
The most entitled generation in all known history, the Baby Boomer generation, aren’t going out like previous generations. Instead they’re bucking trends, like NOT downsizing their homes, according to this Wall Street Journal article:
Well-off boomers are increasingly upsizing their homes as they age, either buying bigger ones or financing additions to their existing properties. They are building guesthouses for family members and gourmet kitchens for entertaining, alongside such features as high-end grab bars and first-floor primary bedrooms for aging in place.
In the process, they are rewriting the rules of retirement and aging, when people are expected to move into smaller homes to save money.
Owning a home–often referred to as “The American Dream”–is more out-of-reach for non-Boomers than it’s ever been, but despite percentages plummeting for those in their 30’s, the overall home-ownership-rate has risen. Why?
A recent post on X by MacroEdge, an economic data organization, was at once jarring and unsurprising. From 1960 to 2025, the number of 30-year-olds who owned a home and were married has dropped from 52% to 12%. But the overall home ownership rate has risen, going from 62% in 1960 to 65% now, while home sales are up, due largely to Boomers buying multiple homes. This discrepancy is not an accident, but the outcome of a protectionist system that Boomers themselves have built.
The Boomer generation has for decades been lead architects of land-use policies that restrict home supply. This creates an artificial shortage that renders housing as a good investment – albeit one that only Boomers can afford. This fuels the rather jarring generational difference in home purchasing statistics.
Further down we get some more numbers highlighting how the engine of Boomer wealth is driving home sales:
According to a recent National Association of Realtors report, Baby Boomers made 42% of all home purchases despite comprising only 20% of the population. Millennials represented 29% and Gen Xers 24% of all purchasers. Overall, there’s a 44-point gap between homeownership between Boomers and Millennials, which is all the more notable given that those younger groups are in their prime home-buying years, while Boomers would, theoretically, be downscaling or moving into retirement complexes.
Much of this is due to Boomers buying multiple investment properties, avoiding high interest rates via all-cash purchases. These cash purchases, according to the Realtors Association, account for nearly half of all Boomer purchases.

My own father reflects this trend, I found out recently, when he bought my brother a house in Lawrence, Kansas. Not only was this probably a smart financial investment, it’s also a smart social investment for a 70 year old man in cognitive decline because it ensures that at least one kid might be around to switch out the dirty adult diapers when the time comes.
Here’s a good question for Boomer’s to think about: how much Boomer wealth will go to paying strangers (who will likely be on amphetamines) to do the diaper changing and other “in-home care” duties in those big, empty houses?
As someone who worked at Missoula Aging Services for 3 years, I can say that A LOT of the 93 trillion in Boomer wealth will make it to the black market via those diaper-changing tweakers going back and forth between suburbia and the pawn shop.

Baby boomers hold roughly $93 trillion in assets, but only $36 trillion could reach Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years, according to new data.
The estimate, released last week by Visa Business and Economic Insights, is far below Cerulli Associates’ widely cited projection that as much as $124 trillion could change hands through 2048.
The gulf between the headline figures offers a sobering picture of the Great Wealth Transfer and exposes a basic problem with the way inheritance is often discussed: Assets held today are not the same as wealth available to heirs tomorrow.
A lot of assumptions about money might need to be reconsidered as the old world the Boomer’s knew gives rise to a new, more hostile one. To help, let’s consider two examples from my own “truly sad” life (mom’s words).
After providing descriptions of my behavior to the director of Winds of Change, my father was rebuffed at getting information about my mental health condition. Seeing a clear example of my perennial claim that this man uses money to control the people around him, I expressed these things called “feelings” about this paternal conduct, and his response was to claim that since he’s paying, he has a right to talk about me to my mental health provider.
Another example of diminishing returns for my father recently emerged when the Volkswagon dealership sold him a lemon, then refused to acknowledge the influence of his money when he threatened to take his business elsewhere. I can’t imagine how traumatic that must have been for him.
In the above article, the blackhole called “long term care” is projected to gobble up TRILLIONS of that Boomer wealth before the “heirs” see a dime.
Visa estimates boomers will draw down about $16 trillion over the next 20 years to cover housing, food, healthcare, prescription drugs, and other living expenses.
Those burdens will be especially acute for families with the fewest assets.
“Their position is different from previous generations because the retirement itself costs more, and more of that wealth gets eaten up before it ever reaches an heir,” Mills says.
Long-term care can accelerate that drawdown.
“Long-term care, healthcare, housing costs, and taxes on retirement account withdrawals can reduce an estate faster than families expect,” explains Zachary Sahar, CPA and managing director at Capital Tax.
Yep, this is 100% correct, and I saw more than my share of awful conversations happen at Missoula Aging Services every day, over and over again, because nothing destroys a family more effectively than family members jockeying for position over a quickly evaporating inheritance pay-out.
Back in March, before I started writing explicitly about the dysfunction of my own family dynamics, I was trying to claw myself out of the financial hole I dug for myself, but the advice I got from the man who bought his other son a house was pretty simple: declare bankruptcy.
“This is a zero-sum game,” he told me, referring to the fact he was no longer working, which meant that any dollar I got from him would be a dollar he couldn’t use for himself. He said this explicitly so that I understood exactly where he was coming from.
If Gen X can just step back from their feels, maybe we can see there’s an opportunity lurking in the Boomer’s brains going collectively soft, and that’s the unfiltered honesty you might get, and can document, so that the relevant agencies can be made aware of things that could harm minors, like parental alienation.
To wrap this post up, here’s a little screenshot from Montana Code Annotated about the kind of rights I have NOT relinquished in anyway whatsoever to a manipulative family member who really does use money to control the people around him.

Thanks for reading.





















