A tweet from a financial advisor in Arizona, Adam Harding, went viral this summer when he shared a conversation he had with a client with a healthy bank account in her 70s. He had encouraged her to share that wealth with her kids and grandkids before she died. The more than 1,500 responses showed the extraordinary divide between the generations, with many gen Zers and millennials saying that baby boomers especially are hanging on to their money too long and boomers saying that’s their right.

“I think it just struck a big chord because there’s the people who are struggling right now and who want some help,” he said.

That tweet joins the surge of others where younger generations protest the financial advantages of older generations, and complain the largesse is not being passed down.

It is a generational phenomenon that facing financial challenges and living paycheque-to-paycheque has been the reality for many in their early working years, especially since the pandemic. But is their circumstance so different from the generations before them? Or has it always been that those who save and build wealth for decades end up as the haves?

Harding says that, while, to some, baby boomers might look more like Scrooge than Santa, he is quick to add that not having to depend on adult children is one of the things that can allow the younger generations to build wealth.

“We have clients that are currently in long-term care situations where they are rapidly spending down the eventual inheritance that their kids will get,” says Harding, who adds that younger generations need to consider whether their parents may become dependent on them.

“Because if not, that’s a form of generational wealth,” he adds. “Your parents have saved and accumulated enough that they don’t have to rely on their adult children. Their adult children can instead go and raise their kids, live their lives and make their own money and not have to worry about that. That’s one form of generational wealth that I think is sometimes overlooked.”

Thomas Klassen, a professor at York University in the School of Public Policy and Administration, agrees that boomers are getting a bad rap as financial hoarders because their spending has meant decades of economic prosperity.

“They’re spending money, to travel, to buy cars, to take care of themselves,” says Klassen. “Whatever they’re spending money on, that’s creating jobs in the economy, which is, in part, why I would argue the employment rate for the past 15, 20 years has been quite low — because we’ve got people spending money.”

He adds misinformation is snowballing among younger generations, even among his students, about the older population. One example he cites is that they don’t have to pay any taxes, “which is, of course, untrue, but I continue to hear it.”

“I also think there’s this sense sometimes among younger people that baby boomers, when they were younger, had it easy,” says Klassen. “That there were tons of jobs and nobody was unemployed, and that’s simply not true because unemployment rates were 12 per cent, 14 per cent in the 1980s. It wasn’t like university students were graduating and they had five job offers, and they bought a house a year later.”

Salvatore Buscemi, co-founder and managing partner of Las Vegas-based wealth management firm and multi-family office Brahmin Partners, says that the financial independence that some boomers have saved for is a benefit to society and that millennials need to stop looking for a handout in the form of an inheritance.

“The millennials that are set to receive a lot of this [money] aren’t like the next generation that I’ve been interacting with — the 24, 23-year-olds who are much more earnest and hardworking and want to learn more. I think the millennials, they’re saying, ‘Well, I’m waiting for mom to die off,’” says Buscemi.

He says that, while he has faith in the younger gen Zs to invest wisely, he doesn’t feel the same about millennials who have lived too many years with low interest rates and dove into investments like crypto and NFTs.

“Whether [millennials] are going to squander [the money] or they’re going to invest it are two different situations,” he adds. “It’s a function of who’s inheriting it.”

Harding says that the great divide between the generations really comes down to mentality and that boomers have trained themselves for decades to have austerity and many are now seeing the liquidity from their assets, but likely haven’t changed the way they view their circumstance.

“The other interesting part is, just generationally, there was just a lot less job switching and things like that that happened in the prior generation. It was just a more conservative approach to work, retirement, and things like that.”

Harding adds that, while boomers had real estate advantages in terms of appreciation, many had mortgage rates above 10 per cent and stock trading fees at the time were hefty. Millennials, however, had low interest rates and a booming stock market, but crippling student loans.

Still, there is a silver lining for the current generation, such as the fact that the investment landscape has been democratized, with technologies making it easy to trade from your phone, and higher education is being looked at as an investment rather than “a rite of passage,” meaning for some, there could be less debt and more money to add to their portfolio.

“Gen Z can expect ups and downs in the market, just as every other generation has experienced good and bad times,” he says.