Babyboomers: £220,000 in debt

miceElf, thank you kindly! problem is I am/was a business economist and I still have this irritating habit of trying to check facts and look for precise definitions and - as someone once told me - I am deeply subversive.

However re-reading my previous post, my proof reading is appalling and spelling/grammar errors that should have been corrected remain uncorrected.

Is that the David Willetts MP whose nickname is 'Two Brains' because he is supposedly so clever?

Gadabout, brilliant suggestions.

.. or set up a GN Think Tank - we have so many brilliant brains & far more experience than the people in IGF but they'd say that was unfair to the young too.

Wasn't it David Willetts who set the ball rolling on this anti-generational stance?

Maybe we should be sending a GN 'paper' to No 10 too. The someone can tell us to "Calm down, dearies & best get off to Bingo"

MiceElf - I agree with you about FlicketyB's post;
But I also think that what she says is known to politicians and media, but they deliberately distort the facts.

Well done anno for your excellent suggestion, JessM for passing it on & GNHQ for taking it up. This kind of action makes GN so much more worthwhile.

Do you know what? I think we ought to have a Q& A with Flickety B. she knows much more than so many of the mouthy types who sound off in the media.

Thank you, *Kat, for being so on the ball and securing Angus Hanton fo the web chat. It looks as if he won't have an easy ride - at least, I hope not.

A better figure to use is the median, which gives the central figure in the distribution, rather than the traditional average. With the median we would know that 50% of the population have incomes below a certain figure and 50% above.

I think benefit calculations use average household income rather than average individual incomes. So a family with 2 people both earning £12,500 would have a household income of £25,000.

Looking at the number of people with large annual incomes, only 410,000 earned more than £100,000 and of those only about 120,000 earned more than £200,000. Given that there are over 26 million tax payers, only 1.5% earn over £100,000 there income will have very little effect on overall averages.

If you take 10 people, one of whom earns £100,000 a year, and nine of whom earn £9,000 a year, the average annual pay of those ten people is £19,000.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Well if it is an average (as in the "mean" - add them all together and divide by the number of people) then the majority will indeed earn less, because a few people are earning many multiples more than £25k and they drag the average up.

I do agree about the misleading nature of averages.

However that applies also to the average salary which I believe is around £25,000 and on which calculations are often based. Many people don't earn anywhere near that.

Seasider, I do not know why so many people are worried about immigration when so many job losses have been and are occurring through these 'backdoor' operations! Jobs have been and continue to be out-sourced overseas and jobs continue to be lost in the UK. It is extremely worrying.

Not sure who set up the Intergenerational Foundation, but it seems to have a lot of supporters, presumably in Generation Y, who seem to be resentful of so-called 'baby boomers' and do seem to have a sense of entitlement which I do not believe we had. What many of us had, being brought up in post-war austerity, was an ambition to do better for ourselves, even if that was simple aspirations. When I was very young my ambitions were for a car and a telephone! As I grew up, my ambition was certainly not to get my hands on anything my parents had worked for, the thought never occurred to me.

averages are so misleading
although the following data is out of date it may recognise that the income of the retired is very varied and single pensioners are not that well-off particularly those over 75.
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pensions/pension-trends/chapter-11--pensioner-income-and-expenditure--2012-edition-/art-pt2012ch11.html#tab-Income

Re Anas useful link "Tue 11-Mar-14 11:52:47"

"According to the ILC-UK's research, the average household wealth of the over 50s is £541,000, including private and personal pensions, property, financial assets, valuables and deposit savings. This wealth more than halves by the time the household reaches 80."

Well if that is correct some b****r else has a lot of my share.
These figures have the same problem as the " averaged out" figures of food waste in households.

It it totally misleading to quote such "average" figures. Averaging out such figures does not give any picture of how evenly that money is distributed in the baby boomer generation. There are numbers of the extremely rich whose asset values appear to raise the average asset value of the majority.

The only meaningful figures would be those that that showed how many BBoomers were in each of a range of asset valuation brackets

This nice little graph is shows this better. It is not specifically about baby boomers but it highlights the problem of averaging.

bellacaledonia.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/ons-total-wealth-distribution.png

The wealthiest 10% own 40% of the overall wealth.

Thanks, Jess. My blood ran cold when i saw my name and 'reported' at the start of your post! However I then read the rest of it!

Just "reported" your post anno to make sure those in GNHQ don't miss your excellent suggestion.
Moving more civil service jobs out of london into areas where office jobs are badly needed would be a good thing I think. In a place like Swansea for instance what are the main sources of employment other than tourism/leisure/retail? Health, education, 2 universities and the DVLA.

I am so sick of hearing what a great life civil servants have! I live in a deprived area with little employment outside tourism . That is why many civil service offices are based here. Over the last few years over 4,000 jobs have been lost devastating the local economy. Remaining staff work under increasing pressure to meet government targets. Holidays have been reduced for new entrants. Pension premiums have increased every year but not wages leading to a drop in income. Only yesterday we heard some of our HR services have been sold off to French company who said in their bid that they would outsource the work. Colleagues around the country will be made redundant and the work is going to India. Not all civil servants are Whitehall fat cats

Time for a well-publicised fight-back. We could get hold of one of these inter-generational people for a web-chat, though I don't think they would come. We need to start a campaign and could produce our own better informed reports. How about it, HQ?

Perhaps he had designs on their house and they wouldn't play ball. Although he must be wealthy to be able to fund the foundation.

I am always wary of 'foundations' with one founding father. They are too often set up to prove a rich man's prejudices or further his preoccupations and the researchers job is to give him the results he wants to see.

What worried me about the housing report, and I assume the same strictures would apply to the new report on Baby Boomers, is not just that the researcher was incompetent and produced a report that was unmitigated twaddle but that those higher in the organisation, who must have read the report before it was published failed to notice this. I once worked for a big industrial research centre and a report like the housing report would have lost me my job and would never have been published - and I was working as a housing economist!

The Intergenerational Foundation is a very dangerous organisation which is causing dissent and resentment between the generations.

The person who suggested that older people under-occupying their homes should be forced encouraged to downsize to free up homes for younger people apparently had parents who were living in a very large 5 bedroomed house. Presumably it is the right thing for ' everyone else' to have to do this, but doesn't apply to them and theirs.

I do not think the report suggested how young people would be able to afford the much larger, more expensive houses. Or are they supposed to do a direct swap with the older homeowners?

There is a concerted campaign against 'baby boomers' at the moment which is very worrying. Those who are able to are probably helping their own families with childcare and financially, but there are many who are unable to do so. If they own their own home it may well be their only asset to pay for their own care if needed one day.

janeainsworth and you highlighted one of the dodgy staistics. The billion pounds John Lewis put into its pension fund was more to do with the life expectancy of its younger contributing members than it does with its retired members. It also has to do with the value of its underlying assets, the market price of its stocks and shares and the interest it gets from the money invested in bonds. If stock market or interest on bonds fall, then the value of the fund falls and a gap opens up between what they need to fund their pension commitments and what their fund is worth and the gap has to be filled. If the stockmarket rises fast they are in the reverse position, the fund is worth more than its commitments.

As I said doubtful statistics and ludicrous conclusions

FlicketyB I'm glad it wasn't just me, but you put it so much better