Baby Boomers are richest generation with $85 TRILLION in assets—younger gens have no chance of catching up

According to research from NYU economics professor Edward Wolf, the reason comes down to timing as well as investing in the stock market and other assets before they grew in value. The four decades between 1983 and 2022, when Baby Boomers saw their wealth increase, also saw the wealth of others decline in real value, as detailed in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“It’s astonishing how their relative wealth has taken off in the last 30-plus years,” said NYU economics professor Edward Wolff, per the Washington Post. “They started out as among the poorest groups in terms of wealth back in 1983.”

The generated wealth of the Baby Boomer generation came from uniquely favorable timing of investments as well as real estate. With housing costs, the Baby Boomer generation also paid a smaller portion of their expenses to housing costs.

Olivia Mitchell, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said that Boomers “entered the labor force during decades of strong economic growth, rising productivity and relatively high real wages."

They were able to invest and earn during their prime years in the workforce in bull markets during the 1980s and 1990s. There were lower tuition costs, lower healthcare costs, as well as a number of other advantages.

Additionally, they had a number of favorable tax policies, such as lower capital gains tax rates. In contrast, younger generations of Millennials got their careers started in the 2000s, with the Great Recession running from 2007 to 2009. Markets afterwards have also been more volatile.

"Particularly for middle-income workers, real wage gains since the 2000s have been modest, compared to the robust wage growth that Boomers benefited from mid-career," Mitchell added. By age 30, Millennials had about two times the debt as their Baby Boomer counterparts, according to Jeremy Ney, a professor of business at Columbia University.

After World War II, "You had this tremendous boom that many got to ride for a very long period of time,” Ney said. “And when you compare that to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when you compare that to the 2008 housing crisis, when you compare that to the declines of covid, it made it much more difficult for people to invest, accumulate wealth," Ney added.

About half of the wealth held by Boomers is tied up in stocks, bonds, or other mutual funds held in retirement accounts, and had over $85 trillion through the second quarter of 2025. Younger generations, however, are much more likely to have debt, leaving less to save or invest.

Boomers were also in a better position to refinance their homes during the Great Recession when interest rates were dropped by the Fed, meaning housing costs were able to be lowered for many in the Boomer generation.