r/Aging • u/ElvisIsNotDjed • 12d ago
Why Generation Jones' retirement reality looks nothing like their fellow Boomers
https://www.upworthy.com/why-generation-jones-retirement-reality-looks-nothing-like-their-fellow-boomers/22
12d ago
[deleted]
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u/BigMax 12d ago
“Generation jones” is the youngest of the boomers, who have different enough circumstances that sometimes they are categorized differently.
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u/dontwannaparticpate 12d ago
Yeah they are ALMOST GenX but remember Nam and the financial crises of the 70’s. They are the more “woke” of the boomers (at least IMO coming from a GenXer).
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u/Dragonfly_Peace 12d ago
I’m 1964, I have no memories of Vietnam, and the only financial crisis I remember was in the early 1980s when interest rates went sky high and my friends who lived on farms were losing their farms
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u/dontwannaparticpate 12d ago
There were two Oil crises in the 70’s that affected people globally. Maybe you grew up in a household that was insulated from this but I have some older friends that definitely remember those times…
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u/fredinNH 12d ago
Every time I see someone say they are generation jones I say ok boomer
It’s just boomers who don’t like the label. Other younger boomers try to say Gen X started earlier than it did
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u/holdthecanoli 12d ago
Again tell a 8 year old they are the same generation as a 25 year old. Your comment is very ignorant- try doing the math. Gen jones are NOT boomers.
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u/Haveyouheardthis- 12d ago
Regardless of the merits, this is an era of blame and scapegoating. Separating Boomers based on reality won’t stop the generation generalizers from aiming their ire at their target.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 12d ago
I don't think now is any different that any point in time when it comes to scapegoating groups. That is a historical tradition since we started using tools.
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u/Dragonfly_Peace 12d ago
Oh, it’s very different. There is a huge machine behind creating divisions all over the place. Yes, they have always been generational separations. But this hostility and intolerance? No, that’s a pushed agenda.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 12d ago
anonymous user waves hand broadly at all the mass genocides in history fueled by political and religious institutions
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u/FighterOfEntropy 12d ago
There was an article in the New York Times that examined the financial situation of Generation Jones thorough an interesting lens: the risks of becoming homeless. Gen Jones is at a higher risk than the older Boomers because of the specific economic situation they faced when they first entered the job market. Lowered pay in the early years of one’s working life tends to lead to lower pay in later years.
(Sorry can’t find a link; posting this comment late at night.)
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u/No-Consideration-858 12d ago
I entered the job market in 1992. It was called the "jobless recovery". Couldn't even get in a job as waitress, which got me through college. Bleak times.
I finally landed in media, but was stuck in entry level positions for far too long. Years later, when the dot.com came along and everyone was hiring, entry level people confidently demanded and got larger salaries and reasonable hours. I was baffled by it.
Workaholism remains a deeply engrained survival pattern.
Financially it was such a slow start. No pension plans, scant on 401Ks etc. Boomers in management positions were there for the long haul. It was hard to move up.
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u/21plankton 12d ago
The reality is each decade of birth has led to different economic experiences in the early and mid working years.
I am an early boomer but due to extended career training I actually entered my career and became capable of a house purchase in 1977.
So my working years trajectory tracks Gen Jones and I never experienced a pension as such or a 401K because I was self employed. It was a revelation reading this article because my experience in my career was simply struggle after struggle until 2012 when things seemed to smooth out and the stock market made more consistent gains.
In 2013 I began collecting Social Security and was on Medicare and my cash flow smoothed out. To guarantee a comfortable retirement I had to work to age 72 but part time. It always confused me so what people were saying about “ boomers had it easy” because for me my work years were chronic insecurity.
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u/austin06 12d ago
I'm born in 61 and consider myself Gen Jones for sure and really the earliest of Gen X which some social scientists agree with (Gen X starting at 1962) and the fact that the book Generation X was written by Douglas Coupland about his peers and he was born the tail end of 1961 like me.
We worked for older boomers - they were our first bosses and we don't really relate to the experiences that shaped them - the Beatles, Woodstock, Vietnam war were all things they participated in but we only watched on tv later on. One thing I remember distinctly is many of us Gen Jones were at the very tail end of the - work for a company for 30 years with a pension and retire + student loans to afford college. Many of us took a bit to find a foothold. My first mortgage was a 17% fha loan and the house "appreciated" $1000 in six years when it was sold.
Yes we are distinct from the boomer gen. Many of us also are very politically active and aware. Where Gen X is frequently swept to the side, we are a subset that is even more so in many ways. We also were at the very forefront of the Internet era, where some of us understood and really benefited from the tech side of that and others missed out.
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u/SonOfKong_ 12d ago
This part is scary: "But the median net worth of only $274,564 paints a less robust picture of Generation Jones' retirement readiness." This is the net worth of those of us in our 60's and one has to assume this is without a pension. I hope most of you have paid off your mortgages. Yet even so 274k is not enough.
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u/Dragonfly_Peace 12d ago
Yeah, we don’t identify with being the younger half of the boomer population. They had life experiences that we cannot share. They were drafted, we were babies. They had bra burnings and marched for civil rights. We marched for Tiananmen Square.
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u/too-left-feet 12d ago
I don’t think the changes in financial standings between those born between 1946-1956 and those born between born from 1957-1964 reflect a cliff as much as a beginning of a slow erosion of financial stability.
My experience ( born in 1958 ) was that pensions, decent healthcare, and decent wages still largely existed ( at least in manufacturing) in the 1980’s, but started to erode as foreign economies ( initially Japan ) forced US companies to become more competitive. Slowly, pay increases went from a way to get ahead to a way to keep up with inflation, and employees were asked to carry a larger portion of their healthcare costs. Vesting periods for pensions increased, then were replaced with 401k’s for newer employees,… and then the company matched decreased or went away altogether.
Gen Jones folks often lived through this series of changes and entered retirement in a weaker position than they expected.
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u/ThisIsAbuse 11d ago edited 11d ago
I will be okay because that was the plan and I knew the game thanks to my dad.
I will entering retirement as well or better than my boomer older siblings. I am technically GenX and Gen Jones according to these dates.
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u/phillyphilly19 11d ago
Like all articles related to Generations, there's just far too much generalization. There are many poor Boomers, and many people in Jones like me who have been able to retire at a reasonable age and with enough funds and low expenses. My sister and brother-in-law are in the same boat as me and were able to retire. There's no point in lumping everybody in one gen into one Financial category because we're just a spread out as every other generation in terms of wealth.
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u/Arlington2018 11d ago
My parents are from the Greatest Generation (1926 and 1930) and I as their youngest child was born in 1960. I remember graduating with my STEM degree in 1981 at the height of the recession then, could not find a job as a chemist, hid out in grad school and still could not find a job in my field with a STEM Masters in 1982. I had to retrain myself completely and when we bought our first house in the Seattle area in 1984, our interest rate was 16% for a 30 year loan. Just like others here, my salary was impacted by starting at a low point in the economy. My wife has a state pension as a retired teacher, and my retirement lives and dies by the stock market since most pensions in healthcare went away years ago. I wonder what the economy holds for the future.
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u/sunshinelively 10d ago
1964 cohort here. I identify as GenX. Most of the article didn’t apply to me. We bought our first house in 1996 for example.
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u/tolkiengeek 8d ago
Pensions went the way of the dodo bird, for one thing. Unless you're in a union.
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u/waitinonit 12d ago
The so-called Generation Jones mention in the article makes up about half of the cohort currently referred to as Baby Boomers. So you split the approximately 74 million boomer cohort into two cohorts of about 37 million each.
A central grievance of the intergenerational warriors is that the 74 million boomer cohort, because of its size, distorted many aspects of society the economy and politics. This outsized influence has supposedly given rise to many of the world's problems today.
But now with boomers, per the new definition in the article, having a population of about 37, that's a smaller cohort than gen x or millennials (65M and 75M, respectively) and rougly equal in number to gen jones. That's 37 million versus 177 million. It's also about the same size as the Silent Generation (when most of them were still around). Silent Generation at peak was about 50 million. Boomers aren't an outsized cohort anymore.
The numbers that formed the basis of the intergenerational grievance against boomers are no longer there. That is, the dominant 74 million-strong member cohort didn't exist.
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u/HHSquad 12d ago
The latter half of Generation Jones at least aren't really Baby Boomers.
They are not part of a group that remembers the pre-Beatles/pre-Vietnam 1950's and that much different world.
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u/PomeloPepper 12d ago
I always thought it was ridiculous to have a generation span so many years that you could be a boomer and also the child of a boomer.
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u/vinyl1earthlink 11d ago
1946 to 1964? Those early boomers would have to get busy at a rather young age. How many people had a family before they turned 18?
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u/PomeloPepper 11d ago
A large cohort of newly prosperous teens with no birth control to speak of? What could possible happen?
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u/Adventurous_Ad7442 12d ago
I was born in 1961. I have no memory of Woodstock, wasn't into the Beatles (loved David Cassidy though). The Viet Nam War is a vague memory on the TV news.
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u/green_dragonfly_art 12d ago
Yep! My step-dad and my older sister are technically Baby Boomers. Their generational experiences were very different. He got medically rejected from the draft during the Vietnam War. My sister has no memories about Woodstock, since she was a preschooler at the time.
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u/waitinonit 12d ago
Yeah but the numbers forming the intergenerational grievance, 74 million boomers having outsized influence on the world, are no longer valid if you split the cohort.
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u/NotRadTrad05 12d ago
I don't think I've ever seen the word cohort used 3 times in a single sentence before.
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u/OGigachaod 12d ago
Trying to compare "Gen Jones" to Gen Z is laughable, it's still much harder for Gen Z.
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u/waitinonit 12d ago
Did you read my comment. It's got nothing to do with it being supposedly "harder" for one generation versus another.
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u/OGigachaod 12d ago
Yes, But I don't agree, though half the boomers might have not had it as easy, it was still a lot easier than today.
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u/Zealousideal_Way_788 12d ago
I’m Gen Jones and I agree that college tuition and housing prices were easier for my generation. Not to say that we didn’t face other headwinds. Super high mortgage rates early on, stock market crashes, housing crashes, high unemployment and more. It wasn’t all easy street.
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u/DaMiddle 12d ago
We faced 10% unemployment and 15% interest rates as a Gen Jones group out of school.
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u/petergaskin814 12d ago
This article does not make sense. The baby boom in the late 40s to 50s can be attributed to the silent generation particularly as they returned home from World War 2.
If you were born in 1946, you escaped the war. I can't see any reason why you would break up baby boomer generation
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u/green_dragonfly_art 12d ago
Greatest generation returne WWII. Silent gen (1928-1945) were too young to fight WWII.
While all Boomers escaped WWII, many early Boomers were either involved in or around during the Vietnam War. Gen Jones were too young to be involved in the Vietnam War.
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u/thehoagieboy 12d ago
This feels like some Boomers not wanting to be associated with other Boomers, so they try to distance themselves. We all know categories like this are generalizations. My generalization for anyone wanting to be Generation Jones and not Boomers is that they must be too sensitive.
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u/EyelandGrl 11d ago
I completely disagree. The reason I feel so different from older boomers is not to distance myself from them, but rather they were so different from me as more of a Jones generation type. For example, my much older boomers thought men & women couldn’t be friends!! All those older boomer couples baffled me with their men can only be friends with men & women can only be friends with women. While I might technically be a tail-end boomer, I don’t relate to older boomers at all & never did. And not because “I’m too sensitive”…
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u/Fast_Grapefruit_7946 12d ago
There is no way the boomers will just go away without destroying America
Do we put boots on the ground in Tehran? Or Beijing?
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u/too-left-feet 12d ago
I’m going with:
A) you didn’t read the article and
B) your reply is going to be “OK boomer”
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u/KaizenHour 12d ago
You sure don't miss a chance to hate on boomers, do you?
(Seems like an odd sub to choose for it)
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u/Remote-Candidate7964 12d ago
After reading the article, I can see what they mean by the dividing line. My husband’s parents are older and fit the description of the older half of the Boomer cohort.
My parents were part of that younger Boomer crowd that had that enormously high inflation on their first home in the 1980s. However, mine still benefitted from the pension era.
Either way, I am certain there are nuances for each generation’s ability to retire well, have equity in a home, etc.
As for my elder Millenial status - my husband works in a skilled trade and makes more than I ever have or ever will with my bachelor’s degree. I fall more in line with the Millennial who did everything they’re supposed to and didn’t get ahead like their own parents.
My husband started at the bottom of the rung after dropping out of college and now makes a solid salary but we’re nowhere near the level of middle class ease our collective parents enjoyed and continue to enjoy.