Gen X and The Pension Problem
When the system breaks, you buy what you can see.
None of my Gen X peers discuss pensions calmly. Nobody I know sat down one day and calmly recalculated. It's wide-eyed fear first, usually triggered by a letter or a headline or a friend's redundancy, then a period of head-in-the-sand avoidance that can run for years, then, eventually, the line that ends almost every version of this conversation: "well, luckily I’ve got the house, that'll have to be my pension." The 2008 crash did it for some. The letter announcing a final salary scheme was closing did it for others. For plenty, it was the 2024 Autumn Budget quietly folding pension death benefits into the inheritance tax estate, a rewrite of long-term planning logic delivered with almost no notice into an already exhausted inbox.
For a generation that arrived too late for final salary pensions and too early for auto-enrolment, none of this was really a surprise, even if it never stopped being frightening. And somewhere underneath the panic and the avoidance, something quieter has been happening too. I've watched it surface across almost every piece of research we've run at FITH: a steady redirection of trust away from anything that depends on someone else's good behaviour, toward things you can actually see.
The DWP's own data shows 56% of 40-75 year olds who haven't yet retired are planning to rely on savings or investments rather than pension income, and 24% are planning to release equity from their home. That's the house-as-pension instinct showing up in the official numbers. Nobody's published a clean figure for where the rest of that discretionary capital is going, but the pattern below suggests a reasonable answer: somewhere visible, with weight, somewhere you can see from across the room.
It's worth being precise about why, because the obvious explanation is wrong. A Publicis Luxe study of affluent Gen X consumers across the US, France and UAE found that more than half buy luxury goods for personal satisfaction rather than social recognition. Decades of marketing built around status and exclusivity, aimed largely at younger demographics, have simply missed the point. Contemporary art, luxury handbags, vinyl, trainers and toy collectibles have crossed from lifestyle category into legitimate wealth strategy not because Gen X is eccentric, but because, for once, the emotional logic and the financial logic are pointing the same way.
Take art. High Street galleries like Halcyon and Clarendon Fine Art have done something the traditional trade never quite managed: made art feel accessible rather than reserved for the HNW’s. For Gen X-ers, it’s grown-up version of the Athena poster rack, except the print on your wall might actually hold -or hopefully gain- its value now. Meanwhile - drink it in! Gen X overtook Millennials last year to become the biggest spenders in the art market, average spend up 3% on 2022 to $578,000, and that lead held through the first half of 2024, running more than a third higher than Millennials and double that of both Boomers and Gen Z.
Handbags make the clearest case of all for tangible assets as genuine financial instruments rather than indulgences. The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index 2025 reports 85% appreciation in luxury bags over the past decade. Hermès Birkins have averaged around 14.2% compound annual returns since 1980, comfortably outpacing the S&P 500, and a 2022 Credit Suisse study identified handbags as one of the least volatile collectible asset classes and a meaningful inflation hedge. Chanel's core models have tracked above inflation on retail price for two decades and hold around 80% of retail value after five years. These were aspirational objects when Gen X first encountered designer culture. They're functioning now as modern heirlooms with legible, transferable worth, and unlike a pension, a Birkin bag keeps providing value while it appreciates.
Vinyl runs on the same logic at a lower price point, with a second motive layered on top: a quiet backlash against paying monthly to rent access to your own music library rather than actually owning it. UK vinyl revenue grew roughly 650% between 2014 and 2024, and the ONS reintroduced vinyl into the Consumer Prices Index that same year, official acknowledgement of the shift. Vinyl is now genuinely treated as an asset class: Discogs own data shows the average record is 24% pricier than five years ago, and its most frequent buyers are largely Millennials and Gen X, twenty years deep into their collections.
Trainers are the least obvious entry on this list, and worth being honest about upfront: the headline growth in sneaker resale, a market worth more than $10B annually, is overwhelmingly a Gen Z story, driven by hype drops and platforms built for a much younger buyer. But sitting underneath that headline is a quieter, more Gen X-shaped pattern, and none other than Antiques Roadshow proved the original Sneakerheads right all along. In 2024 when one collector brought roughly 50 pairs of unworn, boxed Nikes, built up since 2003, expert James Broad valued the collection at £12,000 to £18,000 at auction, adding that he expected the figure to keep climbing.
Collectibles push the same instinct furthest. The trading card segment alone - including physical and digital cards - was valued at about $13.28B in 2025, with projections reaching $24.36B by the early-to-mid 2030s. It’s similar story for action figures - in August 2024 an unreleased 1979 Kenner prototype Boba Fett, one of only 30 ever made and never sold to the public, went for $1.34M at auction, the most expensive toy ever sold. Nobody's inner child owned that specific prototype, which is precisely why it commands the price it does, rarity and biographical resonance are doing different jobs here. Collectible value tends to peak when the generation that grew up around an object reaches its period of maximum financial capacity. Gen X was 45 to 60 in 2025, so that window is now.
And if you fancy a gamble, what’s next for revival? Following the great analogue push and as letter writing becomes popular as part of a move towards off-line culture, will our childhood stamp collections suddenly be worth something? Or vintage landline phones*? What about test polaroids from pre-digital fashion shoots?
For Gen X none of this is a story about nostalgia. It's a story about rational behaviour in response to institutional failure. Gen X didn't abandon long-term thinking, it redirected it toward objects with provenance, secondary markets, and a value story that doesn't depend on a government consultation going the right way. For financial services still treating tangible assets as a footnote rather than a portfolio conversation, that's a gap, and it's widening. Gen X isn't giving up on the future. They're just keeping it somewhere they can see it.
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