Okay, so I was reading this huge Reddit thread the other day, and honestly, it was a bit of a gut punch. The whole discussion was about where all the so-called “boomer wealth” is actually going to end up. And the overwhelming consensus, backed by tons of personal stories, is that it’s not going to the next generation. It’s getting vacuumed up by the elder care and medical industry, especially by private equity firms that own these facilities.
It started with someone pointing out that the real inheritance is just a massive transfer of wealth straight to the medical industry. People shared story after story to back this up. One person’s grandmother went into a nursing home owning thousands of acres and came out with almost nothing. Another talked about “reverse mortgages” – you know, those things Tom Selleck advertises – where the bank gets the house to pay for care, leaving nothing to inherit. The sentiment was pretty clear: “Nobody’s inheriting *shit.*”
The numbers people threw around are staggering. We’re talking $10,000, $12,000, even $15,000 *a month* for a shared room in an assisted living or memory care facility. One person’s grandmother pays $168,000 a year and gets a terrible grilled cheese every single day. For that kind of money, you’d expect luxury, but the descriptions are anything but: understaffed facilities, miserable residents, “prison food,” and nurses waking people up at 5 a.m. There’s this dark joke that keeps popping up: when it’s their turn, they’d rather just “fall asleep in the snow” than go through that.
What really gets people is the structure of it all. There’s a lot of anger directed at private equity. These firms have been buying up nursing homes, assisted living centers, and hospices. The business model, as folks see it, is to extract maximum profit. They’ll calculate how many years you have left, what your house is worth, and drain every last dime. The workers on the floor are severely underpaid and overworked, so the astronomical costs aren’t going to the care – they’re going to the top. It creates this awful situation where families are secretly hoping a loved one doesn’t live *too* long, not for lack of love, but to spare them from dying destitute in a state facility after all their assets are gone. One person put it perfectly: it’s “soul-crushing.”
The details people shared are heartbreaking and infuriating. They talk about caregivers or charities subtly pressuring vulnerable elders for extra money – one carer got over $1,000 for their “dream pet.” They talk about selling the family home for $400k only to watch it evaporate in less than four years of care. They talk about parents with millions in savings and a pension dying with an estate of less than $5,000. Medicaid has strict asset limits, often forcing the sale of a house and heirlooms, leaving a surviving spouse with very little.
And it’s not just medical costs. Scams are a huge factor. People described sharp, successful parents falling for romance scams, sending half a million dollars to strangers, or getting drained by psychics, predatory donations, and shady financial schemes. Even without outright fraud, there’s the “luxury retirement community” trap, where people spend down their wealth long before they need critical care.
The big takeaway from the thread is a profound sense of resignation and systemic critique. The phrase “generational wealth” kept coming up, but in the context of it being “killed” for the middle class. The idea that there’s some big wealth transfer coming is seen as a myth for most people. As one highly-upvoted comment said, the wealth isn’t going to us; it’s going to the private equity firms running the industry. Another joked that the younger generation will just get “a thank-you card from the nursing home” – and probably a bill for it.
It leads to some bleak personal resolutions. Many commenters said they’ve explicitly told their own kids not to expect an inheritance and that they have no intention of spending their final years being milked dry. The talk of “assisted suicide” or a dignified, self-directed end came up not as a morbid fantasy, but as a rational alternative to a system they see as designed to profit from prolonged suffering. The whole thread paints a picture of a late-life stage in America that feels less like a peaceful retirement and more like a final, systematic financial harvest.
