Say you are a millennial or Gen Xer – that is, anyone born after 1964. You are, if a Gen Xer, pondering retirement with some anxiety, and watching in horror as your body enters middle age. If a millennial you’re possibly just stressed out about everything, or so the stereotype goes, anything but that distant mirage called retirement.

One thing is certain though – both those groups, and other institutions, are intently watching that huge pile of Boomer money, the multi-trillion-dollar wealth transfer that has bulked up spectacularly over the past decades. Where is it going to go to, how, and what will the recipients do with it?

There is a danger in thinking of this too simplistically, that the death of the boomers will mean boomer children gathered for the reading of the will simply be handed huge cheques with which to go frolic in the sunshine. Others see the looming wealth transfer as a vast turbo for the stock market, assuming that hordes of inheritors will park their money in stocks (bonds are too boring and pay nothing – not an easy sell to jaded youth) if the world survives the coronavirus meltdown (and if it doesn’t, there will be much bigger worries at hand, like trying to learn how to grow a carrot or chop firewood with that dull axe in the garage).

Of course the answer is far more complex than that; some inheritors will travel, some will invest, some will buy houses, and some will party like its 1999. Some stubborn boomers will not die for a very long time – recall that the Boomers are defined as being born before 1946 and 1964, or now aged between 74 and 56 – spring chickens here in the western world. How they will spend it is purely speculative and individual, but it’s worth considering some of the aspects that we know will happen for sure.

Demographically, children of boomers have tended to move to large centers, become urbanized, and not as enamored of the two cars in a two-car garage in the suburbs boomer mecca. A large question then becomes: what happens to all that boomer habitat?

A Google search of boomer homes indicates somewhere between 20 and 30 million homes in the US (and probably directly proportional in Canada) own homes (the number depending on vacation properties, rentals, etc.) are owned by boomers. Most of these are in suburbia, where millennials are not all that keen on hanging out. So, as one Wall Street Journal article from late 2019 asks, Boomers: Who’s going to buy your 21 million homes?

This is an important question, because much of that boomer wealth is tied up in those paid-for homes. Now, how does that muddy the waters?

We’ve tended to see the wealth transfer as a bunch of cash being thrown to inheritors, but what if the inheritance is millions of McMansions and other suburban treasures that few millennials want? What happens to the value of that pile, and, for the tail end of boomers and Gen Xers, what happens to the value of that real estate?

Given the fact that millennials prefer experience to stuff – that is, they tend to be motivated by things other than bigger fancier cars and bigger fancier houses – they may choose to take time traveling, or extreme-sporting to deal with anxious lives, or lord knows what. But we do know also that the younger generation is not nearly as interested in the stock market, so maybe that vast wealth transfer will turn out to be anything but what we imagine.

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