For millennials, financial security feels like a fairytale. What will the next 40 years look like?
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?
The next forty years will look like absolute hell and the lack of proper services for the explosive number of diseases in the millennial cohort will directly contribute.
Milliennials by and large don't have enough money to retire, and they are experiencing in striking numbers high rates of immunodeficiency and cancers. (I was personally diagnosed with cancer at 42. You know, the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything...) This will mean they will need more elder care and sooner... and they won't really be able to afford it.
No Child Left Behind has properly fucked US education for the foreseeable future, and US education was abysmal before that already. The elderly are going to be being taken care of by adults who may be functionally illiterate and when you're functionally illiterate, you can become anti-vax even if you got hired as caretaker for the elderly. (Not all will grow up to be functionally illiterate, but if we're to take teachers at their word, the gap between the struggling kids and the smart kids is wider than ever. As in C students functionally don't exist, only A students and F students, and the F students are the larger group who are being passed on to higher grades just to hit numbers.)
On top of education being gutted and there being a dangerous future of incapable people being put in these jobs because there's no one else to do them: The collapse in birth rate because nobody can afford to have fucking kids will also make this problem worse as fewer and fewer workers will be available to take care of more and more elderly and infirm people.
Most of the places that take care of the elderly are being bought up at rapid pace by investment groups, private equity, hedge funds, and the like, and all they do is cut services, make things worse, and cause more suffering and death so they can wring more money out of people suffering at the end of their lives. How many of these businesses will even still exist in 20 years? Many of them are shutting down constantly because the numbers just don't add up, or because the private equity group that bought it has finished hollowing it out and there's simply no money left.
Because of all of this, we will see an absolute explosion of homelessness in the elderly.
You can bet your ass fuck-nothing will be done to prevent any of this. Especially if Trump wins in November, then we're dealing with this process outright accelerating at a breakneck pace.
Oh and just for "fun" we can expect to see a lot more police violence against poverty-striken old people. "STOP RESISTING OLD MAN!"
EDIT: Oh yeah, and that's not even counting climate change, finite amounts of topsoil left, potential pandemics, and the fact that most of the world doesn't even have access to clean water. I try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.
EDIT II: Get involved in Mutual Aid Groups. We all have skills. No one is coming to save us. No government or political party or corporation. We have to save each other, and that will be very difficult to achieve. I forget the writer, but she said something like "No dictator is ever going to bring about the revolution. It will always have to come from the bottom organizing together." The only thing we can do is help one another. It will not be easy or fair or entirely successful.
Solid points all around, but I wanted to add one historical tidbit: at one point the USA had literally the best edumacashiun in the world. After WWII, the other nations (like the UK + those in the EU) were bombed all to hell & back whereas the USA was relatively fine. People like Bill Gates advocated strongly for US education funding, b/c it helped feed that behemoth giant of a corporation to have an already-educated workforce, funded by US tax dollars, that they could take advantage of.
We have fallen FAR down the world rankings since then. Tbf, some of that may reflect changes in measurements e.g. does "every" kid need one, or can some be excused to go be a farmhand without needing to finish? (this affects averaged measurements, but not peak ones, or the previously thus-filtered ones)
People like Bill Gates advocated strongly for US education funding, b/c it helped feed that behemoth giant of a corporation to have an already-educated workforce, funded by US tax dollars, that they could take advantage of.
Sounds like bill gates just wanted to steal more surplus labor value from his workers.
try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.
I am just sitting here as a infrastructure guy trying not to have a mental break of crying and laughing. It's so fucking bad and getting so much worse. You know what was today's item? I am working on one small system for a replacement wastewater treatment plant for a town of about 3,000 people that the pieces of shit general contractor has dragged out for 8 fucking years. 8 years for a project that should have taken 6 months. They haven't done any work. Longer it goes on the more they get to bill. Oh and my favorite part? The general contractor is one of the bigger ones, they have a Wikipedia page.
Cost disease is going to break us. Entire country is going to be spending a trillion a year with the water supply of Flint.
Now if you excuse me I am going to drink now. Cause fuck it I can't save anyone.
You've done your best. It's definitely not personally your job to save anyone anyway. If we can't figure out how to do it collectively, well, maybe we just suck as a species. Thanks for doing what you could and can and don't bemoan yourself for your inability to fight a broken system on your own. I don't expect engineers and scientists and doctors who have been telling us this shit needs to be done for years to have any fucking patience for it anymore. You've all done your bit.
Also, thanks because I've just been assuming as much has been going on behind the scenes for a long time. I've been saying for years the entire nation gave up on any idea of long-term maintenance of anything in the 90's. We've had failing infrastructure grades for bridges all over the country since at least 2010, if not earlier, and fuck-all has been done. I'm not even close to being an engineer, but I've helped some friends with some basic construction and I'm just floored at how many corners are cut on so many things in our country. It's prevalent everywhere, it's part of why there's so many data breaches in the tech sector. They don't want to pay to update old systems to bring them up to compliance. We've literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it's not all just in my head.
Are lawyers involved? You should sue to get it for free, not to pay more, because contracts like that usually put a penalty on the supplier if they break their promises
I appreciate your efforts, but we as a nation were not guaranteed to make it. It was up to us to make it, and we failed ourselves by devolving into petty tribalism between two 1% owned political parties.
I at first I expected you to work in IT infrastructure specifically, but sewage? When sewage can't keep shit together - nothing in country can keep shit together. USSA is slowly turning from worse than Russia in some areas to worse than Russia in all areas.
What do you mean somehow? Cyberpunk as a genre has always been a vision of a future of unchecked corporate power, it only became prescient because Americans gave corporations unchecked power.
This is kind of where I'm at. I don't imagine any amount of cash in a bank account is going to prepare us for what's to come. Even if you could put money aside, the money you typically put towards retirement might just be better off towards becoming a doomsday prepper. Probably wouldn't save you either way, but it may buy you a little time that you wouldn't have otherwise.
Like others have said, I imagine my "retirement" as bearing witness to the collapse of modern society and ultimately dying in some lousy brawl with other desperate refugees, or by some untreated bacterial infection.
I just know that my death will be something dumb in the coming collapse, like stubbing my toe and dying to infection when there is no remaining, effective antibiotics on our superheated hellhole.
If the orange man wins, America is over and none of your concerns will matter as we slip into a fascist dystopia. That is an existential threat we have to deal with right now, and it can actually be prevented.
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.
The word "think" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there... plus how many conservative voters these days even have college degrees? The TV (or radio) man says to vote one way, so they do, end of the matter as far as they are concerned. (extraordinarily sadly, no /s on this one)
Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.
That's difficult when a lot of the news media is owned by *checks notes.... the Capital class... and they have vested interest in keeping the conversation about a generational battle.
But yes, 100% agreed. The problem is we're all commenting on news articles that will never stop presenting it that way.
Someone else could write news then? People started doing that on YouTube - e.g. CPG Grey, Ian Danskin/Innuendo Studios, Hank & John Green, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Kurzgesagt, etc. It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.
If we do not value i.e. take care of things, we will lose them. In this case - and here I will use a generational term, b/c it refers to the only people in charge at the time it occurred - the Boomer (+ Great) generations chose this for the legacy of everyone who came after. Which is only the history of how we came to be here, but it is our choice to continue forward this way.
I think you know who... there is one class that seems to go FAR out of their way to control the conversation to the end of "there is no class struggle" (or even "there is no such thing as class"?).
So perhaps we should say: for example, everyone with less than $1M in wealth gets a $20K tax deduction.
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.
My wife has a job with an awesome pension and as a result there is basically no situation she will ever leave. I pointed out to her that the golden handcuffs are still golden.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don't want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother's corpse to get it.
What am I saying? MBAs learning? Hahaha I love being silly.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don't want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother's corpse to get it.
Plus, modern MBAs see turnover as a good things because it makes the short-term investors happy.
Unfortunately, living in the US, I would not take a job with a pension because the (private) pension system cannot be trusted. I remember the 00s when many company pension accounts went bankrupt, because companies were no longer offering it as a benefit and it was easy enough to screw over retired past employees. Companies would take poorly performing divisions and their pension plans, spin them off as a new company that would quickly file for bankruptcy.
I would not trust a pension without it being insured by an organization like the FDIC. Even then, I would be afraid that my pension would not cover living costs due to inflation.
Luckily there are alternatives. I have a 401k, which should give me a steady flow of inflation proof dividends… until a market downturn wipes it out. If that happens, I can fall back to Social Security. Don't believe the baloney that the government will ever let Social Security go bankrupt. They will just cut down benefits.
I don't deny things like that happened. You heard about them right? So did I. But that's the thing, these are the stories you heard. It's man bites dog, it is observation bias.
Also her pension is insured. And I am pretty sure the bankruptcy thing you mentioned was one particular case with a car part maker.
It doesn't matter if any specific MBA learns a lesson. Some other douche canoe will swing by and have their single brain cell fire off just this one time and they'll start hacking away at the pensions to make Q3 look better.
I'm a late gen-Xer (born in '80, so I'm more of a "Xennial"). I have a stable job, pension, matching 401k, no kids, no debt (paid off my car and student loans), make 6 figures, and I am STILL convinced that I will never be able to retire. I feel horrible for all those who are in a worse financial situation than me, but we are all really fucked in the next 20 years.
I have a stable job, pension, matching 401k, no kids, no debt (paid off my car and student loans), make 6 figures, and I am STILL convinced that I will never be able to retire.
If this is your reality, there's more wrong with your expectations than your situation.
Social Security is set to run out in the 2030s, and I fully expect the stock market to crash, effectively wiping out my 401k. As others have mentioned, resources like water will start to become scarce, inciting instability.
Am millennial… xenniel or “elder millennial to be exact… I have completely given up on ever owning a home or being able to retire. Short of some major acts of public disruption at unprecedented, economy-toppling, billionaire-eating scale, my entire generation - and those after us - are fucked.
And yet we act like boiled frogs, each generation making fun of the prior one for expecting things to be better than they are. Gen z is so used to things being like shit that they think that all older generations are entitled fuckers And that we should get used to everything being worse because Right now it’s the best they’ve ever known.
LOL I'm never retiring. I've already accepted that I'll be working until I'm dead. There are those who get dealt the right cards and will get to retire comfortably. I'm just not one of them.
X'er here. I have what most would consider a good job, with good pay, and a good boss. I consider it a good job with good pay and a good boss. My spouse is unable to work, and we have two children. I'm currently seeking some skill or product I can develop without taking time away from my existing responsibilities such that I have a chance of not having to work until I die at my desk one day.
With no shade against millenials, this is the only time I'm grumpy about being forgotten in the generational sniping that goes on. All these articles (like OP) about this very valid angst from older millenials and I identify with it pretty much every time. I know I'm not the only X'er who does.
It's the trouble with attributing it to any specific generation. It's like people forgot that Gen Xers grew up reading the same dystopian sci-fi that we did that predicted this corporate shithole world. Neuromancer was written in 1984, when I was three years old. People forget that the cynicism of Gen X explicitly came from being such a small generation compared to the Boomers that it was just always a given that they wouldn't ever have much political influence. Hell, it even affects a lot of Boomers, because this has been going on for a long time.
Gen X gets forgotten, but they were honestly the first to really bear the brunt of this disease that's eating at all of us, and thus it's sad that they get forgotten. Cheers mate, and I hope you find that skill and succeed in your goals.
I fall just at that borderline of the two and have the same sort of spot. Took too long to get to a decent career-class job, managed to buy a basic house but only just and not much of one, savings of an amount to be confident of retirement are a fantasy from a bygone time. Spent many years with the mantra of show up, do your job, don't cause trouble, the promotions and raises will follow and in 50 years you get a nice gold watch and a permanent vacation. BS...
I have noticed that the titles of many articles, yes even at The Guardian that generally has good content once you get past that, are written to generate maximum clicks.
You were not ignored by accident. It was a calculated decision to maximize profits, in a manner that controls the conversation and leaves you out in the cold.
Fuck corporate greed:-(.
But for you, my fellow human being who isn't a hollowed-out shell i.e. CEO, I wish the absolute best outcome possible. (And me too.)
Maybe house prices will go down someday? I really am genuinely surprised at all that Biden('s administration) has managed to accomplish, but it was set back years before it even started by the pandemic, greedflation, and other economic and other forms of unrest. If we can get past this next election without a literal and actual bloody civil war... well then most of us will still die of climate change (gee, I am just full of positivity today aren't I? sadly, that is the most positive take possible on that one:-|), but we might be able to make some headway? e.g. start incentivizing building houses further away from city centers, which WFH should help make possible - and even if you want to live in a city, the decrease in demand should help lower prices?
Anyway, all we can do is what we can do (aka not everything is within our control), so don't stress too awfully much about it. We'll die - we can't change that - but hopefully we'll have some good days between now and then:-).
Lol this guy thinks there is a chance he will die at his desk. I wish I could feel that optimism.
Chances are better that at best you will die in gig or part time job like Walmart. The most likely is in you kids house, really yours but you will give it to them, and without medical support beyond basic hospice.
Many of your peers and friends will die in homeless camps or from police violence.
i felt like that at 28 after my 3rd layoff, i'm in my early 40's now and still feel this way and wish the article had something to share besides describing my life using other people as an examples.
in the article someone with a successful business is worried about home affordability and retirement.
elsewhere someone with an unsuccessful business is worried about both of those things plus the business bleeding money. I'm referring to myself. I ended my so called business, quitting while I was behind because there is no getting ahead of the explotative big players without drowning in stress and never having time to relax or enkoy life.
For the last 10 years when I've been asked about my career goals during job interviews I always respond, "I would like to retire." I then clarify that I don't mean tomorrow, next year, or even 5 years down the road. I just don't want to die a wage slave.
I don't say the wage slave part outright like that. I say the part about retiring with a smile like I'm joking but then use the opportunity to point out that I think about and plan for the future and that I'm financially responsible. Then I ask about the company's benefits package.
Covid made thing weird for a while but my career has had a generally upward trend. My current job is a pretty serious step up for me in both salary and benefits and has a pretty clear path for future progression. I lost out on some of the creativity that I enjoyed in prior positions but I gained more free time to engage with my hobbies.
I'd say it's been working for me but your mileage may vary based on your delivery and what kind of job you're interviewing for.
Got a job that pays ~80k (with promotion potential to 100k in a year) and I'm just.. dumbfounded at how yall are making it. I didn't grow up wealthy at all, and struggled with homelessness for a time, so I'm not new to the frugal game, but being able to put away only a hundred or two bucks a month after taxes is crazy with the hours and time I put into existing. I'd rather just not work at all if the end result is the same.
Doordash is a crux in my life and something I've definitely splurged on in the past, but groceries are just as expensive outside of rice beans and chicken. Baffling. :(
Most recent social security trustees report says the trust fund will run out in 2035. What happens in 2035? Benefits are still funded at 83% in perpetuity. By the way, last year it was going to run out in 2033, and the year before that it was going to run out in 2031. And also by the way, the trust fund was specifically set up because they knew the baby boomers were going to stress the system, so it's supposed to get depleted as the boomers use it.
Everything is working mostly as intended, and yet there's all this anxiety around Social Security. Why? Because Republicans want you to think Social Security is fucked all on its own so that you don't question it when they ratfuck it. That and they want to constantly frame the conversation as such so that the conversation doesn't turn to "how do we make social security more robust and generous?" or some other radical socialist nonsense.
Early Gen X, late millennial here. This, wondering how we are going to pay for the skyrocketing health care, day to to living, and send our kids to school. We are told to invest in 401k's which after living through the dot com bust and housing crash, is a total fucking gamble. How are we going to live? I.have.no.fucking.idea. To be blunt, this country just doesn't give a fuck, I expect to be working until I die.
I always wonder why people shoot up schools and parks when their problems are caused by people in board rooms. Never see a mass shooting in a board room for some reason.
Well one of the original mass shootings resulted in the expression 'going postal', but I don't recall what was ever theorized as a motive there. Workplace frustration maybe?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
John F. Kennedy
Let's make peaceful revolution possible by campaigning for electoral reform at the state level! We should all be free to vote for those who best represent us, secure in the knowledge that our vote will still be cast against those we don't want in office.
We don't need to wait for trump to have a hamburger heart attack, we dont need to wait for the republicans to stop existing. We can do this right now... and some states already have!
Yours can to, most especially the blue states. Who is stopping you in those blue states?
Gonna leave a bit of advice for any young folks that might see this. Something I wish to god someone had told me when I was 20.
Start an annuity plan. They're generally stable, all but guaranteed to accrue money. You can set a percentage of your paycheck to be deposited automatically into the account. If you have the option to do this through your employer, do it, find out if they match the deposit like mine. Put 10% of your paycheck in there. After 10 years, I have $40,000 sitting in a retirement account with a progressive series of bonds set to mature in between now and my retirement age. Those bonds will roll back into shorter term bonds as they mature, and add more value to the account. My projected retirement age is still 72, but at least I know that money is there.
Also, after 4 years, the account matures and you're able to borrow against it, like collateral for a loan. So if I wanted to right now, I could take that money and use it as a down payment on a house. I'll be expected to put it back, but the interest is generally lower than a home owner's loan.
Generally speaking in the US annuities are horrible and significantly underperform a regular 401k/IRA invested in a broad total market index fund. The fees eat you alive. Don't know how it is in other countries. But annuities here are damn near fraud.
This sounds a lot like superannuation that we have in Australia and is mandatory. A certain amount of money from your paycheck is put with a super and they invest it for you, and the idea is that you should have a few hundred grand by the time you retire.
What a quaint question. I honestly wonder if I'll live my full life and die with a dignity instead of how i suspect, with a fistfull of dirt and a pigs boot on my skull.
You won't retire, no. No longer work a job because everything is slowly falling apart as our climate apocalypse trudges on? Sure, but you'll still be working hard to survive.
This is another one of many things that the government should be taking care of for people (and they sort of tried to with Social Security) but of course the "privatize everything" sociopath elites killed that idea, and our culture expects everyone to just learn how to Warren Buffet better. Bro, do you even index fund?
Of course I’ll retire, when I can no longer get a job, and that time is coming up fast. I only hope it’s not until I get my teens through college and off to a running start. I don’t see how I can afford to keep my house or even continue to live in this town, though
I’m not sure I agree with the narrative about being worse off by generation, though, because it is so tied to what you do. I’m a little sad about my older son starting adult life “in hard mode”: i’m proud that he wants to teach, and we live in an area with generally better teacher pay, but he’ll never earn much. It has certainly made my life easier to be paid better as a software engineer, even if circumstances mean I’m not financially able to retire. He’ll almost certainly live with less, have fewer opportunities, purely by choice of career, and without regard to his generation. Tack on the excessive housing inflation and his desire to stay in a hcol state, and I can’t help but worry for him
Plus social security. OUr effing politicians keep procrastinating on fixing social security, so the biggest impact will be when they are forced to at the last minute, when I need it most. My kids will have lived through that, seen social security fixed, and live in better demographics for it to stay fixed
Thus millennial thinks we will all die in 10 years or so from climate related disasters and none of us will live to retirement age as things currently stand.
Thus millennial thinks hopes we will all die in 10 years or so from climate related disasters and none of us will live to retirement age as things currently stand so they don't have to worry about retirement.
Ftfy. The entire "collapse" thing is a coping mechanism.
We can have different opinions. Imo climate change denialism is a cope. I also hedge my bets by also planning for retirement. But as it stands, we're all on hospice.
I will retire eventually. That may be due to my inability to be productive at an advanced age. I don't see why we shouldn't still get social security payments. I'm gonna just stop eventually once my kids are working. I have a small house and it will have been paid for by that time. Hopefully I can just rest at that point. Job done.
How are you going to make those tax payments, maintenance costs, transportation costs, etc. You think your social security will be enough to cover? Or is the plan "sell the house"?
I'm one of these people. I'm looking at possible war with several countries thanks to Putin and Trumpfus. At the same time I'm making good money but the children below me are already making more so how can I even think I'll have the same chances. But at least I'm not at the bottom of the barrel. I can imagine my mother for example cannot sell her house and she can barely pay for the incorrect in water electric and taxes in San Diego. She's basically locked until her death. Then my brother will be in the same boat.
houses are an asset that a lot of people leverage once they can't work; unless you're already rich, not having one you'll end up dying due from things that cost money like healthcare, food, or shelter.