Summary
Are millennials being given a financial raw deal by their parents' generation? And who do the Baby Boomers expect to pay for their retirement?
Manuela Saragosa looks at the intergenerational contract - the promise that the younger generation will see an improvement in their living standards, in return for which they will care for the older generation in their old age. But is the contract broken?
Many of those born in the developed world in the 1980s and 1990s face inflated housing costs and student fees, stagnant wages and insecure jobs, and little prospect of saving for their retirement. Manuela speaks to one such Millennial - BBC colleague Faarea Masud, whose own podcast series About The Money! charts the precarious financial state of her generation.
Plus Laura Gardiner of think tank The Resolution Foundation explains how the different generations need to work together to manage the demographic challenge of an ageing population, rather than get mired in the "OK Boomer" culture war that has broken out on social media.
Producers: Laurence Knight, Sarah Treanor
(Picture: Close-up of irritated Millennial man with Boomer father looking on; Credit: SDI Productions/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, young, financially strapped and fed up. |
| 0:10.1 | I mean, I always have to have the existential crisis about whether or not I can afford to buy a house. I can say I definitely neglect both my current and my future financial needs. |
| 0:19.1 | We hear from the younger generation who are financially worse off than their parents, |
| 0:23.7 | how to fix it. |
| 0:24.9 | Fairer taxations of pensions, more efficient taxation of housing, |
| 0:29.3 | encouraging young people to vote more, building more homes. |
| 0:32.6 | It's not rocket science. |
| 0:33.6 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:39.7 | We take it for granted that our children will be financially better off than us. But in parts |
| 0:45.2 | of the industrialised world, so-called millennials, that is those born in the 1980s or 1990s, |
| 0:51.6 | could become the first generation to earn less than their parents. |
| 0:55.7 | In fact, it's clear that the financial needs of millennials are quite different to those of |
| 1:00.6 | their parents, the baby boomers born after the Second World War, and Generation X, born in the |
| 1:06.1 | 1960s and 1970s. |
| 1:08.3 | So much so that last year, the Financial Conduct Authority here in the UK, |
| 1:12.9 | the body that regulates the country's financial services, held a conference about it. Here's a clip |
| 1:18.1 | of what was discussed. The evidence is overwhelming that the younger generation are having a raw |
| 1:23.7 | deal. Their pay is not increased on scale it increased for the boomers and the two crucial |
| 1:29.3 | assets we build up, a pension and a house, are much harder for the younger generation to acquire. |
| 1:35.5 | One of the key points is that whatever we do, we want the generations to be collaborating, |
| 1:42.8 | to be close, to understand each other's issues and problems. |
| 1:47.6 | The last thing we want is for the young to say they've got it made. |
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