Your parents raised a family, bought a house and retired comfortably on one salary. You earn five times more and still struggle to pay rent. This is not your failure.
Five safety nets your parents had were quietly taken away from your generation. One by one. Today we earn much more money than our parents ever did. Yet many of us still feel stressed about rent, savings, and the future. It is not because we are careless. The old safety nets that protected our parents have slowly disappeared.
Many young professionals earn far more than their parents ever did, yet paying basic monthly bills still feels stressful and insecure. It is easy to blame yourself for being bad with money, but previous generations were protected by strong systems that no longer exist today. From joint families and guaranteed pensions to affordable homes, lifetime healthcare, and permanent jobs those silent cushions have disappeared, leaving you to handle every crisis alone.
Your Parents Managed on One Salary. You Cannot on Two. This Is Why It Is Not Your Fault.
I don’t know who needs to read this. But I know that no one thinks like me. Everyone is busy in life. And yet here we are, a generation that earns more than any generation before us, and somehow feels more financially insecure than all of them.
People don’t want to listen to your sad story. They want the specific details that are applicable to their lives. So let me get straight to it.
Open your bank account right now and check your balance. Then calculate how much your monthly expenses are. The difference between these two numbers is your safety net. If God forbid your job goes tomorrow, this amount will save you. If your parents get hospitalized, this amount will save you. If there are layoffs in your company, this amount will save you.
But for most people this amount is not very large. Maybe for you too it is not. And this is not your fault.
Your Parents Had Something You Were Never Given
When I look at my parents, something does not add up. They managed their whole life on one salary. They raised children, bought a house, bought a scooter or a car, and their retirement is running fine. And I am earning five times more than they ever did. And still paying rent feels like a struggle some months.
Do you know what the truth is? Your parents did not earn more. They just had safety nets that you were never given. Invisible ones. Safety nets that were always there in the background, protecting them without them even realizing it. And slowly, one by one, those safety nets were taken away from this generation.
This is the first generation in this country’s history that is growing up without all five of these safety nets at the same time. Every generation before this had at least something to fall back on. You are the first ones who have had all of them taken away together.
Let me tell you what those four safety nets were.
Safety Net One: The Joint Family
The joint family was the original safety net. And it actually worked.
In a joint family there was financial support, emotional support and physical support all under one roof. Children were raised together. If someone was in trouble there was an interest free loan available from a brother or an uncle. If someone was going through emotional turmoil there were shoulders to cry on. There was a whole system that functioned without anyone having to pay for it.
Today nearly 70 percent of urban families in this country are nuclear families. Mother, father and one or two children. And it is not even stopping there. One person households are growing faster than nuclear family growth. There are around 9 million people in this country living completely alone. And around 30 percent of the working population are migrants. They have left their city, their village, their hometown to work somewhere else. So naturally their support system has been taken from them. They have to set themselves up in a completely new place from scratch.
Where once there were 10 people in the family to share your heartache with, now there is not even one.
And add to this the fact that 70 percent of senior citizens in this country have no pension and no retirement savings. Their retirement plan is their children. So suddenly you are in a nuclear family. And now your parents’ responsibility is also on you. And everyone is looking at your shoulders expecting you to hold everything together.
Safety Net Two: The Guaranteed Pension
If your parents worked in a central government job, a state government job, a public sector bank, the railways or the armed forces, they were on something called the Old Pension Scheme.
The Old Pension Scheme was something remarkable. Whatever your basic salary was at the time of retirement, you would get 50 percent of that plus a dearness allowance for the rest of your life. Inflation adjusted. And when you died your spouse would keep receiving that pension. The best thing about this was that it was a defined retirement scheme. You knew exactly how much money you would get every month after retirement, adjusted for inflation. And the government took all the risk. Market risk, longevity risk, everything. Someone else was carrying that weight, not you.
In 2004 this was replaced by the New Pension Scheme. The New Pension Scheme is not a bad product by itself. But compared to what came before it, there is one big difference. The New Pension Scheme is market linked. Your contributions go in and your payout at retirement depends on how those investments perform. If the market crashes right when you retire, your savings go down. If you live until 95, God willing, but your money runs out at 82, there is nothing left.
And most people working today are in the private sector anyway. For them none of these pension benefits existed in the first place.
Safety Net Three: Lifetime Healthcare from Your Employer
In 1954 the Central Government Health Scheme was launched. Basically lifetime health coverage. Not for one year. Not until 75. For life. And in 2003 the Ex-Servicemen Contributory Health Scheme was launched, which gave lifetime coverage to members and their dependents.
There was no need to buy a health policy every year. No need to worry about whether your insurance would lapse. You were covered for life.
Today what do you have? You are a corporate employee. You get a health insurance policy for 3 to 5 lakh rupees as long as you are employed there. The moment you leave that job it lapses. Yes there is portability. But portability has a very important clause. When you transfer to an individual policy the insurer will evaluate you all over again. And if you developed any condition while you were working, they will add clauses, waiting periods for pre-existing diseases and various other restrictions.
And the biggest problem is that it is not for life. The moment you stop working it ends. But that is exactly when you need it the most. When we are in our 20s and 30s we can manage our health somewhat. But after 60 is when hospital visits actually begin. And if at that point you have no health coverage, where will you go?
Safety Net Four: Affordable Housing
A very large safety net that existed for your parents was property. Either inherited land or a house, or housing that was genuinely affordable.
In most towns and smaller cities almost every family had some property. A house that came from the family, or a plot of land. And government housing schemes, railway quarters, defense housing, all of these meant that even if you did not have inherited property, housing was within reach on a single government salary.
Today in any major city, almost no house comes for under one crore. The cities where most of the employment opportunities exist are exactly the cities where housing has become completely unaffordable. EMI to income ratio in Mumbai is 51 percent on average. In Bangalore and Chennai around 28 to 30 percent. In Delhi NCR around 31 percent. You are spending one quarter to half your salary just on your home, and that too for 20 to 30 years.
That security of having a roof that is truly yours, that your parents had, is something most of this generation may never have in the same way.
Safety Net Five: Lifetime Employment in One Field
Your parents, once they found a stable job, knew roughly what their career would look like for the next 30 to 35 years. A government job came with an HMT watch on retirement and life was settled. Even in the private sector there was an understanding that if you worked hard and stayed loyal you had a place.
Today the average employment tenure is around 1.6 years. Technology is changing so fast that every four to five years entire industries transform. The work you studied for years to do can become irrelevant in a decade. There is no concept of lifetime employment anymore. If you are 25 today and you want to guarantee an income until you are 60, that question is genuinely hard to answer. Nobody knows which fields will still have work in 35 years. Every industry is changing.
What This Generation Is Actually Facing
So let us add this all up.
Your parents had joint families with hundreds of cousins and siblings as a support system. They had defined pensions. They had lifetime healthcare. They had affordable homes. And they knew their income source would remain stable for decades.
What do you have? Average employment tenure of 1.6 years. Out of pocket healthcare bills. EMI to income ratio of 47 percent on average. A pension system that is one of the lowest ranked in the world, and that too only if you qualify for it. No structural safety net. No institutional safety net.
You have only yourself. Your salary, your skills, your luck and your dedication. And you are being told to build your own life with this. Give your parents a retirement. Give your siblings security. Build a happy life for yourself and your family. And from every corner someone is shouting at you to invest. From another corner someone is selling you an iPhone. From another someone is selling you a car. Banks are smiling at you with beautiful posters offering personal loans. It is chaos everywhere and everyone’s eyes are on you.
And this is not your fault. You are the first generation to face this. No generation before you faced all five of these being taken away at the same time.
What You Can Actually Do
Many things happened with us that are not our fault. But they are our responsibility.
The two safety nets that nobody can take from you are the ones you build yourself. Your own personal health insurance that does not depend on your employer, your country or your government. It depends only on you. And a term insurance that ensures that if something happens to you, your family is protected.
Health insurance at 25 costs a fraction of what it costs at 60. And by 60 it comes with so many clauses and waiting periods that it barely protects you anyway. The best time to build these safety nets is before you need them. Because illness never comes with a warning. It just comes.
Be the reason for your own happiness. Do not depend on others. Plan for the future but live in the moment.
The best three lessons I have learned are these. Be you. Do not bother what people think about you. Be the reason for your own happiness. Do not depend on others. Plan for the future but live in the moment.
You came naked. You will leave naked. You came without anything. You will leave without anything. So why so much hatred, resentment, envy, selfishness and pride? We will all go empty handed. Everything we have earned, we earned here and we will leave it here only.
This generation is genuinely going through a very difficult time. And it is not your fault. But it is your responsibility. The sooner you accept that no institution, no government, no employer and sometimes not even family will be there to catch you when you fall, the sooner you can start building something that actually holds.
You are the safety net now. Build yourself accordingly.
Read After this post:
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The World is Trapped in Debt: 300 Years, Four People, One System
The Man 21 Countries Banned: 5 Lessons From Osho That Will Change How You Think
Conclusion
This generation faces harder financial pressure than any before it. The old supports are gone, so we must build our own. Buy personal health insurance early, get term insurance, save carefully, and take responsibility for ourselves. It is not our fault that things changed, but it is our job to protect ourselves now.
Thank you, and have a great day! 💜
About The Author
Hemant Singh
Hello friends, I am Hemant, Technical Writer & Co-Founder of Education Learn Academy. Talking about education, I am a student. I enjoy learning things related to new technology and teaching others. I request you that you keep supporting us in this way and we will continue to provide new information for you. :)
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