The wickedness of boomers who ski

“A GOOD MAN leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.”

Proverbs 13:22

The acronym SKI has become a lighthearted and sometimes serious reference to members of the Baby Boomer generation, “boomers”, who are proudly Spending their Kids’ Inheritance (SKI). They spend all their money while they can, leaving nothing for the kids.

Money saving expert, Joel Gibson, says:

“The SKI movement is all about enjoying your retirement to the full and not scrabbling away every penny to pass it on to your kids.”

Arguments on both sides of this philosophy often miss the big questions, and paddle in shallow thinking.

The boomers rationalise, “It’s my money. I earned it through hard work and personal responsibility. I sacrificed for your childhood and wedding. It’s my turn now. I saved, I invested, I risked and I was rewarded. I deserve to spend my money how I want to, and if that’s lavish holidays and luxurious living, then that’s my right and you can do the same if you drop the false sense of entitlement, roll up your sleeves and stick at a job for more than 5 minutes before quitting over some relatively trivial complaint.”

The entitled younger generation looks at the Baby Boomers and respond, “You had opportunities that weren’t a result of your hard work like a free tertiary education and an enormous windfall in the property market. We need your help or we’ll never own a property.”

There’s some truth to both perspectives, and as always, the key is in the Bible.

If we want to experience higher than average wealth like so many (not all) Jewish familes, we need to learn what God taught them about intergenerational wealth. In Ancient Israel the idea of leaving an inheritance was a sign of God’s blessing. Traditionally, blessings were thought to be extended to the righteous but not sinners. King Solomon wrote that good people leave an inheritance for their grandchildren, but the accumulated wealth of sinners passes to better people they don’t know.

In Christianity, we don’t do unto others whatever poverty our parents did unto us – we do what is right, wise, good and generous. We sow for what we want to reap in the future, not from whatever little someone else gave us.

The SKI philosophy is civilisational cancer. Instead of improving our world slowly, generation by generation, SKIers ensure – probably unintentionally – that the next generations have to start from the same place they did, with zero intergenerational wealth. This creates a familial and sovereign weakness. Everything boomers worked for and built becomes forgotten and meaningless, like a fart in a cyclone, and the family they founded never becomes a clan. Any significant wealth they created gets swallowed up by strangers and potentially consumed by foreigners or corporations, or foreign corporations.

Check this out for example.

That isn’t the story of a lazy, entitled son (which, for the record, should be kicked out by his father). He was kicked out at 18 because he had mouths to feed and couldn’t work for free. The specifics aren’t really relevant because the story is so typical of the failed cultural values we share in Australia.

Kicking adult offspring out is common for all the wrong reasons, usually just because they’ve finished school. Where it’s becoming less common, it’s still treated with a degree of scorn as if the kids are lazy or irresponsible, or the parents are willing victims.

We’re addicted to big government because we’ve scorned big families. There would be significantly less need for aged care and child care if we were more inclined to multigenerational households – like the rest of the world. Our national affluence has become an unhealthy obsession with independence and privacy, and is unravelling the social fabric our affluence was built upon.

Small wonder cost of living and housing shortages and affordability are sky rocketing!

Whatever I earn – and I’m not on an above average income – the first ten percent always goes to God, and the next ten percent goes to my family’s future fund. I was not taught to aggressively save or to avoid consumer debt, but it’s what I’m teaching my kids. I tell them the family future fund, investment savings, are for the wealth of their children, and it is their responsibility to save for their grandchildren’s future, and to teach their kids to do the same.

My kids are no longer teenagers, and I am way too young for what I leave behind to help them get started. But that is why Proverbs teaches, “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”

So called “nuclear families” were never God’s plan. Marxists may hate the family and want it destroyed by feminism, abortion, sexual perversions and undefining marriage and gender, but consumerism destroys the family by measuring “success” by what you accumulate and how much independence and isolation you can sustain.

Families should buy one or properties together with permanent multigenerational living in mind. That’s a far better way to spend your life’s savings than the fleeting experiences of holidays.

Instead of “needing” a house, car or holiday to compare to “the Joneses”, practice contentment. Paul wrote to Timothy that godliness with contentment is great gain. In the arc of human history, every single Australian resident is unbelievably wealthy.

If you have a fridge, a microwave and a television, if you can drive to a supermarket and buy a meal for yourself for less than an hour’s award wages, if you can make a long phone call to anyone in the world, if you can get treatment for the infectious diseases which have killed swathes of people in cities for many thousands of years – you are in the immeasurably tiniest fraction of the wealthiest people who have ever lived.

We are all very wealthy! With that wealth comes the obligation and responsibility to make our family, our community and our nation incrementally better than we found it. We are collectively the beneficiaries of centuries of incremental social and civilisational improvements, and it would be exceedingly arrogant to think we have nothing to be grateful for or no significant debt to pay forward.

Betraying that obligation and abdicating that God-given responsibility is wickedly selfish and lazy. On a national scale, leaving the next generation with crushing debts accumulated by our consumption of government services, to repaid by their taxes before they could even vote, is brazenly immoral.

If you can’t: don’t be condemned. God measures the intentions of your heart.

The balance in all this is yes, boomers and others can of course spend the fruits of their labours and circumstantial blessings for their personal enjoyment and comfort, but not at the cost of leaving an inheritance of intergenerational wealth for their grandchildren.

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, director of annual Church And State conferences around Australia, and founding editor of The Good Sauce. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to redeem culture through videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand, and events from Perth to Auckland. [more]

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