Retirement delayed and broke anyway

[lambchopp59]

24. You're a tail-end boomer like myself.

Circumstantially with a sunk below zero start in adulthood up against the the economic ladder cranking up wildly steeper under RayGun, no unskilled jobs in the paper for years, scraping together the $50 per semester California tuition and $80 per month rent I was wildly fortunate to find. It was a young collaborator helped to get me started buying wrecked motorcycles to put together and sell. We had to be slick about that though to avoid requirements to obtain dealer licensure-- a few of my motorcycles were placed under some of my elderly neighbors names who would cooperate with us if I kicked them ten bucks for their signatures from the sales. It got some laughable looks from DMV clerks who were handling 90 year olds with walkers "selling their (late model) motorcycle"
Industrial district growth razed that ramshackle neighborhood and screwed over all those fixed income seniors living there horrifically, at the same time offering no jobs for anyone younger, just the bigger manufacturing monolith displaced us where we once happily lived, filled with machines and laying off the prior assembly line employees.
I'm isolated in age group in my entire extended family.
Years before this, utilizing the inflationary spiral of the 1970's that I did the math in front of my parents and considerably older siblings:
All my older siblings bought their "first homes" long before the upfront shot way out of reach for zero-credit young folks.

My core-boomer age relatives all attended universities even through far higher level degrees in the 1960's for far less than it cost for me to attend community college after losing my advantageous rent, they were making final payments on their 'first house' 20 or more years later, something I'll still never know, life long rent and debt cycle just to maintain my ability to go to work. Emergencies emptied any retirement savings repeatedly, including the biggest and best retirement account I had ever managed a few years ago. A single small cancerous tumor wiped that out.
Economically speaking, it is a do-the-math equation that our age group has far more in common with Gen X than the core "okay boomers" when I presented some of them with the mathematics who were a bit shocked, but reverted right back to "I got mine, get your own" attitude.