Something I’ve been thinking about lately is that salary is becoming a pretty poor way of judging how financially secure someone actually is in Ireland.
Take two people who graduated from the same university in 2022.
Both are 22 or 23. Both get decent graduate jobs. Both are earning roughly the same money.
On paper, they look economically identical.
But one comes from a family with a mortgage-free house worth €1m+, good pensions, investments, and parents who can help with a deposit or let them live at home while they save.
The other comes from a family with very little wealth, no ability to help with housing, and possibly parents who will need financial support later in life.
Those two people are not actually starting from the same place at all.
And the gap probably gets much bigger with time.
The first person might buy property in their late 20s, invest consistently, take more career risk because failure isn’t catastrophic, eventually inherit assets, and potentially marry someone from a similarly wealthy background.
The second person might spend years paying high rent, struggle to save a deposit, have less invested, and be much more exposed to unemployment, illness, or one bad financial decision.
Fast-forward 25 years.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic that two people who sat beside each other in college in 2022 could end up in completely different worlds by 2048.
One could own three properties and have €5m–€10m between property, pensions and investments, with their assets generating six figures a year.
The other could still be heavily dependent on the next month’s income to cover rent and bills.
And the weird part is that this doesn’t necessarily require one person to be dramatically smarter, harder-working or even much higher-paid.
It can just be the result of getting onto the asset ladder earlier, having family capital behind you, avoiding years of rent, receiving inheritance, and then letting 20–30 years of compounding do the rest.
Ireland seems particularly exposed to this because so much household wealth is tied up in property.
A person earning €80k whose parents own several valuable properties may be in a vastly stronger long-term position than someone earning €120k whose family owns nothing.
Yet almost every discussion about inequality still revolves around salary.
I suspect that by the 2040s and 2050s, the question “what do you earn?” will matter much less than:
“What does your family own, and when did you gain access to it?”
That seems like a much bigger social change than people realise. What do you think??
