Lucky for me my parents were both “I didn’t save anything for retirement, my kids will take care of me when I’m older”, so I don’t have to suffer through this.
I was sexually/otherwise abused by my mother for most of my life. When I brought it up to family, I was basically told to shut up about it/“go to therapy.” They spent thousands torturing me in troubled teen facilities, and provided me with nothing for college (which I paid for with multiple jobs and sex work.)
I will never own a house. I spent almost two years after my divorce to just be able to afford an apartment. My family has never valued me - I will not give them the comfort they denied when it is the end. My entire life has been a hell.
You’d be completely wrong.
millennials may miss out
Love how that title makes it sound millennials are somehow to blame
I don’t see that. To me it reads as guilt tripping the parents for wanting to spend the money they themselves earned.
Lucky for me my parents were both “I didn’t save anything for retirement, my kids will take care of me when I’m older”
man I feel that. It’s like raising a teenager.
“don’t do that, it’ll infect your PC.”
“don’t buy from there your card info will be stolen.”
“no, Biden isn’t going to round us up into camps.”
“now we have to call and get you a new debit card.”
“please don’t buy so much junk food…why? because you have diabetes.”
please don’t buy so much junk food…why? because you have diabetes
This one hit too close to home. My mum has diabetes, dad is close to it, I can’t get them to stop eating sweets
I never really considered an inheritance an option. Seems so off-worldly to me, even though I am by no means from a poor family, just lower middle class.
I think the entire concept of inheritance is something more prominent in developing countries like US or India, where there isn’t a well-established safety nets already in place by the government itself.
Of course we have inheritances too, I know a few who got something, but most of it gets taxed away upon receiving or vanishes covering the deceased’s debts, so I’ve never heard anyone I know get anything other than maybe a weekend vacation in the city next over or maybe a small chunk of student debt away.
Then again I’m not very well-off, and I do know there are the upper class families that have a long standing generational wealth passing over to the new generations. I guess it really depends on the circles one’s in.
But I still think it’s not as common here, at least I’ve never considered it to be normal, and I’ve known well people from upper middle class too.
Many people inherit a house or a flat
Unless they’re the sole recipient of a will (doesn’t seem very common), at least here those are almost always liquified and proceeds split according to the will. Doesn’t amount to much usually, though it might be different in countries that have very large and expensive cities.
I am with you I never considered that an option and I don’t want to think about it either. But I do think our parents gets/got a lot (depending on how our grandparents lived) more than we will. My grandparents left house and money and even a vacation house so my parents could put the sould houses and furnitures money into building their own house. My mom even gave me and my sister a bit to use to buy our first apartments. It is still money even tho it is pretty sad way to “earn” money… I assume your friends parents lived in rented apartments if there was not much left.
When my grandparents passed away they left my boomer mother a fully paid off duplex…
Which she immediately reverse mortgaged to fund her retirement because she has nothing.
A house my grandmother designed, and great grandmother financed and built, where 4 generations of my family lived and literally died, will be pissed into the wind when my mother dies.
My dad - who was an amazingly racist conspiracy theorist - gave all his money to 2 redhead women he started fucking after divorcing the woman he married after my mom died.
He chose not to leave me anything because I called him out for using the “n” word any time he talked about African Americans.
I’m out $150k
He is out having a legacy. My kids will never know his name, story, or hate.
Congratulations on being a decent person even though your role model was not. It’s hard to break that cycle.
Well, at least he fathered a decent kid, it seems. I don’t think it was his intention for you to turn out so decent, so I wouldn’t give him credit for that, but I guess he did something right despite all his efforts.
No, some people just raise up to the task.
I hate this idea that parents “did something good” if they are pieces of shit but their kids turn out good. Especially if there is no evidence of it. Why people feel the need to do that is a mystery for me, like protecting the bad guy at any cost.
Oh no, I’m not saying he did good. I’m saying he failed to do bad.
*without
Damn, I wish my parents had an inheritance to waste.
How dare they raise you and then spend their own money?!
What’s infuriating about this? Why the heck should I inherit something I haven’t worked for? I’ve always told my parents and grandparents that dying with an empty bank balance is the ideal way to go. Hell, preferably be in debt.
Inheritance is a stepping stone to get out of poverty over generations. If the next generation can build upon it.
Inheritance from who? Your poor parents?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to pass the product of your entire life to your offspring, surely. We can’t be so atomised. Where do you think it should go? Inheriting an empire is one thing, but why shouldn’t you be able to give your own house to your child? I say this as somebody disowned by their father.
My criticism isn’t aimed at parents who want to leave an inheritance to their kids. It’s directed at those kids who expect it from their parents, as if they’re somehow entitled to it.
It comes from a time where your whole family lived in the same house and the kids eventually take care of their parents. In todays system where people usually dont live with their parents for very long, it doesnt really make sense anymore. People need money long before they get to the age where their parents die. Getting a bunch of money at 30, to establish a life/family, is much more useful and long term impactful than getting it at 50-60. So inheritance is a flawed idea from the start.
Exactly my thoughts too. Life’s meant to be lived. Hoarding assets to save for an uncertain future is counterproductive even in terms of economy at large, if one’s inclined to think that way.
It creates expectations that don’t seem natural, and then leads to disappointments and bitterness when life does not go as planned, as it never will.
But then again, I get wanting to make things better for your children. But at least for me, it seems less prone to pure chance and circumstance if the efforts went into building a more sustainable, inclusive and supportive country to live in. And enjoy the ride while it lasts, since your pain and suffering will reflect on your children, want it or not. If things are tight and you get stressed from that, it’s always going to affect everyone around you, often negatively. If, instead, you could relieve that stress by not saving more than you need as a buffer here and now, or for something like a house (I.e not for some abstract future that might never come, for your children who might not live that far, but are here now, with you), that’s probably going to be much better for everyone. Smiles generate smiles and it’s not a zero-sum game. Life well lived is one with smiles, not one with fragile, ephemeral value of some sort stored away with sweat and blood.
But of course if there’s already too much to use realistically, why not do that then. But that’s an entirely different discussion altogether, if we ever should have something like that.
Edit: there’s a distinction I failed to emphasis enough, between a realistic and very worthwhile buffer of saved value for unexpected situations, which everyone should of course have, and saving for no reason at all, other than just having excess that isn’t needed for anything, to maybe if one’s very lucky pass on down the line.
Saving assets and value isn’t bad. But saving it for no practical reason other than inheritance, takes that value out of circulation and makes everyone in your economy worse off. If that’s important to you. But more importantly, it often means a life less well lived, and often one full of stress, tiredness and one with less time actually spend with your family and close ones in general. Which is enormously more negative in impact than any amount of money in excess, or lack thereof, could ever have when you finally die.
This apparently is a hard pill to swallow for some. They can’t wrap there head around having to work hard to eventually relax and enjoy life.
I want my parents to enjoy the money they worked their entire life for. I believe work is meant to live, and not the contrary where you live to work. I would 10000x rather my parents enjoy the effort they put for their money instead of dying of exhaustion without being able to use their money
Posting this as infuriating seems grossly entitled. Many of us in these younger generations won’t have excess to give to the next generation, why should we feel that is owed to us?
You may be right, but at the same time, you getting an inheritance makes it a lot easier for your kids to get one too some day.
So much this. In my country my parents generation could afford buying a house on two middle class incomes when they were end of 20s early 30s. In my generation that is only possible with generational wealth.
I will never be able to own a home because the cost of a down payment goes up with the market, while my saved money’s value stays constant (goes down with inflation). It is literally impossible for me to save it fast enough, even if I saved $1000, which is half of what I pay in rent, per month.
My grandpa wants to go to space in his lifetime, but doesn’t want to spend everything he’s been saving for my us. I’m like…dude. You worked your ass off all this time. Go to fucking space. I think it’d be badass.
Sure and that’s fine, but then we need to stop as a society assuming that generational wealth is a thing, and that parents will help their children. Parents do not help with down payments like they used to, or with other major life events, and so we need to assume everyone is starting from zero
Well, that really depends on the society. I don’t live in one that makes such assumptions. It feels a little bit entitled to assume something like that, but that could also just be cultural differences between developed and non-developed countries. The former have social security and safety nets, rendering an inheritance less important and much less prominent. Feels like the only inheritance worth even thinking about is if you have millions in excess of what you need for living, and in developed countries that is very much less prominent than in developing countries
How can we be reaching this conclusion, with all the accumulated wealth in the world? How can we be seriously believing everybody should start at zero? I can’t believe what I’m reading here. Generational wealth is absolutely a thing, we inherit everything from the past. As a species, we inherit the wealth of the previous generation. Where are we imagining it goes? Given that it exists, why are we not entitled to benefit from it? There is so much wealth in the global economy, the issue is of distribution.
What on earth are you talking about? Generational wealth is not a binary thing. There are people rich enough to pass their fortune to their kids and then there are ones who can’t. That’s how it has always been and that’s how it’s always going to be.
The big caveat to this is if it is a lot of money. If it more than a few million it should be passed down and someone can live off of interest and some good investments.
I know a guy who technically doesn’t have to work at all because his family has been passing down a huge amount of money though the generations. I guess his great great grandfather struck it rich and now everyone is set. How the fortune is maintained is though legal stuff tied to the money in the form of wills. Basically it prohibits crazy spending and sets rules.
I don’t think what’s talked about enough is kids having the talk with their parents about not being able to take care of them when they get old because you can’t afford to take of yourself and didn’t save anything for retirement. So you hope SSN will be enough for them. I know my mother always asked me if I would take care of her when she got old.
She would say that’s why she had kids. But I had to sit her down and run the math and I said it’s not about if I have the will or not it’s is it possible and the math just doesn’t workout and I have an okay job. I can only imagine what people lower down on the ladder are going through.
There are a lot of boomers that about to get a horrible wake up call and a lot of heartbreak watching our parents suffer at hands of their own making.
They will be drowning and some kids are going to jump in and get pulled under when trying to rescue them and the ones who know they don’t have to proper equipment. Stay out of the water and mourn the loss.
I’m sure there is more to it but telling you she had kids so you can take care of her sounds pretty bad - even though I know it’s not uncommon.
I have had to have this talk with my parents as well since I moved to a different country at 19. I’ve told them to prepare for me not to be able to be around all the time, and luckily they have done that. It still feels selfish after so many years and they have been great about it, so I can understand this conversation being extremely difficult when the parents expect to be taken care of.
My boomer dad: you probably won’t get anything because I’m paying [i.e. using my retirement] to take care of my [100 year old] mother
Me: that’s understandable
I’m relying on my inheritance from my mum to get a house, but that’s mostly from selling her house, I’m sure her actual savings will be quite low by the time that comes around.
Watched my mom work her ass off to raise me and save everything she could for retirement. She got to do some fun things, but not enough. I’m glad she had good insurance and a little money saved for when she got sick. I inherited a house with a mortgage, taxes, insurance, and repairs that are bleeding me dry and I’m pulling money out of my retirement to cover it. I’m thankful that it’s given my son a decent place to live for the last year and i hope to break even when we sell it. I’m fine with that. I didn’t earn it. I didn’t take care of her for money. If you’re only helping your family because you want money, you suck and they’re probably better off without you.
First of all, my parents have never had much if ever at all in the way of savings. Tbh not sure what’s going to happen when they aren’t going to be able to work anymore.
But I’m with you. I absolutely never understood why people ever feel like they are entitled to their parents money. Your parents earned that, not you. If my parents were never able to leave me a dime, I wouldn’t give a shit. Even if they had a million dollars. I didn’t earn that. I have no right to someone else’s money.
I would feel different in scenarios where we are talking about a minor. If a 12 year old becomes orphaned, then yes, they should 100% be entitled to their parents’ funds.
But why in the everliving fuck do people as adults feel entitled to money that is not theirs and they didn’t earn? Incredibly bizarre concept to me.
But I’m with you. I absolutely never understood why people ever feel like they are entitled to their parents money. Your parents earned that, not you.
I think the biggest implication here is that they didn’t earn it entirely. That they at least inherited something from their parents. Which would have given them a leg up and they refuse to pay it forward.
Obviously that’s not the case for everyone. For instance, my entire family was poor as far back as I am aware of. None of them had shit or got shit or were able to have a good retirement. So obviously I don’t expect anything from them.
