We've never had it so good

So said Supermac in 1957. This was paraphrased by Trog the
cartoonist (after the Profumo affair) as "We've never had it
so often".

Today's blog is all about baby boomers
...yes, I'm one of them, and yes, I've never had it so good.

As you will all know, there was a baby boom just after the war,
WW2. So there's a whole generation of us, who've lived
through the exciting 1960s .. the decade of the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones, of flower power and the pill... etc, etc.
And now we're all about 60, most of us thinking about retiring
from work soon, though I was lucky in being able to retire
early.

The baby boom generation is a recurring news item in the
press and on the TV, and the current worry is that the
pensions crisis will worsen as more and more of us retire, and
will continue worsening in the years when you, yes you, will
become pensioners. As usual it boils down to money, and
arguments as to who’s going to pay for it. Blair takes the line
that it’s going to be up to the individual rather than the state
who is going to pay, so a lot of you will be obliged to carry on
working until you drop dead. The state pensionable age will be
extended further and further into the distance, and the state
pension when you get it won’t be worth much either. So the
Blair message appears to be – start saving now for your old
age, or carry on working into your very old age, or be
poverty-stricken.

I mention all this as there was a very upbeat programme on
BBC4 on Monday night all about the baby boomers: “Are we
having fun yet?” It featured several retired folk who were
really enjoying themselves – affluent middle class people
who were off “skiing” here and there. One of them was
skiing on a Harley Davidson motorbike, bombing down country
lanes, and another was skiing/windsurfing on the South West
coast. Other people were skiing in Southern Spain, enjoying
the warmth and life with all the retired Brits living out there.

To ski is to “spend the kids’ inheritance” of course. Sell up
your posh home in London and spend it on a home or two
elsewhere, where it’s warmer and less expensive to live, and
spend the rest of your money on having some fun. That’s
the "in thing" to do at the moment. I know of several
instances where elderly couples have been“impoverished”
by having to spend their savings on providing care for one
of them, who’s become physically or mentally disabled. If
you’ve got savings over £8000, then the surplus has to be
spent on providing such care, before the state will step in
and help out financially. So what happens when there’s a
large bill to pay for re-roofing the house? Selling up and
moving elsewhere becomes the only option (unless you’ve
got wealthy children to help you out).

So it’s not surprising that younger retired couples feel that
they might as well go on a spending spree rather than save
their money for future years.... money that would be used up
otherwise by paying for nursing home care. Some homes will
charge in the region of £24k a year to look after one elderly
person, so those life-time savings would soon disappear.

To come back to the TV programme, it was well put together,
but there was nothing new in it for me. In fact I went off to
sleep in the middle of it...it was sooo exciting. I woke up
towards the end, just when the programmer was saying in a
very lively way something like, “It's amazing how the baby
boomers are bursting with energy, and are full of zest for life”.
Mrs C and our daughter L burst out laughing at me, as I woke
up at that very moment.

We had the usual comic banter afterwards. I said, "Oh, I
missed the last bit of that", whereupon Mrs C quipped,"Most
of it, in fact!". "Oh no, surely not ... only about 10 minutes."
"More like 40 minutes", said Mrs C. "Bursting with energy and
full of the zest of life ??!"

Post re-posted to remove an unwelcome comment (link to a
porn site).