Page 8 - 1. What Wealthy Means to Australians in 2023

Retirees in the 1980s and 1990s were frugal
people with modest lifestyle expectations.

Boomers’ faith in housing was partly The extension of life expectancy—today
shaped by their parent’s childhood stories hovering around the mid-80s—created
of the need for security during the Great demand for retirement planning.
Depression. To both of these generations— Accumulating wealth via housing and
boomers and their parents—home carrying it into retirement wasn’t an issue ...it was generation
ownership was not just a store of wealth, in the 1960s when retirement lasted, say,
it offered security. five years. Today retirees can live 25 X who first embraced
years beyond official retirement from inner city-living.”
At this time, some baby boomers
the workforce.
reimagined the inner city by renovating
terrace houses abandoned in the 1960s. Plus, the ideal of what retirement might
It was a movement that was to gather look like has changed. Retirees in the
momentum, morph into different formats 1980s and 1990s were frugal people
and eventually (in the 2000s) create a new with modest lifestyle expectations. Like
lifeform known as the ‘hipster’. all Australians retirees today have bigger
expectations of how life might be lived.
However, it was Generation X who first
embraced inner-city living in an apartment And there are now far more older singles,
format. Apartments clustered near the often women, who have chosen to remain
CBD close to universities and often in large single (often happily so) whilst others have
scale redevelopment projects in places like been thrust into singledom via the loss of
South Sydney, Melbourne’s Southbank and a life partner.
Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.
With such seismic shifts in the social
By the early 2000s the social structure structure of the Australian community
of middle Australia had shifted. More it is unsurprising that the key concept
Australians were working. Singledom defining ‘wealthy’ for middle Australia—
dominated the 20s although other home ownership—should be broadened,
outposts surfaced in the 40s, the 50s and transformed and boldly reimagined in
the 60s as couples separated and divorced. the 2020s.

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