Baby boomer wealth will create a different world

IT’S scarcely credible but the youngest baby boomers were born 60 years ago. So here we are now with some of my generation heading towards 80 having benefited from free university education, low mortgage rates, reasonable pensions and relative peace. In theory, we’ve accrued something to hand on to the next generation when we shuffle off.

When this handover happens, it should change the housing landscape as a generation of young people stuck in a rental trap find themselves able to buy property with their inheritance. That is unless we baby boomers live for so long, it’s all spent on old age care.

Even so, there’s no guarantee that the next generation will spend this redistributed money in the same ways their parents have done. For, the property scene aside, there is evidence they will choose not to invest in hefty possessions such as art, jewellery and furniture and, instead, splash out on three holidays a year on the ski slopes and islands in the Indian Ocean.

Perhaps they will buy property, but most likely abroad.

Even the richest boomers are likely to find their wealth used in different ways. The new edition of the renowned The Art Newspaper claims that museums and institutions substantially funded by the philanthropic model can no longer rely on the next generation of wealth for support.

Whereas arts and culture were often second on the list of priorities for very rich boomers, they’ve been substantially downgraded by their heirs. Naming rights in a national gallery no longer has its appeal.

Most of us are not among the 1,000 boomer billionaires who’ll hand £4 trillion to their children in the next two decades but even so our combined wealth is likely to make the world look a different place in 30 years when most of it will have changed hands.