Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

>I was surprised that the article talks about employment. I expected it to be about the assets they hold.

Good employment opportunities give you the power to build wealth and access high QoL perks like remote work and more free time to live life, that previous generations didn't have.

Try not having good employment and see, you're not thinking about assets or complaining about a 2h commute to the office but about paying for food and rent.

View on HN

The parents of Gen Z are the baby boomers, right?

According to Google, the average baby boomer has $1.2M in assets.

If they had given 10% of that to their newborn and invested it in software companies, the child would already be as wealthy as the parent now. And could focus on asset allocation.

Instead of spending decades with other stuff to then finally come to learn about asset allocation.

Yes and? Why are you repeating yourself? The average baby boome is much older as well. Time in the market beats everything. Gen Z is still young, also has time to build wealth. Especially if they later inherit their parents wealth when they pass away.

Time in the market does not beat everything.

10 years in the Nasdaq beats 20 years in the S&P 500.

GenX are parents of GenZ. Older GenX started work in the early 90s and bought houses before the runup. Later GenX entered job market in dot.bomb and bought homes at peak of housing bubble (that was us, we are not rich).

Aren't we at the peak of house prices these days?

This chart:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI

Seems to indicate house prices tripled since 2000?

We definitely own a house and it’s not all terrible. But where we live house prices have probably doubled in 20 years; if we had bought 5 years earlier (when we were in college), we would have seen our home value quintuple.

Damn, I realized should have bought a house instead of being in 10th grade.

Also some millennials entered the job market around the 2009 crash and it was brutal. It would set your career back years behind and it was a tough damage to undo later.

Yeah I entered job market right after dot.com crash and 9/11; GFC was definitely worse overall across all markets. I made choices based upon that time that i really wish had gone another way (mostly risk aversion since everything seemed dicey).

It takes a bit to overcome:

https://economics.td.com/ca-labour-market-during-recession-c...

https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/recession-graduate/

Wouldn't the parents fall into the Gen X?

The parents of millennials are baby boomers.

The parents of Gen Z are mostly Gen X.

I don’t understand the point of this post. Aside from missing the mark on who gen z’s parents are, the rest is nonsense. How would boomers have given their newborns (each!) $100,000? They didn’t have $1.2m then. Likely they didn’t have $100,000, especially liquid, at all. And now probably 1/3 to 1/2 of that average (and it’s only an average! Median could be much lower) is in home value, so they’re retiring on six figures of investments (and again, only on average!) which isn’t exactly great given that medical costs very much do not stop when you gain Medicare. Younger-side boomers about to retire with $1.2m total net worth are gonna spend all of what’s not tied up in housing (and maybe that too!), largely on medical and assisted-living care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com