A 38-year-old from Calgary, Canada named Levi McCachen posted a short Instagram video about baby boomers that has now been watched more than 127,000 times. His central observation wasn’t a sweeping condemnation of an entire generation. It was something far more specific: that boomers and millennials both use the word “struggling,” but they’re not describing the same reality.
McCachen’s argument, posted under the username @levi_mccachen, was that many baby boomers feel financially pinched – but their version of tight times is “inflation is up, I might not be able to take as many vacations as I want this year.” The millennial version, he argues, is deciding whether to throw out moldy cheese or cut off the edges because paying for a fresh block might mean not making rent.
The comparison hit a nerve because it’s hard to argue with. Both statements could technically be called “struggling.” But the word doesn’t mean the same thing when one person is calculating vacation budgets and another is calculating whether food or rent gets paid first. That gap in lived experience, McCachen argues, is exactly why the generations so often talk past each other. And when you look at the data on millennials vs baby boomers across housing, wealth, and education costs, his frustration lines up with something structural, not just anecdotal.
McCachen told Newsweek that “most baby boomers have a complete inability to relate to the economic struggles of millennials and younger generations,” rooted in a belief that they succeeded purely by working hard and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That belief isn’t irrational for a generation that actually lived it. The problem, as the numbers show, is that the bootstraps got a lot shorter.
The Housing Math Doesn’t Work Anymore
The median age of a first-time homebuyer in the U.S. was 28 years old in the early 1990s. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 38 years old, according to the National Association of Realtors. That decade-long delay isn’t primarily a lifestyle choice. It reflects what buying a home now actually costs.
A 2024 report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury found that rents and house prices have been rising faster than incomes across most regions of the U.S. for the past two decades, and as of early 2024, Americans needed to make about $141,000 to afford a median-priced home. The median household income sits well below that threshold, which means homeownership for millions of millennials isn’t a matter of saving harder – it’s mathematically out of reach at current incomes and price levels.
In 2024, the millennial homeownership rate stood at around 55 percent, according to Redfin’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. By contrast, roughly 80 percent of baby boomers own their homes. That gap reflects decades of diverging conditions – millennials are consistently tracking below where boomers were at equivalent ages, weighed down by affordability pressures, student debt, and delayed entry into homeownership.
Baby boomer empty nesters own nearly twice the share of American homes with three or more bedrooms – 28% – compared to millennial parents, who own 16%, according to a Redfin analysis of 2024 Census data. Boomers aren’t villains for staying in their homes. But the structural effect is that the housing stock younger families need is largely occupied by people who no longer need it at that scale, and many have no immediate plans to sell.
As of mid-2025, owning a median-priced home consumes 47.7% of the median household’s income, dramatically above the 30% threshold traditionally considered affordable. That figure would have been unrecognizable to someone buying their first home in 1985.
The College Cost Comparison Is Just as Stark
The millennial vs baby boomer debate often circles back to education, and for good reason. The cost of an undergraduate degree at a public college soared by 421% between boomer and millennial graduation years, while tuition at private colleges rose 303%, according to a Creditnews analysis. Wages didn’t come close to keeping up.
A baby boomer earning minimum wage in the early 1980s could pay back their public college tuition by working 1,410 hours, or about nine months. A millennial earning minimum wage faced 3,398 hours – more than twice as long – and their post-graduation salaries hardly closed the gap, with wages increasing by only 116% compared to a 421% jump in tuition.
As of 2025, 15.1% of all millennials carried student loan debt, and 83% of those with loans had put off major investments, including buying a home or starting a business. This is the direct mechanism through which debt delays homeownership, retirement savings, and family formation – it’s not a cultural preference for renting or “adulting late.” It’s a financial constraint with a paper trail.
Read More: Why Younger Americans Doubt the American Dream
The Wealth Gap in Raw Numbers
The millennials vs baby boomers divide isn’t just about housing prices and college tuition. It shows up in total accumulated wealth, and the gap is enormous. Baby boomers, who make up about 20% of the U.S. population, hold more than $85 trillion in assets, according to Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts data. Millennials, who represent roughly the same share of the population, hold about $18 trillion – approximately one-fifth as much.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, baby boomers owned 51.2% of total U.S. wealth, while millennials owned around 10.7%, despite the two generations being nearly equal in population size, according to Federal Reserve data compiled by Statista.
The stock market gap compounds the problem. As of early 2025, boomers held about 54% of U.S. stocks, worth over $25 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data analyzed by The Motley Fool. Millennials owned about 8.2% of stocks, worth $3.9 trillion. Equity ownership is one of the main engines of wealth accumulation over time, and millennials entered the market late – many during or after the 2008 financial crisis – missing years of compounding growth that boomers had benefited from for decades.
Student debt has been another defining factor in this divide. College tuition costs have increased more than 300% since the 1980s, and student loans now total more than $1.83 trillion nationwide. That debt didn’t just delay homeownership. It directly reduced the amount millennials could invest during their early careers, widening the gap with each passing year.
What Commenters Said – and Why It Resonated
One commenter on McCachen’s video put it plainly: baby boomers who “played by the rules” did become successful, because “the rules of their time worked for them and ordinarily people could generally get that career and house and comfortable life if they studied and worked hard.” But “the game has changed and they can’t fathom that the rules no longer apply. They think they got ahead because they’re so virtuous when in reality it was because they were lucky enough to be born into the most prosperous time in human history.”
That’s a pointed framing, but the economic timeline supports the core claim. Boomer wealth accumulated through real estate appreciation, long-term equity market exposure, and access to defined benefit pension plans that are now rare. Boomers bought homes when prices were lower and held them through decades of appreciation, and their working years overlapped with a multi-decade equity bull market. Carrying less student debt than later generations also allowed wealth to compound earlier.
Millennials, by contrast, entered the workforce during or after major recessions, including the 2008 financial crisis. Many lacked both the disposable income and confidence to invest early, missing key years of market growth. That difference in timing alone has significantly widened the wealth gap between generations.
McCachen’s video doesn’t accuse boomers of malicious intent. His point is more specific: when your reference point for “financial struggle” is fewer vacations, it’s genuinely difficult to imagine what it means to choose between food and rent. The gap isn’t about character. It’s about what economic era you were born into – and what was waiting for you when you graduated, looked for housing, and tried to build a life.
What This Means for You
The data doesn’t exist to make anyone feel guilty for the era they were born in. Baby boomers who bought homes in the 1980s weren’t doing anything wrong – they were following the same rules everyone was playing by. The problem McCachen identifies is the assumption that those rules still apply. They don’t, and pretending they do makes real conversations about economic policy, housing supply, education costs, and intergenerational equity nearly impossible.
A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of 8,709 U.S. adults found that among adults aged 18 to 29, only 39% believe the American Dream is still possible, compared to 68% of those aged 65 and older – a nearly 30-point generational gap. The older group largely experienced an economy where hard work reliably delivered results. The younger group has watched that promise recede in real time.
If you’re a millennial navigating these conditions, the most useful thing McCachen’s video does is name the friction clearly: you’re not failing to work hard enough. You’re working in a structurally different environment. McCachen points to housing as one of the clearest examples, where rising property values have benefited older generations while making it increasingly difficult for younger people to afford basic necessities. That’s not a personal failing. It’s a policy outcome. And recognizing the difference matters – both for the conversations between generations and for the decisions that eventually get made about housing supply, tuition costs, and the economic rules that will define the next thirty years.
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