People complain a lot about my generation. For good reason. Free love, free education, nearly free medical care. Plus – the opportunity to put together a deposit for a home with just one year’s savings! Practically free in comparison to today’s lot of first home buyers who would need to triple the 1993 (why 1993? Hold that thought) household income to do the same. Takes them six years – at least!

I’m sympathetic. Or I was until a week ago. Now it turns out that people like me, bad Boomers, two million of us, are in direct competition with middle-class Millennials. Those same people, grumpy at Boomers and older Gen X-ers, are right to be extremely concerned about how their generation of young families is ever going to buy a house.

I was sympathetic towards Millennials, until a week go. Credit: SMH

But now my generation is failing too. Failing to downsize. And I can only blame moneyed-up Millennials. At every auction for spacious two-bedroom homes, you’ll see two distinct groups. The young people with wealthy parents in pocket. Those folks have a multitude of tools at the ready: going guarantor, providing some or all of the deposit, some or all of the house. They are loaded. They even own other properties. I hate them as much as Millennials hate Boomers.

And then the second group? Failed downsizers. Like me. Our hopes and aspirations for our more diminutive lives are not so different from the hopes and aspirations of first home buyers. Space. A garden. No dungeons.

Michael Blythe, former Reserve Banker, former chief economist at the Commonwealth Bank, has a new gig in line with the time of his life, a project called Downsizer.com. He’s just writing up the findings of the company’s latest research and says there are now 1.9 million downsizers, two-thirds of whom are between 60 and 70, willing, able or aspiring to sell the family home.

But they have lived in their houses for 20, 30, 40 years. And they want the same amenity. They are also discovering that what they buy might not leave as much left over from the sale of the family homes as they hoped.

Plus they have the dining table problem.

I went to an auction a week ago to buy a house half the size of the one I live in. I spent hours doing inspections, tape measure in hand. Would our existing dining table fit? If it didn’t, how would we feed everyone all at once. We regularly have our kids and grandkids – 11 people – at dinner. High chairs take up a lot of room.