From as early as I can remember, visiting my grandparents meant treats and gifts. £10 pocket money here, the biggest cream cake from the bakery there.
Grandparents often carry that reputation. Over time, that generosity tends to scale up, with help with school fees, support at university, maybe even a contribution towards a house deposit.
It’s rarely something people formally rely on. You don’t build it into a spreadsheet, but mentally, it sits there. There is a sense that when the big milestones come along, there might be something to soften the edges.
Perhaps more interestingly, many grandparents seem to maintain that generosity while also enjoying a genuinely full retirement.
According to the latest Quilter retirement survey, holidays and home renovations are among the biggest areas of discretionary spending among those in their later years, while they are still spending thousands of pounds gifting to family members on top of this.
Although my generation can be grateful for what our grandparents have given us, my concern is that this trend of behavior isn’t one that we’ll be able to follow.
Thinking about my own grandparents’ retirement brings this clearly into view. After stopping working, they travelled the world – Singapore, Tahiti, New Orleans, Hong Kong, New Zealand. They funded it with their 25 per cent tax-free lump sum and turned it into the kind of trip that still gets talked about decades later.
At one point, their retired friends even met them in Graceland – the estate in Memphis, Tennessee which American singer Elvis Presley once owned – all of them being fans of the King of Rock n Roll who had, apparently in sync, decided this was their moment for a global tour.
I don’t remember it myself as I was too young in the early 2000s, but I’ve spent most of my life slightly jealous of it. It was their plan for years, something they worked towards, a clear, celebratory start to retirement.
It does feel like they got it exactly right – doing all this but still leaving enough to be generous to their family later. I struggle to imagine that same story playing out for me and my generation.
Part of that is straightforward economics because they bought their first home in south London in the 1970s for about £20,000. It is now worth close to £1m.
I, meanwhile, have just bought a one-bedroom flat just outside London for £200,000, with a 35-year mortgage attached. I’ll likely still be paying it off into my 60s, assuming everything goes to plan.
Layer in rising living costs and stubborn inflation – I recently spent nearly £3 for an 80g bag of Popchips – and the starting point looks very different. The idea of building both a comfortable retirement and a surplus to pass on starts to feel less straightforward.
This raises a broader question of what happens to that intergenerational support if the conditions that enabled it begin to disappear?
Because for many in Gen Z, the direction of travel already feels different with less certainty, less surplus, and in some cases, less expectation that retirement will be a period of abundance. That has implications beyond our own lives.
A lot of people today have, in small ways, benefited from the financial support of their grandparents. If that pattern weakens, the effects don’t stop with us, they carry forward.
If our generation is less able to support the next, then those future milestones – education, housing, financial stability – may become harder still. The quiet, informal system of family support that has helped smooth those transitions could begin to thin out, which leads to a slightly uncomfortable conclusion.
We still tend to talk about retirement as the point where people finally get to enjoy themselves. And for many of today’s retirees, that’s true – they’ve shown it’s possible to have both a fulfilling lifestyle and the capacity to give. But it’s not clear that this balance will hold.
Instead, we may be moving towards a version of retirement that is smaller, later, and less generous, not just in lifestyle terms, but in what it can offer the generations that follow.
And perhaps the biggest shift is that Gen Z won’t retire like our grandparents, but that we may also lose the ability to play the role they did for us.
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