re: Are you better off than your parents? Is your kids likely to be better off than you?

Macro economic factors like recession or even war

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Macro economic factors like recession or even war

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Meh, if you're looking for an excuse you can/will find one.

Yes and yes

Yes, I had outpaced my parents before I hit 30. But I am the son of an illiterate man and a high school dropout mom. They were wonderful parents and I didn't realize how poor we were until I was much older, my dad also passed away when I was 9.

3 of 4 of my kids are probably a no.

But my youngest and her future husband will outpace me within 10 years. She will be a registered dietician and already has people where she is interning gauging her interest in working there after school, her boyfriend has accepted an engineering job (chemical engineering) at the consulting firm he worked at while in college. They may outpace me before they hit 30.

I'm a boomer. My two oldest are millennials, and my two youngest are whatever 1998 & 2000 are (Gen Z?).

my dad is about to retire but makes like 400k. I don't see how I'll ever get to that (in real dollars) tbh

Yes. My biological father abandoned us so there is no where to go but up for my kids.

Yes I am better off than my parents

And my 24yo son is doing WAY better than I was at his age

Yes, I am.

My folks didn't make much growing up.

My wife and I are far better off than either or our parents. I was the second person in my family to finish high school and the first to finish college. Most of her family finished high school but she was one of three cousins who graduated college in the same year for the first time in their family. My wife is the first to earn a masters degree.

I grew up in apartments and mobile homes in Atlanta and North Georgia. No one in my immediate family owned a home. Some of her family owned homes in Chicago but most of them lived in Florida and either lived in mobile homes or pretty primitive homes. She and I have owned a home since I was 23 and she was 21. We pay more in state income taxes than either of our parents earned in a year and make more every 3 years than either of our Dad's earned in their lifetimes. We are far better off because they saw to it that we received an education, wore our asses out when we fricked up, which we both did, and sacrificed so we could do better. Not just our parents but our grandparents and in her case aunts and uncles. It is what family is about...sacrificing for the next generation.

I am not sure our kids will do as much better than us than we did our own parents. My son is doing alright and there is a fairly narrow window where he could actually become generationally wealthy in his chosen profession but more than likely he will merely earn a good living. My daughter will be in the 9th grade next year and is an excellent student with no real work ethic (out son did not have it either but does now that he has an actual job). She is interested in music so she will probably earn a decent living at best. She is young though so who knows, she may wind up on a pole somewhere...you never know about people.

All in all I would say that the kids of Gen X parents, millennials and Gen Z kids, will probably have to learn to live on less disposable income than their parents had. I think Gen X may be the last generation of Americans who really surpassed their parents success by a large degree. First off we (gen x) do not make the sacrifices our parents made but a lot of that has to do with unintended consequences of years of idiotic tax policy based on rising tides and ships without any regards to the amount of anchor rode an individual may have. There are also unforeseen consequences of policies like air bags in cars and arc fault breakers in homes that supposedly make us safer but cost a shite ton of money in an era where wages have struggled for 40+ years to keep up with inflation.