This is Part III of our series Senior Class. Hear Part II and Part I.

The Baby Boomer generation holds most of the country’s wealth. The top 10% of Boomers have some $55 trillion in assets. What effect does that lopsided wealth have on our economy and society?

Guests

Jeremy Ney, adjunct professor of business at Columbia University. Former economic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. Author of the newsletter “American Inequality.” Author of the forthcoming book, “The Opportunity Map: How to Close the Divide Between Inequality and Prosperity.”

Also Featured

Gary, 76-year-old living in Denver, Colorado.

Haley, 26-year-old living in Big Bear, California. Gary’s granddaughter.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

Part I   

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and this is episode three where we’re going to talk about old money.

GARY: I am a bona fide boomer, born in 1950. We’re not rich now, but we’re certainly doing well in retirement.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Gary. He’s 76 years old and lives with his wife, Denise, in Denver, Colorado.

GARY: We are proud thousandaires. We don’t have a million dollars. No way.

HALEY: I’m Haley. I’ve been blessed to be able to be a stay-at-home mom for the past, about a year now, eight months.

CHAKRABARTI: And this is Haley, Gary’s granddaughter. She’s 26 and lives in Big Bear, California.

HALEY: My son, Anthony, he’s a year old, and the cutest little, tiniest thing. Runs around nonstop.

CHAKRABARTI: We recently talked to Gary and Haley together on Zoom. Since the conversation was about sensitive financial matters, we’re not using their last names. Gary and Haley are in vastly different life stages and vastly different financial situations.

GARY: I retired when I was 65, and we are currently living in an active 55. It’s the first time in 50 years that we’ve lived in an apartment. We pay $1,750 for a two bedroom, two bath. Very good for Denver.

HALEY: My parents own a house in Big Bear, and my brother, his fiancé, and baby are living here, and then me, my husband, and our baby are living here. So there’s four bedrooms. We each pay $600, just to help out.

CHAKRABARTI: Just a quick note here. During our conversation, Haley had to switch rooms a couple of times. That’s why her audio will sometimes sound different, or you’ll hear kids in the background. Haley and her husband moved to Big Bear because their last place was just too expensive. Her husband works in city water maintenance in Southern California.

HALEY: He makes about $2,000 every two weeks, so $4,000 a month. We were living in Huntington Beach, California. That was insane. A one-bedroom was $2,600 a month. So we’re just going to pay off all of our debts up here and save up a bunch of money.

CHAKRABARTI: Gary’s income these days is from Social Security and investments. It’s about $7,200 a month. In 2015, Gary and his wife sold their house in the Denver suburbs. It had cost them $90,000 when they bought it in 1989.

GARY: Somebody knocked on my door and said, “I want to buy your house.” So I said, “Okay, I want this much money, and I’m not doing anything.” They said, “Here you go.” From $90 to $290. Of course, now it’s $695.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, it makes sense that a 76-year-old and a 26-year-old are at different stages financially, but Gary says the bigger financial picture was also different for everyone in his generation.

GARY: It was my generation that had a draft, that had the Vietnam War. … I went to Eastern Michigan University. With ROTC, you get a stipend every month. It wasn’t very much, but it, boy, it sure helped. Bought all the books and everything else. So it wasn’t a financial burden at all to go to college.

CHAKRABARTI: Gary went to Eastern Michigan University right when the Boomer tidal wave hit higher education. We found the 1967 Eastern Michigan undergraduate catalog. It is an incredibly interesting time capsule of a different era. In 1967, tuition, room, and board cost under $1,300 per year, or $13,000 in today’s money. Most of that was room and board. Gary lived at home for his first two years, so he only paid his tuition costs, about $450 per year in ’67, which is about $4,500 today.

GARY: We got married between my sophomore and junior year. My family owned a music store. I was the record buyer. Denise worked at a minimum wage dress shop. Still went to school and could pay for all of that. Three days after Denise pinned little gold bars on my shoulder to become an officer, they signed the peace treaty in Vietnam. When I did go into the service, I got a graduate degree paid for by the GI Bill.

CHAKRABARTI: The GI Bill, still in effect today, refers to laws that give veterans benefits, like low-interest loans and free tuition. 50 years later, Haley also went to college at what’s now called Utah Tech University.

HALEY: I loved it. It was four hours away from home. My parents helped me with rent and all that stuff.

CHAKRABARTI: She didn’t have to pay tuition either. Her family used money they’d saved in a college fund.

HALEY: I honestly don’t know how much it was to go there. I want to say maybe $10,000 for the two years that I was there.

CHAKRABARTI: Today, tuition for out-of-state students, which Haley was, at Utah Tech, costs $8,900. With room and board, it bumps up to $13,000, making it one of the country’s more affordable colleges. Unlike Gary, Haley had to take out $4,000 in loans for books and fees, which she’s since paid off. But when it comes to the cost of education nationwide, the difference between the two generations could not be more stark.

Back in 1969, the total annual cost at a public university was about $1,200, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s about $12,000 in today’s dollars. More importantly, that translates to 13% of the median family income in 1969. But by 2024, those same schools cost more than $27,000 per year, almost 33% of the median household income.

Let’s get back to Haley. She got her associate’s degree, and she’d planned to continue on to nursing school, but changed her mind when COVID hit.

HALEY: So I moved back home, and I started working at the job I was working at in high school. It was just a little serving job at a mom-and-pop restaurant. I was making, I think, $16 an hour, but I was coming home on the weekends roughly with $600 to $1,000 a night.

CHAKRABARTI: The extra income was from tips. Then Haley got a job as a certified nursing assistant, which paid less than her serving job. She left that job after having a baby.

HALEY: If I was working full-time, we would need daycare or a nanny. It would be basically my whole paycheck plus a couple hundred dollars.

CHAKRABARTI: Haley and her husband have about $10,000 in credit card debt, bills they racked up for things like groceries, gas, and dinners with friends. They have $2,000 in emergency savings. They don’t own a home. When Gary was just two years older than Haley is now, he bought his first house. It was 1978.

GARY: And it was in Moline, Illinois. And we found a HUD home that the bank wanted to get rid of, was able to buy that house and live in it with one income. The house was a three bed, one and a half bath. It cost $12,000, which is roughly $62,000 today.

CHAKRABARTI: Gary says he didn’t need a down payment because he bought the home through the VA.

GARY: Paul Simon wrote, Born at the Right Time. Shoot, we were.

HALEY: Crazy. We have been looking into buying a house, dreaming about it, basically. It’s almost impossible as a one income household. It doesn’t need to be a big house. Two bedroom, one bath would be perfect. Big Bear is more affordable, so we could, but we would need financial help for a down payment. The loan, whatever, that would be fine. The monthlies would be fine, but it’s honestly just getting your foot in the door with the down payment.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s another way to look at it. Using historical census and housing data, we found that in 1967, a median home’s price was just over three times the national median income. By 2025, home prices rose to just under five times the national median income, a 50% increase, meaning you have to spend a lot more of your income now to buy the same amount of house. And when it comes to retirement, Gary says he feels comfortable.

GARY: Our finance guy said, “How much you need per month?” He created a program to make sure we get a direct deposit from our pot. So we’ve been very fortunate. My goodness.

CHAKRABARTI: Haley’s not sure where she’d be if not for her parents’ help and her husband’s savings.

HALEY: My husband started a double retirement plan when he was 18. I have zero retirement. I paid into Social Security, which I don’t think that we’ll ever get, to be honest, my generation.

CHAKRABARTI: Gary and Haley are a grandfather-granddaughter duo in Colorado and California. Jeremy Ney joins us now. He’s an adjunct professor of business at Columbia University and a former economic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. He writes a newsletter called American Inequality, and his forthcoming book is “The Opportunity Map: How to Close the Divide Between Inequality and Prosperity.”

Jeremy, welcome to On Point.

JEREMY NEY: Hi, Meghna. Thanks so much for having me today.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So as a cohort, how much wealth do baby boomers have?

NEY: Baby boomers have about half of all wealth in America, while millennials hold half of all debt. This divide has really grown over time and has become a real stark inequality that we’re seeing in America.

CHAKRABARTI: So baby boomers have half of all the wealth in this country, but they’re only 18% of the population.

NEY: Yeah, that’s right. And I think one thing that, I really like to look at here is when I tell people that boomers have half of all wealth, they say of course, they have had the benefit of time. Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. But when we instead, try to look at what life was like at comparable ages, we see that boomers have almost always had an advantage. So when we compare 1989, when the youngest boomers were 25, to 2021, when the youngest millennials were 25, we see that boomers held, even back then, 20% of all wealth compared to millennials, who at that age of 25 held only 7% of all wealth. Those boomers were 24% more likely, only had 24% chance of falling into poverty versus millennials that had a 37% chance of falling into poverty.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So those are a lot of numbers that we went through very quickly, but they’re so telling. So I just want to take a second to go back over them, if you don’t mind, Jeremy.

NEY: Of course.

CHAKRABARTI: So in 1989 the youngest boomers were, what’d you say, 21?

NEY: 25.

CHAKRABARTI: 25, 25. See, so we do have to go over this. They were 25, and those boomers held 20% of the wealth in this country. Okay. And comparatively when the youngest millennials were 25, how much of the wealth of the country did you say they had?

NEY: Just 7% of all wealth.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Jeremy, this is the one issue in our series that touches a nerve more than any other. We have heard already from so many people, so I’m going to try and do my best to create some space for these voices. Let’s listen to a couple of folks. This is Barbara in Westwood, Massachusetts.

BARBARA: I’m a retired 69-year-old single female with no kids or grandkids. I’ve been very successful with my retirement savings of over a million dollars because I worked hard to get an advanced degree, picked a high-paying field, and lived below my means.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s Ralph in Spokane, Washington.

RALPH: My overall net worth is a lot more than I ever expected. What I think really made things comfortable is that I had multiple income streams, military retirement, government retirement, corporate retirement.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Helena in Raleigh, North Carolina. She’s an elder millennial. Her dad is a boomer.

HELENA: I remember growing up, he was a convicted felon who worked a blue-collar job, and we ate steak for dinner, and he owned a bass boat. And I did everything right. Graduated magna cum laude from a really good university, got a master’s degree. Just last year, if you adjust for inflation, I was able to match the income level that he had.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Jeremy do you wanna respond to some of those? Just what’s your reaction?

NEY: My reaction is, it’s not really a question to me about whether boomers worked hard. We heard Barbara established this, large savings from her hard work. I think the real question is, why do younger generations need to work twice as hard and get half as much, right? These generations graduated into back-to-back what was supposed to be once-in-a-generation crises, right? The 2008 financial crisis, COVID, and now they are saddled with student debt, medical debt, and this inability to land these high-paying jobs.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, so you know what I’d like to, one of our great goals for this hour, and thank you for being here to help us achieve it, is there are so many stereotypes about every generation, but especially the sort of boomers versus millennial stereotypes are they’re quite pointed and often wrong.

So I’d like to battle back against these financial stereotypes with more numbers, okay, because I think the numbers just don’t lie. So Jeremy, check me on this. When we are talking about today and who has the majority of this country’s wealth, I have seen numbers that say the baby boomer generation in total, the entire generation, in dollar value holds some $77 trillion in wealth.

Is that right?

NEY: That’s right. They hold $77 trillion in wealth, whereas millennials hold about $20 trillion in wealth. And those divides, again it’s part of this growth that we have, have maybe seen over time. But it’s really difficult, for costs of childcare that have doubled for millennials, the household debt that they’ve had to carry. Because of, you know, college debt and credit card debt that makes buying a home —

CHAKRABARTI: I’m gonna jump in here and just say hang on for a second. Because the sort of relative costs of life I’m going to get into with you in just a second. But so that $77 trillion, though, for boomers as a cohort is such an arresting number that I know a lot of people are like, “There’s no way.” Because, for example, there are, the majority of boomers aren’t actually, they’re not multimillionaires or 10 millionaires or 100 millionaires.

For example, this is Maddie in Arlington, Virginia.

MADDIE: Baby boomers often get stereotyped as having made it financially. But in actuality, a lot of us weren’t afforded the luxury of socking away a lot of savings since we were ensuring our kids made it through college somewhat debt-free. Then simultaneously, we found ourselves being suddenly laid off from our jobs and replaced by younger staff at our advanced age of 50.

CHAKRABARTI: So Jeremy, when we’re saying $77 trillion in assets held by baby boomers, how much, who amongst those boomers has most of that money?

NEY: So the top basically 10% of boomers hold about 70% of that $77 trillion. So it’s really these wealthiest boomers who are holding onto the lion’s share of that tremendous wealth.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that’s a very important distinction, and we’re gonna come back to that. But nevertheless, we’re talking about 10% of boomers having, what’d you say, $55 trillion? It’s a stunning number. Now, getting back to the phrase that you used earlier about millennials today have to work twice as hard to get back half as much.

Do you have sort of numerical analysis to back that up?

NEY: Yes, the median household income basically to afford a home has basically doubled from 1989 to 2021, so that, household price was about $120,000 in 1989. The median household is about $400,000 now, so it costs about five times household income to afford the average home.

At the same time, we’ve seen college debt balloon, so now millennials carry about four times as much college debt, even adjusted for inflation, as boomers did when they were going off to college.

CHAKRABARTI: So homeownership and college, are those the two by far biggest drivers?

NEY: Yes. They’re the biggest drivers on the asset side and the debt side, right? Boomers have been able to see their wealth really increase by holding onto these homes whereas millennials have seen their liabilities and their debt really increase because they’ve been saddled with so much debt. About 67% of millennials hold onto student debt. Compared to boomers, where it was only about 40%.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and debt is like a double whammy, right? Because it’s an anchor that just drags you financially for 20, 30 years even.

NEY: So not only are you not owning a home, but you’ve basically been able, further had to pay off these overwhelming costs that can stick with you for 20, 30 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I want to dig into the education debt for another second because we very frequently hear from a lot of older people don’t choose to go to an expensive school. Go to your local state university. It’s a better deal.” But I see here that you have some analysis that shows that if you go to a public now, if you go to a public university plus having a median annual home payment, that’s more than 50% of a family’s income on just those two things.

How does that compare with what it was like 50 years ago?

NEY: So the median debt that a Boomer carried, even when they were going to college, was only about $13,000 versus $47,000 today.

CHAKRABARTI: Are these comparative inflation-adjusted numbers?

NEY: Inflation-adjusted, yes. Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay. So there’s a, what? A $30,000 difference there.

NEY: Yeah, exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So but tell me more. I interrupted you there, but tell me more.

NEY: So even going to college, you are more likely to earn a higher salary, basically coming out on the other side.

But today it’s quite difficult for many people to earn those, and land in those high-paying jobs. 58% of Gen Z is still looking for a job after graduation, whereas for Boomers it was only 25%. We hear these stories of people who are just looking through a newspaper and they see a job; they go up to the front desk and end up working at IBM or something for 25 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. I’m just trying to tick through sort of the major costs of life in America, both then and now. So we talked about higher education, we talked about housing, student loan debt. What about health care? Now, Boomers and no one’s going to begrudge them this, but Boomers now, if they’re 60, over 65, health care should be less of an expense because of Medicare.

But again, comparatively, when they were younger versus what, let’s say, Millennials have to spend on health care now. Do you have some numbers on that?

NEY: I do. So again, comparing 1989 to 2021 that these, younger Boomers are spending about 4 to 5% of their income on health care, and a large reason, you know, for that low spend is because many of them were working in union jobs that had really strong benefits.

We’ve seen union jobs basically fall off a cliff over the last few decades, whereas for Millennials and Gen Z in 2021, they’re spending about 8 to 12% of their income on health care, in part because many of them are working in the gig economy. They are freelancers who don’t have good health care support and end up needing to spend a lot of money out of pocket.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. What about taxation?

NEY: Taxation, in many ways we’ve seen the highest tax brackets fall. Boomers were growing up, and so there are people who are having to pay less and less in taxes. But we’ve also seen an eroding of the social safety net, and so many of the benefits that you could have gotten from some of those higher taxation, we’re not seeing that floor rise underneath those lower income or high poverty regions in the U.S.

CHAKRABARTI: So Jeremy, are you saying that we’ll come back to those ultra wealthy boomers who have that $55 trillion. We’ll come back to them in a few minutes. But are you saying that sort of a median member of the baby boomer generation versus a median member of the millennial generation, that there are actually very profound structural differences in finances, the economy, and government support that are leading to not just a wealth divide right now based on age, but are millennials going to be able to catch up to where boomers are now when they become 60, 70?

NEY: Yeah, absolutely there are these big structural divides, and I think the answer is no, they are not likely to catch up, right? Even boomers who were dealt sometimes this difficult hand. We heard about the draft already. 1989 is when the Berlin Wall falls, when we have Tiananmen Square.

And, 2021, we also have these big events of COVID and January 6th. But when we look ahead, we have eroded so much of that infrastructure that helped these boomers get ahead, things like the GI Bill, you know, FHA, the ability to get these low student loans that helped you go to school.

And without those, that infrastructure support I worry that millennials will not be able to get ahead.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, you also have, I understand, a kind of a one statistic that in a sense says it all, because it has everything to do with what for generations was believed as the fundamental American dream. And that is, what is your chance to earn more, right? To live a more comfortable life than your parents. How do the two generations compare?

NEY: So Raj Chetty at Harvard has this seminal study showing, how much more likely are you to earn more than your parents growing up, and did this tremendous research showing, looking at all of these IRS tax records.

And what Chetty and his colleagues found is that baby boomers had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. And for millennials and Gen Z, it is just a coin flip. They only have a 50% chance of earning more than their parents, or in many ways achieving the American dream.

CHAKRABARTI: A 50% chance. Is that likely?

I don’t know how far Raj went into his study, but is that likely to be even further eroded for, like you said, Gen Z or even younger generations?

NEY: Yes. This is a trend that we are seeing where the further generations you are, the less likely it is that you are to earn more than your parents.

And when we break this out by region, it gets even worse. So in places like West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, where incomes are already quite low, that ability to climb the economic ladder, we’re seeing that many boomers pulled up those rungs behind them.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. So this is not just a kind of whiny millennials on social media phenomenon. It’s real, and it’s deep and it’s structural it sounds.

NEY: Yes, this is not just an issue of millennials buying too much avocado toast or lattes. This is a structural force in the U.S. economy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You’re listening to Jeremy Ney. He’s an adjunct professor of business at Columbia. His forthcoming book is “The Opportunity Map,” and this is episode three of our week-long series, Senior Class: Gerontocracy in America, and we’re talking about old money.

And as I said, Jeremy, this is the episode that’s really touched a nerve. So for folks, if you’re listening right now and you got some things to say, we definitely welcome your input, no matter what generation you’re a part of. But here’s how we want it. We want you to give us your thoughts on solutions.

If you do actually think that there is a important, meaningful, and potentially negative generational divide in this country, what are your recommendations on how to solve it? How to solve the generational wealth divide, how to solve the generational voting divide. We’re going to talk about jobs in tomorrow’s episode.

So we’re looking, no matter what age you are, we’re looking for your thoughts on solutions that not only will help younger Americans, but the truth is because income inequality is so deeply embedded into all of these problems, are there solutions that can also actually help young Americans and the impoverished elderly?

So grab your phones and get that On Point VoxPop app, wherever you get your apps. If you don’t already have it, look for On Point VoxPop, or you can call us at 617-353-0683, because on Friday we’re gonna be talking about solutions. Okay, Jeremy, I want to go back to our listeners, because you talked about latte-drinking, avocado toast-eating millennials as a stereotype.

We got a little bit of that from some of our callers. This is first Barbara. She’s 68 and lives in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

BARBARA: We were always very careful with our money. We did not take on very much debt. We bought used cars. When we were raising kids, I was at home with my kids for a lot of that time, so part of the frugality was out of necessity since we were living on one income.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Jake in Winterset, Iowa. He’s a 46-year-old farmer.

JAKE: Sometimes the perspective that the older generation gives or makes me feel is that you’re just not working hard enough, or an ungrateful millennial. In reality, that’s not the case. I work very hard and have made good financial decisions, but land prices are $15,000 to $20,000 per acre for me to buy, and they were $300 to $1,000 an acre for my parents to buy, and it’s just a hurdle that working hard isn’t going to overcome.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Barbara in Columbus, Ohio. She was born in 1944, and she says she is tired of listening to ageism.

BARBARA: Yes, I own a house, but I’ve spent 50 years paying mortgage payments and I’m surrounded by kids, I call them, who don’t even mow their own lawns. They have a service come in and do it for them.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Jeremy, so here’s my question.

Latte drinking, avocado toast eating, lawn service buying millennials. We’ve heard it all, but let’s just say for a second that a millennial today, eliminated all those costs from their lives, all those discretionary spending things. Would that be able to close the kind of the wealth gap to set them up to be as wealthy as in 20 or 30 years as a median boomer is now?

NEY: The answer is no. We’ve actually seen, what we call luxury goods, so things like cell phones or TVs or even appliances, toys. Those costs have actually dramatically fallen, over the last 30, 40 years. But for these necessities, things like childcare, health care, housing those areas have dramatically increased in cost.

So we really swapped a high mobility economy for this asset-locked economy, and now even just cutting out the small things is not enough to help you get ahead.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: At the top of the episode, you heard from 76-year-old Gary and 26-year-old Haley, the grandfather-granddaughter duo from Colorado and California. They’ve led very different financial lives. They also had very different expectations.

GARY: When Denise and I got married, I had $300 in the bank that I was gonna buy some new tires, these real fancy, cool tires. I had no money. My only program was, as long as I can be with her, we’ll figure it out.

CHAKRABARTI: Haley says she and her now husband were best friends for two years before they became a couple.

HALEY: Basically, when we first started dating night one of us saying, “Yeah, let’s do this let’s date,” it was, “We’re getting married. We’re having kids. We wanna be done having kids by 30.”

CHAKRABARTI: But Haley says she didn’t always expect to get married or have kids.

HALEY: When I was younger, yes, I was like, “Oh, I want a husband and babies, and marriage,” the fairytale life or whatever. And then early 20s, I was like, “I don’t wanna have kids. I wanna travel everywhere. I don’t wanna be tied down to anything.”

CHAKRABARTI: Gary and his wife, Denise, had their first child while they were living in their first house in Illinois.

GARY: That’s when we had Haley’s dad.

CHAKRABARTI: They decided Denise would be a stay-at-home mom.

GARY: That’s what worked. She talks about, and sometimes you went through the couch looking for spare change to get an ice cream cone when the ice cream man went by.

CHAKRABARTI: Gary says money was especially tight when he was working as a minister and they moved to Winter Park, Florida, a wealthy suburb of Orlando. Denise found them a small home they could afford, and they had a second child.

GARY: We did almost no traveling, didn’t do the extra things, didn’t go out to eat, and we kept having fun. And so we figured out, what are the fun things we can do? We can go over here and go to New Smyrna Beach. Doesn’t cost anything, just gas. Okay.

HALEY: I don’t know, I think we’re very different in every aspect, honestly, but we also grew up very different. The cost of living anywhere is so much higher than what it was back then. You could still semi-afford something even working on one income.

CHAKRABARTI: Haley and Gary have also made different financial decisions. Haley says she and her husband chose to go into credit card debt, sometimes for necessary expenses like gas, sometimes for less necessary things.

HALEY: We were like, “Yes, let’s go do these fun things. Let’s travel.” Time is valuable. Money can always be replaced, and I feel like their generation was money, more sedentary, no traveling, no that kind of stuff.

GARY: Since we’ve been retired, man, we’re going nuts. We’re traveling everywhere. But it’s what you had to do to get here. The message was, you show up to work every day, and you work hard, and you do what you gotta do. And if you show up, things will work out. When we were in grade school, middle school, high school, we would duck under our desks because the Russians were gonna bomb us. It was gonna be nuclear annihilation. And then it’s like, okay, we made it past that, but then I have 58,000 of my friends and brothers and sisters who are killed in this stupid war. So it did something to us. But here we are. We showed up. We did what we had to do, and we made it.

HALEY: I would rather be able to make a memory, and it doesn’t even have to be expensive, even though nothing’s free anymore, than to stay at home and not make a memory.

CHAKRABARTI: At the beginning of the show, Haley told us she and her husband don’t own their own home yet. They’re living at her parents’ house in Big Bear, and will stay there for at least the next year so that they can pay off that $10,000 credit card debt.

HALEY: Yes, we want to own a house, but it’s not like we have to own a house in order to feel accomplished. If we were to buy a house, he would look for a job up here, or we go back down near his job, rent an apartment or a little condo the rest of our lives, and we’re totally okay with that, too.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, Haley is only 26. Today, the median first-time home buyer is around 35 years old, according to a census analysis by the real estate company Redfin. The National Association of Realtors puts the number even higher at 40 years old. Back in 1981, it was 29. Either way, first-time homeowners have been getting older since Gary’s day.

Gary says he does plan to leave his kids and his grandkids some money when he dies, but he wouldn’t say how much.

GARY: Our finance guy said, “Okay, when you’re 95, here’s how much is left over that you can leave.” Being goofballs, we said, “What do you mean leave? We ain’t gonna leave anything.” And then he said, “I won’t let you spend down your pot.”

He said, “What if when you’re 85, you need to go into long-term care?” So at least we have some wise person who’s watching over us, and we thought, “Boy, that’s good.”

CHAKRABARTI: Gary and Haley, a grandfather-granddaughter duo in Denver, Colorado, that’s where Gary lives, and Big Bear, California, where Haley lives. Jeremy Ney, we wanted to feature this part of the conversation with Gary and Haley because it comes back to this issue of different expectations. And I’m not talking about the small bore avocado toast stuff, but different expectations for, say, what does it actually mean to live small and within your means now versus what it meant in Gary’s time?

Because I can really sympathize with Haley. She’s like, “I want to travel now. I wanna make memories now. We’ll deal with the cost of it later.” Whether, whereas Gary, when he was in his late 20s, you heard him say they went to the beach, and that was good enough. Is that a kind of a relevant criticism here?

NEY: I think that there is an understanding now for millennials and Gen Z where they see so much of this kind of hopelessness about their financial future. There’s a lot of research that’s been done on financial nihilism and this growth as the economist Kyla Scanlon has called it, of the treat economy, what people want to buy these goods to make them feel like there isn’t so much nihilism out in the world.

And I think that is something that boomers see as, “Oh I saved up. I worked hard, right? I tried to stock all this money away, but you aren’t doing that. You’re trying to buy yourself all these treats.”

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, interesting. I also know that we’ve been talking extensively about boomers and millennials.

There is a generation in between that, those two, which is mine Gen Xers, who are in that same trap, and we did hear from some Gen Xers, too. So here’s Shelley. She’s 56. She lives in Bellbrook, Ohio. She works in health care administration and makes $24 an hour.

SHELLEY: Even though I purposefully made my life very small, I don’t go out to eat. I don’t travel. I’m still unable to meet my needs financially, and I am selling plasma to make ends meet. I do not think I’m going to enjoy the safety or financial security of my parents or grandparents. Even though I’ve been paying into Social Security since being employed, I don’t think that’s going to be enough to sustain me, even if it’s available.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Jeremy, I want to go back to something you said earlier, that we’ve become an asset-locked society, which is why I keep quoting that $77 trillion in assets that baby boomers have. Are we talking housing and the stock market, essentially?

NEY: Those are the two biggest buckets that boomers bought into these homes when they were much more affordable, where it was a lower share of your income.

And for millennials and Gen Z, they don’t really have the money to purchase new homes.

CHAKRABARTI: And is the rate of homeownership for boomers back in 1989, as you said earlier, is that higher than millennial homeownership now?

NEY: Yes, it was far higher back then. So at age 30, boomers owned home ownership rate was about 54% whereas for millennials, college educated, it was at 38%.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow, that’s a really big drop. Okay, so is this why, you had mentioned at the top of the show, Jeremy, for millennials … and Gen Xers, I’m gonna throw us in there, two once in a lifetime crises, the 2008 financial crisis, which was definitely an asset crisis, right? Stock market and housing, which then later translated to jobs, and then COVID, which was an income crisis for a lot of people.

So tell me how those two things factor into this sort of ever-growing divide between generations.

NEY: Yeah, I think it created a lot of, you know, fear for younger generations where they saw that you could have this tremendous wipe out in your assets and wealth the same time that you saw this wipe out in your incomes during COVID.

But boomers saw the same things, too, right? They also were worried that they might lose a lot of their wealth in that process. And so many of them decided to stay in their homes rather than possibly give them up. All of this happening at a time that the U.S. was producing far fewer homes than it had in the past.

So we used to … when boomers were growing up, we were producing about 1.4 million homes a year. Now, we produce about 1.6 million homes a year, but the population size has increased, about 35%. As a result, you now see empty nester boomers who are two times more likely to live in a three-bedroom home than millennials with children.

So they have basically stayed in these homes that millennials want to move into because they are worried about what the economy might look like if they had to swap out.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. No I hear you on that, but at the same time, boomers are … we’ve been told that one of the goals should be to age in place, right?

That’s a more dignified way to spend your senior years, possibly less expensive than if you had to be in assisted living or long-term care. So can you really blame them?

NEY: No, I think when they want to age in place you can’t make a lot of qualms about people’s personal decisions.

But I do think that there is perhaps a federal policy angle, where we do not incentivize some of these boomers to downsize, right? We heard that, Gary, for the first time, is living in an apartment now, because he chose to, but we could perhaps make it more viable for boomers to downsize and open up these homes for millennials with children.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Let’s go back to our listeners. This is Julie. She and her husband live in Austin, Texas. Her husband in his late 30s. They’re both doing much worse than her father-in-law, who has $2.5 million saved for retirement.

JULIE: His parents own a literal mansion in Dallas that is gorgeous and has amenities we could only dream of. His parents go on vacation all the time. This was what he was able to afford on one single software engineer salary. We are both software engineers and can’t afford anywhere near his lifestyle with zero kids.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Jo, a millennial in Sacramento, California.

JO: The only thing that would make a difference is inheriting what my parents are able to give me, and then that creates the awkward dynamic of trying to remember how much I love them and how much I want to enjoy the time that I have with them and not think too much about the money I’ll get when they die.

CHAKRABARTI: Jo, I appreciate your honesty there. But Jeremy, Jo’s getting to something because, okay, this $77 trillion that’s currently assets owned by boomers, it’s not gonna stay with them forever. There will be an enormous wealth transfer first to Gen Xers and then to millennials. So will this sort of, will the gap essentially be balanced out or reduced over time?

NEY: The great generational wealth transfer is this giant source of what is going to happen, right? We have this $77 trillion. Some people put it as high as $100 trillion with asset growth that’s expected to transfer by 2048. But when you look at some of these numbers around inequality, we actually see that the great generational wealth transfer is going to exacerbate and increase inequality.

So the top 1% of boomers are going to give around $719,000 to their children and grandchildren. But when we look at the bottom 90%, the research shows that they will get effectively nothing.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more.

NEY: So part of this is because the top 10% of boomers own that $55 trillion. That’s 71% of wealth. There’s this really high concentration already. And so we don’t actually expect this giant generational wealth transfer to reduce inequality and be this big transfer of money that levels the playing field. It’s really only going to continue to go to these wealthy households.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so it’s essentially the King Charles generation. They’ll get the wealth eventually but it’s only if they’re already in wealthy families. Okay, so it’s really calcifying, this huge income inequality problem across generations. Jeremy, I also wanted to say that the rate at which the divide is growing is really shocking to me.

I’m seeing some numbers here from the 2010 census that looking at older adults older than 65, in the previous quarter century, they’d improved their median net worth by 42%. But households headed by adults between 18 and 34 had actually received a reduction in their net worth by 68%. The divide is just enormous.

And I want to play two more boomers here at the end. Because it’ll get us to our final, and I think most important question, Jeremy. This is Jim, who’s in Vancouver, Washington.

JIM: I’d like to announce myself as a 77-year-old geriatric parasite. I’d like to maybe wonder if the definition of my generation is the luckiest generation or the most selfish generation.

CHAKRABARTI: And this is Lynn, who lives in Portland, Maine. She’s in her early 80s with her husband, and she’s worried about her sons.

LYNN: We and their spouses’ parents have been able to help them buy houses. They both have good jobs, but not jobs that pay a huge amount. I worry about them in retirement, and I worry about our grandchildren and how well they’re going to be supported financially.

CHAKRABARTI: Jeremy, we’ve got about 30 seconds left. What do you think the long-term sort of societal level consequences are if we keep having this much lopsided wealth?

NEY: I think we will see financial crises that continue to worsen. There’s strong evidence showing that the more inequality there is in an economy the weaker it is and the deeper those recessions can go.

And I also think you see these tremendous power imbalances, right? So in The Opportunity Map, we talk about these big regional divides, these large challenges in, on society that we have, but when we look at what’s going to happen, not only for millennials and Gen Z, but Gen Alpha, we are only going to see even worse inequality persist.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.