The Great Wealth Transfer Reality Check: $36 Trillion vs $93 Trillion
While baby boomers hold $93 trillion in assets, Visa Business and Economic Insights reveals only $36 trillion will actually pass to heirs after debts, taxes, and retirement costs. This transfer is highly uneven, with affluent households retaining most wealth, meaning the impact on consumer spending will be far smaller than headline figures suggest.
Imagine you are sitting on a winning lottery ticket. You hit the jackpot, but you immediately lose half by—smartly—taking the lump sum. Next, you lose another 30–40 percent through taxes and fees.
- massysett
Heh, I saw the title and the domain, and I thought it was referring to wealth transferred from poor to rich by all the credit card fees that merchants pay that are refunded to well-off cardholders through rebates. Poorer customers do not get lucrative rebates, it they use debit and get none at all.
- zhainya
So, the rich will keep getting richer? Is that about right?
- atleastoptimal
80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see a cent of it. Coupled with AI taking everyone's job, the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots.
- AshamedBadger56
Keep in mind these charts are almost useless if you're trying to determine how much the typical millennial or gen x person has compared to boomers.
I'd go as far as to say it's misleading at best to portray "The kids are alright" and that "Gen X and millennial heirs are starting from a position of strength", when the charts used to back that up are based on net worth per capita, a very poor metric to use for this. They might as well say "A small portion of the kids, that happen to be in the top ~10%, are alright".
- mikestew
Despite TFA coming from Visa, of all places, I found it to be a read worthy of my time. Basically, inheritances might not be as large as one might suspect, and the all that "inheritance spending lift" might already be happening (my parents are blowing my inheritance).
I might take issue with the conclusion at the very bottom that GenX and Millenials are ahead of Boomers on a capital per-capita basis. That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable. So it's not like the "kids" are necessarily spending their money on the fabled avocado toast (a dish this Boomer enjoys very much, thank you).
- NoDodgeQuestion
>baby boomers are sitting on at least $93 trillion in assets
> $36 trillion in baby boomer wealth will pass to Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years after subtracting liabilities, excluding the top 1 percent of households (the outliers in how they spend their wealth)
Why the fuck would you be allowed to include top 1% in first number but not second? They are outliers, yes, so what?
- tonymet
don’t think of it as a setback, imagine the opportunity
- KwisatzHaderack
Ag, so it’s not really “eat the rich” but “eat the boomers”.