OutWest wrote:To the original post. I agree that a bank is a very poor place to keep assets for any length of time. I like productive real estate- modest rentals with no mortgage, farm land, and deals on "gold in the ground" - proven gold sources that have not yet been developed.
I have been spending quite a few days with my family (southern Italian town) and something that is embarrassingly evident finally struck me: "hard", productive assets and investments are typically the thing of the baby boomer, the thing of a generation past.
It's my grand-grandfather who was a local construction tycoon and owned swathes of prime residential property, whether buildable land, or built condos or houses, and made a small fortune. A smaller fraction of that legacy went on to my granpa, who was also a master builder (though not an engineer) and carried on with the family business for as long as he could, albeit with a more perfectionist and less business-savvy approach. His legacy was then split acrooss his children - my mom, uncles and aunties - who all got to own multiple properties, which they could rent or live in paying no rent or mortgage, and were lifted to upper middle class status despite having pretty standard jobs.
Paying attention to my extended family, the families of those who married into my family, or my friends, the patterns is always the same. Even the most modest middle class family here owns at least one extra property or land, or business, on top of the place where they reside, and sit comfortably in their middle class (or above) lifestyle wiithout having to work particularly hard. That doesn't mean they were a**holes who showed off and squandered their fortunes, but their relative weight was and is visible the moment they have been helping my generation - passing over their assets to their sons and daughters, thus lifting them comfortably above mediocrity in most cases.
Which kind of brings me to my generation. We are the ones who get to work for their bills, or to chase the carrot-and-stick dream of getting rich via the usual plethora of financial or speculative assets. Or, much much more often, get a perception, a whiff of prosperity by buying exciting stuff that we don't really need and bears no future value, just a feeble, hedonic present value.
Our parents are teachers and public officers, small-time business owners and yet own houses and lands, as well as a good stash of cash in their accounts. We use their money on a hard (and - at least in the US - extremely overpriced) education system so we are allowed to work even harder in order to get iStuff, plasma TV screen and have a stab at a 30-year mortgage in a house that is perhaps a third of our family home.
Then, heaven forbids, as late as possible, our parents will pass away and we will get to inherit more assets, productive, real-value assets, of the class and value that we could never even dream to get in our lifetime.
Which does bring me to the final conclusion, which is yet another proof of what I have always suspected:
inflation is not just a measure conjured up in the monetary policy circles. It's a built-in aspect of our generation, a generation which, blessed though it may be by the chance of a valuable legacy (the baby boomer legacy), is plagued by an increasingly uphill struggle for ever-diminishing returns.
This is where I can see that, sadly, the game is rigged, or was rigged and the push to the top looks more of a task for Sisyphus (
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus) than one for Atlas.
As a marginal corollary, the dating scene bears the same degree of inflation. Less good girls with less marriage-like values and more men who need to work harder to even be able to find the, let alone woo them and marry them.
Don't remember who first said that, but it really make me grin when I think about it:
the future just ain't what it used to be.
