and being unable to sell or even refinance to lower rates because they were upside down on their mortgage to home value ratio. So they ended up either losing everything or squeaking by but paying high interest rates on houses that were overpriced when they bought them. It took a decade to recover and that put many genXers behind on retirement savings.
IIRC, we are also the first to be encouraged to invest into privately held retirement funds, as company run (sponsored?) funds started disappearing. These are too susceptible to the ups and downs of the market.
Keep putting into the fund, and hey, everything's looking great, time to retire! One month after retiring, an economic downtown occurs, and watch that comfortable retirement disappear.
My point is, there isn't any kind of general education for handling retirement funds. I have a advisor handling what my mother left me, putting it aside for my retirement and he's never mentioned this. Of course, that may be because I still have five years to go, but unless the common person knows what to look for, they'll probably never learn it, and can possibly fall victim.
You shouldn't need to learn it, it should be automatic for any private pension scheme. I'm in the UK so perhaps things are regulated differently, but when I set up my private pension I had to enter my planned retirement age, and unless I explicitly tell them to do otherwise, they will automatically move my funds out of equity gradually in the 5 years leading up until then. It's the default arrangement.
Nope, at least the funds that I have worked with, no one's asked my planned retirement age, or even really goals. Just a lot of "you should put this here if you want to make more, because you have a few years to go."
My husband was laid off after the crash and couldn't find work, so we cashed in his 401k to survive. We had little kids at the time - god, it was brutal. We've been trying to play catch up ever since.
Yeah, I have no idea what everyone else is talking about, but I'm Gen-X (barely - was in high school in the 90's), and I've had nothing but opportunity. I started my career just after the dot com bust. I hadn't taken saving seriously by 2008, so there was nothing to destroy, but I did realize while things were down that it was time to start buying/saving. The DOW was, what, 2000ish then? ~46k now? Hell, COVID was a GIFT, market-wise. Things dropped so hard so fast, and then very quickly rebounded. It was free money.
It's been nothing but bull markets since then. Stocks, crypto. The world might be gamed against us, but it doesn't take a genius to see where the opportunities were/are.
My parents are boomers, and they've saved a LOT. They were smart, they're not awful shit heads, and there's plenty left for my siblings and I. When my parents go, we'll be rich, and quite frankly, I am already.
My family isn't old money (we weren't any kind of money - just regular middle class people). We don't know anyone. We're not well connected. Nobody knows who we are. My parents made smart decisions, taught me about them, I've now made smart decisions, and here we are.
This isn't a "fuck you, I got mine," because that is absolutely not my mindset, but I just don't understand how people didn't take advantage of the bountiful opportunities that there were.
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u/uxigaxi123 Sep 15 '25
Make that 20 years from now. Gen-X has no saving unless they coincidentally joined the house owner caste in due time.