Based on savings data, baby boomers have to keep working. Most of them have under $50k saved for retirement. They’ll be 100% dependent on social security. That’s blocking upward mobility for gen x.
I’m confused. I thought the baby boomers were holding on to all the real estate and wealth…
Jil, if you aren’t a previous owner then they haven’t gotten to you yet. They are prioritizing existing owners in California first, even if you were first in line for pre-orders. Most of my friends already got their Model 3s and they bought Model S like middle of 2017. That having been said, they still haven’t ramped up production to where they want.
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Yes, it is was by Elon already.
I still have LEAF contract until Aug 2018, not in rush to go. If I get model 3 before then, I will get it. Otherwise, I will go for Bolt as this is available in the market.
@wuqijun - At least you bought. I have a friend who’s been waiting for a downturn/correction since 2014, and now he’s getting serious FOMO, but he’s held off so long now that he’s just going to keep waiting I guess. I kept telling him to just buy back then.
I agree with @manch, I thought I overpaid each time I bought too. One of them the jury is still out so we’ll see.
The top 10% of them are. The majority of them have very little. Wealth distribution is very uneven.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. They lived in a time when things were more affordable, and you could live on a single salary.
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Live luxuriously 
So good that they didn’t think of saving and investing. Woke up to realize someone moved their cheese.
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My builder buddy and ex partner just finished this $4.3m house in RWC. Teed up to build five more.
Still plenty of money in San Carlos and RWC.
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Emerald-Hills/508-Oak-Park-Way-94062/home/144914819
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Congrats!
Who buys spec builds like this up in Emerald Hills?
I think most people will have less than 50k for retirement, boomers, hen-Xers, and millennials. Most people will have social security as the sole income after retirement.
Previous generations had pension and social security. The current and future generations will have only social security. Some people will never retire and continue to work until 95. Statistically people can not live many decades after retirement on average, not enough resource to support an average of 35 years of retirement. Social security and Medicare will bankrupt if everyone stops working at 65 and live until 100
Cost structure needs to downsize dramatically. We need to invent ways to make 20k average total cost of living per person after retirement,
including the real cost for medical care and other living expenses.
I thought your family was living on a single salary for a long time too.
People that sold stock at the high. When stocks are shaky Real Estate goes up.
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Single salary for a couple of years, yes, but most families can’t, and even we can’t long-term–certainly not here. (I gave up the job a couple of months after #3 came along. Worked with #1 and #2)
You have to be kidding. Jobless for 16 years, single salary family for 16 years, family salary when I first arrived is way less than what a fresh graduate SWE gets in Google. Of course is possible, control your expenses.
You know what hanera, you’re right.
To retire, all you have to do is move to SF. You get rent control for life, and if your parents were jobless you must have been getting housing assistance, food stamps and PG&E assistance. Plenty of soup kitchens–I can even volunteer to “pay” for my meal. I can probably make it through retirement just sucking off the system. It’s just medical that’s the issue. Just need to get a ballot measure going that requires the top 10% to pay for everyone else’s medical care. That’s so California. it’s gotta pass.
Great! Now I don’t have to get a job.
But please don’t be voting down rent control! That’s part of my retirement plan. 
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I can empathize with this. 2018 is very different from, say, 1988 w.r.t costs here in the bay area. Especially once you have kids. And especially if one lives in the “Real Bay Area” (i.e. Peninsula, SF, or the very close-by-East-Bay).
I have one kid. All in I spend probably 50K/yr on that kid with all the lessons, activities, and private school education. Obviously private school education is a big expense. I could send my kid to the local public school and get a quality education, as my neighbors also with one kid do, but let’s use this as an example.
That 50K is post tax dollars. Accounting to CA income tax, Fed income tax, Fed net investment tax, SS / Medicare tax / etc etc … that kid represents a pre-tax wage income of what — guessing 80K? More?
Now let’s add in housing costs — how much does one have to pay — say $5000 / month (whether rent or own incl property tax?) That’s 60K per year in post tax dollars. Pre tax dollars is what - say 85K?
So now we’re up to 165K in pre-tax dollars, not including food, savings, or anything else. I don’t know how single income families survive in the bay area anymore in 2018 — unless one has multiple generations living under one roof, pooling income sources and reducing costs that way. That’s the immigrant way. But, culturally speaking, that’s not the “American” way as we have been telling ourselves that the “American” way is a house, a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a car since the start of the post-WWII-war era.
And I’m talking about one kid, not three.
Public School is one way. But then you’re moving to a place like Lafayette — great place for families and schools, but your housing costs are going up too.
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I think this is the problem when one conflates a product of “happy circumstance” (i.e. luck) with “innate ability”. Generally speaking I hypothesize that Baby Boomers grew up in an era in American history where life was easy. The rest of the world was physically shattered from WWII. All of Europe, China, and Japan had to rebuild post-WWII. Places like India, Singapore, Thailand, and Korea weren’t even in the American consciousness as an economic force.
So we Americans had it easy for a long time — there was no real foreign competition anywhere.
The problem is that we Baby Boomer Americans started to view the result of this economic success as a result of innate ability, or somehow as the result of a “superior” economic or political system. Baby Boomers drank our own koolaid.
Now in 2018 things are very different.
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