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Well, I'm 57. So...

And boomers did not have it easy. It was just as hard to make ends meet in the 60's as it is today.

The difference is boomers didn't waste money going to Starbucks every day, getting tattoos, hair coloring, door dash, the latest tech constantly, Taylor Swift concerts, vacations, etc.

They lived within their means and set themselves up to buy a house and for retirement. 

Some of us even started businesses to provide good jobs for others. Do you think that's easy too?

What is not true about that statement?

They made their own coffee. They cooked their own modest food. Vacation was a drive to a lake to go fishing. They had one black and white TV to watch Lawrence Welk. They didn't desecrate their bodies.

How is this bullshit?

They didn't lease fancy cars they couldn't afford to buy. They bought that station wagon and took care of it.

And when it comes to generations, the boomers should be renamed the selfish generation, for hording up all of the wealth and screwing over everyone else.  The boomers had the easiest financial environment as young adults and they've created a situation that is now the most difficult possible situation for young adults today.

Fuck them.

I couldn’t disagree more.  I am at the end of the boomers (1961) but that’s not how it was for me and everyone I knew   

I remember sleeping with my three brothers in one queen size bed growing up while my father worked two jobs and went to school.  My folks could not afford to own a house in those earlier so we just rented crappy houses in and around Cleveland.

By the time I got to my teens, dad had earned 2 degrees( Business and Engineering).  my folks could finally afford to buy a house, but it wasn’t anything fancy. I remember going on a first vacation when I was 13 and driving from Ohio to California to go to Disneyland. I remember not having enough money on the way home for us to get anything to eat besides a few hamburgers from McDonald’s that we had to share between seven people in the car. 

I remember having to do a lot of chores and a lot of homework before we were allowed to “go out and play“  As the years went by, dad transferred to new jobs to get a better life.  we went from Cleveland when I was 13, to a small town in Illinois for a couple years, to Michigan, where dad finally landed a higher level job as a vice president of a manufacturing firm.  I remember him buying his first new car then.  By that time I was in HS.  Mom and dad saved enough money then to give college money for 1/2 of freshmen year.

between student loans and working damn near full-time I was able to get myself my bachelors degree in business.  Met my wife at school and she also had a business degree and after we were married, we rented for five years before we could afford to buy a house in 1991 at an interest rate of 10.2%

I used tuition assistance from my employer to earn my masters degree and she did the same.  Been able to buy a little bit nicer house where we had our two daughters.  by now you’re into the early 90s and we were able to take them on vacation to like Disney World type of places when they were five and seven years old and we were able to start saving for their education. 

That was 40 years ago when I started working and I’m still going now. It took me that long to save when I now consider enough to retire on. Several of those eras fortified by substantial loss of retirement savings due to stock market problems, and economic problems. 

This pass was pretty much the same for all of my really good friends and family members. Early struggles followed by many years of hard work in school to get to where they can now probably retire or have already retired.  I’m not sure anybody hoarded anything or did anything to hurt anyone else.  All of them volunteer in the community and give freely to charitable causes.
so I’m just one. I have to say you’re just dead wrong.

 Notice in there that it took 2 educated people 5 years of working before we’re able to buy a house. 

I leased cars or drive beat up ones until I could afford a new one in my mid 30s.  

What does hoarding wealth even mean?

The average cost of buying a home is much higher today (adjusted for inflation) than it was in 1960. So is the cost of college. So is the cost of medical care. So is the cost of a car. The car can at least be--in part--blamed on added features: stripped down cars of the kind my family bought as late as 1979 (cost extra to have a tape deck, no AC, no power doors/windows, etc.) are hard to find. But the availability of homes and the cost of college and medical care are three expenses that have vastly outpaced inflation.

That hurts the millenials in a way that has nothing to do with Starbucks and cable. The middle class has also been shrinking for a while now, and is approximatley 10 percent smaller than it was in the 1960s. To be fair, the upper classes have also gotten bigger (but not by 10 percent). Again, that has little to do with Starbucks and cable.

An interesting dynamic as it relates to the cost of homes, scarcity is, of course, a big factor. And equity in one's house has traditionally been one of the strongest assets middle class Americans have had. Own a home, grow equity, move up the economic escalator. That has worked very well for a lot of people, but with the increasing cost of entry, it has become harder for the current generation to tap into (to even get on the escalator). Conversely, the scarcity that is driving those price increases is to the benefit of those who are already on the escalator, i.e., already own their home. Their equity has also grown disproportionately to the cost of other goods. That has directly benefitted the babyboomers while hurting the millenials (GenX gets a little of both on this one).

There are a great deal of things that are better now than they were in the 60s and 70s, but some of the economic issues that millenials face really are much worse, and that's not because of consumer spending habits.

Conversely, the average savings rate is also about half what it was in the 1960s. Of course, boomers are a big part of that number, so they can't just blame that on millenials (in fact the self-reported savings rate for boomers is lower than for millenials).

Another factor that plays into consumer habits is the availability of credit. Credit cards grew from the 50s through the 80s, but the 80s was when they became a primary growth tool for banks, i.e., when banks started selling credit cards en masse to consumers. One could be tempted to argue the chicken or the egg here, but from my perspective, the banks are the ones who had the economic data around selling credit to people, whereas individual consumers only have their instincts to go off of. In other words, sure, the masses could have said no thanks, we can't really afford it, but the banks had the data to know--and the marketing to explain to people why they could afford their credit cards. 

Today it would be difficult to navigate the U.S. without credit cards, but in the 1980s a lot of households didn't have them at all, or had gas cards and cards that wouldn't allow you to build up a significant balance.

In other words, there are a lot of different economic factors going on, but buying a house, paying for college, and paying for health care are big expenses that are harder for the millenials to afford than they were for the boomers. GenX did better on houses and college, but is squarely in the middle of paying the increased costs of health care.