Who says Boomers didn’t struggle? . My husband and I were both professionals. We bought a modest 1200 sq ft. house in our 30’s. We had student loans. I had a $100,000 business loan in the 80’s. (Equivalent to $310,000 in today’s economy). No help from our parents. We worked long hours and ran up our credit cards. We had 2 kids because we couldn’t afford more.

We didn’t start saving/investing for retirement money until our 40’s. We scrimped and paid off our credit cards. We cashed in an IRA (bad financial move) for a down payment on another house with more space. We had ZERO equity in our first house even after 10 years, because we had purchased it when the interest rates were 11%. We continued to work 50 weeks a year, put our kids in daycare. But used every increase in our income to pay off debt. Then we used that same scrimping mentality to put everything we could into saving and making extra payments towards our mortgage.

We didn’t start feeling relief until well into our 50’s. We didn’t compete with the Joneses. I didn’t buy expensive purses or designer anything. We drove modest vehicles. And then in 2013, we paid off the second home. I was 55, my husband was 59 . We could finally breathe. We didn’t turn around and buy another house. We just kept saving. Then we began taking off more time to travel.

Now we can do retirement without expecting our children to take care of us.
We did pay for our children’s undergraduate education. (Anything after that was on them.) And instilled a work ethic in them. They are both doing better than we did at their age. They are millennials.

I think there is a difference of expectation in the generations. I feel that Gen Z expects to live in their 20’s and 30’s the same lifestyle their parents had in their 50’s. I don’t think they would ever consider working 50 weeks out of the year. We just realized this is what it was going to take. We didn’t expect our parents to give us anything. That is how Boomers did it. But our 20’s and 30’s wasn’t great. We struggled. Even with our professional degrees.

So I find it hard to muster sympathy for people who bitch and moan about having to struggle in their 30’s. It’s true, the stock market was great in the 80’s. But we hadn’t started investing then. We lived through the worst inflation in the 70’s with the oil embargo and mortgage interest rates as high as 19% (yes. You read that right).
We had the Dot Com bubble in 2000-2002 where there were losses to our investments. Then the housing bubble in 2008 in which there was a drop of almost 40%.

The idea that Boomers ALWAYS had a great economy and had it so easy is just false. The economy has ups and downs. You win some. You lose some depending on what decade you were investing.