Experts say baby boomers will give more than $50 trillion to their heirs. But for many, health care costs will claim the bulk of that wealth.
The story goes that baby boomers are going to give tens of trillions of dollars to their heirs over the next few decades.
The “generational wealth transfer” has become a media fascination, both for its eye-popping size and because it might help younger generations as they face doubts about their financial security.
That shift is already in the works, and will continue for a couple of decades. According to wealth management firm Cerulli Associates, some $53 trillion will be passed down from boomers to their Gen X, millennial and Gen Z heirs, as well as to charities. That includes both gifts during their lifetimes and inheritances afterward.
But the overwhelming cost of health care for older people means most people in those later generations won’t inherit much, even if their elders seem well-off today.
Well, if Gen X and Millennials wanted their own fortunes they should have planned ahead like boomers and been born back when a house cost $7,500.
/sarcasm
Wait. What if these anonymous crypto whale accounts were created by future us shortly after we discovered time travel? We just don’t know we own them yet!
Watching Married with Children and realizing this dude is working as a store clerk and supporting a family of 5 on that single wage without actually living paycheck to paycheck and then realizing this isn’t a fictional representation of the timeperiod, is really goddamn depresssing.
In less than 40 years the inequality of wealth distribution and the cost of living has changed so drastically that then they could live on one paycheck and now you only get by with a minimum of two.
for those curious but lazy, married with children was started filming in 1987 and supposed to take place in schaumberg illinois, so historically those homes were 4x less expensive than today.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=historical+home+value+Schaumburg+Il+in+1987
That’s because the real wealth transfer has been to the billionaires and close to billionaires.
Nothing will fix that short of a cyclical historic repetition of the French Revolution.
I’m GenX. I’ve spent my entire life watching the Boomers fuck things up, then having to wade through the debris they leave in their wake.
I’m not expecting that to change now.
GenX here as well. My mother died horribly of cancer when I was 13 and my father left about two weeks after her death and I was legally transferred to the State’s custody.
I’ve been told I’m “lucky” in that I’ll never have to shoulder my parent’s debt. So, you other people don’t know how lucky it was to be an orphan! But no really, a finical planner literally indicated to me that, THAT was a positive. And somehow that’s really colored my opinion on where we are as a society.
What do you mean by shoulder your parent’s debt? Do you live somewhere that debts can transfer to children?
Yeah here in Tennessee we have filial laws that puts some of that debt that parents rack up on the backs of the children. TCA § 71-5-115.
Thank you every piece of shit asshole that bucks against the idea of universal healthcare. Fuck you a billion times over. Price gouging out of control capitalist bullshit
That has nothing to do with capitalism. Germany and UK are pretty capitalist (probably more capitalist than US) and yet they either have a functioning private medicine or a completely nationalised one.
Lol “it’s not capitalism, because a nationalized healthcare is capitalism”
The profit motive of capitalist controlled entities is completely capitalism; it’s basically a textbook case of capitalism. Don’t fool yourself by saying the countries with more socialized healthcare are somehow more capitalist to the one that doesn’t.
Germany and the UK are demonstrably less capitalist than the US, both because they are social democracies with large, taxpayer-funded social welfare systems, and because their economies are significantly more regulated by both state policies and widespread labor unions.
Regulations are inefficiencies, because corporations with profit motive will of course make good decisions for everyone
Gen X here. I do not expect any inheritance at all.
And how much of this “fascination” with generational wealth transfer is actually companies salivating over potential profits?
Elder millenial here. I expect no inheritance from my mom or grandparents and no social security. I’m one of the lucky ones though. My dad died ten years ago and left me just enough to make a down payment on a house.
The moral of the story is, give your parents cigarettes and hope the cancer kills them quick before the bills can pile up.
Don’t believe the social security scare tactics. It’s always been a shell game. It isn’t some pile of money that runs out if we don’t pay into it. It is just another line item. Short of voting for it to die, it will be there.
I hope you’re right but we will see. It would really suck to pay into a system your whole life and never get what you were promised.
They summoned a new inheritance tax over here, they sold it to us in the shape of: to get more taxes from the rich.
But those idiots don’t run around giving away money, they hand out businesses and stocks to their family or other assets.
So who are once again ending up paying even more money? Hmm? Yeah that’s right, if my dad manages to have some money left the goddamn tax criminals will gobble that up even though i probably need it to pay for his funeral.
Only 1 in every 500 Americans is affected by the inheritance tax.
Hmm? Yeah that’s right, if my dad manages to have some money left the goddamn tax criminals will gobble that up even though i probably need it to pay for his funeral.
You need more than $5 million to pay for a funeral? Because there won’t be any taxes on the first 5 million.
In the US the threshold is 13 mil before inheritance taxes kick in, so basically never.
The ultrarich still dont pay it here. The con they use is setting up a charity that they dump hundreds of millions into and then give their children outrageous lifetime salaries and full discretion to throw parties/events/travel/etc in the name of the “charity.” Since no one else actually donates, no one cares about how thr money is spent. They kids get the same ultra wealthy life style with none of the downsides, with media accolades and “Charitywashing” rarr rarrs to boot.
Chances are, corporations are already plotting how to get the boomers to spend as much as possible before they pass away.
Shopping network and other 24/7 buy-over-the-phone television programming has already filched billions away from the silent generation by taking advantage of their cognitive decline. They just need to figure out what sticks with the Boomers now.
Same. Everyone I know who has boomer relatives doesn’t expect to get any inheritance. That goes for my wife and I as well. I don’t really mind personally. I’ve made a concerted effort to be self-sufficient and have never banked on getting a dime of inheritance. But I feel like too many in the media are setting a dangerous cultural trend where many people will falsely expect to get money.
