Summary

The “Bank of Mum and Dad” drives modern inequality, fostering an “inheritocracy” where family wealth shapes opportunities over individual merit. This safety net often undermines social mobility, tying success to inheritance rather than personal effort.

Rising housing costs, wage stagnation, and unequal inheritance have entrenched this dynamic, with parental support shaping life milestones like homeownership, career paths, and education.

While early inheritances advantage some, the burden of social care costs threatens others’ expectations.

This growing reliance on family wealth exacerbates inequality within and across generations, highlighting the need for a broader societal conversation about privilege and fairness.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    1 minute ago

    Call it what it is, a Neo Aristocracy. A class of landed wealth is forming that is harder to join every year and will only pay off generationally as your land accrues value.

    I’m waiting with baited breath for laws to officially enshrine the already existing double standard for wealth and justice. Some American conservatives have already started including land in their idea of voting restrictions.

  • Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Jokes on you, my parents don’t have anything to leave me… If anything I’ll have to pay for their care bills as they age

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    The estate tax should be absolished in favor of treating inheritance as income and gifts to children should also be taxed as income.

  • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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    3 hours ago

    My parents were quite wealthy and they wasted almost all of it in a nasty 8-year long divorce battle.

    They sold most of their belongings in estate sales because they couldnt stop fighting about who owned what so the court decided no one owned anything and they all sold everything for cheap. Infrared sauna sold for $200.

    Now both parents are retired, one has fuck you money that they hid away on an offshore account and fled the country so spousal support doesn’t garnish from their retirement funds, and the other is very broke with virtually nothing to their name.

    Guess who needs to support them?

    I guess I’m just a lil salty. I’m not entitled to anything but just sucks thinking about what would happen if I came from a happy home instead.

  • Soup@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Rant:

    I have a vaguely ok life only because of my parents and my grandmother. Help from my family has helped pay for car parts(repairs), some exercise stuff, French classes, and hell I only finished the third “optional” part of my education because I was able to not work while I did it. I haven’t been able to buy a single one of my instruments myself, they’ve all been from parents or my grandparents and I don’t have expensive instruments(ok one was $50, that was a good feeling but I got real lucky there). If it wasn’t for the family plan phone I’ve got no idea how I’d pay for a phone on top of everything.

    I’m do a bit to save, still. I fix my car myself almost every single time, even if it’s big stuff, but I can only do that because my dad has loads of tools and my parents’ driveway is large enough. I built my own computer, modified one of my basses instead of buying a more expensive one, have learned basic luthier skills to get my instruments playing out of their price range, and a lot of my home stuff is actually either on a longterm loan or was handed down. And you can forget buying clothes all that often; I’ll go a year not buying anything and when I do finally grab a nice new shirt I feel guilty. My place makes me look way richer than I really am and there are times I’m embarrassed by it given how vocal I am about our low pay problems.

    I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people have serious challenges and no support system. They don’t have tools or space to fix their vehicles cheaply, or parents to give them kitchen supplies, or friends who move away and leave their furniture behind for indefinite periods of time. They don’t get to stop working to go to school and further their education, and there is no one to save them if they get slapped by a huge bill out of nowhere. It is so GODDAMN expensive to be poor and if I can feel that then those with less…well that is no way to live.

    It’s fucking disgusting how we treat the poorest among us and how we’ll turn around and act like someone like me is some wonderful hard worker while my classmates who get bad marks are dumb or lazy but no one accounted for the fact that they work nearly fulltime and help support a family while trying to also do school. Life gets easier the more money you have and yet we collectively choose to believe that people without it are lazy or not trying hard enough.

    Without all this support and privilege and luck I’d be nothing and I’m not so insecure that I won’t admit that.

    • Tiefling IRL@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 hours ago

      Kinda similar here. My partner and I have a bit of savings, but due to a chain of deaths in her family and retirement, her mom has fuck you money. She’s supportive of us and is willing to tap into that money to help us get to a safe location.

      But there’s a real sense of survivors guilt there because virtually everyone else we know is struggling to just pay rent. I see friends asking mutual aid groups for $20 almost daily. I try to help my friends however I can but no one has a job that pays a liveable wage, everyone is living off of scraps.

      • Soup@lemmy.world
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        16 minutes ago

        Exactly! It’s hard to help when a lot of the help would be technically coming from someone else’s pocket and it doesn’t feel right to be spreading around. I help my friends with any mechanical stuff and only ask that they stay, help, and learn something new(also hoping that some new confidence will help them take care of themselves better). Sharing skills and time is the best way I’ve found so far.