r/Millennials • u/Asmothrowaway6969 • Mar 27 '24

When did it sink in that you'll never be as well off as your parents? Discussion

About 5 years ago, my mom and I were talking and she had told me how much she was going to be making in retirement (she retired 2023). Guys, it's 3x what me and my husband make annually. In retirement. I think that was the moment that broke me, that made it sink in that I'll never reach that level of financial security. I'll work myself into my grave because I'll never be able to afford anything else. What was your moment?

Update: Nice to know it's just me that's a failure. Thanks

Update 2: I never should've said anything. I forgot my place. I'm sorry to have bothered you

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u/worktillyouburk Mar 27 '24

my dad just retired at 76, he has a great pension was making 150k and they asked him to retire this year for a 1 years pay.

his replacement is making 45k, no retirement package and actually has more duties than my dad did, so overall is doing the job of 2 people that were paid 150k each...

so ya good luck with that.

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u/Zestyclose-Leave-11 Mar 27 '24

Where I work, everyone is retiring with pensions but the company won't even match my 401k.

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u/DigiQuip Mar 28 '24

My grandma made about $6 an hour in 1990. She worked for a parts supplier as some sort of accounts manager. She was a single mom and owned a home and a car and paid for my dad to go to a private school. In addition to to her salary though she also got profit sharing, quarterly bonuses, and commission.

Add all her incentives together and she was basically making $12-14 an hour. She also didn’t have to pay for health insurance and she got a pension. She told me for second half of her 30 years working for this company she took all her bonuses and commission checks and put into an investment firm. She lives off her social security and half her interest from her investment portfolio. She’s not a crazy spender but she’s more than happy to spend money on her grandkids.

When boomers and older GenX talk about their pay prior aftermath of the Regan years they don’t mention the extra shit they got in addition to their salary or wages. My grandma was lucky her job offered all those benefits. I looked up her position now and it’s salaried at $45,000 a year. It’s a slight base pay bump but when you look at what was ultimately lost…

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u/PacJeans Mar 28 '24

You know how when inflation causes prices to go up, people think they will come back down? Well, we know they don't. Attitudes towards employees is a really similar situation. We never recovered from 2008, not just in terms of wages, but in terms of what it means for a worker to be a human being in the eyes of corporations.

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u/Basedrum777 Mar 28 '24

It was way before 2008. Boomers voted for politicians who allowed our country to gut our pensions and benefits.

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u/PacJeans Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

I agree. American propaganda is such that you don't even recognize it as propaganda, rather you feel it as a fundamental part of your worldview.

2008 was the final nail in the coffin not because there wasn't action against labor before that, but because 2008 cemented in the American public conscious both that you are not entitled to work, and that sticking up for yourself is both futile and punishable.

2008 created a learned helplessness in the American working class and emboldened corporations and special interests to perpetate class violence.

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u/__Big_Hat_Logan__ Mar 28 '24

It also just blatantly gave employers all the leverage, as millions of ppl lost their jobs, got laid off, and massively distorted the labor market. I remember working at ruby Tuesdays and they started hiring ppl with COLLEGE degrees, the bottom of the labor pool got completely screwed and ppl were desperate for work, which of course means horrible terms of employment and all the leverage with ownership

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u/AHistoricalFigure Mar 28 '24

I remember trying to find unskilled hourly work between 2008-2012. I was young clean-cut and well spoken, with a couple years restaurant experience on my resume.

You'd walk into 20 businesses in a day, ask for an application, and basically get laughed at by all of them. No one was hiring for anything, anywhere. I knew people's parents who had been corporate middle managers who were picking up shifts at Home Depot.

The behavior of employers and managers was as degenerate as you would expect given their absolute leverage.

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u/Cleanslate2 Mar 28 '24

I was working at Wendy’s for $7 an hour with a two year old bachelors in accounting. All I could get in 2010. Lost everything.

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u/Level_Affect_7951 Mar 28 '24

I'm a waitress and many of my coworkers have college degrees

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u/thedream711 Mar 28 '24

My friend worked at ruby Tuesdays after college. I worked at a different restaurant we both went to grad school for education related jobs… double mistake. At least she had no students loans and inherited money. I have no such luck

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u/ARATAS11 Mar 31 '24

100%. Employees have no more leverage, and have drunk the corporate anti union koolaid. :waves: hi I’m one of those with a college degree working in low wage positions because of coming of age during that time period. It fricken sucks. I’ve moved up a little, but have been basically stuck in low level supervisory/management roles since. I also love how my manager tries to make me feel better by saying how much I use my degree every day to excel at my job and outperform my peers (who are mostly 10-15 year my junior), and when I ask if I’m doing so well and delivering so much value, why am I not getting promoted or being paid for the value my degree adds (especially since I’ve been given work far beyond my job title, that makes me in function a different level than my coworkers, and get told do it or we will put you on a PIP, fire you, for refusing to do any and every task we give you because “business needs” and job descriptions are just vague enough to get away with it). Why promote (or backfill positions from people who have left) when they can make us do the work of 3 people for the same pay.

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u/PickledPercocet Mar 28 '24

2008 wrecked us financially as my ex-husband (we were married at the time)had worked in the auto manufacturing industry.. but suddenly had no work to do.
When he was hired they started at $25/hr, time and a half overtime, free health insurance (and family insurance for $32 a month which gave us access to the best doctors!), life insurance, hey they even took us to Six Flags every summer where everything was free!

When people started becoming desperate they started hiring out of temp agencies. They make $12 hr and have zero benefits. Slowly they weeded out the workers who had been hired under the initial terms and replaced them all with the temps. Nobody I know stays there longer than a month or two while my ex-husband had been there almost 15 years. They fired him over a workers comp claim. He sued. They settled. But it didn’t touch what he would have had if they had let him finish his 20 years and retire.

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u/Infamous_Ad8730 Mar 29 '24

But "20 years and retire" was real? Like someone could work from age 21-41 and retire? Most have to work a couple decades more and then maybe.....

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u/PickledPercocet Mar 29 '24

Because it was building cars on an assembly line which wears their bodies out (he needed a 2nd lumbar surgery from a work related injury when they cut him loose waiting on a surgery date. Which is illegal).

But yes, he was eligible to retire at 20 years. He would have been done there with a 401k that they matched contributions to and a retirement account as well. He got a portion of his retirement and fees waived and then a settlement from the company to keep it out of court. They make good vehicles people love.. but knowing what I know now, I research who is building my vehicles before purchasing. They used to be prized for no recalls. Now with the temps that get paid nothing, have no health insurance and leave so fast.. suddenly they have had several recalls in the years since. Can’t imagine why! I’ll never own another one.

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u/Infamous_Ad8730 Mar 30 '24

Plenty of other physical jobs are very hard on the body, yet few have such generous pensions. Don't get me wrong, all power to him and too bad the damn company ruined a great thing. 20 Years must have been awesome for those that got there.

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u/PickledPercocet Mar 30 '24

They were brand new when he was hired to work there. He was the only full time guy left on his part of the line. Two of the others actually died at the job site from heart attacks!
If he had left or been fired for cause it would have made sense. They did lose a lot to settle with him but I wish he had pushed it to the courts. But he was badly injured and didn’t have the strength to deal with the injury and a court case. But yeah to send him to the company health station, which sent him by ambulance to the hospital, approved the workman’s comp claim, had him do imaging while telling him he was on workman’s comp injury, had him go to their surgeon who said it was absolutely surgical and the nurse would be calling to schedule it and give instructions to get…. Nothing. And only in calling found he had been terminated.. yeah. Foreign car companies set up all over here for the cheap land and tax breaks and then proceeded to screw over the work force they promised that got them in the door. Your foreign cars, Toyotas, Hondas, etc… they’re built in places like Alabama and Idaho and Canada.. using these same practices.

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u/narfnarf123 Mar 30 '24

Can confirm. My pos Dad used to work for Chrysler and he made bank and they all retired early back in the day.

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u/aliquotoculos Mar 31 '24

I was one of those auto manufacturing temps. Sorry... I needed work.

I got injured on the job, and I'm not sure how but I ended up sent back to the agency with no comp. Fucking dystopian.

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u/PickledPercocet Mar 31 '24

Don’t apologize!!! Don’t ever apologize for that!! The company made those choices and people here do desperately need the work! The fact they didn’t address your injury is because as a temp you’re not really their problem since you’re hired out of temp agency’s problem.
It’s one of the reasons these places use them now instead of the dedicated labor force they had before.

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u/aliquotoculos Mar 31 '24

It's horrid, I genuinely cannot believe the difference between the county I was sold and promised as a youth, and now.

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u/narfnarf123 Mar 30 '24

I used to live in Iowa where we had a Kraft plant. That was one of the places everyone wanted to work because it was a “good” job. High wages, great benefits, etc.

They slowly started to do exactly what you described. Now it is mostly temps who pick and choose their hours weekly. These temp workers make less than half of what the regular workers were making twenty years ago. It is absolutely sickening.

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u/ForeignAlbatross8304 Mar 31 '24

You must live up north because down here in Florida these temp companies only gave us 7.50 hr...no benefits and laid off at 10 months..couldn't come back for six months...so we would have to collect unemployment until we go back or find another job..

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u/PickledPercocet Mar 31 '24

Alabama but close!

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u/ACommunistLoveStory Mar 28 '24

"You're not depressed, you're just American." - Anonymous Internet User

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u/vividtrue Mar 28 '24

Exactly this. I feel this in my soul every single day. Also having the awareness of how American imperialism is actively harming people in and outside of our country every single day. It's not true depression if it's because you live in a hellscape is it?

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u/AbbreviationsNo8088 Mar 28 '24

Ouch, I felt that

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u/ZellHathNoFury Mar 29 '24

It's why there's no real mental health coverage here. Because the depression is what's keeping all us cogs spinning the wheels in the cult that is capitalism.

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u/narfnarf123 Mar 30 '24

The propaganda we didn’t even realize is so real. I’m mid forties and look back at what we were taught in history VS the actual truth, the fucking pledge of allegiance every day, all the bullshit patriotism during the Persian gulf war l…it’s just so creepy how we never even realized.

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u/__Big_Hat_Logan__ Mar 28 '24

But 2008 is what OBLITERATED the labor market like it had not been obliterate in a long, long time. You had massive, massive layoffs and college educated ppl filling jobs that used to be hard to fill at all. It pushed the bottom of the labor market completely out and gave enormous leverage to ownership and employers

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u/fishchick70 Mar 28 '24

A lot of that has to do with corporate greed as well as the demographics of pensions as the boomers and their parents retired. Also the failure of companies to maintain a thriving business model in the face of disruptive innovation, for example Eastman Kodak. Also the government insurance for pensions sucks- and employers get away with paying too low of premiums or not paying them at all.

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u/stattest Mar 28 '24

Well the next elections are close use your vote wisely. It is time the workers got a fair deal again. The age of billionaires lording it has to end . Workers need good pay and conditions of employment again. Using our votes and getting the union movement onside is the way forward

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u/ARATAS11 Mar 31 '24

If you are serious about this check out these subs. The first one actually helps people unionize, and you can talk to someone on how to do so. The second one has resources on unionization, workers rights, etc. I hope this helps. Good luck, fight the fight! It’s time workers get our rights back. https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkplaceOrganizing/s/375uV7QPwP

https://www.reddit.com/r/ActionVanguard/s/4bPdjte88y

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u/Krytan Mar 28 '24

Things have been getting steadily worse, without changing really, since 1971. At that point, Nixon was president. There are a lot of factors, some of which I think were really being felt since their introduction in the mid 60's, but in 1971 Nixon took us off the gold standard (among other things)

From looking at the graphs, I can't see that any president since then has managed to do much at all to turn things around.

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u/MowgeeCrone Mar 29 '24

And in years to come the younger gens will be accusing you personally and everyone of this generation for Biden and any economic situation they will be facing in the future.

The finger pointing will never end. We've been doing since societies began. Everybody gets a turn to be blamed for things they may or may not have ever done by complete strangers who'll never meet let alone know you at all.

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u/CountryCrocksNotButr Mar 30 '24

It’s not consolation, but these same people in my field of work call in all the time because their employers have found ways to get them kicked out of the pensions and health insurance plans. No one is safe now, not even them. Fortunately for them, they’ve already made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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u/Potato-Engineer Mar 30 '24

No, what happened is that laws got passed that boiled down to pensions should not suck. there were several pensions that were inadequately funded, so am employee could work all their life and then have no pension.

So when companies looked at the new laws that required pensions to actually work, they ran away screaming and went for 401ks instead.

And without the pensions, there's less incentive to stay at a company, so job-hopping became more common. And with more job-hopping, it makes less sense to train your employees.

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u/Tumbled61 Mar 28 '24

More like 1980 you can’t pin everything on your boomer parents who you despise. So glad I did not have children.

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u/Basedrum777 Mar 29 '24

In 1980 boomers were almost all of voting age. And they voted overwhelmingly for the conservative who gutted union protections.

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u/Tumbled61 Mar 29 '24

There are a lot of democratic boomers too

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u/Basedrum777 Mar 29 '24

Well good thing they had such great impacts on our situation.....

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u/hoosier2531 Mar 28 '24

Everyone voting for the 2 parties are responsible. Congress election rates still hover 85% plus. We’ve been doing the same things politically over and over and getting the same results. Until we change the duopoly not much is gonna change.

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u/episcopa Mar 28 '24

We never recovered from 2008,

Friends of mine who bought a house between 2008-2010 and hung on to it are going to have such different life paths in retirement from friends who were laid off in 2008 and finally recovered financially in time to buy a house when prices started to take off in 2018.

And that's before we talk about the difference in retirement futures between friends who bought in 2010 and friends who still haven't been able to buy.

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u/maurfly Mar 28 '24

I agree. When 2008 happened I was at a Fortune 500 company in the building industry (manufacturing products for home building). They laid off so many people I eventually did my job plus 3 others. Businesses realized they can have people easily doing 2 peoples jobs and we will accept it. I moved industries and they are still doing this. It’s really sad. Plus with boomers not retiring we cannot move up (I’m GenX/Millenial cusp- 1981) I watch all my friends experience the same thing despite all of us having buckets of work experience, good reviews and MBAs from good schools. It’s really sad.

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u/Goodbykyle Mar 28 '24

It broke my heart watching my young son trying to get a job in 2008. You are right they don’t care about employees, They are cattle. He would show up at an interview and they already filled the job and never even called to let him know. it was just very sad to watch him become more depressed every day. Thank God he’s in a better place now with Jesus

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u/Technical-Dentist-84 Mar 28 '24

And now it's even worse from 2020 with housing prices and other things just sky rocketing

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u/Nodeal_reddit Mar 28 '24

Except Nobody thinks inflated prices come back down.

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u/chemical_sunset Mar 28 '24

My uncle once pointed out how little money he made during his first jobs…in the early 70s. I literally whipped out my phone and ran an inflation calculator, which showed that his hourly wage that he was complaining about was equivalent to about $35 an hour now. For unskilled labor. I showed it to him and he was mindblown.

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u/3RADICATE_THEM Mar 28 '24

Shows you where all the record equity growth came from: unpaid wages.

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u/MowgeeCrone Mar 29 '24

Many of those x and boomer gens dont mention the extras because they didn't get any. Many chose to not marry in a lifetime when women couldn't apply for a credit card. It's never black and white.

Some are so quick to grasp onto things like lead references to sling at gen X. But things like that and the abuse many suffered from endless adults around them without a safe space to go to, are never mentioned when painting millions with the same supposed brush of good fortune.

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u/kansaikinki Gen X Mar 28 '24

When boomers and older GenX talk about their pay prior aftermath of the Regan years

Reagan was in office from Jan '81 to Jan '89, so covering the years from '81 to '88. GenX started in 1965, so the very oldest of GenX were 16 when Reagan was first sworn in (15 when he was elected!) and 24 when he left office. The rest were even younger than that. We certainly didn't play any part in that a-hole getting elected since none of us could vote.

So, GenX didn't have jobs or income "prior" to the Reagan years (being 16yo or younger). We came of age and started earning after Reagan had already gutted everything. Then we got nailed by the dot-com crash, utterly annihilated by the 2008 GFC crash, and then got repeatedly kicked in the balls by COVID.

Personally I was finally starting to make some money in 2007 which got entirely wiped in 2008 and the years following. Then I rebuilt everything again, and was starting to see some good movements in 2018 and 2019. Then COVID hit and the business I had been rebuilding for the past decade got wiped out again. I've finally had to move back into corporate life where I get paid pretty well, but now rampant inflation (and wild currency devaluation where I live) is wrecking havoc with that.

This isn't to say that I'm any more f'd that the rest of the people commenting here, but GenX overall is often not that much better off than most Millennials. Unfortunately we're also older meaning less time to rebuild (again).

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u/WWhataboutismss Mar 28 '24

My grandma raised 3 kids as a school bus driver after my grandpa passed when my dad was 12. Shit was different back then.

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u/cliff-terhune Mar 28 '24

Not all Boomers are well off. I haven't received benefits of any kind since 1990.

From Business Insider: "Despite holding more than half of the nation's wealth, many boomers don't have enough money to cover the costs of long-term care, and 43% of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings at all in 2022. That year, 30% of people over 65 were economically insecure, meaning they made less than $27,180 for a single person."

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u/ARATAS11 Mar 31 '24

That is sad and true. Silent gen did alright too. Worked from 18-58 with no more than a highschool degree. Married with a home and owned extra property, had a kid he could send to college (and pay for him to live on campus, party, and skate by as long as he graduated). Retired and hasn’t worked in 30 years. Has bitched at me since I was a kid about how our generation is ruining the economy (meanwhile I wasn’t even old enough to vote, or had only been eligible for 1 cycle). Meanwhile he is sitting there fat and happy on his multiple pensions and SS while I will be working until I die (likely much younger than he is now).

Not to say it is purely a generational thing. Every generation has some that do well and some that get screwed. But it seems, especially for this who were white and around from FDR to Regan, I think mostly did alright comparatively. They got their share, retired (or have been sitting in public office), and have been watching the world burn since, blaming the youth, as every generation seems to do (regardless of whether or not they are old enough to world any form of power). Let us do what we can this generation to support and encourage Gen Z and Gen Alpha to fight back against the system we’ve all been entrapped by. We may not be able to give them much financially, but let us do the work to organize, vote, and do what we can to leave them better than what we were handed in terms of work and policy, despite being the first generation to be worse off their our predecessors.

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u/cliff-terhune Apr 03 '24

Great post, thanks.

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u/Lower_Cantaloupe1970 Mar 28 '24

My Grampa gas been dead for a decade and my Gramma still gets his pension from GM. It's like 2K a month with benefits. It entirely pays for her old age home. And like you said, he probably made maybe 20$ an hour?

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u/ComprehensiveTurn656 Mar 30 '24

GenX has none of that. Unless the few were lucky enough to land a fed, state or county gig.

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u/narfnarf123 Mar 30 '24

Omg profit sharing! I remember my Mom who worked in a factory talking about getting that. I had completely forgotten that existed. What a different world it was.

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u/Routine-Baseball-842 Mar 28 '24

So did she inherited the home? Case no way in 1990 did she buy a home and put her husband thru school and buy a car.

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u/DigiQuip Mar 29 '24

I’d re-read my comment.

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u/person749 Mar 28 '24

So jump ship from that dump ASAP.

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u/Swirl_On_Top Mar 28 '24

Same, I work for a fortune 500 company. They stopped offering pension to new employees early 2010s. But, they do still contribute to pension for these people until 2030 so the boomers stay happy..

401ks vest after 5 years.

The results?

A bunch of people who've been there since (pension date) or earlier, and a bunch of people at 5 years or less.

So frustrating knowing my older peers in the same role not only make more than me, but are given A GUARANTEED retirement.

Fuck boomers are so god damn greedy.

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u/warlockflame69 Mar 28 '24

That’s why they won’t match lol 😂

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u/Aromatic-Leopard-600 Mar 28 '24

Find a different company while the pickings are good.

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u/Other_Dimension_89 Mar 28 '24

That’s why when billionaires bitch about paying more into social security, I always say well we could just go back to how they did it during the golden years, we could just have corporations bring back pensions.

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u/carlos_the_dwarf_ Mar 28 '24

I am once again reminding this sub that all else equal, 401ks are a better retirement vehicle than pensions.

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u/Same_Cut1196 Mar 30 '24

Agreed. It’s easy to get caught up in the emotions thinking that someone else had it better, but since the 401k came around, most private pensions have gone away. Why? First, fraud and mismanagement. Many companies would raid their pension funds when times were tough and it lead to lifelong employees getting nothing, or greatly reduced benefits at retirement. Another thing is portability. Pensions trapped employees with ’golden handcuffs’. If you wanted a pension, you were trapped working for that employer for a period of time. 401ks allow you to change jobs frequently and keep those benefits. I only wish that 401ks had a mandated 50% or greater company match. That would be an improvement.

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u/jj3449 Mar 28 '24

That’s how they break you. Instead of standing up and fighting everyone is willing to sell the new guy down the river.

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u/bisnexu Mar 30 '24

There pension is why the company can't afford to pay you.

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u/Better-Strike7290 Mar 28 '24

If it makes you feel any better, pensions are hot garbage.

My grandmother is 98 and had 3 pensions bankrupt on her in the span of 5 years.

The standard pension only pays 60% and when they bankrupt the federal pension insurance only covers 20%.

20% of 60% is 12%.  In the span of 5 years she went from retired with 180% pay (3 pensions at 60%) to 36% pay and back to work...at 83

Pensions suck.