Millennials are about to become the ‘richest generation in history’? It’s about time!

I love being a millennial. I get to meet interesting people every time I move into a new house share, I never do any real work because I’m so lazy, and I have all the avocado toast I can eat. If anything bad ever happens to me, I can take solace in the fact that it was all my own fault, and that if I wanted things to be better I simply should have worked harder, because economic, social and historical contexts are myths. Nothing significant happened in 2008!

It looks like there’s more good news on the way for me and all my latte-sipping, Netflix-binging friends, as the 2024 wealth report by real estate agent Knight Frank has concluded that millennials are on track to become the richest generation in history! Well that’s just… wait, what?

Oh, I see. According to the study, around $90tn (or £71tn) of assets is expected to move between generations in the US alone over the next 20 years, meaning that a large portion of the wealth transfer will take place via inheritance as the older generations die off. So if you don’t already have an incredibly rich grandmother who hoards land and trinkets like a dragon, don’t expect a big deposit to just randomly hit your account in the next decade.

All four of my grandparents are dead, and the only one to leave me anything was my grandad, who left behind £1000 for each of his three grandkids. Don’t get me wrong, that money was very much appreciated and he did all he could for us, but it wasn’t like I was asked to spent the night in a haunted mansion before I could claim my millions (I assume that’s how inheritances work for rich people).

No, unfortunately the story is the same as it ever is – the rich, as always, are expected to get richer. And that’s great for them, but it does nothing to address the wider problem of wealth disparity that has plagued the Myspace generation. Millennials were given a handbook for success for the first two decades of their life, and then somebody completely changed the rules of the game. That’s an issue that isn’t going away any time soon, and in fact may get even worse when our already well-off peers suddenly come into that second yacht.

I’m being a little hyperbolic. This research is good news for our middle class peers who are going to find themselves moving up an income bracket when mummy and daddy go to the big Waitrose in the sky, but that assumes that things won’t get significantly worse for them in the meantime. For a lot of people, what was once a decent chunk of change might only end up being enough to help keep our heads above water, if that.

Between the war in Ukraine, wars in the Middle East, an unstable political climate here in the UK and US, and a million other factors beyond our control, it might be better for our Gen X and Boomer forebears to leave us bottled water and fuel in their wills, to help us survive the upcoming Mad Max wasteland we’re all going to inherent.

Growing up kids my age were told that if we worked hard, and were smart about our career choices, and put effort into school, we could be anything we wanted to be. Now that’s been replaced by somebody shrugging and saying “hey, if you’re lucky your dad might die soon”. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but that feels like a downgrade.

Maybe once those older generations start dying off, and millennials get some real power, we’ll be able to undo some of the circumstances that put us here in the first place – and we won’t make the mistakes they did, of demonising the younger generations for circumstances that are beyond their control.

And hey, no matter how bad it gets for us millennials, at least we’ll never be as badly off as Gen Z. Don’t worry though, they deserve it – I hear they’re all too busy doing TikTok dances and watching MrBeast videos to get a real job.