Front Burner - Introducing, Canada’s millennial ‘Jackpot Generation’

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Over the next two years, baby boomers will pass a reported 1 trillion dollars down to their heirs, who, in most cases, are their millennial children. This intergenerational transfer of wealth is expected to be the largest in Canadian history. The nature of homeownership in Canada has changed many times over in the last half century, and these changes have contributed to widening gulfs in wealth and prosperity. Baby boomers came into their adult years through an economic golden age, in which many were able to invest in homeownership well before prices became prohibitive. And as many now enter older age, they are sitting on homes worth many times more than what they paid for them. Katrina Onstad is a freelance reporter and producer for the Globe and Mail’s tech business podcast, Lately. And she’s just written a cover story for Maclean’s about inheritance, and an incoming millennial windfall that she calls the ‘Jackpot generation.’

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. In the next two years alone, Canadian millennials stand to inherit nearly $1 trillion from their boomer parents. Let me remind you that this is a generation that has spent a lot of time being resentful of boomers who grew up in more of an economic golden era and are now sitting on homes worth many, many times more than what they paid for them.

But what's going to happen when all this good fortune changes hands? My guest today, Katrina Onstead, is a freelance reporter and producer of the Globe and podcast, Lately, which is about the latest shifts in business and tech. And she just wrote a cover story for Maclean's about this coming millennial windfall called the jackpot generation. Katrina, thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. It's great to have you. Great to be here. So there's a lot to talk about here today, but I feel like we should start by laying out how we got to this point. So let's go back to the mid-20th century when the baby boomer generation was born and what kind of economy were they born into? was born and what kind of economy were they born into? Yeah, well, those are some lucky ducks. They were born to an extremely prosperous post-war economy. They benefited from Canada's boom in the job market. They were also the beneficiaries of really strongly funded public institutions like education and healthcare. And of course,

the luckiest thing of all was housing, which, you know, was not expensive at that time. And while they did actually hit some higher interest rates over the years between then and now, mostly they were very able to buy into the housing market. Yeah. You hear millennials complain about this a lot, right? That I am a millennial, so our parents are telling us to stop buying avocado toast to work as hard as they did. But, you know, they also showed up to the auto factory and got a decent paying job and bought a house for like five cents. So it's a thing. Yeah. And they also had, you know, defined pensions out of those jobs.

And yeah, you're right. Like manufacturing sector, you could have a pretty decent life with a blue collar job, too. And those, you know, obviously that situation has changed dramatically for their children. You mentioned access to like a robust social safety net. Just elaborate on that for me a little bit more, you know, access to things like a good public education and healthcare. How is it different, if at all, to today? One of the biggest differentiators for millennials is student debt, right? Like the cost of tuition has just skyrocketed in their lifetime. So they're being hit kind of by this trifecta of lower wages,

lower wages, more expensive housing, and student debt. And that's usually where they're at when they're starting. That's for many of them. That's how they start adulthood. For their parents, tuition, the idea of publicly funded institutions like post-secondary education was much cheaper, more accessible, less competitive even to get in to universities and those kinds of programs. So, yeah, it was just a different world. You reported that Canadian millennials stand to inherit a trillion dollars in the next two years alone. I mean, that sounds like a lot of money. But just give me a sense of how we think that could be distributed, right? Like how many families are we talking about here and what's the average that they will stand to inherit in coming years?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's been called the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in Canada's history, quite a phrase. According to an IPSO survey, among Canadian boomers who are planning to leave 100% of their estates for their children, the average inheritance will be about $940,000. But this is not everyone right these are people who have inheritance to give um and so who are those people uh well that's determined generally by whether or not you're attached to housing wealth right um one estimate i heard said that like about three quarters of canadians are going to have a familial connection to a boomer and a big chunk of those boomers are going to have housing wealth.

But for the quarter who don't have that attachment or for those who are attached to a boomer who didn't buy into the market during that incredibly opportune moment, this transfer could pass them by. And just elaborate for me a little bit more on how that might affect the economy at large. The people that I talk to, the economists that I talk to are most concerned about the ways in which this wealth transfer might entrench a trend that we're already seeing, which is wealth inequality, right? That's already a huge issue in this country. Income inequality has increased over the last 20 years in Canada. And in the past two years, I guess, because of inflation, because of higher interest rates,

post-COVID, you know, have shrunk the wealth of the poorest 40% of the population, while the richest 20% are kind of continuing to get farther ahead, right? So we're now in a situation where the top 1% in Canada controls a quarter of the country's wealth. So if this money is funneling from the wealthy to the children of the wealthy, it's kind of a 19th century vibe, isn't it? It sort of speaks- Big time. Yeah. It speaks to a shift from an earnings-based economy to an inheritance-based economy, right? Your station in life isn't so much earned, but inherited. Like it's passed, you know, your status is passed down to you, which is kind of the exact

opposite of what we think of when we think of new world achievement, right? Which is supposed to be, you know, brokering your own success. It also keeps wealth really concentrated within families. And when wealth is concentrated in that way, it doesn't make for a ton of like opportunity or a very fluid economy. Yeah, I think we definitely want to point out here that this wealth transfer, it's already been happening to a decent extent, right? Before parents die, you know, the joke that you hear people make about the bank of mom and dad helping a lot of their kids with down payments on homes like that.

That is a very real thing. It's like this is this has been playing out for years. Yeah. One of the financial advisors I spoke to for this piece used the phrase giving with a warm hand instead of a cold one, which I found like very, very creepy, kind of a weird phrase, but it's true, like giving while living. This is increasingly a norm because of the lack of affordability and particularly because, you know, Canada has one of the most expensive housing markets in the world. So yeah, now we're seeing like a third of first time Canadian homebuyers cover their down payment with money from either parents or relatives. That's unprecedented.

And the national average for that kind of help is $115,000. Actually, something I really learned doing this piece is that inheritance is sort of, it's broader than just like a check upon the death of the parent, you know. And it's happening all around us, right? of the parent, you know, and it's happening all around us, right? That like these baby boomer parents who, by virtue of being born at the right time have accrued all this wealth or are helping their kids with their family vacations, paying for tuition, or even like free labor in the form of babysitting. So that takes daycare off of the off of the family bill. I think it's I found that really interesting here, the potential for how this might change family dynamics, right?

These new kind of financial arrangement can kind of keep children enmeshed with their parents much longer. Financial independence, we associate financial independence with becoming an adult. But that parent-child bond is getting severed much later now because of this economy.

Talk to me more about that. That's really interesting. So one, here's an example. One family that we talked to for this piece said, you know, we will buy, the parents said to the kid, we will buy you a house upon graduation, but it has to be in the same neighborhood where we are. I thought that was a very kind of fascinating little power move. Yeah. So that's, you know, what does that do to an adult? How is that going to change who we are? And then here's a kind of more positive outcome of this. There's more co-ownership happening. There's more intergenerational cohabitating.

And I talked to another family in Vancouver that had actually come up with a really creative way to divide up the property so that a sister, a family, the parents, a step-parent, like all live together in a kind of urban compound. And it had really, really worked for them emotionally too. Like these kids were kind of being raised by a village and that's a kind of, you know, feels old school, but is now new school out of need.

And maybe it's creating actually a different kind of a more closer emotional attachment or a sense of community. So maybe there's an upside to this, too. There's something that you talk about in your piece called status fog. And just, you know, tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that. Yeah. So in terms of this giving while living, I think one of the effects that a lot of people have noticed, but maybe we haven't quite named yet, I called it status fog is this feeling that you never really know anyone's financial standing. Like we will watch our friends and neighbors live in houses that seem out of whack with the salaries that would

be adjacent to their jobs or taking vacations that kind of don't make sense. And like, it's sort of disorienting. I find this in my neighborhood, you know, where I see people who have these really creative class jobs, like this example, my story was, you know, where I see people who have these really creative class jobs. Like this example in my story was, you know, a potter renovating a solarium. Like this feels very, very misaligned. Right. And you live in downtown Toronto. So, I mean, these are like $2 million houses. They're very expensive houses that 25 years ago were, you know, being gentrified by the likes of people like us,

like right-wing people who didn't have a ton of money because they were cheap. But now they're very expensive. And yet we're still seeing a lot of these people in there. And it was actually kind of comforting to have this revelation that, oh, a lot of these people are being backed by their parents. It's not, you know, kind of upends our idea of what success is, right, which is independence and being self-made. But it is confusing. not, you know, kind of upends our idea of what success is, right, which is independence and being self-made, but it is confusing. And I think maybe the danger of this is that we,

these optics misrepresent what it takes to succeed in our society, right? Like, I would hate for politicians to think, well, look, it is still possible for a potter to buy a $2 million house. Like, it is not not. And so what levers don't get pulled when we're all kind of pretending that we're self-sufficient, but in fact, we're super enmeshed with our parents and they're cutting the checks. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Tell me more about what the millennials and the parents that you talked to for for this piece when you're reporting it out told you about how how they're feeling about all of this yeah i mean so this this whole idea of inheritance is really fraught it's very emotional to talk about the

death of your parents leading to a great financial gain. There's a gain braided to a loss, right? A lot of people are not talking about this, about how this is actually going to play out, which is maybe another form of status fog. Financial planners are very panicked by how few conversations they're hearing about what inheritance is actually going to look like so i talked to one guy i will call him chris and um he had done really well like he was a real he really benefited from familial help all along the way he was extremely aware of this of his privilege that that his grandparents had paid for university his parents had helped with the down payment on a condo just before

things went totally nuts. And so he, you know, owns a condo and he's, he's doing well. He has like a, he's one of the wealthier millennials and there are very wealthy millennials within that cohort to be clear.

But he has a lot of guilt, a about the fact that he didn't do it on his own, right. That he, that, that the foundation, and he's also thrifty and really good at his job and works hard.

So he's checking all those boxes, but still there's something about it that sits, that he's ill at ease with, that he had this help. And because of this, he doesn't even wanna think about or talk about what's coming down the road for him and his brother, which is actually quite a sizable inheritance. And he said, if I talk about that, it's like quite a sizable inheritance. And he said, you know, if I talk

about that, it's like I'm killing my parents. So it's very emotional. I think financial planners are kind of up against it, getting people to have these conversations and talk about it out loud. And why is it that they want people to talk about it out loud? Well, I think because so much can go wrong, right? When someone gets an inheritance, it's usually an emotionally difficult time anyway. It can be braided to a sense of obligation to one's parents. So another analyst I talked to said, you know, people are very worried about squandering this money. They don't know how to spend it. Some people won't spend it and they kind of hoard it. Other people will blow through it because they feel more comfortable not having money. I talked to one person who said having a lot of money didn't

align with their values and they wanted to get rid of it. And there's actually a financial guru named James Grubman who came up with this idea of money as being like a new country. And if you inherit it, you're kind of an immigrant to a country where you had never been before. And you might try and get rid of it to go back to the place that you're comfortable and that you know, and that you're familiar with. So, you know, it's... Although I'm sure there are people listening to that right now who are absolutely rolling their eyes. There are people listening to that right now who are absolutely rolling their eyes.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. And that, I think, probably is most people. But, you know, it is interesting. Like, people don't, I think, we don't talk about sex. We don't talk about death. We don't talk about money. We have two out of three in what's coming with this inheritance. So, probably, it's us to start talking about it.

So I want to come back to something that you said earlier, this idea that these injections of money are kind of creating this facade, this idea that everybody's doing okay, right? When in reality, this is a one-time injection. Also, there are a lot of people who are not going to benefit from it at all. So experts that you're talking to, what are they saying about all of this? Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting because the way it was described to me was there's a perfect storm coming, right? So as the boomers age and die, their wealth might pass down to their individual heirs, but it's going to happen at exactly the same moment that Canada stands to become poorer because we have to take care of those baby boomers. There's so many of them. Because we have to take care of those baby boomers.

There's so many of them. There's 9 million of them. And their needs, their retirement, their health care needs, the federal spending that's going to be necessary to help the boomers get through this next chapter. Stands to really damage Canada. They're going to cost us a lot. And the problem, as it was explained to me, is demographics again, right? Like in the 70s, governments could pay for medical care for older people because there were so many boomers. There were seven boomers to pay for every retiree. But today, there's only three workers to pay for every retiree. So we are going to kind of run out of money, right? And we know about the deficit and everything. Someone said to me, Canada's economy is a pyramid scheme with young people at the

bottom, and something has to change. This idea that, you know, there are going to be many millennials that receive this windfall, but also many who don't. And the fact that it's going to create this widening inequality gulf. What are people saying about the impact that that could have? And, you know, are there any proposals out there to do anything about that? Yeah, well, one shift that is anticipated by some is, you know, no more of this intergenerational squabbling. But now it's going to be intra-generational squabbling, right? head just because their parents died because they, you know, reaped the benefits of an inheritance. It feels like the system isn't really working, right? Like it just, it doesn't, it doesn't, it feels like it's rigged. This guy over here gets a house because his parents had a house.

How is that fair? And I think that sense of a rigged system is never good for the national psyche, right? It foments dissent, division, populism, civil unrest. I think what we're going to see is an entrenching of the have-have-not situation that we're already in. And I guess there's nothing that can be done about that? I mean, what can be done about it sort of leads us to this very unsexy space of redistribution and taxation, right? Like, what are the kind of policy and regulatory positions that we can start taking now to protect us from this thing that's already happening and get ahead of it? Like, how should we be considering ways in which to unlock some of that wealth? Canada is the only G7 country without an inheritance tax.

And we do have like some sort of smaller provincial levers that get pulled. But I mean, that's pretty interesting, right? Like the UK has a fairly aggressive inheritance tax. It's actually about to get more aggressive, but it generates billions for the UK. We don't do that. That's money that we are not unleashing. You know, there's also more radical proposals of like inheritance for all, where every citizen will receive an inheritance, kind of a posthumous universal basic income idea. But yeah, I think, you know, you said this earlier, too, like, is it time to examine the personal residence exemption, the PRE, the idea that we do not tax the first home that people sell? Can we diffuse some of this concentration of wealth. You know, I will say that there were some efforts in this direction in the last budget,

and, you know, people were very grumpy about it, the new capital gains inclusion rate. But, you know, that potentially could generate like almost $20 billion for Canada. And yet, you know, getting between people and their housing wealth does feel like political suicide, doesn't it? Oof. It does. I can't imagine a politician trying to take that on right now and what would happen. And it's a super interesting conversation. Katrina, thank you very much for this. You're welcome.

All right. That is all for today. FrontBurner was produced this week by Joytha Shangupta, Matt Mews, Matt Alma, Iman Bare, Aja Sauter, and Allie Janes. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Sam McNulty. Music is by Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos, and I am Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening, and we will talk to you on Monday. Thank you.