Depending on whose data you believe, millennials, now the largest generation in the workforce, are poised to inherit $30 trillion to $60 trillion in inheritances and wealth transfers from older generations over the next two decades.
Gabriel Garcia doesn’t think it will happen that way.
Garcia, managing director and head of relationship management for BNY Mellon Pershing’s Advisor Solutions business, played down the potential for a huge upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer on Wednesday in a session titled “How Will You Ensure The Relevance of Advice for Future Generations?” at BNY Mellon Pershing’s 2019 INSITE conference in Phoenix.
“Boomers, at a rate of only 40 percent, identify themselves as having a plan to leave behind an inheritance to their heirs,” said Garcia. “They spent a lifetime of providing for others—college educations, buying first cars, helping to buy first homes, paying down debts, paying for weddings. Now boomers spend $40 billion on consumer goods and $120 billion on leisure travel each year. They’re three times as likely as Gen Xers or millennials to spend $10,000 on landscaping or interior décor. Boomers are quite a spendthrift generation.”
The other expense that is likely to eat into boomer wealth? Health care. Garcia argued that boomers are planning to live longer, and thus they will spend a lot more on health care than previous generations.
Add on other common retirement expenses like taxes, philanthropic endeavors and spending on children and grandchildren, and a large portion of boomer wealth could dissipate before it can be passed on in an inheritance.
“It getting passed down directly is frankly something that I challenge,” said Garcia. “I don’t think it’s the most likely scenario.”
The generation preceding the boomers—often called alternately the “silent generation” or “the greatest generation”—developed passing down inheritance as part of their core values during the Great Depression, said Scott Klososky, founding partner of Future Point of View, a technology and cybersecurity firm.
Klososky described his grandfather, who lived a frugal, simple lifestyle in order to pass down an inheritance to his grandchildren, as a good illustration of the silent generation’s ethos.
“The older generations came up in a world that was tougher,” he said. “My grandfather came up in the Depression. They were reusing tinfoil. They reused every glass jar—they didn’t throw it in the trash. In the greatest generation, you saw the world differently. You could die—you could literally starve to death—if the economy drops through the floor. For them, saving money and passing it on was maybe a matter of life or death.”