It's rubbish to be young

Who's to blame for the credit crunch? Not the youth of today, that's for sure....

Isn't it funny how older folk are always moaning about the youth of today? How they are lazy, feckless, don't know the value of money, and prone to running up hefty credit card debts.

Some of these youngsters even seem to think money grows on trees (or at least plastic).

I never hear young people moaning about the older generation's money habits, but they should. Because it's the older generation who have blown all the cash, and younger people who are going to foot the bill.

Yes, me too.

I'm not talking about my grandparents' generation, the ones who lived through two world wars, worked hard for a pittance, went abroad once in their life and died with a few hundred pounds to their name, and absolutely no debts. People like my grandparents, god rest their souls.

No, I'm talking about the postwar generation, the baby boomers, for want of a better word.

I'm talking about my parents. In fact, I'm talking about anybody over 40. And since I turn 43 next week, I include myself in this baleful category.

We didn't always realise it at the time, but we had it sweet, especially during the Blair-Brown years of plenty, when jobs and credit were easy to come by, and property prices flew relentlessly skywards.

For us, money pretty much did grow on trees.

A mountain to climb.

Okay, some of us endured regular recessions before that, and decent jobs are never easy to come by, but at least we didn't graduate with a mountain of debt.

New figures from The Children's Mutual suggest the average student is set to leave university in 2016 an unimaginable £50,000 in the red.

There were no tuition or top-up fees in my day. I got a full student grant, was careful with my cash, and graduated owing just £200.

I didn't know how lucky I was.

The young will inherit the debt.

The younger generation also stand to inherit a shattered economy, one that the IMF expects will still be in recession when the rest of the world is already recovering.

So they can take their five-figure debts and join the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

And even if they can land a job, their income is set to be strangled in the forthcoming fiscal tightening. Somebody has to stump up for the banking bailouts, the billions in lost corporation tax receipts and the swelling welfare bills, and the burden will fall disproportionately on the young.

We enjoyed the boom, they can pay for the bust.

We must be Madoff.

Those feckless youngsters will also have to fund the retirement plans of an ageing population, and that's going to be a huge and growing burden.

There are currently four people of working age for every retired person, but that figure is set to fall to just two. In future, every worker will have to fund half a person's state pension.

Even more worryingly, the UK pension system works like a giant Ponzi scheme, and as Bernie Madoff belatedly realised, at some point the new entrants can't sustain payouts to the old ones, and the whole thing crashes.

Now imagine a Ponzi scheme involving 60 or 70 million people, and you can imagine how it's going to end.

After funding everybody else's retirement, the younger generation will find there won't be any money left for their own.

I don't think they'll thank us.

Oh, and us oldies have also drained the North Sea of its gas and oil - and blown the proceeds.

Sorry.

Buy-to-let us get rich.

The over-40s also milked the housing boom for all it was worth, braying over the soaring value of our properties, and shedding crocodile tears over first-time buyers who had to borrow six times salary to fund our excesses.

Some even skimmed off the spare equity in our properties to invest in buy-to-let, effectively outbidding first-time buyers then renting the property back to them at a profit.

Talk about eating your young.

The property market may have been the ultimate financial triumph of the feckless over-40s, but it is also our downfall.

House prices will have to slide, because the next generation of buyers will be too over-taxed, underpaid and riddled with debt to pay our vastly inflated valuations.

So what's bad news for the young will ultimately be bad news for the old.

Lousy role models.

Of course, young people aren't all paragons of financial virtue (nor are most older people vulgar spendthrifts). Many have run up far larger debts than their parents ever did, and with no practical idea how to repay them.

But they're our children, we raised them, and set the financial parameters of their behaviour. And we got it wrong - or at least our politicians and regulators did.

We're the ones who were financially naïve, acting like the years of plenty would last forever.

Given the choice, I would still rather be 23 than 43, but I'd be furious at the financial legacy the older generation had landed me with.

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