Spending our kids’ inheritance – or losing it

THE term “spending my kids’ inheritance” does bring a wry smile to many of us with wicked senses of humour – although the joke could be on us.

Our compulsion to spend points to the love of life our generation has – the wish to get more out of our senior years than our parents and grandparents did.

But now there is another factor affecting our childrens’  inheritance – the current global financial crisis which has seen many of  us lose at least some of the money we had, or planned on having.

Up until now, we were the generation spending freely on travel, holiday homes, boats, new cars, caravans, fashionable clothes, beauty treatments – and let’s not forget the bucket loads of cash we spend on hair dye!

We in our fifties, the so-called baby boomers, are the generation which does not want to get old. But we might have to grow up if we want enough money for our retirement, let alone leaving any behind for the kids.

Of course, young people are worse-affected in the current financial times if they don’t have anything behind them and have just started buying a home. And now there is less chance of  them being helped by their parents than during the good times when their free-spending parents had money to give them while they could.

For one of the reasons we oldies were not leaving much behind was because we were spoiling our kids while we were still here – while also spending freely on ourselves.

We have not taught our kids much about frugality, how to get through the tough times because we foolishly did not think that the tough times that our parents and grandparents suffered would ever come again.

Our parents probably tried to teach us but they also wanted to give us a better life than they had. For a start, they were more open to spending money on our education than their parents had spent on theirs.

My mother barely went to school and it was considered really odd if  girls or boys stayed on to graduate for university, unless they were very bright and their parents were rich.

So we were the first generation to be highly educated, highly paid and . . . big spenders.

If only our grannies were still around to tell us how to make do on less.

Whichever way it goes – whether we spend as we had been or lose it through the financial crisis, there still will not be that pot of gold for our children.