80% of Millennials Say They Want To Buy a Home -- But Most Have Less Than $1,000 (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Millennials aren't buying homes in the same numbers as previous and older generations, but it's not because they don't want to. The vast majority of millennials do indeed aim to buy someday, or would even like to now if they could. Unfortunately, the numbers don't look good. New data from Apartment List shows that, although 80 percent of millennials would like to purchase real estate, very few are in a good position to buy, largely because they have nothing saved. According to the report, '68 percent of millennials said they have saved less than $1,000 for a down payment. Almost half, or 44 percent, of millennials said they have not saved anything for a down payment.'

Comments

What a coincidence

[American AC in Paris]

I'm sure this is completely unrelated to the previous article about our booming gig economy

Re:What a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is it's related to this:
http://ghsvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ff.png
It's a bit harder to save with current tuition costs.

Re:What a coincidence

[ranton]

What this article also missed is that nearly 60% of all Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $500 - $1000 unplanned expense. This article is trying to make this a Millennial problem, but in truth it is just a reality of the majority of all US households.

Re:What a coincidence

[thegarbz]

That's just it. 80% of millennials have less than $1000 "FOR A HOME DEPOSIT". I'm sure they can tell me all about it when I meet them on their yearly international holiday on the beach sipping margaritas, or when they invite me to their expensive inner city rental for a nice fresh pressed juice from their $400 juicer.

Yes the specifics of the examples are facetious. The value however is not. There's about as many articles discussing the millennial trait of living for the now as there are articles talking about them having a lack of savings for the future.

Re:What a coincidence

[cayenne8]

What this article also missed is that nearly 60% of all Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $500 - $1000 unplanned expense [cnn.com]. This article is trying to make this a Millennial problem, but in truth it is just a reality of the majority of all US households.

I guess the last couple of generations for some reason, weren't taught to budget, and save most of your money....that luxury items like the latest phone or $$ Nike's or whatever were meant to be saved for only after you save everything else for a rainy day or things that matter.

And...if you don't make enough money after living and saving as you need to, then you DON'T get those luxury items, you are not entitled to them, hence the term "luxury".

Re:What a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true. I've never made enough money most of my life to be able to put any away in savings, and it seems like every time I try, that's when some 'emergency' pops up and wipes me out to zero (and below zero). I'm old enough now that I don't even bother to try unless it's for something I want to purchase. Retirement? LOL, that's a fantasy I refuse to believe in. I'll either work until I'm dead, or allow myself to live only so long as I can take care of myself.

Re:What a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever actually met a millennial?

Re:What a coincidence

[Jfetjunky]

I'm guessing you didn't look at the article linked... Where it clearly says Millennials actually were more likely than others to be able to cover a $500 unexpected expense. We can speculate why, maybe lack of kids or something, but 47% of Millennials say they could cover it vs the 37% overall average.

Also, as a Millennial, I prefer to have a couple months salary of savings, for obvious reasons. I have a budgeted amount that goes to savings every month, and I get quite agitated if for some reason I have to use it for something else. But that usually stops me from drawing it from savings, so it's a wash really.

And what's that about parents? Oh yeah, I pay their cell phone bill and have paid for other things that come up because they blew every cent they had.

My criteria for "affording" something is "can I do that AND still put away my monthly savings". If the answer is yes, then I don't feel bad about doing it. I've denied myself plenty of things because the answer to the question was no, but that's the price I pay for financial security.

Aside from that, I'm not so naive as to think everyone has it as easy as me. However, I know from experience that if my earnings were reduced, I would scale the savings also and my criteria would stay unchanged.

Re:What a coincidence

[alvinrod]

Also, how many of them are getting a $4 coffee here, buying a new $50 video game every month, and plenty of other small regular expenses that add up to a significant amount over the course of a year. You don't even need to buy luxury items to piss away a lot of money. I think that this ties into the notion of not budgeting properly, because if you sit down and do this, you realize just how much you can save.

And it's not like saving money means you have to give up everything. I buy beans in bulk and make me own coffee every morning, buy games or movies when they go on sale and have a co-worker who just borrow movies from the library since they stock more than books now.

Re:What a coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't buy a house until I have career security in my chose profession. But even as a permanent software engineer, most gigs don't last two years.

Re:What a coincidence

[ShanghaiBill]

Indeed. I got my first job in the 1970s. I clearly remember many of my co-workers constantly complaining about being broke. Financial incompetence is nothing new and I have seen no evidence that it is worse with millennials.

Re:What a coincidence

[david_thornley]

If you piss away $100/month, you're pissing away $1200/year. That's not the kind of money that allows you to buy real estate.

Luxuries are a lot cheaper than they were, and things like houses and college educations are much more expensive. Hence, people spend money on different things than when I was a kid.

Re:What a coincidence

[Gr8Apes]

I'm guessing you didn't look at the article linked... Where it clearly says Millennials actually were more likely than others to be able to cover a $500 unexpected expense. We can speculate why, maybe lack of kids or something, but 47% of Millennials say they could cover it vs the 37% overall average.

I'd guess because they would skip the next couple of game releases and movie/date nights.

Also, as a Millennial, I prefer to have a couple months salary of savings, for obvious reasons. I have a budgeted amount that goes to savings every month, and I get quite agitated if for some reason I have to use it for something else. But that usually stops me from drawing it from savings, so it's a wash really.

Couple of months? How about a couple of years before you have to tap into real savings? Looking for a job can take time.

And what's that about parents? Oh yeah, I pay their cell phone bill and have paid for other things that come up because they blew every cent they had.

On you? Just wait until you have to start supporting family members that can no longer get a job or work. This is where a bunch of us employed and older than millennials are, because they either have really old parents that didn't have much or baby boomer parents that were irresponsible, or just plain bad luck.

Re:What a coincidence

[dcollins117]

I wonder how much this has to do with bank saving accounts and money market funds paying interest below the inflation rate. In this environment, the rational choice is to put your money elsewhere, like stocks and bonds, to avoid losing purchasing power. When surveyed, people rightly consider these investments, not savings.

In which case they are not being as irresponsible as is being reported, but rather making the rational, smart choice. Even buying stuff to stockpile now is better than leaving your money in a place where it will just decline in value.

Re:What a coincidence

[Razed By TV]

Couple of months? How about a couple of years before you have to tap into real savings? Looking for a job can take time.

You 1) have two years of salary saved up and 2) you don't consider it real savings?

Re:What a coincidence

[Gr8Apes]

Couple of months? How about a couple of years before you have to tap into real savings? Looking for a job can take time.

You 1) have two years of salary saved up and 2) you don't consider it real savings?

Pretty much. Real savings is what you retire on. Granted, it's investments, etc, but that's the point. Real savings aren't highly liquid. The safety net savings are generally more liquid with a reasonable portion in cash. Given how long it takes people to get jobs, spending less and saving more seems like a good plan.

I came about this process as I grew up in a lower cost area and then got my first job in a relatively high cost area. A colleague who came from a high cost area showed me what was possible. We earned the same, but he had the 20% downpayment for a house saved up in 3 years, plus enough extra cash to qualify as savings. Me, not so much, just some savings. I took a good look at why, and changed my lifestyle and expectations accordingly. I've not regretted that move, although I did keep the shiny new car through 200K miles, not so shiny or new by the end, and replaced it with something I could pay cash for.

Re:What a coincidence

[serviscope_minor]

Also, as a Millennial, I prefer ...

I say this as a late gen Xer, that what, as a millenial, you are missing is the appeal of good, old-fashioned ageism. There seems to be nothing more fun for some people to basically aggregate every thing they dislike that they've ever seen or heard of a young person doing, assuming that all young people do all of them, blaming you therefore for doing them and then getting to feel entirely superior to you because they are too smart to do all of those things.

It's very appealing because you don't have to be more clever, richer, more virtuous, more experienced, skilled or really anything to feel superior to whole swathes of the population. You simply have to be older, which is free and easy.

Re:What a coincidence

[serviscope_minor]

In which case they are not being as irresponsible as is being reported, but rather making the rational, smart choice. Even buying stuff to stockpile now is better than leaving your money in a place where it will just decline in value.

Or just enjoying it. There's nothing irrational about that if your criteria in life isn't maximizing the money you own but instead maximizing your enjoyment of it.

Re:What a coincidence

[thegarbz]

Also, as a Millennial

Anecdotes are fun. Let me play too: As a millennial I have my home loan half paid off already and I'm looking at buying a second house now.

Re: What a coincidence

[ian_billyboy_morris]

I'm a Brit so not quite so up to speed with the US labour market but surely as in the UK those cheaper areas are cheap because there is no work there.

My (northern) hometown has cheap house prices, but there are few jobs as such my potential earnings are much lower here than in London and the South East of England. For what my 2 bed flat (in a not very nice area) cost me in London I could get 3 bedroom house with a nice garden in a good bit of town up here, but my career opportunities would be severely limited.

Surely it's worse in the US with a much greater geographical spread, telling someone to save up to buy a house in Detroit is probably not very helpful if they are software developer or engineer and need to be where the work is?

Re: What a coincidence

[ian_billyboy_morris]

I actually think that changing every 2 years is fairly optimal, let's be realistic here, the only way your getting a pay raise these days is change jobs (or not had an above Retail price index pay raise ever), so if you want your salary to go up you have to move jobs. You don't want to change too often because employers think you are flighty and won't stick around long, so 2 to 3 years before you move on and up seems about right.

Re:What a coincidence

[drinkypoo]

I guess the last couple of generations for some reason, weren't taught to budget, and save most of your money...

It's hard when you grow up without money. When the most money you've ever had in your hand at one time by the time you're fifteen is a hundred bucks, and you've grown up eating ramen and peanut butter sandwiches, you get a tendency to just spend money because tomorrow might never come.

And...if you don't make enough money after living and saving as you need to, then you DON'T get those luxury items, you are not entitled to them, hence the term "luxury".

I have a much easier time with this than I did when I was young, and I felt more like I was my possessions because society is always trying to make you feel that way. It's still difficult.

Re:What a coincidence

[strstr]

you guys realize that a virtually 100% automated machine duplicates unlimited numbers of games and similarly starbucks stores have enough coffee to hand it out all for free all day long? why should millenials do without something when we have the capacity to give everyone one?

maybe the problem is really capitalism. it's not paying enough and millenials are living super poor and on the cheap already and still don't have enough to afford things like a vacation or a home when they need it, medical expenses or a lawyer. they also can't afford to go do political activism that is leave work to pursue political agendas for any set amount of time. on the other hand they can afford cheap massively produced and duplicated things like starbucks and video game monthly and even a cellphone once a year or every two.

maybe it's time we switch to communism since machines can create enough stock to give everyone some of everything equally and none of it will be in shortage any more also known as being unaffordable or unobtainable.

trumpsweapon.com

Re:What a coincidence

[Comrade Ogilvy]

It's very appealing because you don't have to be more clever, richer, more virtuous, more experienced, skilled or really anything to feel superior to whole swathes of the population. You simply have to be older, which is free and easy.

Actually, I am quite certain that becoming such a narrow-minded prick as to belittle large swaths of the population on such little anecdotal data took years and years of practice, but you are too young and inexperienced to appreciate such things.

Re:What a coincidence

[Comrade Ogilvy]

The problem is that people cherry pick anecdotal data and paint whatever picture they want. Someone who buys two $60 video games per year, but does not go out to movies is arguably frugal, by the norms of American society. Someone who has a very nice used smart phone but is careful with the choice of data plan and does not have cable is arguably frugal. Someone who has a nice mountain bike, but a crappy old car is arguably frugal.

But the geezers (people my age or older) see the nice bike or a nice phone, and assume the movies and the premium cable and the vacations in Baja are there, too, when very often they are not. In fact, it is clear to me that there are many geezers who like to whine about these youngsters, when quite a few of these youngsters are more frugal than they ever were.

The fact there are indeed a few ridiculous spendthrifts in every generation does not seem worthy of comment. Such does not prove anything that matters.

Re:What a coincidence

[Ol Olsoc]

Also, as a Millennial, I prefer to have a couple months salary of savings, for obvious reasons. I have a budgeted amount that goes to savings every month, and I get quite agitated if for some reason I have to use it for something else. But that usually stops me from drawing it from savings, so it's a wash really. And what's that about parents? Oh yeah, I pay their cell phone bill and have paid for other things that come up because they blew every cent they had.

And you dear sir are exactly like 100 percent of the millennials.

Re:What a coincidence

[Ol Olsoc]

If you piss away $100/month, you're pissing away $1200/year. That's not the kind of money that allows you to buy real estate.

But it does become the kind of money after ten years or so.

While millenials have had some issues - and every generation does - this is not specifically one of them.

Seems like most people don't know how to save money, nor do they know how to make their money work for them. You buy when the time is right, not when you or your spouse falls in love with a house, or even when there are special deals with down payments.

You save money. Try saving a mortgage payment of a house every month. You'll see your savings approach down payment level in no time, and if you still take a little longer to find a place, well, you'll just have more moey for the down payment.

Financial incompetence knows no one generation. I'm a late stage boomer, and we had plenty of financial dumfuks.

Re:What a coincidence

[in10se]

The average person/family can't save up enough money for a down payment on a home in 1 year, so saving $1200 per year is exactly the kind of money that allows you to buy real estate over time.

Re: What a coincidence

[david_thornley]

I've gotten that on some investments, but it involves a significant element of risk. Most people like to have some reliable savings, which are going to return far less.

Re:What a coincidence

[david_thornley]

$12K was about a 20% down payment when we bought our first house in 1981. It was a nice house, nothing special. Prices have changed since then, and savings accounts tend to lose value to inflation over time.

Re: What a coincidence

[Whorhay]

Work opportunities will of course affect property values but it is only one factor among many. Where I live work isn't necessarily plentiful but it's not very difficult to find either. Many people I work with live up to 30 minutes away from the office. Within that range there is everything from $20k houses in bad parts of town to multi million dollar mansions, and everything in between. Personally I bought a home in the just over $100k range that is about a 10 minute drive from the office all on residential roads with six stop signs and one light. I live in a mid sized city of which there are dozens in the USA. There are only a few places in the USA that I can think of where property is so restricted and prices high that buying property would be an unwise burden. If you do happen to live in one of those areas though it just highlights the importance of saving.

All of the smug old losers...

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the smug old losers will run their mouths and call the millennials snowflakes. Get over yourselves. You had government social programs to help you get where you are, but then you've fought to take those social programs away from later generations. Millennials are stuck with student loan debt because older people have fought to take funding away from higher education. Also, "kids these days" is bullshit, because it's the older generations that raised these kids and encouraged the behaviors that they now complain about.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[pecosdave]

I got to where I was at without riding the benefits bandwagon, even though I certainly qualified for it. The need for government handouts is an illusion, and the student loan debt is so high BECAUSE those programs exist to ensure it. The last sentence is right, you just want the problem to be worse so it can be fixed....

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Opportunist]

Bullshit.

What we have is degrees that are worth something in the real world out there. If you complain about not getting hired and your degree is about something no sane person considers marketable, it ain't the market that's wrong.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you name a government social program that has ever been "taken away" in the US?

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[nephilimsd]

Most state universities used to be funded by public dollars, so tuition costs remained low. The subsidies dried up and were replaced with private loans. A lot of those loans didn't pan out. Banks started reducing the number of student loans they were offering and increased the eligibility requirements due to the high risk. When banks reduced their loan offerings for public schools, government stepped in to back them. Don't get me wrong, I agree that guaranteed loans drove the cost of tuition sky high, but that is a symptom, not a cause.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck it up. I'm an older millennial (mid 80s), but by acting responsibly I managed to get a well paying job and, pertinent to the article, home in SoCal. I have no student debt, because I saw that I couldn't afford the college-level programs that both interested me and had a good rate of return, and so took an alternate path. I have taken advantage of exactly one "social program" which was earned through service, not handed to me "because I deserve it."

Stop blaming your poor decisions on others.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Kierthos]

Except that sometimes it's not just the degree.

My first degree was in Mechanical Engineering. Couldn't get a job. Hell, I only got a few interviews, and most places that were advertising openings were barely responding to resume inquiries.

My second degree was in Computer Science. I got the timing of that down just as the Dot-com crash was in full swing. So, I had a second degree in the wrong field at the wrong time, as people weren't exactly hiring fresh graduates when they could hire someone with a half-dozen or more years of experience who was willing to work for the same amount of compensation.

Yes, if you get a degree in Underwater Basket-weaving, you have no one to blame but yourself (and whoever talked you into that major.)

Part of the problem is that most U.S. universities do not give a solitary fuck what you major in, as long as you pay tuition. They couldn't care less that you can't find a job unless they're one of those colleges that advertises what percent of their graduates are employed within so many months of graduating. And a fair number of those pad their numbers in various ways.

Re: All of the smug old losers...

[Chewbacon]

Just want to throw in there: someone was buying the participation trophies for those millennials. The older generation is partly to blame.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[thinkwaitfast]

The same and even more programs exist today.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Baton Rogue]

Obamacare (soon will be if Trump gets his way).

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[TWX]

It's a mixed bag.

For reasons probably too elaborate to get into here, more and more types of jobs cite having a college degree as a plus. More and more high schools push students toward college as the best path. Therefore more and more high school graduates seek college degrees. Colleges only have so many seats, so as demand for those seats goes up, colleges can charge more. As prices go up, coupled with the apparent need for college training, government offers loans to make college more affordable. Unfortunately this helps prices to continue to climb and may make college more accessible for those who previously might not have demonstrated the academic chops to qualify for academic-merit scholarship. Private entities see the desire and start opening more private schools, demand still goes up, and unscrupulous entities open up more schools that provide almost no beneficial education to those who would literally not be accepted elsewhere regardless of money and who drop-out, so there's little need to provide real education.

We need to be realistic about what kinds of jobs need college degreees and how much having a degree should count in the applicant's favor. We need to also look at what kinds of college programs are going to help our country to grow, and how to fund them and how to screen for admissions better, so that those who go through the training actually stick with the field that has cost real money to train them for. Lastly we need to do a better job of not demonizing those who don't ever go to college or those who enter various trades, so that high school graduates do not feel that it is beneath them to take that path if their academic chops are not really up for college.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Darinbob]

It's sort of a holdover when one expected a broad based education for management style jobs. Getting that English degree was not always a dead end choice. For instance, getting into law school does not require having a marketable undergraduate degree. Part of the problem is that many job positions are much more picky than they used to be - they want to hire managers with MBAs despite it being pointless for so many management jobs for instance.

Even for technical jobs I feel strongly that a broader based education in that field is still much much better than a narrow focus in the long run. Never aim for the first entry level job to be your entire career. So someone who wants only to learn about web programing and ignore everything else is most likely going to be stuck at the bottom rung forever. This sort of feels like the current tendency in society to mock and downplay intellectural pursuits has permeated even engineering disciplines. "Be your best" is not fashionable for some reason.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it is the cause, along with universities hiring top dollar professors and excessive spending on non academic items like new venues and buildings.

Many universities have endowments and their tuition have increased at the same rate. So public dollars doesn't explain it.

I paid $16 per credit hour 30 years ago plus some fees and books. Today it's over $500 at the public university I attended. An increase of over 3000%. 12% per year average increase. Tax dollar spending hasn't decreased in that state and endowments are still used.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Obfuscant]

Millennials are stuck with student loan debt because older people have fought to take funding away from higher education.

Millennials are stuck with student loan debt because they bought into the concept that a college education is a right and the student loan program was "free money" to get them something they deserved. They used that money to get degrees in things that would never pay a good wage because they felt entitled to a college degree and a living wage just for breathing. (UBI, $15 minimum wage, etc, anyone?)

Don't condemn the "older people" who don't want to pay for the useless educations of millennials any more than the millennials who don't feel compelled to pay back their student loans for the educations they now realize were useless.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[sims 2]

The CCC and WPA were pretty nice programs imho.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Obfuscant]

Part of the problem is that most U.S. universities do not give a solitary fuck what you major in, as long as you pay tuition. They couldn't care less that you can't find a job

Of course they don't care. It isn't their job to care. It's YOUR job to figure out what you want to study and make good choices.

Do you really think the Universities are supposed to hold your hand and guide you through life, and coerce you into studying something you don't want to so you'll be employable when you graduate?

unless they're one of those colleges that advertises what percent of their graduates are employed

Because those are TRADE SCHOOLS that exist to teach you a TRADE that will lead to employment, and how many grads get jobs is a selling point for them. They are not universities, or even really "schools of higher education".

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[epyT-R]

No, they are stuck with it because of guaranteed loans driving up tuition and because the rise of HR departments who expect shit shovelers to have a bachelors.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[MBGMorden]

But "soon will be" would not explain any problems that already exist, unless you're saying the effect is preceding the cause.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[j33px0r]

I'm in education. Brought up the fact that the college was graduating more teachers than the job market could bare to the dean and his response was, "True but that hasn't stopped the students from enrolling."

Individual college administration recognizes the issue but, as you've noted, the almighty dollar rules in the end as individual colleges will be required to implement layoffs if they aren't deemed profitable by the university administration.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[rgbscan]

This is true locally. State funding for the University of MN peaked in the 70's.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Verdatum]

I used to think that a liberal education program was stupid for technical fields. I thought it was dumb that I had to take all of these core classes that weren't related to Comp-Sci. But on reflection, and having dealt with people who experienced the fully technical schools, people who self-taught and had no formal higher education and others like myself who got a liberal 4-year Bachelor of Science, I really feel that it enriched me, both in my personal and professional life. I always hear people talking about how they never use what they learned in college...I use tons of what I learned in college. I wish the foreign language requirements weren't as harsh; I came in with 3 years of spanish in high school, and they still wanted me to take more. But beyond that, most everything I picked has helped me in life.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Verdatum]

I miss the days when PBS had enough federal funding that it didn't need to air the quasi-informercial junk that it has now. I mean, they always had the aggravating pledge drives, but they'd usually at least have good programming that went along with them.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Darinbob]

All the CS classes I use at work at one point or another, but I run across so many professional programmers that just don't seem to understand computer science, they're just coders. They sort of self-learn some advanced topics but it feels like they're just stumbling along the same steps someone already took instead of going further. People 20 to 30 years programming will complain that code reviews are worthless and why do they have to use "const". And so few people understand floating point that I'm baffled how they got this far. That's just the programming part, never mind not having any concept of algorithms or graph theory or other concepts that underly what they're doing.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a millennial. I make almost 85k/yr, live in Vancouver Canada, and my spouse makes under 13k/yr (casual part time)

Here are my observations:

1) I'd have to drop about 200k on a 1 bedroom apartment and pay condo fees ($300 - $500/mo)
2) I gave up driving (no car) and bike to work since I'm downtown and the bike lanes are awesome
3) I pay $1300/mo for a small 1 bed in a nice area and it goes up 2.5-3% a year
4) Cost of food is very high and general cost of living is ridiculous (I actually drink casually, and stopped going out to restaurants almost entirely)
5) After all the taxes and deductions, I take home about 2/3 of my gross pay
6) The way the tax system is, I get taxed on 85k, my partner gets taxed on 13k and they do not allow income splitting . I find that to be extremely dishonest way to gouge extra taxes out of us
7) I just paid off the last of my student loans and basically debt free now.
8) Our almost 100k combined income has the purchasing power of probably 50k income when my parents were my age

I am turning 34, and there is no way I want kids or will sink money into some crappy apartment that I will be stuck paying off the rest of my life. These days I'd rather just be debt free, try to save 1k/mo and if I get fed up with my job, we can just up and leave.

I also have to say that the baby boomer generation is the pyramid scheme generation. They implemented pensions and social programs that they never fully paid into but will use more than they contributed. Of course my taxes are so debilitating high to fund it and I know I won't get the same level of benefits when it comes my turn to use it (assuming it's still around)

If I ever have the opportunity to throw a stick in the wheel spokes of the baby boomer generation -- I won't think twice!

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[david_thornley]

That's where I went, and where my son went. In constant dollars, his education cost about four times what mine did.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[david_thornley]

Stop perpetuating survivor bias. Not everyone without a college degree has a well-paying job, and it isn't for lack of trying.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[david_thornley]

They bought into the heavily advertised concept that you need a college degree for a good job. They used that money to get degrees in things that wouldn't pay well because of changing demand and unretired boomers clogging up the good jobs.

I will condemn the older people who pushed younger people into thinking they needed college educations while forcing tuition up and letting minimum wage slide. I find it hard to condemn someone who was sold a bill of goods and doesn't want to be paying for it for the next twenty years.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[jeff4747]

One major element of the mixed bag you skipped was the very large reduction in government spending on "State" schools. That has shifted the cost from taxpayers to the students themselves, resulting in those students having far more debt.

If you were a student at any University of California campus in the 1960s, a low-wage summer job made plenty of money to cover your tuition and fees for an undergraduate degree. That is not remotely possible today due to cuts in state funding on top of all the other factors you cite.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Cederic]

they do not allow income splitting . I find that to be extremely dishonest way to gouge extra taxes out of us

Why? Tax is due on your 85k and why the fuck should you get to reduce it? People living alone without that extra 13k gross household income don't get a tax bill reduction, still pay the same rent, still pay the same property taxes, utility bills, TV and broadband fees.

You're already better off purely because so many of your fixed costs are shared, and you want an additional tax break too? Selfish cock.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Cederic]

A 20% down payment where I live is the the same as the national average wage - before tax. Given I don't live in London, that average is above average for my area.

I think it's reasonable that people will struggle to save that amount of cash. Shit, I don't think I've ever been in employment and had a year's gross salary in savings at the same time and I own my home outright.

Could I do that? Yeah, if I dropped my living standards back down to my student days I'd save around 3/4 of my net salary. I'd also end up quitting my job due to the stress so it wouldn't really help anyway.

Re: All of the smug old losers...

[mapkinase]

Lashing at boomers and xers is as stupid as lashing at millenials.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Falos]

The musical chairs are disappearing and you want to blame the players.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Strider-]

I used to think that a liberal education program was stupid for technical fields. I thought it was dumb that I had to take all of these core classes that weren't related to Comp-Sci.

Whenever I talk to kids who are just starting out at University, my single biggest piece of advice is always "Take at least a couple of classes that are completely useless for your degree, but interest you personally." It's the one chance in your life to learn something from someone who is usually going to be an expert in their field, and in the grand scheme of things, the cost isn't enormous. Plus, you never know who you might meet in those classes, and it's always good to have contacts and friends outside your normal social group.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Obfuscant]

They bought into the heavily advertised concept that you need a college degree for a good job.

No. The "heavily advertised" concept in that regard is that you need certain college degrees to get certain good jobs. Nobody has ever said that a degree in art history was the route to a good job, or feminist studies, or degrees in a lot of other liberal arts. The heavily advertised degrees are CS, engineering, etc.

What they actually bought into was the concept spread by their peers that a college degree was a right and thus someone else should help them pay for it. That's why they accept high levels of debt for student loans. If the concept was simply that "degree is needed for good job", then they'd not be expecting "free money" to pay for the degree.

They used that money to get degrees in things that wouldn't pay well because of changing demand

Oh, right. I just missed all the demand for art historians that dried up in the last couple of years, I guess.

I will condemn the older people who pushed younger people into thinking they needed college educations

A pretty small subset of "older people".

while forcing tuition up

Older people didn't force tuition up -- that's the fault of the money availability from student loans increasing both demand and ability to pay.

and letting minimum wage slide.

Well, there goes your argument about older people telling kids they needed a college degree for a good job then. Nobody ever told anyone that a minimum wage job was the expected outcome of a college degree, so the fact that minimum wage has not spiraled up is irrelevant. Minimum wage has not slid, ever. There is no time in history that minimum wage was reduced.

I find it hard to condemn someone who was sold a bill of goods and doesn't want to be paying for it for the next twenty years.

Whatever they were "sold" didn't come from older people, it came from their peers who decided that their rights needed public funding, and student loans were the closest to public funded college educations that they could get. And they weren't "sold", they walked into the loans of their own free will. Nobody held a gun to my head, nobody held a gun to theirs.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[110010001000]

If you really have a degree in ME and CS and can't find a job then you must be psychotic. I call bullshit.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Opportunist]

Excuse me, but how is it the university's business what you major in? Especially in the US. In Europe, where most (older) universities are actually state-owned I can see to some degree how they would have an interest to focus on courses that will create a useful workforce, since that way they have to deal with fewer unemployed and have a higher tax turnout, but where is a for-profit university's incentive that you will get a job? Their incentive is that you study there and get your degree there, preferably after as many paid for semesters they can squeeze out of you.

Yes, they don't give a fuck what you major in as long as you pay tuition. Welcome to the free market where you have the free choice. Even the choice to make a bad choice.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Opportunist]

You (hopefully) jest, but I fully expect this to happen when the first gender studies majors get their diploma and find out that the only jobs they get offered require them to say "you want fries with that?".

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Opportunist]

I blame the players that complain about the disappearing chairs instead of trying to get one of the ones that are left.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[serviscope_minor]

Do you really think the Universities are supposed to hold your hand and guide you through life,

To some extent, yes. I mean otherwise, it's chucking a bunch of kids---and yes they are kids---with few life skills and a head full of all the bad advice they've recieved, out into the world and then saying "har har fuck you you're fucked for life lololol" if they don't figure it all out fast enough.

You can't force people to make good decisions but you can guide them and you can, you know, not take their money while knowingly selling them a worthless course.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[pecosdave]

I lost 40 lbs after high school, part of it because I couldn't afford to eat. I was a little over weight when I graduated but not really bad, I had a lot of muscle because I biked all over the place, I lost a lot of that too.

I lived in a fishing shack for $500 a month for quite a while (after school).

I learned I could make a tank of gas stretch three weeks in my Tacoma (very first model when they still got good mileage) while driving to work and school every day.

I found I could eat for more than a week by paying $2 for two huge cans of pork and beans at Costco using someone elses' card and $2 for a big bag of generic hot dog wieners at the local grocery store.

Yes I did have some advantages, my parents did buy my truck and pay the insurance during my time in school, and when I just flat couldn't make rent - I got paid twice a month and my rent was greater than one of those checks - they bailed me out.

I believe in taking care of your own - like my parents did when they bailed me out and by helping to keep me in a vehicle. It would have been a very different experience otherwise. Honestly people on food stamps ate a lot better than I did. Thanks to now being divorced with a kid in Texas people on food stamps eat better than me now. I know this for a fact, a former in-law was on them and always had lots of food.

Being a boot-straps type is a good thing. If everybody was one we wouldn't need the benefits system - because people take care of their own. What is "your own?" That's up for you to decide. Obviously family comes to mind and most people that would qualify. Close friends certainly qualify, people from your job you work closely with, people from your church if you're religious, maybe someone from your bowling league, whatever, it's up to you to decide. A boot-straps attitude and loyal circles of people keep people going. In fact I would argue it works better than government benefits systems. Government benefits short-circuit the natural village support system, people just expect big-brother to step in and it stops those support systems from happening.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[djinn6]

Minimum wage has not slid, ever. There is no time in history that minimum wage was reduced.

You can say something true, but also lie at the same time. Minimum wage has never been reduced nominally, but the purchasing power of the dollar has always fallen 1-2% a year. So in a real sense, that is, the only sense that matters to people, a minimum wage job has gotten people worse and worse of a living standard.

Don't condemn the "older people" who don't want to pay for the useless educations of millennials any more than the millennials who don't feel compelled to pay back their student loans for the educations they now realize were useless.

Don't condemn "young people" for not wanting to pay social security and health care for you greedy old bastards then. Who was it that fucked those up?

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[david_thornley]

Old people did force tuition up. My son's college degree cost about four times what mine did in real dollars, from the same University. It doesn't seem to be a case of easy money from student loans.

With the erosion of the minimum wage and the big increase in college costs, working one's way through college has become far more difficult. Naturally, a college student is aiming for more after graduation, but that's with a degree and the ability to work full-time without a class load. The "has not slid" is disingenuous at best, since I'm trying to express things in constant dollars.

What they were "sold" was the idea that they needed a degree for a good job. There's the perception (haven't verified how true it is) that a high school diploma doesn't mean as much education as it used to (my son had more rigorous coursework than I did), and there are more people with degrees, so there's at least some truth to that. They were offered loans, rather than jobs that could be made to cover tuition. That meant, for many, either giving up a shot at a good job, or taking on massive college loans, a dichotomy that simply didn't exist when I was young. You don't need a gun when you've got information asymmetry and threats of an entire future working for you.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Obfuscant]

a minimum wage job has gotten people worse and worse of a living standard.

Minimum wage has never been intended to provide a "living wage".

Don't condemn "young people" for not wanting to pay social security and health care for you greedy old bastards then.

Because social security and health care are as useless as a degree in art history paid for with $100,000 in student loans. Right. And another difference is that people have been forced to pay into social security for their entire working lives, so dumping it now would be a huge breach of promise and unethical in any sense.

Who was it that fucked those up?

FDR, a very long time before I was born.

Re:All of the smug old losers...

[Obfuscant]

Old people did force tuition up. My son's college degree cost about four times what mine did in real dollars, from the same University.

If by "old people" you mean the state legislature that says "we will put in place a great retirement plan if you will put off getting a raise this year and to make up for the last few years of no raises", ok. (Oregon is stuck in that position: they told the unions "we will gladly pay you tomorrow for work you do today", and now that it is tomorrow they don't have the money. It's called "PERS", and it's a huge labor cost today as the people to whom those promises were paid start retiring.) And if "old people" means "an old university president who gives raises to himself and his administrator pals", ok. But "old people" in general? No.

It doesn't seem to be a case of easy money from student loans.

You're selling a product and someone is standing outside your store door giving people money to buy it. You don't raise prices both because you can and because the demand goes up, no. You don't hire more people to provide that service, so your labor costs don't go up. You're one in a billion.

What they were "sold" was the idea that they needed a degree for a good job.

For some jobs, yes. For many jobs, no. Nobody ever said that art history was a pathway to a ton of money.

They were offered loans, rather than jobs that could be made to cover tuition.

I'd be very interested in hearing about your student indentured servitude program for college students.

You don't need a gun when you've got information asymmetry and threats of an entire future working for you.

Information asymmetry? Is this a newspeak phrase for "makes bad decisions"? It isn't that hard to look at a piece of paper that says you are going to owe buttloads of money when you borrow money to get an art history degree, or feminist studies, or English lit, or whatever, and realize that you are going to owe buttloads of money for shot at a job that doesn't pay very well. It doesn't take much information to say "no, I can't afford that", unless you have decided before you sign on the dotted line that you aren't paying it back anyway.

And if you sign for that loan because you assume you will be given a good job when you graduate, well, that's an entitlement philosophy writ large. "I borrowed your money, you owe me a job." Not only did they assume they had a right to the education, they assumed the right to a good job after they got the education.

Priorities

[WoodstockJeff]

"68% of millennials have saved less than $1000 towards a down payment on buying a house."

But probably 100% of them have spent twice that much for a smart phone and data plan within the last year.

Not to mention games.

Re: Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news the poor also own refrigerators!

Re:Priorities

[Opportunist]

I agree, having to use a year old cellphone, that's the end of the world!

Re:Priorities

[avandesande]

I'm using a hand-me down phone from my son and paying 12$ a month for service.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

"68% of millennials have saved less than $1000 towards a down payment on buying a house."

But probably 100% of them have spent twice that much for a smart phone and data plan within the last year.

This sounds a lot like that statement from whoever-it-was about paying for healthcare by giving up phones. How many times do I need to not-buy-a-phone before I have enough for a down payment on a house? Besides that, who budgets $2k/yr for a data plan?

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Crucial, possibly. Do they need a 1000$ iphone and an $80 a month data plan? No. You can find a decent phone for $200 w/o contract and providers offering plans in the $30 a month range.

Re:Priorities

[Kierthos]

Hell, I barely use my smartphone's data plan and my bill is around $45 a month. Admittedly, I am an outlier when it comes to such things, as I am over 40 and only got a smartphone last year.

Re: Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like how kids behave these days, take some responsibility for how you raised them. The behaviors you don't like didn't just come out of nowhere. Older generations tolerated, encouraged, and rewarded those behaviors. Parents have a lot of responsibility for how their kids behave. Your generation won't take responsibility for it, then you have the nerve to complain about millennials not taking responsibility. Fuck off, snowflake. Take some goddamned responsibility for your mistakes and set an example for the kids.

Re:Priorities

[thinkwaitfast]

Please explain. I'm a very successful person and have never owned a smartphone (other than the maemo I bought on sale to be used for hacking).

Re:Priorities

[samwichse]

I mean, 68% of millennials are under the age of 30, right?

And 44% are under the age of 25?

I mean, assuming the range of 1981-2000.

These numbers don't seem terrible unless you're a boomer who could get a good paying factory job out of high school or something.

Re: Priorities

[Darinbob]

So make those loan payments on time. That increases credit score making house buying easier.

Re:Priorities

[Baton Rogue]

I'm using a hand-me down phone from my son and paying 12$ a month for service.

Then that probably makes you not a millennial, and not relevant to the conversation? I think that is GP's point. The younger generation is spending their money on frivolous things instead of saving for the future, while the "older" generations are taking measures to cut costs and live cheaper.

Re:Priorities

[TheRaven64]

A smartphone is now pretty close to being essential. An expensive one is not. My phone is now over 3 years old (and cost about £100 then) and still does everything I need it to. I'm on a pre-pay contract and typically spend about £1/month on it. I'll probably replace it soon, because it hasn't had security updates for a little while (I don't trust it with any important data, passwords, and so on, but people are increasingly using SMS for two-factor auth so that's starting to be an issue).

I quite often see students with far less disposable income than me spending £600 on a brand-new iPhone and then £10-20/month on a contract for it. This isn't a new phenomenon by any means, but a lot of people seem really bad at doing cost-benefit analyses.

Re:Priorities

[GameboyRMH]

If the downpayment is $10k, you need to not buy a new unlocked high-end smartphone approximately 20 times. If you otherwise would've bought one every year, you'll be able to buy a house by the time you're middle-aged, and then maybe the year after that, you can own a smartphone!

I've never kept a phone for less than 5 years so far, so it'll take me longer.

Re:Priorities

[Cyberax]

Ok. Suppose that you don't use an iPhone ($25 per month savings) and don't use data ($30 per month savings). So in this case you'll get around $55 per month additional savings - this works out to $660 per year.

So to save enough for a downpayment for a house you need to live without a decent phone for, oh, about 150 years.

But yeah, let's make it more cruel and allow phones only for me-first generation of baby-boomers.

Re:Priorities

[Rick Schumann]

I'm not a Millennial, I'm Gen-Y, but when you're living in an ever-increasingly dystopian world, what's the point in 'planning for the future'? That's how I think they're seeing things.

Re:Priorities

[x0ra]

my $100 costco phone does about 95% of what the brand new iPhone 99 does, minus giving its owner the associate social status.

Re: Priorities

[x0ra]

there is a difference between a $500 basic refrigerator, and a $3000 ice & filtered water dispensers all stainless refrigerator.

Re: Priorities

[x0ra]

why ? I don't have kids, and by today's standard, even if I had any, the education I would gave them would probably be considered child abuse...

Re:Priorities

[RhettLivingston]

Interesting.

Priorities are indeed cultural. Could it be that this generation is envisioning a different world?

Perhaps they want to lead a lighter life - more virtual and less actual. There is a lot of positive good that can come of that.

I personally believe that our society badly needs to step back and assess what is important and reduce our per capita consumption of resources.

There would be nothing wrong with millennials not tieing themselves to the home ownership boat anchor if it is a movement based on values. We would just have to figure out how to get through the economic impact of millennials not turning over their future to their profiteering elders via stepping into life-changing loans.

That is the real problem here. How are the business interests of the older generations going to remain alive in a world where people feel free to bounce around from place-to-place without the weight of paying for cars and homes?

Re:Priorities

[Solandri]

There are lots of other discretionary expenses people can reduce or cut.

• cable TV subscriptions
• Internet plans at a higher speed than you really need
• easing an expensive car you can show off instead of buying one more practical
• buying a new car instead of a used car
• replacing a car after using it just 3 years
• getting a new computer and GPU every 3 years instead of 5
• getting a new TV every 5 years so you can upgrade to something 5 inches bigger
• upgrading your iPad device every 2 years
• driving alone in your car instead of carpooling
• owning a car instead of taking public transportation
• buying a caffe mocha grande at Starbucks every morning
• going out for lunch every day at work instead of packing your own lunch (made with groceries) in a brown paper sack
• eating out for dinner every other evening
• buying concert tickets instead of watching it on TV
• consolidating your debt
• price-shop big expenses like insurance
• and dozens more

Phones and phone plans are just frequently given as an example because pretty much everyone has one and they're very consistent in pricing between budget and high-end models. It's an example demonstrating how things many people consider "necessities" are not really necessary, they're just spending a lot more money than they need to satisfy their desires. Not an indictment of phones per se.

Re:Priorities

[Stormwatch]

I quite often see students with far less disposable income than me spending £600 on a brand-new iPhone and then £10-20/month on a contract for it. This isn't a new phenomenon by any means, but a lot of people seem really bad at doing cost-benefit analyses.

Bad analysis would be a dumb but innocent mistake. But this seems to be a sort of conspicuous consumption. Sure, you can get essentially the same functionality and performance from a $200 Android (if anything the Android will offer more functionality because it's far less locked down). But those kids want to signal their belonging to a group, and being on par with the elite of that group; their friends have fancy iPhones, so they have to do the same, even if they can't afford to.

Re:Priorities

[david_thornley]

If the younger generation is spending on frivolous things, rather than saving for the future, it's because they don't see a future and are living it up in the present. That isn't their fault; that's the world we're leaving them.

Re:Priorities

[david_thornley]

Yeah, if they need to call someone they can always use a pay phone like we did when I was young. Right.

Re: Priorities

[david_thornley]

I'm a boomer, and I assure you college was a lot cheaper when I got my BA. Working one's way through college has gotten a lot harder, with minimum wage not keeping pace with inflation and college tuition soaring much higher than inflation.

The key is finding a very good job. That's the hardest. Get started, get a very good job, and you'll get there.

Re: Priorities

[david_thornley]

You think a sense of entitlement is anything new? It's common to young people, and has been. It gets knocked out of people eventually, and then those people see young people as not having the virtue they think falsely remember they had.

Re:Priorities

[david_thornley]

Except, of course, that you won't be able to get anything with a $10K down payment by the time you're middle-aged.

Re:Priorities

[afgam28]

This idea seems very common - if only Millennials would stop spending so much, and start saving up like their parents' generation, they would be able to afford a house.

Where I live, the house price to income ratio is double what it was in 1985. This means that young people need double the income that their parents had, to buy the same home.

In this case, it isn't that they're spending too much - it's that houses are too expensive relative to the jobs that are available.

Re:Priorities

[gravewax]

the point is that millennials have there priorities totally out of fucking whack, they will go out several times a week, buy breakfast, lunch and coffee's from Cafe's and have the latest iPhone and holidays all the while bitching about how unfair it is that they can't afford a house.

Re:Priorities

[Cederic]

Sure. Add in the coffee bill, at $15/week.
Lets throw in the leased car, call that $300/month.
Maybe a meal out each week, on the cheap, so another $10.

There's $6k/year and we haven't even touched the entertainment costs, holidays away from home, fashion and other luxuries.

The phone might only be $660/year but add it to everything else, suddenly you can save $50k in five years.

Sure, you can't anymore do what I did and buy a house, pay the legal fees, buy furniture, move in, decorate and replace the soft furnishings for a total of £150 outlay but $50k goes a long way and if you need more, wait another 2-3 years.

Re: Priorities

[Cederic]

I don't have kids, and my friends' kids are pretty much all self-sufficient educated capable people.

I can write to complain about the 'everybody is a winner!' bullshit in schools, the switch in curriculum and attainment measurement that's fucked over an entire generation of boys, the focus at university on feelings rather than proper academia, but no cunt listens.

I can't invade peoples homes and stop them brainwashing their fuckwit offspring into their particular flavour of suicide bombing cult.
I can't walk down the street slapping every parent I see failing miserably to control their children.
I'm sadly just not allowed to pick up twelve year-olds and throw them into the sea so that their peers learn about consequences.

What exactly do you fucking want me to do?

Re:Priorities

[Tesen]

"68% of millennials have saved less than $1000 towards a down payment on buying a house."

But probably 100% of them have spent twice that much for a smart phone and data plan within the last year.

Not to mention games.

Have you ever considered that most millennials lied in the survey? Most of the millennials I know (I am 38 btw) don't want the burden of home ownership. They grew up DURING recessions, grew up with terrorism. They grew up seeing uncertainty in the job market. Who the fuck wants to be saddled with that debt at that young age? Selling a house you can't afford anymore is a tough situation especially when you are in a recession. They would rather live life and not have to get stuck in the sinking rat race and be mobile enough to go where the jobs are.

My only desire is they saved more - but shit, most Americans do not save well. The old timers are some of the worst and it has been that way for generations. Why in the world do you think social security was created? If the older generations really did so well, there would not have been the need for the new deal.

So yeah, pick on the kids because they have different values than you, pick on them because they have seen what dedication and devotion got their parents and grandparents, lost houses, lost finances they spent a lifetime building and working for. No, they are not whiners, they are basically broken because WE broke them even before they were born and now they have to deal with the fallout of our bad decisions.

Re:Priorities

[Cederic]

If I took your house and car away, your pensions / salary, your healthcare, and any other source of finance or wealth, and replaced it with a car from mom and dad, a $50,000 student loan debt (at 10% interest), and a minimum wage budget, would you still make ends meet????

Yes, of course I fucking would. I'd start by getting a job that pays more than minimum wage, selling the car and replacing it with a pedal bike, refinancing so that I'm not paying 10% interest and tracking you down to kill you for stealing everything I have.

If I turned back the clock on you so that you were 22 again, and made all of your friends forget who you were, and took away your social skills (because you try growing up in a Social Media world and see how good your social skills are, then realize that society expects something other than text speak and no-one will help train you correctly no matter how much money you give them), wanna bet you'd get a job easily????

Sounds exactly like the position I was in at 21. I went out and got a job based on my skills, which I can assure you did not include anything remotely involving the word 'social'.

no need to worry about H-1B visa abusers or foreign investors that push the locals out of the housing market

Oh, you poor precious darling. All these problems that impact you and your age group, and it's all the fault of the old people.

Here's a fucking clue for you: immigrant workers depress wages for everybody, and if you think student debt is crippling wait until you have a mortgage or children of your own to pay for.

Foreign investors pushing you out of the housing market? Try being 50 and unable to afford your own home, or to move from the one you did buy because the costs of selling and buying a new one would force you to downgrade severely.

You clearly haven't fucking worked it out yet but life sucks, you have to work hard if you want luxuries, and I'm fucked off with paying stupidly high taxes to cover an education that clearly taught you fuck all and then bail you out when you can't manage your own life.

Yes, we millennials buy some stuff that is for entertainment.

Here's my final fucking clue for you: The people I went to university with had fun, found multiple forms of entertainment, left university with manageable debt levels, cleared them, worked hard and didn't waste all their cash on luxuries. Shit, my friends were all late 20s or early 30s before they did things like owning a car, eating meals in restaurants more than once a month, living in a house that didn't have three strangers sharing it, taking holidays abroad.

Now you maybe realise why we're lacking in sympathy for your hedonistic inability to fucking save any of your income, and completely refusing to let you blame us for it.

Re: Priorities

[Jarik C-Bol]

Hell, home depot will sell you a basic refrigerator for under 400$

Re:Priorities

[Cyberax]

Ok, let's add. Coffee bill works out to about $100 a month (I don't know what you're drinking, but Starbucks coffee costs less than $5), meals are about $200 a month. So all-in-all that's less than $500 a month or $5000 a year - still requires more than 20 years of saving for the _downpayment_. And with millenials, car ownership is actually down compared to previous generations - they're already saving more.

There's simply no way an average millennial can save $50k in 5 years. The median salary for them is right now around $22k per year - that would require savings on the order of two _years_ of salary ( http://www.businessinsider.com... ). Oh, and downpayment of $50k is not enough these days for a home close to a city with good employment perspective.

Old people (primarily baby boomers) often don't understand how deeply they managed to fuck up the most recent generation's live. Perhaps we should reform Medicare and Social Security, after all?

Re:Priorities

[Jarik C-Bol]

Exactly. Take it from someone who got in the hole, (medical expense cropped up between jobs, no insurance back then) and has been living this way for years now trying to drag myself back into stable territory, and I can tell you. 20 year old TV, computer that was a gift, iPad that was a gift, own my 25 year old vehicle, paying my share of an old family plan phone with my folks (because it makes sense) and living in literally a three room apartment (kitchen, bathroom, and bed/living/diningroom) It has taken seven years of focused savings and fuckery to get even close to back to where stable, let alone advancing, because there is ALWAYS a magical *emergency expense* like getting the flu and losing a week of wages getting better, or throw out your back and lose a week of wages and a couple hundred bucks on therapy getting better. It Never. Fucking. Ends.
So sure, I could cancel my netflix, and turn off my internet, and save just a little more every month, but that fractional increase is beans compared to the sums needed to buy a house, and tends to be swallowed up by the churn of daily life. Turns out, saving up from the bottom of the heap is a fucking bitch, and only the seriously dedicated manage it. I'm not looking for a handout, I'll get myself their, but don't pretend this shit is simple.

Re:Priorities

[Jarik C-Bol]

*there, not their, fucking proofreading.

Re:Priorities

[guruevi]

Every young generation does that. You could've said the same about 20yo baby boomers, "they're not saving up, they have less than $1000 in the bank" and you'd get the same excuses. The problem is that the generation of millennial and their parents think their kids are entitled to a house and a job and an education while neither of them are putting much effort in any of it.

As someone who's left home at 17/18yo and never got any 'help' from parents or family, I couldn't afford a house until I was in my late 20s and even so, it was only by aggressive savings and employer contributions and when houses and loans were really cheap.

No generation before has ever been able to afford houses at 20-25 and yet many now do.

Re:Priorities

[guruevi]

$50k buys an entire house in some markets, not everybody lives in SF/NYC. Average home cost across the US is $189k, 5% down payment is ~$10k which most banks will accept (at higher interest rates) and you can often roll in your closing costs with good credit and most cities, states and even federal have various grants.

Sure you'll be paying more per month if you roll everything in a 30y mortgage (and I've even seen banks offering 45 years) but it will be way lower than renting and within about 5 years you can save up that rent savings to refinance the loan on better terms, down to 15y.

Re:Priorities

[guruevi]

I thought millennials were people born on or after the change of the millennium so 17yo at best.

A quick Wikipedia search says 1980-2000. I am a "Millenial" I guess but I never seen me or my age-peers (1980-1990) with any of the problems described, I would classify myself more Gen X when it comes to attitude, work ethic and personal responsibility.

There is no excuse for a 30-40yo person not to own a house. We've lived through the dot com boom, the Matrix, and the housing bubble - if you still don't have the down payment for a house at 30+ you "done fucked up".

Re:Priorities

[Cyberax]

Well, you can live in the middle of nowhere very cheaply. However, employment opportunities are really there only in big cities. Small cities with people employed at the local Factory are pretty much a dying breed. And even in states with lots of land the home prices are out of reach. For example in Austin, TX the average home price now is now $410000. At the current median salary in Austin this is around 13 years of income.

Yep, millennials are well and truly fucked.

Re:Priorities

[psycho12345]

Except that in many urban areas, you need 6 figures to do so. Most people are not making that, period. Let alone by age 35.

Re:Priorities

[TheRaven64]

There's a simple solution to this: choose better friends. If your friends are going to judge you based on the toys that you buy, then they're probably idiots. Kindergarten is about the right time to learn this lesson.

Re:Priorities

[TheRaven64]

easing an expensive car you can show off instead of buying one more practical

buying a new car instead of a used car

replacing a car after using it just 3 years

Or, in many cases, buying a car at all. Before I bought my first house, I looked at the difference in price for somewhere cheaper a bit out of town and then added in the running costs of a car (which I didn't need living in the city) and, counting appreciation and depreciation, came to the conclusion that not buying a car was a better financial bet. I'd done something similar earlier when I was renting: the monthly operating costs of a car were more than the difference in rent between somewhere near the middle of town and somewhere far enough out that I'd need to drive. The last time this came up, someone posted a detailed analysis that someone had done for the US.

Cars cost a lot to maintain, insure, and fuel, and depreciate over their lifetime. The benefits only outweigh the costs if you have a well-paid job out in the countryside.

Re:Priorities

[TheRaven64]

There are two issues: Are you saving a sensible amount, will that amount ever amount to the ability to purchase a house. They're related, but they're not the same: there are lots of reasons to have a good safety net other than saving for a house. I'd be very nervous if I only had $1,000 in liquid assets.

I did the calculations a few months ago for a postdoc trying to buy a house here in Cambridge. Assuming that property prices and salaries keep increasing at the rates that they have been for the last few years (not necessarily a given - I actually picked a slightly lower number for house price growth given Brexit) and assuming that you need a 20% deposit for a house, the amount of the deposit will go up by 10-25% (over 10 years) of the gross (pre-tax) salary of a postdoc per year. Even if you save 10% of your gross income (basically impossible with rental prices here) now, you're not actually getting any closer to a house deposit, and next year that 10% will be higher. That's basically unsustainable, but if you don't have savings then you won't be able to buy when the bubble bursts.

Re: Priorities

[Reverend Green]

Thank you, Professor Pedant, for your enlightening wisdom.

Re: Priorities

[TheRaven64]

Thanks, it looks as if my phone is supported. One thing I didn't get from their web site: do they have an update mechanism that doesn't involve doing a complete reinstall (after the initial install overwriting the vendor-supplied Android, I mean)?

Re:Priorities

[drinkypoo]

Cars cost a lot to maintain, insure, and fuel, and depreciate over their lifetime. The benefits only outweigh the costs if you have a well-paid job out in the countryside.

Bullshit. Not being homeless is a substantial benefit.

Re:Priorities

[TheRaven64]

Did you read the link that you titled 'bullshit'? It says people are commuting long distances, this is bad for their general wellbeing, bad for their productivity, and an increasing number are telecommuting as a result. That in no way contradicts what I said, it just adds another reason to avoid jobs that require you to own a car.

Re:Priorities

[EvilAlphonso]

Where I work, if you had started saving 50% of the gross median salary ($51K) 8 years ago you'd be able to afford the 20% down payment on a flat close to work (roughly $1MM). Unfortunately, even if you bring those 20% the banks won't lend you the money because there's a percentage cap to the maximum monthly payment... and the remaining 80% of the purchase value over 30 years will be over that cap. There's also the small issue that it's literally no longer possible to save those 50% if you're not living in your parent's basement or under a bridge, or that you won't cross that median salary line before your mid-thirties.

Or you could do what I did, move outside the commuter belt and buy the property of my dreams for less than that down payment.

BTW, your 50K wouldn't even buy a parking spot in that area. A weekend chalet that you can't register as a primary address fetches >180K.

Re:Priorities

[Cederic]

Well, yeah. I could sell my whole house and it'd be worth a 20% deposit on the smallest house currently on the market in Kensington, with the remaining mortgage payments looking suspiciously close to my net salary.

House prices are insanely high in some places, and just stupidly high in others.

Re:Priorities

[beelsebob]

Hahaha, you think $50k is enough for a downpayment in SF or NYC?

Try $300k

$50k is your downpayment for a house out in the middle of no where, so many hours away from any city that you can't possibly earn a reasonable amount.

Re:Priorities

[beelsebob]

$1000 in a year is not really an expensive smart phone though.

That's $60 a month on your phone plan, plus a $300 phone.

Re:Priorities

[beelsebob]

Sure, and along with $60 a month on even the most basic of phone plans, that's $820 in a year.

Re:Priorities

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Someone mod this guy up, please.

The great challenge of the 21st century may well be how to manage an aging workforce that cannot produce stronger than 1%-2% GDP growth. Many many assumptions from the past may not serve us.

Re:Priorities

[Stormwatch]

The problem is not necessarily the friends, but the kid's fear that he'll not fit in.

Re:Priorities

[guruevi]

That is patently false. Sure, perhaps in the outliers of high cost urban areas but then your rent is according too (there is no such thing as a landlord renting out below the cost). You only need 5-20% of the total cost as a down payment to a house and most houses do not cost $1M.

Re:Priorities

[guruevi]

Median income for those areas are also $80k. If you're making $20k/year as is often claimed, you can't afford to live in a $400k house, rent or own.

Re:Priorities

[TheRaven64]

$60/month? I don't think I could spend that much on a phone contract here, even if I wanted to. Is that unlimited calls, 4G data and texts?

Re: Priorities

[TheRaven64]

Thanks. I had a look and my phone hadn't had a security update for over a year, so it seemed that now was as good a time as any to replace the stock install with something better.

I did an adb backup and copied the contents of the sdcard partition. Unlocking the bootloader deleted everything, which seemed a bit gratuitous, but then the TWRP, LineageOS and pick OpenGApps installs all went fine and I was able to install the privileged version of F-Droid. Not sure if I'll keep the Google stuff - the only app that I use from the Play store is the United Airlines app and it's also in the Amazon store.

Reinstalling all of my apps went mostly smoothly. Unfortunately, adb restore doesn't work from 5.1 to 7.1 because the filesystem layout has changed and it isn't clever enough to move things to their new location. The one slightly stressful moment was when I realised that my BookCatalog data hadn't transferred and my last full backup was from before I moved house and scanned around 600 books. Fortunately, the data was there in the adb backup and I was able to reinstall it manually (this was nontrivial because the instructions for extracting the backup say to use openssl zlib, but zlib isn't in the default openssl build and so I had to compile a new openssl binary to extract it). Having a rooted phone meant that I could just insert the database and settings files in the correct place in /data.

So far, everything is positive. The phone feels a little bit faster (hopefully it will get even faster tomorrow after the AOT compiler has run overnight), the base install is about 2GB smaller, so I have a lot more free space (the Motorola version had a load of apps that I didn't want, but which took up space anyway). The newer version of Android finally supports my old ThinkOutside folding keyboard, which I used to write a lot of articles with my old Nokia 770 - now that it works with my phone and the phone has vim installed, I expect to get a lot more use from it.

I'm now using a our-year old phone with a brand new OS and it's completely adequate for my needs. I'll probably keep it for at least another one - there's no user replaceable battery though, so that's probably the limiting factor. Thanks again - I hate to waste working hardware.

Re:Priorities

[beelsebob]

No, that, in the US, is the bare minimum of connecting a device to the network, and having a couple of gigs of data available to you.

Re:Priorities

[david_thornley]

"The problem is" that people think the current generation is somehow defective, rather than just like any other generation would be in their circumstances. When I was young, the expectation would be that a man could graduate from high school (or maybe not), get a factory job with no particular skill required, work hard, support a wife, modest house, kids, and a used car. People thought they were entitled to a house and a job, and didn't need an education.

I can, but just missed the last bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd prefer to wait till this new bubble pops. Millennials being this poor is a bad omen for the future economy, and prices will fall accordingly.

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[thinkwaitfast]

I didn't buy a house until later in life. Not so bad...but I saved and paid cash for it.

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[MBGMorden]

Yeah, I have a feeling this one will pop too. I bought during the absolute lowest point of the last crash. My house is now worth about 60% more than what I paid for it.

I've debating selling it for a profit but if you do that while prices are still high you're stuck paying those prices for a new home too.

On the plus side, if prices crash again without me selling I'm not really any worse off.

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[lister king of smeg]

Once the boomers start to die off en masse there will be a lot of homes available. Look for housing prices to fall.

The average life expectancy in the US is 78.94 lets call it 80 as it is a nice round number. the baby boom started in 1946 ending in 1964 so average boomer was born in 1955. the the should start dying in numbers around 2035. So the menials (1980-1995) wont be able to buy their homes until they are in their mid 40s to 50s.

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[CrimsonAvenger]

Millennials being this poor is a bad omen for the future economy, and prices will fall accordingly.

Assuming more or less normal birthrates, better than half of the "millenials" are under 25. I daresay that most current homeowners didn't have the wherewithal to buy a home when they were 25 or younger. I sure didn't. And yet, here I am, a homeowner. And have owned my home free and clear since nine years after I signed the mortgage agreement....

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[Cederic]

That's increasingly hard to do these days.

People are spending a third of their net income on rent, so saving is tough enough to start with. Add in property prices at five times gross wages, that's a hell of a lot of cash to try and save upfront.

Taking a mortgage and going into debt becomes financially responsible. That huge rent payment suddenly starts translating into equity and although sure, I've paid 15% more for my house due to interest than had I bought it in cash, I've also saved the house's purchase price in rent payments since I bought it. So basically for 15% more than I would have paid in rent I now own outright a whole house.

It's also gained substantially in value through that period, but that's kind of irrelevant. If I sold it I'd use all the extra cash buying a new house anyway so the net gain only matters when I get dementia and need professional care.

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[Cederic]

I'm not sure prices can go up much further.

They've levelled off recently in the UK and although Brexit and a general lack of growth in average wages will have heavily influenced that, there's a limit to how many people can actually afford a house at their current price.

The market's been kept buoyant by foreign investment and buy-to-let purchasers but I'll be surprised if that's enough to keep prices going up.

Personally I'm hoping prices crash. I'd be delighted if houses dropped to a third of their current value. Although then people would be able to afford them again, demand would rise and prices would follow...

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[Nethemas the Great]

Expect the ALE to go down as access to healthcare falls off and the unhealthy lifestyles of boomers to catch up with them, e.g. pancreatic cancer, type II complications, heart disease, etc..

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[DarthVain]

It will be a lot sooner if no one is buying houses. Most boomers have their house has the primary investment. When one of two things happens, the housing market is going to probably make a very large adjustment. 1) Boomers won't be able to sell their houses for the money they need for retirement, and 2) Interest rates will go up and those people that put themselves into extreme debt to buy a house will not be able to afford them anymore, pushing more housing on market.

While I'm not sure when any of these things will happen, and there will be a lot of momentum to prevent it from both home owners, real estate folks, and government, eventually it will, and I don't think it will take until 2035 until it does. Also I'd say that most of those boomers won't be living in those houses until they die at 80, most will either downsize or go into group living well before then.

Re:I can, but just missed the last bubble

[Rande]

(Speaking for the UK market)
I got a mortgage because it was cheaper than paying someone else mortgage.
Seriously, if you have the deposit, it's actually much cheaper to buy than to rent here eg. £1200pcm for rent vs £1000pcm for the mortgage on the same cookie cutter house. Sure, some of it will be taken up in maintenance, but after 25 years, you'll have a house rather than 20 landlords that you've rented (they don't like tenants getting too comfortable and will turf you out every 6 months-2 years) from having houses.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Hognoxious]

Don't they just need to wait for their parents to die?

I wish I could point and call them irresponsible,

[pecosdave]

but I look at the turnover rate at companies these days and I realize stable employment is nearing a thing of the past, especially for younger people starting out. I don't care if they want stable employment, they're probably not going to get it. I look at what percentage of my own income rent is, then my health insurance which is nearly as high as that. Even without any revolving entertainment bills like over-priced cable there's not a huge amount left if you're regularly employed, and if you're someone who has to constantly search for the next gig and have to be prepared for a dry spell there's even less.

We need to get a little government out of employment, the rates companies have to pay big brother (which includes healthcare and other mandatory funds) to actually employ people makes it difficult to keep someone around when you don't have a specific pressing need.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Opportunist]

But I DESERVE that house! I did show up for the appointment to view it!

First Time Buyers

[WrongMonkey]

The article talks about a 20% down payment. But I don't know any first time home buyers who actually pay that much. FHA loans require 3% for a down payment. Many cities, counties and states have additional programs that will provide additional assistance. Washington state has a down payment assistance program that will give you a second mortgage loan up to 4.00% of the total loan amount with 0% interest and payments deferred for 30 years.

Re:First Time Buyers

[PhoenixFlare]

My wife & I used the USDA loan program a couple years ago, and bought our first place with 3% down & the seller paying closing costs.

Would we have liked to have 20%? Do we understand why that would be better financially than what we did?

Yes on both counts. But, to us the trade-off was worth escaping the hideously high DC metro area living costs...and things worked out to where the mortgage is literally the same as the rent payment we had paid for 4 years after moving here - and thanks to the low down payment, we still have enough cash stashed away in an emergency fund to pay for an eventual new roof and other large expenses.

Re:First Time Buyers

[Pfhorrest]

The problem is that in many places the interest you will pay on a mortgage for the cheapest available home with only 3% down is higher than the cheapest available rental alternative. You can't buy small enough homes. People are living out of bedrooms in other people's houses and struggling to make rent even there. You can't buy one of those. I'm living in a tiny mobile home that I own outright... on rented land, a tiny parcel of rented land the like of which you can't buy anywhere. The mere interest on a mortgage on an empty normal-sized lot to park my tiny home on (if you could get mortgages on empty lots, or park mobile homes on them, neither of which you can) would exceed the rent I pay here. So I'm stuck renting until I can save up the hundreds of thousands of dollars to put enough down on a house that the interest alone on the consequent mortgage doesn't push the date I can finish paying it off even further past what should be retirement age but already won't.

Re:First Time Buyers

[Darinbob]

I had to have 10% down I think for my condo, and only that low because of a good credit score. Paying less down means you end up paying lots more points which is more expensive in the long run.

Re:First Time Buyers

[WrongMonkey]

You don't have to buy points. But you do have to pay for Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). The PMI can be discharged once you have 20% equity in the house, either by making payments or from appreciation on the value of the house. In market where housing prices are going up, that might only be 2 or 3 years of PMI.

Re:First Time Buyers

[Billly Gates]

Then they are dumb. At least 15%! Today you need to pay the bank insurance for less to cover the bank losses??! So do under 15% and now you pay an extra $300 to cover the bank in case you foreclosure and they cannot get as much.

Rotten deal for the little guy getting raped. I would rather rent then be in such a position

Re:First Time Buyers

[Shatrat]

I paid 20% down on my first home, and got a 15 year mortgage. That means that I didn't have to pay mortgage insurance for my FHA loan so my payments aren't that much higher than if I had opted for a 30 year. It's possible to do the smart thing, you just have to tune out the noise.

Re:First Time Buyers

[Cederic]

The problem is that in many places the interest you will pay on a mortgage for the cheapest available home with only 3% down is higher than the cheapest available rental alternative

My first mortgage was for 102% of the value of the property and had a 40% higher monthly payment than I was paying in rent.

But I was paying for a single room in a shared house, and when I bought my own property I immediately let out a spare room to a lodger. Suddenly I had my own home, I was gaining equity rather than all my cash going to someone else, and I had higher disposable income too due to the lodger's rent payments more than offsetting the my own 40% higher outgoings.

But yeah, if you want to live alone? It's tough out there. But it was 20 years ago too.

Re: Thank your parrents

[Opportunist]

You don't spend much time on Twitter, do you?

The Millennials Are Alright

[American AC in Paris]

As A Gen-Xer, I gotta say that the Millenials are doing a helluva lot better job at living than our generation ever did. Lay off 'em.

Re:Well now.

[BradleyUffner]

The correlates well with the statistic that 100% of Millennials are entitled whiners.

Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.

How does "wanting something but not having the money for it" count as entitled whining? Especially when it is a response given to a survey explicitly asking people if they want to own a house some day?

I hope to one day see the Grand Canyon, but I don't currently have any free time to do so, does that make me a "whiner"?

You, on the other hand, seem to be making an awful lot of high pitched noises about how you think millennials behave.

Millenials are age 13-35

[davidwr]

I didn't have significant savings until I was way over 13. I don't remember if I could afford a down payment for a house at age 35 but if I could, it would've been a small one.

Re:Millenials are age 13-35

[Quirkz]

Yep. I was 33 before I bought a house, and really only started to save in the year before that. Also, even then I only had 5% down, not 20%.

I'm sure this is due to all the avocado toast.

[JoshuaZ]

Remember, Millennials lack money not due to a lack of jobs https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2015/05/11/the-5-4-unemployment-rate-means-nothing-for-millennials https://generationopportunity.org/press-release/millennial-unemployment-rate-stagnant-at-12-8-percent/ and not due to a lack of job security or stability http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/191459/millennials-job-hopping-generation.aspx. And this isn't at all connected to the fact that most of them entered the workforce during the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression. No, the problem is that millennials are too busy buying avocado toast http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/15/news/millennials-home-buying-avocado-toast/and the like. Never mind that millenials are more frugal than other generational groups http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/famously-frugal-nearly-40-percent-millennials-will-stash-their-tax-n731076 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-25/millennials-are-careful-frugal-shoppers-who-buy-for-the-long-term. No the real problem must be some sort of failing on their part. Like how some of them bring parents to interviews or some other failing, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/parent-job-interview_n_3907447.html. Let's ignore that that the claims that a whole 8% were doing so would include things like a parent literally just driving the poor millennial to the interview. It really must be their fault.

Disclaimer: I'm one of these terrible, no-good, lazy, overspending millennials. I have actually a pretty good job situation, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lie to myself that somehow I've done better because I'm somehow a better person. I've been very lucky, and a lot of millennials are being screwed over through no fault of their own at all.

Re:I'm sure this is due to all the avocado toast.

[thegarbz]

I was with you until I saw that title and the article you're referring to. I remember when that made the rounds the first time.

Smashed avo toast is no where near $19 unless you're buying it in the nicest swankiest restaurant in the Sydney inner city. I used to love this stuff. I would get it for breakfast with a latte together for $13 from a city cafe. Looking back at it now, blaming finances on that was a complete cop out. I can't find any food that cheap in most of western Europe, and I used to make more money living in Australia too.

Article should really be titled: "Rich idiot out of touch with reality", however that would hardly make it newsworthy. Mind you this came out only a few months after our genius treasurer said that all you need to buy a house is a good job that pays a lot of money. He then proceeded to cut funding for teachers and nursing in the budget.

Re:I'm sure this is due to all the avocado toast.

[Rick Schumann]

I dunno about anything else you said, but you really need to learn how to embed hyperlinks properly in comments. Here, let me help you:

<a href="{your hyperlink here}">{word or phrase describing hyperlink here}</a>

You're welcome. :-)

Re:I'm sure this is due to all the avocado toast.

[Billly Gates]

The fact your generation loves leasing beamers and infinties as their favorite car options might not have anything to do with this? Not you particularly but there is an allergic reaction to being seen with an old car

Re:I'm sure this is due to all the avocado toast.

[axenavier]

I believe most millennials have very unrealistic life expectations. They want everything but no compromises, in previous posts basically said that this generation struggles more than the previous. I believe that's not true, every generation had its challenges. I'm a millennial just saying.

Since graduation I had the same job even same position for 5 years, at one point I made the technical part interview for new applicants and I've seen that most millennials have very unrealistic expectations about:
- Salaries. Sometimes they wanted to earn more than me.
- Life/work balance. At some point in your life, you will have to work extra hours, deal with it.
- Career growth. Just because they have some basic understanding of the job, watched some TED talks and read some empowerment/leadership books they feel entitled to be managers in the short term.

Even at one point one candidate told me, "how is it possible that you are not a manager yet, this job sucks".

I reached the time that said that I have a fat enough resume and started to apply to dream job companies and guess what I nailed it. Because when those companies see your resume they know you are committed and all the sacrifices you had to make to be where you are.

Stable companies do exist, even the ones that are stable in the worst financial times.

So if someone is a job hopper, non-committed, with unrealistic expectations, the chances of not getting a good job are extremely high.

They also believe that you need a lot of money to invest or expect very fast ROI, there are zillion options, even cryptocurrencies, obviously, at the beginning, you are very likely not to see the profit or even like me that lost the investment for not knowing how investments worked.

I believe that "luck" does not exist, it's just grit, and everything I have I earned it.

Re:I'm sure this is due to all the avocado toast.

[RuffMasterD]

There has been a significant decrease in the proportion of young people holding a driver licence over the last decade. Part of the reason was put down to cost of owning and operating a vehicle.

Re:Thank your parrents

[timelorde]

and then move upstairs?

How much are they making?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 33, and just bought my first house a couple months ago. I had $140k saved up for the down payment/closing costs. I saved that money while having a salary that slowly grew over 11 years from $48k to $75k. If you live frugally and make half-decent money, it's easy to save. Some people need a crash course on budgeting and self-control.

Re:How much are they making?

[GameboyRMH]

You're making about twice as much as the average millennial. However, you didn't mention how much student debt you were carrying, which is a major factor.

Any other questions?

Re:How much are they making?

[Whatsisname]

I hope you didn't use any more of that 140k on down payment than was absolutely necessary. With mortgage rates being under 4% you would be much better of with the majority of that in a higher-yield investment strategy. If not, you yourself need a crash course and should no be looking down on others.

Re:How much are they making?

[Pfhorrest]

You STARTED OUT making more money than almost 75% of Americans, almost TWICE the amount that half of Americans make less than. Which is still, also, only around the mean income. But you have always made at least about average and the vast majority make far less than average, so for most people it is just now that easy. It is impossible to live frugally enough to achieve the same results as more than doubling your income.

or h-1bs

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much wage depression is the result of h-1bs?

Re:or h-1bs

[TWX]

It's arguable that immigration always leads to wage depression because it increases supply.

The H1B program should be reserved for the cream of the crop; for jobs where not only is there little supply of workers immediately available but where there are very poor prospects of training enough people to do the job.

We have plenty of shortages in the medical field, and it takes a lot of skill and effort to become a doctor. It does not take as much skill or effort to become an IT services worker, even one specialized in certain specific fields. I've seen eighteen year olds recruited fresh out of highschool pick it up and I've seen older workers that transfered within the non-IT-focused company to the IT department manage to do it. We don't need to import workers for IT, and I expect a lot of CIS and CSE jobs likewise could be done with existing population.

Save the H1B for the specialists where we really do need their help.

Re:or h-1bs

[cayenne8]

Hmm..maybe the snowflake generation didn't realize they had to save on their own...?

I mean, they were raised with everyone getting a trophy just for showing up...maybe they thought mommy and daddy (or the mommy state) would give them a house too...?

Re:or h-1bs

[Gr8Apes]

They thought money just appears out of thin air, like... snowflakes. They drive brand new cars on leases, because they can't afford to buy them. They live in mom's basement, because they can't buy that $1M house they've been eyeing, but they do have both XBones and Ps4s and every game known to mankind.

Re:or h-1bs

[Billly Gates]

Saving yes I agree debt is a freaking problem! I listen to Dave Ramsey and this rant was shocking!

To summarize funny video:
1. 85% of all car sales were financed
2. 1/3 of those were subprimed! Meaning 10% to 24% interest!

Mellinials prefer BMWs as the most preferred car leased of course which is hard to believe.

Besides no one wanting to be seen with a beater car I think if you make so little with the high cost of living that you need to cut back to save means you are not ready for a house. Think about it?

A new roof? $10,000. Garage door open breaks? $2,500. AC goes out? $7,000 etc. What you think your rant about not going to Starbucks and buying Nikes every month will save enough for these unfortunate expenses?? I got into an argument with a co-worker who is trying to make me feel bad he is about to get a home with his grin. ... the dude is so broke he didn't have have AC in his car for 6 months. He is buying an auctioned foreclosed house. I asked him how he plans to repair the roof or buy an AC if it's been stolen?

So it's 2 fold. Too much debt and shitty $15/he jobs which corporate America loves as even senior level positions HR wants less than 5 years experience so they can pay less. Combined with a 100% increase in rent and home prices since 2011 and mellinials are shit up the creek.

It's a mess. But Lord help you if you buy a home and don't have $20,000 in cash for emergencies? Saving on small things won't get you that. You need to earn more and for heaven sakes don't buy new SUVs!

Re:or h-1bs

[amicusNYCL]

I wonder how much wage depression is the result of h-1bs?

Hmmm. Yeah. I also wonder how much termite farts contribute to global warming. Let's list some other things we wonder about in our spare time.

Back on track to the actual story though, I doubt this has much to do with wages, I bet there are a lot of people that could be paid $80,000 per year who would find a way to spend all of it. The article points out that around 40% of people 18-24, and only slightly less (38%?) of people 25-34 are saving exactly $0 each month for a down payment. I doubt this is solely due to wages, I think it has more to do with spending habits. I know that people have always been able to waste money, but within the past 15 years or so there has been an enormous market aimed at younger people with fairly expensive things. There are always new game consoles, games, phones, music players, tablets, etc that are little more than luxury items, which a lot of young people seem to be willing to cough up money for. They can find the money to pay for things like that, but they aren't in the habit of saving for anything major in the longer term. And this has fuck-all to do with H-1B visas.

Re:or h-1bs

[Solandri]

That is ostensibly the reason the H-1B program exists. Research found a net movement of skilled workers out of the U.S. So a visa program was created to stem the tide, by encouraging skilled foreign workers to apply for jobs in the U.S. via a route which led to eventual citizenship. (Same thing for student visas - research found most of the foreigners attending U.S. colleges simply went back to their home country after graduation. They displaced an American student from college, got an education, and took that education out of the U.S. So the student visas were modified to give graduates a chance to find employment in the U.S. as a prelude to U.S. citizenship.)

But then the program was hijacked by HR personnel exploiting the "unable to find a suitable American for the job" requirement by crafting needlessly specific job requirements, so they could hire foreign workers at below-market wages. Eventually this led to entire personnel companies set up for this purpose. (Schools don't have an incentive to exploit student visas since their tuition is the same.)

Re:or h-1bs

[TWX]

Harder to be an IT professional than a doctor? I don't see that.

Re:or h-1bs

[Applehu Akbar]

What you forget is that it is much tougher to be an IT professional than a doctor.

Depends on the specialty. You can think of audiologists as being the Visual Basic coders of medicine.

Re:or h-1bs

[Dare nMc]

I personally think the government should look after the current citizens. Some of that is what jobs do we have a under-supply of, and is that under-supply hurting more people than it is helping. If Engineers are creating (good) jobs and we have a under-supply of engineers, then we should let more in. The rate needs to be controlled, you don't want to create a oversupply, and drive out education and training... Perhaps medical should be judged on that they are improving lives (through treatment) and have that be a criteria as well. Personally I do think having a premium on doctors, that require so much education, to drive minimizing the over-use may have more longer term value. The development of programs like IBM's Watson, and driving to create lower education jobs to take off more work for doctors. But with that said, part of this program, is that education is reasonable. So definitely changes to H1B that would drive better outcomes to society are needed. And that is tied into improving access to education in the country would be part of that.

Re:or h-1bs

[rtb61]

Gaming is by far the cheapest kind of entertainment, the only other kind of entertainment that would be cheaper is masturbation, now that is the key to where all the money goes. The insane demands about how much you must spend to achieve non-reproductive mutual masturbation. Clothes, personal adornments, cosmetics, and splurging on the night out, this driven into youth again and again and again in the most psychologically damaging way possible, fail to spend enough and you are a worthless failure, resulting in a single weekend out costing more that an entire year of computer gaming.

Reality is capitalism, marketing, corrupt governance are all psychopathically designed to strip youth of the minds and their wealth and then the gods of capitalism complain when youth are broke, not because they give one shit about those youth, capitalism thinks it great to send them to kill others and die themselves to enrich the profits of corporations, but because there is nothing left to take.

Do not blame the victims of a corrupt society when it is the society that is broken from the top down, blame those who control that corrupt society, who designed it to service them and only them, who corrupt the public mind space with their sicknesses as the norm.

Want a stable society, have stable employment, providing a stable income which properly informed youth can invest into a, surprise, surprise stable society. Want an insane corrupt society, designed to strip as many people of their wealth as possible, to bleed the society dry to feed your insane insatiable greed, well, don't complain you already have it.

Re:or h-1bs

[TWX]

I don't think that technology like IBM's Watson will really reduce the number of doctors needed or really otherwise significantly address the shortage. A doctor will still be needed to be the primary point of contact for medical practice and specialists will still be needed to perform consultations and do more advanced work. A system like Watson may help the doctor confirm the diagnosis or to help cross-compare the multitude of symptoms to discover less common ailments that might not be recognized so easily, but the software can perform only as well as the conditions/symptoms are discovered and entered, and the doctor still has to evaluate the best treatment.

Re:or h-1bs

[ghoul]

All you have done is prove my point. It isnt actually more difficult to do what a doctor does than do what an IT guy does. The AMA just creates an artificial shortage of doctors to keep incomes high by making people jump through unnecessary hoops to become a doctor. People all over the world learn to be doctors in 4-5 years after high school and they dont have student debt. Of course this does mean that they actually are studying in college rather than networking and building political capital which is what pre-meds do (their course load is pathetic just rehash of stuff that should have been taught in high school). The political capital helps later in life in keeping both parties under control so that they dont open up the profession.

Re:or h-1bs

[ghoul]

Its harder to become a doctor due to unnecessary hoops the AMA makes people jump through. its not actually harder to do the job on a day to day basis. A doctor is mostly going through a long switch case or an embedded if then else of symptoms and diagnoses. Not much creativity or thinking required.

Re:or h-1bs

[HornWumpus]

I just want to be the dude selling you garage door openers...chump.

Re:or h-1bs

[cayenne8]

Reality is capitalism, marketing, corrupt governance are all psychopathically designed to strip youth of the minds and their wealth and then the gods of capitalism complain when youth are broke...

Funny..it worked all the way up until this most recent generation that for some reason, can't seem to get with the program, and learn you have to work and earn it.

Re:I wish I could point and call them irresponsibl

[beheaderaswp]

I would mod you up for being reasonable and intelligent...

Though I disagree a little bit. There are places you can hide and stay stable for long periods of time. Try doing IT for a stable manufacturer. They are out there. That's what I did.

After spending time in the "big league IT world" in, or associated,with silicon valley, I decided my last job before retirement would be at a successful commodity manufacturer. It worked. There are people here who have worked for 40 years in this company.

Though I did a lot of research of the local companies before trying for a position. And when I got the position it was as a tech rather than my usual executive/IT Director type gig. It's a big pay cut. I have good benefits. And drive 12 minutes to work with no traffic in a small town setting.

Successful manufacturers are hurting for IT people.. especially outside of major cities. They regularly promote from within, pay a lot less, and exist in rural or semi-rural areas.

Seems to me my lifestyle is about the same as it was in San Jose or Cupertino. A movie, popcorn, and a drink is less than $10.00 at the first run theater.

But the fun part? If you've held some decent positions and come out to the country with a fat resume.... suddenly you are a very big fish in a small pond. It's nice. And if you are struggling in a major metro area.... the undiscovered hinterland is bleeding for talent.

Keep an open mind... It's out there...

Re:Thank your parrents

[sycodon]

My parents helped me with my first down payment. I will be helping my kids.

This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.

Most politicans say they want affordable housing

[istartedi]

Most politicians say they want affordable housing, but when we started to get it during the so-called "crisis" of 2008, all everybody did was bitch.

The housing collapse was the very definition of housing becoming affordable--prices dropped dramatically.

The cognitive dissonance on this issue never ceases to amaze me. You can blame the banks, and they bear some of the blame but not all of it. You can blame the NIMBY phenomenon, but that's not the whole picture either. IMHO, the core of the issue is that housing is a leveraged "investment", and that creates structural issues that encourage it to be expensive.

If a significant percentage of your net worth is in your house, you are strongly incentivized to do everything you can to make housing expensive in your area.

The banks are encouraged to make housing expensive, because cash purchases are for the wealthy only, and the rest of us pay interest.

Local governments are incentivized to make housing expensive because property taxes are based on assessed value.

There is, IMHO, no *technical* barrier to supplying a house for less than $100k almost everywhere in the USA. In a few special places you can argue that flooding the market with a supply of cheap housing is not possible due to resource constraints; but that's not true in most parts of the USA.

Every once in a while, somebody does actually supply cheap housing. It's like an elm sprout in the forest. As soon as it springs up, the structural fungus of our NIMBY, Leverage, debt-financed, assessed value taxed housing system attacks it and it dies.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Scottingham]

Same. This also (partially) explains why many black populations in the US are so screwed over today. They weren't able to get mortgages in the 50s and 60s, so they never were able to start accruing wealth to pass onto the next generation.

For older gen, no expense equivalent to phones?

[Ted Stoner]

When I grew up there was no Internet or smartphones. Nothing seems to drain money faster today than phone contracts, based on observing my kids. I am not sure that we had any equivalent expense leaching away at us back then. I did have a CB radio for awhile, but you bought the h/w then no monthly payments to any providers.

Re:For older gen, no expense equivalent to phones?

[vel-ex-tech]

What, were landlines free for you fuckers?

Gen-X Homeowner here... Ownership is Overrated

[slacktide]

I've owned my house for about 15 years now, bought it when I was 26. Home ownership has a lot of disadvantages that I didn't consider when buying.

The amount of maintenance, both scheduled and unscheduled, that a home requires has proven to be a lot more than I expected or budgeted for. I'm a pretty handy DIYer, and even at that I get overwhelmed sometimes with deferred tasks. It eats your time if you DIY, or your money if you hire it out. I'm quite certain that I am not financially ahead, compared to if I had been renting, and I'd certainly have a LOT more free time.

You loose a lot of flexibility by owning a home. The transactional costs of buying and selling mean that it is difficult to justify moving to a new job in a different area, or even to relocate to a more convenient location in the same metro area, unless you know for sure it will be at least a 5 year gig. I have turned down interesting job opportunities for this reason. At the time I bought my home, I was a 10 minute bike ride from work. Then my division of the company "temporarily" relocated (We were told 2 years, then 3, which turned into 5) my department to the other side of our metro area (25 miles), and I had a 1 - 1.5 hour car commute. If I were a renter, it would have made sense to lease in the "temporary" location for a while.

Finally, as a homeowner you are more exposed to swings of the market. I got lucky when the bubble popped, as I had bought in a good bit before it, and had no need to sell at the low point.... but I had friends who lost their jobs, and had to relocate across the country, and HAD to sell when the market was depressed. Some lost over a hundred thou on that deal.

Re:Gen-X Homeowner here... Ownership is Overrated

[sootman]

> I've owned my house for about 15 years now, bought it when I
> was 26. Home ownership has a lot of disadvantages that I
> didn't consider when buying.

Well, it should be worth quite a bit more now than when you bought it. If you don't want it, sell it.

When your work moved, or those jobs came along, you could have rented out your house and rented yourself another place. I'll bet the current monthly rental value of your house is well above your mortgage payment from 15 years ago.

> Finally, as a homeowner you are more exposed to swings of the market.

Rents go up and down too. In some markets they can double in a small number of years. Other markets climb at least steadily. If your rent goes up 5% per year it'll double in 15 years. Compare that to having the exact same mortgage payment every month from the day you close to the day it's paid off -- not to mention that magical day when you pay off your mortgage AND YOU GET TO KEEP STAYING THERE FOR FREE! (Minus bills and upkeep and taxes, but still -- a HELL of a lot less than rent.) Do you want to keep working and paying rent until the day you die? Are you depending on social security? (Good luck with that!) Or do you have investments? Do those investments have a guaranteed return? One thing I know -- come hell or high water, I get to keep my house once it's paid off, barring very rare circumstances.

If you rent for a long time, every penny you spent on rent is gone. As a homeowner, you're sitting on a nice valuable asset. If you don't want to own it anymore, sell!

You haven't discovered anything a thousand other people couldn't have told you. The basic finances are VERY straightforward; the only surprise should have been the EXACT amount of upkeep needed.

And it's not like home ownership has NO benefits and renting has NO downsides. I'd rather put up with twice as many home-related headaches than be back in an apartment with neighbors on every side of me. Renting a house is only as good as the landlord. When you own, you have to fix your own stuff, but you also GET to fix your own stuff, the way you want to, and as soon as you want to. If something breaks in a rental, you get to deal with, and then wait on, the landlord or management company.

tl;dr: renting and owning each have pros and cons. How they balance out depends on the person.

Re:Gen-X Homeowner here... Ownership is Overrated

[avandesande]

I've managed to rent and keep my kids in the best district in our area since kindergarten. We are in our 4th house now and my last one is 2 years from graduations. It's not ideal but it's possible.

Re:Gen-X Homeowner here... Ownership is Overrated

[TheRaven64]

Selling isn't the only option. When I moved here for a job, I rented out the house I had bought, which helped offset the cost of renting somewhere with much higher property prices.

Re:Gen-X Homeowner here... Ownership is Overrated

[chihowa]

The amount of maintenance, both scheduled and unscheduled, that a home requires has proven to be a lot more than I expected or budgeted for. I'm a pretty handy DIYer, and even at that I get overwhelmed sometimes with deferred tasks. It eats your time if you DIY, or your money if you hire it out. I'm quite certain that I am not financially ahead, compared to if I had been renting, and I'd certainly have a LOT more free time.

As a homeowner who also owns rental properties, I can tell you that the cost of maintenance is also folded into whatever you would pay to rent a house. My renters pay the sum of the mortgage on the property, the estimated cost of repairs and maintenance, plus a little more (which will be profit if nothing goes wrong; or a buffer if maintenance is unexpectedly expensive or the renters misbehave). Some property owners skimp on maintenance to take more profit, but they pay for it in the long run with a deteriorating property and the renters pay for it by having to deal with shitty half-assed repairs (actually, they don't pay for it for long before they leave and you end up with tenants who see no problem with trashing the place. I mean, the owner clearly doesn't care about it...).

As long as your interest rate is reasonable and you live there long enough to diffuse the transactional costs, you're financially better off owning your house instead of renting.

Re:Thank your parrents

[TWX]

Yes, but for that to self-perpetuate the following generation needs to not be entirely aware that their parents got their back. They have to hunger a little, they have to have a need to put forth the effort to live independently so they learn how to be financially responsible.

My parents had my back and I didn't realize it. As a consequence I only had a couple of relatively minor scrapes where I benefitted from help; probably could have made it work without their help but it was definitely easier with it.

To contrast I know of one family where the granddad has told the now-adult grandkids of what they're going to get when he dies. He is a minor real estate mogul, the grandkids are each going to get a couple-million bucks. Right now they have essentially nothing, they live below-average as their own parents didn't learn to support themselves and did a poor job raising them; it's expected by others that know them that they'll blow through that money in a few years and be no better off than they are today.

One has to learn self-sufficiency and the only way to do that is with experience. To gain that experience you have to take risks. Cautioned risks, measured risks, but still risks. The parents should be there to help mitigate those risks but they should not entirely protect their children from them otherwise those children won't really learn.

House? What about retirement?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Graduate from college, and rather than buy that $6 latte every day, put it away in a DJIA index fund. When you retire at 65, you'll have over $1 million. Then you can retire wherever you like...

Oh, sure, blame millennials

[Kierthos]

Part of the problem is that the housing market is out of whack.

Using data for 1972, when you compare median household income and median house price, the house price is ~325% of the income.

Using data for 2015, when you compare median household income and median house price, the house price is ~525% of the income.

Just a bit of difference there. Now, part of that is different (more exacting) house construction standards, increased costs of construction materials, and so on, but that much of a difference?

Yes, some millennials have poor spending habits and poor savings habits. But the increased cost of houses also plays a part. Not to mention student debt. (And DeVos seems to give not a single fuck about that.)

Yes, exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA:

As the report puts it, "millennials face a severe shortage of affordable entry-level homes in many parts of the country."

I've been watching the real estate development and most of it is McMansions - just like in 2007. Rents - apartments - aren't much better. In my county, one needs to make $18.92 an hour working 40 hours a week to afford a place to live - I'm outside Atlanta, GA.

And unlike me who was able to get a 4 year degree for $10,000 - yes, $10K for four years at state, these kids have to deal with obscene tuition costs.

Yeah, it's fun to poke fun at them for buying video games and iStuff - which may be true in some cases - but our economy isn't what it was when I graduated,

I didn't have to compete with folks in Third World countries. Offshoring and H1-bs were unheard of. There were training programs. The Hartford insurers at the time all had programmer training programs and path to better oneself. So did many other companies And there were opportunities for the liberal/fine arts grads. You were educated and they'd train you for the vocation.

Now, college is vocational training.

OK, I'm going off here - but things are much different and kids today don't have the opportunities I had when I was their age. Yep, I'm the old guy saying that, yes, I DID have it better.

Ahh ok

[Sycraft-fu]

So surely you don't have a smartphone then, since they are such a waste?

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[Major Blud]

This. Whatever happened to buying a home and then living in it until you die? I understand that you may have to relocate to find work, but that's different than just buying a house that you're treating as a financial instrument instead of a place to sleep.

Just stop drinking Starbucks

[rsilvergun]

at $5 a day it'll only take 20 years to save up the $40k downpayment for a typical 3 bed/2bath house (good thing housing prices aren't going up faster than inflation so that $40k won't be the equivalent of $20k in 20 years...). Or if you're Australian skip the Avo-Toast.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering the reason home prices are sky rocketing is cuts in government infrastructure spending. The government was putting up the money to do the expensive stuff to get the land ready for home building so that companies could throw up cheap houses and make billions. As soon as the government stopped doing that (thanks, 30 years of tax cuts and trickle down econ) home building screeched to a halt and that investment capital shifted to .com style unicorns like Uber pushing the gig economy and whathaveyou.

Re:Just stop drinking Starbucks

[OrangeTide]

$125/mo starbucks (~$5/day)
$50/month cable (or hulu+netflix+etc)
$15/month MMO (or $45 if you are an addict and paying for 3 MMO accounts)
$220/month car insurance (full coverage for a 20 year old is about $2600/year)
$400/month car payments (because you wanted a brand new car and got screwed on the interest rate for the loan)
$200/month on take-out (a big underestimate, at one time I was spending $700/mo on eating out and take-out for 2 people)

That's $1010/month that can probably be reduced or eliminated, that's $12K/year.
If you've already made decisions (like bought a new car), well you'd kind of stuck with it for a while. If you get a less expensive used car you could go for liability coverage only, or the full coverage might be significantly cheaper because the used car is not worth as much.

Buying a bunch of freezer safe microwavable containers and packing leftovers into them can give you much of the convenient of take-out at a fraction of the cost. You can cook once or twice a week, and shuffle around the meals in the freezer to keep some variety. It's not extra work to cook 4 servings instead of 1 serving, but when you're single or a couple it's hard to manage the left overs. (seriously, I saved thousands of dollars over the years)

Re:Just stop drinking Starbucks

[__aaclcg7560]

$220/month car insurance (full coverage for a 20 year old is about $2600/year)

I paid $1,600 cash for the 15-year-old cars I've had in the past and only paid $300 per year on liability insurance from AAA. I don't even have a car now and I pay $78 for driver insurance.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Pfhorrest]

You assume our parents own homes too.

And they still have options, too ....

[King_TJ]

With no money down, it's still possible to get a USDA loan for a home. The "catch" is, you're going to have to select a home that's in one of the designated "rural" parts of America (as well as meeting some other criteria like having a reasonable debt to income ratio).

But USDA loans aren't just for buying farm-houses .... You might be surprised how many places qualify for one. You just have to consider a home that's outside a major city to have a shot at it.

You can't really avoid "closing costs" because the parties doing all the paperwork and making the sale happen want their cut. But this is negotiable too. Many times, a motivated seller of a pre-owned house will agree to pay all closing costs as part of the deal.

Re:Thank your parrents

[TheRaven64]

This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.

I'd argue exactly the opposite. Parents are now one of the biggest mortgage lenders in the UK and this has increased wealth inequality: your parents' wealth is now a bigger indicator of whether you'll be able to afford a house than your personal income. If this continues, you'll see a greater divide between those born to well-off parents and those who weren't.

Nope, sorry

[Sycraft-fu]

Student loan debt is so high because the cot of university has skyrocketed. Go have a look at what a state school costs now as opposed to what it did when you went, and adjust for inflation.

The problem is all you "muh bootstraps" types (and by the way you benefited from plenty of things, even if you don't realize it) want to keep cutting spending and a popular area is assistance to public education. So the state aid to universities go down, but costs do not. Universities can't just "make cuts and do more with less" so they have to get more money at some point, and that is done by increasing tuition.

You can't shift costs from the government to the individual and then hate on the individual for having trouble bearing those costs.

Re:I wish I could point and call them irresponsibl

[pecosdave]

I would like to go to a more rural place. Even with a pay cut I could do better than if I continued to live in a metropolis. I seriously considered some "stationed" out of the country rotate in and out work, but with a toddler I can't, and with a child from a previous marriage I'm pretty much held hostage in the city I'm in. I've given some serious thought to finding a place in flyover country, some old has-been town that happens to be on some fiber backbone and setting up my own data centric business where location doesn't matter, but building your own business isn't always a "just out of the gate" thing the millennials need.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[DiSKiLLeR]

Houses ARE cheap to build and ARE cheap.

What is so expensive is THE LAND. Especially in metro areas in any of the big cities.

I live downtown SF. A million dollars only gets you a tiny studio here, because the demand to live here is so incredibly high and land is limited.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[AVryhof]

I have a nasty feeling that by the time I retire, with inflation, $1 million won't buy quite as much as $1 million will buy today.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[Pfhorrest]

I wish I could upmod you but I've already posted upthread. This is the most insightful post in this thread.

Re: Thank your parrents

[ArmoredDragon]

Millennial here, parents didn't give me anything. Paid for my own college, and now I'm saving roughly $2000 per month towards a house, just waiting for the bubble to pop. I'm at about $63,000 saved right now.

Re:Well now.

[Dorianny]

80% of Millennials Say They Want To Buy a Home -- But Most Have Less Than $1,000

The correlates well with the statistic that 100% of Millennials are entitled whiners.

Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.

Your post correlates perfectly with the statistics that people get more grumpy/needy/whiny with each passing year.

Now go give yourselves more tax-breaks and add trillions to the National Debt the "entitled whiners" will have to pay off

Re:House? What about retirement?

[fermion]

This is a well refuted urban myth.

I do get the point. People waste money. But really they don't. For instance my cell phone bill isn't much more than a land line cost me 30 years ago. In 1970 I can see people paying a buck for a cup of coffee, which is what is costs now inflation adjusted at Starbucks.

On the other hand, people regularly bought houses for $25,000 in 1970. Today such a house should cost no more than 150,000. For such a house you need to scrounge up $10,000 and maybe $700 a month. But how many houses are on the market for that price? The median home price is more like $200,000. Here is another thing speaking for an older generation. While i do know people who make six figures who saved for the down payment of their home, almost everyone else I know got money from their parents That is a truth that most people won't admit to you. Along with the amount of drugs they do/did. The older you are, the more cash you have on hand. So middle class parents, who are no longer paying for kids, not longer paying for school, often have several grand that they are happy to give to the adult child to help them start life and a family.

Re:Thank your parrents

[rfengr]

Never mind all the Asian boat people from the 70's who came with only rags. I knew one who beat his kids for anything grade less than an A. Both kids are now successful engineers.

Re:Well now.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Peeps, this is what you get when you refuse to believe in all the things that got your parents and grandparents what they have.

I'm GenX and even I know that believing their parents and especially their grandparents is absolutely useless for Millennials. The economy their grandparents participated in that got them all their nice things doesn't exist anymore. Nothing like it exists anymore.

Nobody drops out of high school and goes to work and builds a nice middle class lifestyle for themselves anymore. Nobody starts in the mailroom and becomes a company president anymore. Nobody holds one job their whole lives anymore. Shit, that was already fading for my father, a Boomer. I'm not certain how many jobs he held, but it was at least six, and he has a chemical engineering degree. And speaking of Boomers, they're clinging to jobs they should have left to GenX by now, so GenX can move up and open up jobs for Millennials, but that hasn't happened. My neighbor across the street is 68 years old and still working. Why? Because his house isn't paid off yet and his youngest child (a Millennial) still lives in his basement. Statistically, he's not unusual.

Meanwhile houses have doubled and tripled in price, even in parts of the country that aren't hyper-inflated, and the hyper-inflated parts have risen by factors of five and eight and ten.. Car prices have doubled, both new and used.[1] Even food prices have risen dramatically since Boomers were young. All of that would be tolerable if wages had kept pace with inflation, but wages didn't keep pace with inflation even for those smug Boomers. Wage growth fell behind in the 1970s and never recovered, so even my father the Boomer never earned as much money as his own father, relative to his expenses.

Millennials would be fools to listen to economic advice from their parents and grandparents. The manufacturing economy that advice was relevant to doesn't exist anymore. The service economy that allegedly replaced it, didn't. I judge the health of the local economy by the number of Help Wanted signs (there aren't any) and by the number of hand-lettered signs offering lawn service (the number fluctuates, but hasn't dropped to zero in years). Lawn service 15 years ago was being done by Mexicans. Not anymore. It's all white boys now. Millennials, in fact, desperately participating in the gig economy, because that's all there is, and there isn't nearly enough of it to go around.

----
[1] Yes there are reasons why both real estate and car prices have gone up. The reasons are irrelevant when talking about purchasing power. Only the price matters.

"Normal" Millenial

[QlooQl]

I guess I'm one of those normal millenials who literally just spent the week in Spain eating avocado, manchego and jamon toast. I had no problem with the 40k downpayment on my new house at the age of 27. I made $28k per year in 2008. I'm up to $40k now. The thing I didn't have was student loan debt or any medical problems. I feel very sorry for my friends with $40k in student loans. They won't be able to invest in a house until later. They never got the chance to invest in the stock market post 2008. They got ripped off.

Re:Well now.

[thinkwaitfast]

How does "wanting something but not having the money for it" count as entitled whining?

If that's not the definition, then what is? What do you call it when kids want ice cream from the store, but parents won't buy it for them?

Don't buy a place to live...

[Anonymous Coward]

... unless you can make a couple of job transitions without moving. Otherwise, you might end up trapped in a buyers market with an illiquid asset. Since I didn't follow my hard-earned advice, I lost several 10's of thousands of $$ during these times.

Re:I wish I could point and call them irresponsibl

[Darinbob]

Employment is rarely stable, even in past generations.
But you're making another mistake - without the government doing anything, most larger companies are paying the health care costs anyway. If you're trying to be competitive when hiring employees, the very first perk you're going to have to show is a medical plan. Without the plan the only employees you're going to get are those who couldn't get a job elsewhere.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Anonymous Coward]

My folks would never consider this sort of thing; they're more concerned about saving enough to not become a burden on me later in life. They could easily afford to purchase a second home outright. That being said, I make more than enough to afford entry-level real estate in my area.

Do you think this sort of cash giveaway made you more or less dependent on the safety net? Do you see value in making your children work for what they have?

Welp

[OrangeTide]

I guess you're renting.

FHA loan will let you do a 3.5% down payment if you have decent credit. Still, 3.5% on a $300K house is over $10K. It will take a couple years of steady job and scrimping and saving, but it's a feasible goal for many people. Things get more complicated if you absolutely must have a house in an expensive location, getting mortgages for $700K+ homes with very little down is unlikely unless you have a huge income. (dual income would help, I guess find a spouse that makes as much or more than you)

I didn't really have any money saved up when I was in my 20's either, but I have a house now (in Silicon Valley). I got into a groove in my late-20's/early-30's and was able to keep credit cards under control, paid off the car and kept it for several years (no car payments), car insurance got a lot cheaper, job paid more with more experience under my belt, and lots of other factors contributed.

Re:Thank your parrents

[__aaclcg7560]

Don't they just need to wait for their parents to die?

The Baby Boomer parents are too busy spending their inheritance. All that they're going to get is a bill from Uncle Sam to pay for Social Security/Medicare and everything else.

I just paid for college and a house, no govt

[raymorris]

I have a few months of college left and rather than graduating with debt, I'll graduate with more money in the bank than when I started school. While in school, I bought a new house worth twice as much as the one I bought before I went to college.

You *can* go into a bunch of debt and get a useless degree in Gender Studies. A degree in snowflake studies at UCLA and then whining about it is an option.

Another option is a degree in an IT field from WGU, which costs $4,500 / year after the current $1,500 tax credit, and while you're in school you'll be getting certifications such as Cisco CCNA, which increases your salary while you're still in school.

Your parents and grandparents *also* had the option to do dumb shit. Most of them didn't.

Re:I just paid for college and a house, no govt

[david_thornley]

Your parents and grandparents *also* had the option to do dumb shit. Most of them didn't.

Pull the other one. Their parents and grandparents did lots of dumb shit. The difference is that society was more forgiving of mistakes then. I've got a boomer cousin with an American Studies degree, and he wound up being paid pretty well. I'm not going into what a certain other relative did when he was young.

Re:I just paid for college and a house, no govt

[Obfuscant]

Their parents and grandparents did lots of dumb shit. The difference is that society was more forgiving of mistakes then.

The difference is that the dumb shit they did wasn't long-term dumb shit like signing for a loan that takes 20 years to pay off to get a degree in something that nobody has jobs for. It was more like "spent $100 on a run-down jalopy with sawdust in the transmission".

I've got a boomer cousin with an American Studies degree, and he wound up being paid pretty well.

That's nice. Anecdotal evidence is so convincing.

They'll be trankful for that later

[damn_registrars]

The myth of a home being a quality investment is just that - a myth - and is finally starting to crumble completely and people are recognizing it for the fallacy that it is. Few people other than realtors will make money on the sales of homes again any time in the forseeable future; what then is the incentive to purchasing a home at all? Smart people are renting apartments in better designed buildings where they can get the amenities they want and need without being dragged down by pointless shit like lawn maintenance and mortgage insurance. They then can invest the money they save in retirement accounts or go on the vacations that their friends who are being dragged under by home ownership can only aspire to.

There's a reason why we are seeing nice apartment complexes being built in desirable school districts.

Re:They'll be trankful for that later

[Anonymous Coward]

The myth of a home being a quality investment is just that - a myth - and is finally starting to crumble completely and people are recognizing it for the fallacy that it is.

Rationalization from a millennial! How cute.

Few people other than realtors will make money on the sales of homes again any time in the forseeable future;

The point is not to "make money on the sale of the home."

You need a place to live; You can do one of two things.

First, you could rent. In this case, every cent you spend lines your landlord's pocket, and leaves you in a place where you can't change or customize anything without risking your security deposit, and maintenance will be as shoddy & minimalistic as the landlord thinks he can get away with. And, at the end of your lease, the only "thing" you're left with is the warm, fuzzy feeling that "well, at least I wasn't homeless for the last year."

Second, you could buy. In this case, yes, a fair amount of the money you'll spend on a mortgage will line your lender's pocket. But the principal will build equity in the property, which, at the end of the mortgage term, you will own, free and clear. You can change and customize everything to your heart's content, and maintenance and upkeep will be as nice as you want it to be. Plus, at the end of your mortgage, you have a house that you can continue to live in, or sell, and recoup a significant chunk of your outlay. On a 300k mortgage, the interest you pay will average out over the life of a 30 year loan to be about 500 a month, so in essence, you are "renting" the property for $500 a month, and "saving" the principal, and at the end of 30 years, you owe nothing and still have a place to live.

Which brings us to:

what then is the incentive to purchasing a home at all?

enforced savings, less of your monthly payments lining someone else's pocket, and having a home that you can keep and do whatever you want with after your mortgage is paid off. Plus, there's some hellaciously good tax benefits.

Smart people are renting apartments in better designed buildings where they can get the amenities they want and need without being dragged down by pointless shit like lawn maintenance and mortgage insurance.

No, dumb people are renting apartments. Period. If you go to one of those fancy communities that has a lot of "amenities," your monthly payment is at the mercy of your landlord. I lived in one of those "fancy, amenity-rich" apartment complexes for 2 years. I was a good tenant, paid on time, all that jazz - and they jacked up my monthly rent 10% each time my lease was up for renewal. In 2 years, my rent went up nearly 300 dollars a month - which is why I declined to re-up that second time, and went and bought a house instead. Now I spend $2k a month on mortgage (only about 200 more than my 2nd lease renewal's rent), but I get great tax deductions, my monthly payment isn't going to keep inching up every year, and I have more space. As for amenities - I can work out in the gym my employer provides in the building, I can swim at the town beach for a couple bucks each time I want to go, I can have friends over for a barbecue any time, and I have a home office, so who needs their "business center." I have to drive a little further to reach public transit and get into Boston, but I also don't have noisy asshole neighbors pounding on the walls and ceiling at weird hours of the day.

So... it's not all bad.

They then can invest the money they save in retirement accounts or go on the vacations that their friends who are being dragged under by home ownership can only aspire to.

If they're renting, and blowing a bunch of money on vacations, then they're in for a RUDE fucking awakening someday soon, when they suddenly realize they've saved up nothing, and their yearly rent increases is sl

Re:They'll be trankful for that later

[TheRaven64]

This needs moderating up. Anyone who thinks that renting is such a great financial choice needs to think about why rental property is available. Could it be because the rent plus appreciation on the property is worth more than the sum of the maintenance, rental management overhead, and either loan interest or opportunity cost from sinking the money into the building? If this isn't the case, expect either the rental prices to increase until it is or the availability of rented accommodation to plummet. If it is, then you might want to rethink you notion that you're so smart to be making money for someone else.

Re:They'll be trankful for that later

[Ash-Fox]

Anyone who thinks that purchasing is such a great financial choice needs to think about why purchasing property is available. Could it be because purchasing property is worth more than the sum of the building a property from scratch? If this isn't the case, expect either the purchasing new properties to increase until it is or the availability of purchasable accommodation to plummet. If it is, then you might want to rethink you notion that you're so smart to be making money for someone else.

Re:They'll be trankful for that later

[TheRaven64]

False equivalence, and the fact that you don't understand the difference between capital cost and TCO tells anyone reading your post a great deal about your financial acumen.

Re:They'll be trankful for that later

[Ash-Fox]

Whooosh.

I also think we need to stop using millenial

[Sycraft-fu]

Or at least get a concrete definition, because it seems to just mean "those damn kids" at this point. The year range is extremely hazy, and ever expanding from what I've seen. Originally what I saw was people born from 1982-1995, 82 because that's the first year that would be the graduating class of 2000 and hence the name. However as of late I've seen it defined as broadly as 1980 up until now.

Ok well first off it seems rather silly to include almost a 40 year period as a "generation" since there would be many children literally in the same "generation" as their parents which makes no sense (a family generation is offspring). Makes the term pretty meaningless.

That aside if you are going to define it so broadly, then you can't make any generalizations about said group since they are very different people and faced very different problems. I'd be a "millennial" by that definition, but I'm 37. I've been working professionally for over 15 years, when I got in to the workforce, the big depression hadn't happened, when I went to university costs hadn't gone nuts, I've owned a home for a decade, etc.

So the experiences I've had have little in common with our students who are 18-22 and will be entering the workforce soon. They get called "millennials" too which would maybe be accurate for the tail end of the initial definition. What they are going to deal with going in to the workforce is very different then what I had to, and their school has been WAY more expensive because the state has been cutting tax money to public schools for over a decade.

So I think the media bitching about millennials needs to stop at the very least until they can work out a concrete definition of a "millennial". Stop acting like everyone under 40 is some kind of homogeneous group, it is absurd on the face of it.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[AlanBDee]

SF is an edge case here. In most the U.S. the land is the inexpensive part. The raw materials for the house are far more expensive. In my area, a .25 acre lot sells for around 70k. Houses range from 300k-600k.

As a software engineer, I can almost guarantee that my quality of life is much higher here then it would be in SF, even though I could make almost twice as much in SF.

Millennial here

[Anonymous Coward]

I have $80k liquid saved (still live at home) but because I live in Orange County, my choices are an overvalued condo, a house in Santa Ana or Long Beach (ehhh), or finding a place in Riverside (reasonable, nice homes, but very hot and a terrible commute).

Hoping there's another housing collapse relatively soon (even ~half as significant at the ~'08 one would be great for me), or I'll likely have to move.

You're probably taking out your smallest violin at the moment, but a ~600 sq ft condo w/ garage in a nice area (~$320k) or house w/ bars on the windows (Santa Ana/Long Beach) isnt my idea of a great trade for all the cash I've saved.

Re:Thank your parrents

[ColdWetDog]

And the college fund may be the most useful thing you could give (give a man a fish....). My folks didn't 'bequeath' me anything (except having to deal with the paperwork of being dead - that is a trial in and of itself). They did pay for a substantial amount of money for my BA degree. That allowed me to get a stipend as a grad student. Twice. And then I was able to bootstrap that into making enough to more or less afford medical school.

But had I been saddled with $100K of student loans as an undergraduate, I doubt I could have moved up the ladder very easily.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[AlanBDee]

I agree. I don't ever plan to move unless something drastic changes. As I've seen my own net worth grow because I'm not house poor I truly feel bad for people who do end up with too much house.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Anonymous Coward]

The wealth didn't disappear, it shifted. My stocks plummeted well over 50% and stayed down there for a few years. Then they rebounded and effectively doubled my 2 years of investment. The rule of thumb is to buy low sell high, not sell when the stocks drop, then buy them back when they're up again. This is why many people suddenly "lost everything". They bought high and sold low.

Re:Wow, this post is everything wrong in the world

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of demanding better conditions for yourself you want the Millennials to suffer?

I think you've missed the fact that Generation-X is stereotypically cynical, and the poster was just expressing that cynicism. He doesn't want Millennials to suffer. Instead, he's complaining that nobody cared when Generation-X had the same problem.

The two generations have different ways of complaining. Millennials complain by with very public (and often emotional) outbursts. Generation-X complains by making wry, cynical statements. The difference probably has it origins in their relationships with their parents. The Millennials have a lot of support from their parents and other adults in the community. So, they can expect that the adults will correct a problem if they are made aware of it. In contrast, Generation-X had very little support from their parents and other adults. In fact, Gen-Xers usually felt that the adults were idiots. (For example, the character of Marty McFly in Back To The Future was a typical Generation-X teenager.) A Generation-X teenager couldn't complain publicly without be scolded by the adults. So, the whole generation resorted to cynicism as a way of expressing their complaints to each other, while avoiding the wrath of the adults.

You got the causation backwards

[scatbomb]

You got it backwards, the cost of higher ed is high because student enrollment is up and the large quantity of federal higher ed loans. Think of it this way, if you ran a $1/slice pizza shop and all your customers started showing up holding $1 federal pizza vouchers, you'd conclude that you could raise the price to more than $1 and still get plenty of customers right? It works the same way with federal loans and college tuition.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[Sycraft-fu]

Nope, sorry. I know that is how people like to sell it, but that's not how it works. State universities have their tuition controlled by a board of regents and funding regulated by the state and those states have been cutting and cutting and cutting. If you are interested, go and get the numbers from any of them you wish. Being public, they have to have their books open. Also realize it isn't like they can charge a lot and pocket the money like a private business. Again, the books are open, you are welcome to go and see where the money goes.

I work at a state university so I've seen it happen. Year after year the state kept cutting the universities' allocation. I don't mean "cutting the rate of increase" or even "not increasing it" I mean outright saying "You have $500 million less from us than you did last year." The response from the universities has been to make cuts where they can, try to bring in more private research dollars, and to skyrocket tuition. It turns out that the facilities, computers, materials and people you need are not cheap, the dollars have to come from somewhere.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[scatbomb]

Nope, sorry. I know that is how people like to sell it, but that's not how it works. State universities have their tuition controlled by a board of regents and funding regulated by the state and those states have been cutting and cutting and cutting. If you are interested, go and get the numbers from any of them you wish. Being public, they have to have their books open. Also realize it isn't like they can charge a lot and pocket the money like a private business. Again, the books are open, you are welcome to go and see where the money goes.

I work at a state university so I've seen it happen. Year after year the state kept cutting the universities' allocation. I don't mean "cutting the rate of increase" or even "not increasing it" I mean outright saying "You have $500 million less from us than you did last year." The response from the universities has been to make cuts where they can, try to bring in more private research dollars, and to skyrocket tuition. It turns out that the facilities, computers, materials and people you need are not cheap, the dollars have to come from somewhere.

Tuition has skyrocketed for *private* colleges too. Your argument doesn't hold any water.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[david_thornley]

So, in a given field, when costs go up it absolutely has to be for the same reason in every individual case?

It could be that, when public school tuition went up, private schools found they could raise tuition to match.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[phantomfive]

5:38 wrote an article on high tuition recently. As you mention, it's a combination of issues.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[Amazing Proton Boy]

Ok, I went and looked at the California State University system. 1999-2000 Allocation (Funding) $2.25 billion. 2016-2017 $3.4 billion, the highest it has ever been. It peaked near $3 billion around 2010, fell off for a few years and bounced way back. Maybe you should go work at a CSU? The real problem there is the same as many places, vastly more overpaid administrators, not enough spent on students and education.

Sources
http://www.calstate.edu/budget...
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2016...

Re:You got the causation backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what actual research says.

And funny, I also worked at a state university, and every year, the Board chose to raise tuition BECAUSE they had far more applicants willing to pay their federally granted loan money to attend the school than the school could afford to take. Related is the emphasis on out-of-state students, that pay far more. Yeah, the State's portion got cut every year, but no one cared, because the tuition and fees payments went up way more.

University of Michigan, in 2010, had state funding cut by $1.4 million, or about 0.5%, off of $316 million. But they raised tuition by almost 4%, and raised fees as well for a total increase of 7.1% - or $68 million out of $1 BILLION.

So STFU, because you are completely wrong.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[scatbomb]

Read the other posts in this thread replying to grandparent. I think it's safe to say an increase in willingness to go into debt for college combined with availability of loans for college students is to blame for tuition increases, not a lack of govt funding.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[Dogers]

Look up inflation - $2.25B in 2000 is worth ~$3.2B now.

Re:You got the causation backwards

[RuffMasterD]

Inflation alone would mean $2.25 billion in 2000 is the equivalent of $3.2 billion in 2017. So in real terms, California State University earned about $200 million more in today’s money than they did 17 years ago. If they were listed on the stock exchange I would be quite disappointed with their performance. I wonder what happened to enrolment numbers and external research funding during that time?

Re:WHO IS SETH RICH?

[Thanatiel]

Thank you : I mis-modded a post a while ago and didn't think of this way to erase it.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Hognoxious]

Yes but communism blah blah hard-working blah blah legacy blah blah taxing it twice blah blah.

(Just to save ArchangelCayenneMir the bother).

Re:Well now.

[x0ra]

bullshit, I am a millenial, and put down 37% on my house. Well, I'm a right-wing millenial, that's probably why.

Re:Wow, this post is everything wrong in the world

[scatbomb]

As A Gen-Xer, I gotta say that the Millenials are doing a helluva lot better job at living than our generation ever did. Lay off 'em.

Instead of demanding better conditions for yourself you want the Millennials to suffer? I know that's not what you said, but it's the sentiment you're expressing. I hear it over and over and over again.

Reading and rereading the parent, I have no idea where you got that sentiment. Sure you're not imagining things instead of hearing it over and over again? Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Re:House? What about retirement?

[myrdos2]

Actually, assuming 45 years of work and buying a latte EVERY day, you'll have $98,617. And 50 cents. Happy retirement!

Re:Thank your parrents

[Hognoxious]

II heard it described as "rags to rags in three generations". Somebody from modest origins starts a business, they make their kids work and study hard and when they grow up they either expand that business or go into good professions. The third generation are spoiled and feckless. When the money runs out they're incapable of supporting themselves.

Re: Thank your parrents

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words you are a lottery winner and don't know it.

And yet...

[Jawnn]

Our "leaders" will tell you that the economy is in good shape. And they can do that, because they changed yardsticks during the Reagan years. All the economic conditions that virtually created a middle class that could reasonably expect to do things like graduate from college debt free, or work in a trade that paid a living wage, buy a home, put kids through college, etc., no longer exist.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Pfhorrest]

So everyone born to poor parents is just fucked, and that's fine and we should leave it like that instead of actually giving people that equal opportunity you folks love to bang on about?

Re:Thank your parrents

[fluffernutter]

It's not impossible to both help your kids when they need it and raise them to have a sense of self-worth and independence. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Re:Thank your parrents

[TWX]

Yep. This can happen anytime that there's money. Even Europeans with titles have had this happen; being of the peerage can help but does not make one immune to financial obligations.

Basically every new generation inherits most of the same kinds of struggles that the previous generation had. The new generation might also have a few new struggles, and might shed a few of the kinds of struggles of-old, but by and large the situation is the same as it always was. This includes the problem of how to motivate the majority of the upcoming generation to take care of itself as it reaches the age of majority.

1000$ will buy them a VR headset for their VR home

[ffkom]

and isn't a virtual home all they every wanted? They are working in virtual jobs, spend their time with virtual friends - so why bother with reality at all?

Millenials in denial?

[thegreatbob]

I'd like to see an article that highlights the percentage of millenials (specifically, for the sake of sanity, aged 18-34) who appear to believe that the term is reserved for berating people younger than them. From my own subjective observations, it seems that people in the 28-34 bracket have a much higher tendency to exempt themselves from it, while simultaneously applying it to people only slightly younger than them.

Full disclosure, I'm 30-ish, and don't find the label bothersome.

Re:Millenials in denial?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

I'm in the 28-34 age bracket and figure the most deserving of the term 'millenial' is anyone who remembers the Willenium. I mean after X, Y, and Z they ran out of ideas so it seems fair to me to just make this shit up as well.

Re:Millenials in denial?

[Szeraax]

well, i'm not yet in that 28-34 bracket, but I do recall when MIB came out and the music video thereafter. Close enough to the Willenium?

Re:Thank your parrents

[ghoul]

It has to be a balance of opportunity and responsibility. If you mess up your life there have to be consequences and one of them is your children grow up in poverty. Else why would you not just enjoy your 20s and 30s and dont worry about building a career. At the same time there needs to be enough social mobility so that over 2-3 generations a poor man become a rich man. One generation rags to riches just leads to social instability and a gambler society.

Be very careful of "savings" stats

[Anonymous Coward]

There are lots of banks that release these studies in an effort to drum up support for (now useless) "Savings Accounts".

Interest rates have fallen so far that nearly nobody is interested in Savings Accounts anymore.

Of course, a headline that reads 80% of Americans have less than $1000 in a Savings Account, it's not nearly as dire.

I have around $300 sitting idly in a savings account. But it's not like that's a measure of my worth.

Re:snowflake

[david_thornley]

Man, you snowflakes get upset by other people complaining. You need to find a safe space.

Re:Thank your parrents

[david_thornley]

Speaking personally, I wanted to be financially independent of my parents, and asked for financial help once (and paid it back ASAP). I did accept Mom's contribution towards a down payment, though.

Re:Thank your parrents

[interkin3tic]

That is not how you "fight poverty." Nearly all the millennials buying houses have rich parents. If you're in a financial position to help your kids buy houses today, your kids cannot in any meaningful sense be considered to be at risk of poverty (unless they have mental illness).

How you fight poverty at a societal level is... actually fuck it, we all know the country is going to run as fast as it can in the exact opposite of the direction of that for the next few years, no point in actual solutions.

How you fight poverty is "1. Don't be poor 2. Have a lot of money 3. Don't get sick."

Re: Thank your parrents

[Gr8Apes]

But he got a participation trophy!

Re:Thank your parrents

[david_thornley]

My parents did support me through my undergrad education, and we did the same for our son. It seemed fair.

Re:Thank your parrents

[david_thornley]

In other words, you're willing to sacrifice people's futures because they had unlucky or unwise parents?

Re:Thank your parrents

[Frobnicator]

This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.

This is also how you teach your kids to be lazy and not work for anything.

Work ethic can be taught while enjoying a nice life. The two are not mutually exclusive. You don't need poverty to teach how to work.

Some parents pass along a strong work ethic through modeling (showing the kids how to work) and by parents requiring and expecting work from the kids. Some rich kids are hard workers, so are some middle-class kids, so are some poor kids. Yes it may be easier to teach if the only choice is work or die, but the value of work can be taught under less dire circumstances.

It is best if the family can help with both. The rising generation can be taught the value of work, and the family can help buffer against life's everyday bruises to uplift their children to heights the parents were unable to reach. Sadly we're in a decline cycle where children are unlikely to reach the same levels their parents had, but we can still try.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[phantomfive]

I want affordable housing for everyone, but I don't want the value of my house to go down.

Re:Thank your parrents

[tquasar]

I've given thousands to my sons, I would rather see them spend or save it as they wish. Son Bryan wants to buy a house but a two bedroom shack in south California costs $450,000 USD. My other son went to Europe for three weeks to meet a friend. I love to hear him say " When I was in Spain...."

So after reading all the responses...

[sycodon]

...I'm pretty sure that there are many Slashdotters with crappy parents and they intend to be crappy to their kids too.

Really, what kind of asshole parent doesn't want their children to succeed and won't give them a leg up on that?

Actually no, that's not going to help

[rsilvergun]

thanks to our medical system their parents are going to be broke leaving nothing but medical debt and a "reverse" mortgage that means even their house gets claimed by debtors when they die.

Re:Actually no, that's not going to help

[Tesen]

thanks to our medical system their parents are going to be broke leaving nothing but medical debt and a "reverse" mortgage that means even their house gets claimed by debtors when they die.

It's called, "inherited debt." Check out the term, "filial responsibility".

Re:Thank your parrents

[ghoul]

Who am I to decide the futures of other people's children? We dont want a nanny state. If parents cannot give a leg up to their children what is the motivation to do well in life?

That's not true for most people

[rsilvergun]

What you saying sounds nice but it's just not true in practice. We had strong family unites for thousands of years and abject poverty for all but a few kings.

Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s. They slow down, make more mistakes and generally just aren't as productive. By then they're spending what little energy they have keeping themselves alive, not paying their kids mortgages. Yes, there are exceptions. You and your family are probably one of them. But they're exceptions. By the time I'm 50 I'm going to be basically worthless to my kid like my Dad and mom were to me and their dad and mom where to them.

No, it's not family that fought a successful battle against poverty. It's a) war reducing unnecessary population b) technology (especially food growing) allowing us to feed more people and c) government taking an active and positive role in the economy to prevent things like the dust bowls of the 30s. Family doesn't hurt, but don't say it'll stop or even slow poverty. You've got 5 thousand years of recorded history proving you wrong.

Not true

[rsilvergun]

the cost hasn't gone up. We pulled federal funding during the Clinton era. I was in college then and the college newspapers were all talking about it. Bush continued to pull funding and Obama did (or could do) nothing to restore it. College has always been expensive as fuck. We used to hide that by taxing the rich to pay for the working class' education. In the 90s and 2000s we stopped doing that.

I call bullshit

[rsilvergun]

Unless you're independently wealthy you went to a public school on public roads grades K-12. If you're in your 40s you went to a University that was heavily subsidized by tax payers to hide the true cost of your education (unless you're rich or one of those rare geniuses who gets a full ride to a private U like Harvard, in which case what the hell are you doing wasting your time on /.?).

You road the benefits bandwagon with the rest of us. It was just cleverly disguised as a car you paid for so you wouldn't get all uppity about accepting the help you need. We do the same thing with social security. Remember Ayn Rand? She lived out her old age on it.

i know what they can buy

[FudRucker]

i bet they can get a really good cardboard box for a 1000 dollars

Maths are hard

[rsilvergun]

If you trade your old phone in you get a new one every year for $500. I'm not going to talk about the service fees because, like cars, we've made cell phones a necessity. If you don't have one you're marked as weird and will have doors closed to you.

Now, $500/yr sounds like a lot if you can't do math. Lets say our Hypothetical Millennial buys a $100 phone and replaces it every 2 years ( I own cheap phones, they start getting crashy and failing in about 2 years). They're saving $450/year now. They need $40k for a down payment on a 'starter' home in a city with a job market (it's not good living in a place where I can buy a house for $40k if I can't get a job to pay for it). 40,000/$450 = 88 years.

Nows the part where you point out their coffee is $5 bucks a day or about $1800/yr. With our savings from our cell phone that's just 17 years to get our starter home. Of course, there's this little thing called inflation and this other little thing called Wage Stagnation. So in 17 years our plucky Millennial's savings are worth about 3/4 what they were (I'm being _very_ charitable here with my math).

The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money. Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys. Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...

Re:Maths are hard

[Cederic]

The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money

The working class can not sensibly be summarised as having a single attitude to money. My grandparents were thrifty and stayed out of debt. My parents managed it, some of their siblings did not. I managed it, my sister wouldn't know a fucking savings account if you opened it for her and paid your own salary in.

One of my cousins had a job once. She didn't like it, hasn't worked since, has no intention of ever working again. Another cousin works two jobs covering 80 hours a week to keep his family fed and sheltered.

Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys.

In four months time I'm going to be jobless. I'm also going to reduce my monthly outgoings to a third of their current level, by cutting out the meals out, the coffee shops, the premium TV service, the random shit I buy from Amazon.

Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...

Turns out I'm better at maths than you. But I don't look down on 'Millenials'. I don't even look down on people that can't properly manage their finances, because on average people are quite stupid.

I do look down on fuckwits bleating on about "It's all the Boomer's fault. Generation X let us down. I must have the iPhone 9, I couldn't possibly live without it"

Take some fucking responsibility for your own life for once.

Re:Maths are hard

[drinkypoo]

I do look down on fuckwits bleating on about "It's all the Boomer's fault. Generation X let us down. I must have the iPhone 9, I couldn't possibly live without it"

Why don't you want a society healthy enough for everyone to have a smartphone? Why don't you want that to be a reasonable demand? The Boomers did shit on everything. Gen X did fail to change anything.

Re:Maths are hard

[Cederic]

Sure, I'd love everybody to have everything they could possibly need.

Reality is that 'the West' rapidly advanced their own quality of life by exploiting other parts of the world. Now the rest of the world wants to catch up and it means that millenials now need to compare their quality of life with their global peers, not their elders.

I don't see many smart phones in Africa.

The challenge is that the world lacks the resources to give everybody a Denver lifestyle. If millenials want this shit they're going to have to work for it, compete for it and accept that it's not going to be easy.

Blaming previous generations? Sure, if you're a lazy entitled cunt.

Re:Maths are hard

[djinn6]

I don't even look down on people that can't properly manage their finances, because on average people are quite stupid.

You can blame the education system for that. Personal finances is seldom taught in high school.

Re:Maths are hard

[Whorhay]

There is a big difference between having a smart phone and having the newest version of the make with the highest profit margin in the industry. And really people by and large don't need smartphones, it's debatable enough whether or not they even need cell phones.

As others have pointed out though the whole blame game over one generation screwing another is tired and pointless. If you want to fix things by all means run for office, start a lobbying group, go carry a sign in a protest. Just don't be surprised when half the people or more, that support you come from one of those generations that you gleefully deride.

Prices don't have to fall

[rsilvergun]

a small group of billionaires owns just about everything. Prices didn't fall after 2008. Also, we're not building. The government usually puts money into infrastructure so that builders can do the cheap work of throwing up a frame and some spackle and make tons of money. After 30 years of tax cuts the government isn't doing that anymore.

We're heading for dystopia. It's not going to just correct itself. Take action now.

Inflation for essentials is around 5%

[rsilvergun]

That's food, shelter, healthcare, education, transportation. Wages are going up around 2%. Youngungs can't stay around because they're constantly on the move for more money to stay ahead of inflation. Most fail, some succeed. We celebrate the ones that succeed and ignore the ones that fail...

Re:Thank your parrents

[Pfhorrest]

My grandparents were rich. My parents are both rapidly on their way to dying in the street by "retirement age". And I'm 10 years behind them in life. Despite being an order of magnitude or two further ahead than most of my generation, according to articles like this. We are all completely fucked unless something is done about it.

Mod Parrent Up

[rsilvergun]

+5 isn't enough. The problem with the world is that it takes both hard work _and_ luck to succeed. The people who do almost immediately forget that.

Re:Thank your parrents

[gravewax]

Personally I would say the opposite. You don't encourage children to excel and improve by handing them something on a platter, you instill good practises like working hard, saving, good money management etc. My parents were very successful, they gave me nothing to start off with except a good impression of what dedication, hardwork and good money practises can provide. I had my first house by age 24, I do the same for my children.

Troubling

[XSportSeeker]

I find these oversimplistic generalizations that do not take changes in politics, culture, cost of health and education, among several other factors just to bunch in an entirely diverse category of the population in a homogeneous mass extremely troubling and extremely disingenuous.

It's just food for trolls of the "everything was good back when everything was worse" kind. I'm not a "millennial" myself, but analysis like these reeks of prejudice. More problematic is that it ends up masking real problems for the sake of scapegoating. It only helps spread the holier than thou attitude some people already mount on.

Back when I was your age I had 5 jobs, lived on a grass and water diet and the occasional rat I killed, skinned and cooked myself, and I still saved enough to buy my mansion in the suburbs... omg, who the fuck cares.

Re:Thank your parrents

[bob4u2c]

I knew one who beat his kids for anything grade less than an A. Both kids are now successful engineers.

Wait a second, is the lesson here that I need to beat my kids?

Re:Thank your parrents

[Dr_Barnowl]

The government in the UK has promised to help their motivation and spirit by putting a lien on their parents house to pay for any social care they require. Go UK!

Two causes seem likely

[See Attached]

First - Cost of education.. every kid who sought to get an education is digging out from under mountains of debt. Second - Savings are not important when you are fascinated (and expect to be part of ) a post apocalyptic dystopia. Hollywood has been putting out movies that make the future predictably awful. How about we make saving and planning and being prepared both possible and desirable?

Good Savers?

[dlingman]

68% have less than a thousand bucks saved. But according to the article most of them are good savers. They just save for short term things, instead of long term. Yet 80% say they want to buy a house.

Who the heck edits these dumb articles?

Re:Thank your parrents

[geek]

And reverse mortgages will fuck them even harder.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[jader3rd]

Most politicians say they want affordable housing, but when we started to get it during the so-called "crisis" of 2008, all everybody did was bitch.

It politicians really wanted affordable housing they'd get rid of the mortgage interest tax break. That would bring housing prices more in line with what the market could actually bare.

Other way around

[Solandri]

Universities were able to extract more money from students because of loans, and used that money to hire more administrators who did not help improve student performance in any way. That's why cost has gone up - because they had more money to throw around, they hired more paper pushers who don't actually help with anything. Not the other way around as you seem to think. If that one link isn't enough to convince you, take your pick.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[Cederic]

If you're a millenial, retirement is at least 30-35 years away

Shit, I'm mid-point Gen X and I'm still 30 years away from retirement.

Pensions aren't worth what they used to be and the state isn't handing them out any more.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[Cederic]

Shit, you really don't know how to get a return on your investment.

Even at just 3% compound you'd have $211k. The FTSE100 index alone has averaged substantially better than that in the past 45 years.

If you have a job, get a plan.

[ishmaelflood]

I assume you have a job. This is how I did it: no $5 coffees or brunches or random workplace social functions. Go out once or twice a week in the evening. Cook a lot for your friends rather than seeing them down the pub. Live in a small flat. Drive a nasty car. I did that for 6 years and had enough money saved to buy my first house for cash. It was functional, but not attractive, in a suburb with a less than snobby reputation (not the worst part of town but downmarket). When I moved in I carried on living in more or less the same fashion, maintained the house myself but did not improve it. Ten years later I had saved/invested enough to have it knocked down, and a new one built in its placed. Meanwhile the suburb had gone up in reputation and so I had not over capitalised..

I would agree that the savings you can make from a frugal lifestyle are smaller in the USA as you don't suffer from stupid Australian prices Just in case I sound like it was a prison sentence my personal extravagance is travel, I always went overseas every couple of years. I also worked on a racing team (unpaid) which has a way of absorbing any amount of free time. Even now i have a spreadsheet of income and expenses, and if I can't pay cash for something then I don't buy it. My one exception to that is a margin loan for my shares which I now occasionally use as a short term buffer, but that nearly cost me all my savings,twice, so I'm glad I wasn't using it early on.

If you haven't got a job yes you are fucked.Incidentally I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or paid for stuff.

Re:If you have a job, get a plan.

[Pfhorrest]

I make more than 75% of Americans and save 1/3 of my income toward future housing and I'm still probably fucked, but thanks for trying anyway.

Re: If you have a job, get a plan.

[Pfhorrest]

Half of Americans make around $25k or less. Mean is around $50k or so, and falls around the 75th percentile. You're probably thinking household income which is about twice personal income because the median household is about two people. I am not two people. And housing is stupidly fucking expensive. Almost everyone is completely fucked. I am just barely maybe not fucked eventually.

Re: If you have a job, get a plan.

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit you are a whiny pussy.

I was born into abject poverty. I've worked in food service my entire life. I saved and didn't buy stupid shit I didn't need. I've never made more than $45k, and yet I'll be retiring at 48 with a paid off house, car, and boat.

You have earned more than double what I have, yet are crying about not having a chance? Fuck you. That's only possible if you squandered it frivolously.. Petulant victim. It's your fault.

Re: If you have a job, get a plan.

[Pfhorrest]

You probably live somewhere ridiculously cheap. There is no other way that is true. In any case, $45k is almost twice the median income and not far from the 75th percentile yourself. You are not poor, you whiney baby. Also did you not see the part where I save a third of my income? I am not frivilous. Housing is just stupidly fucking expensive, you self righteous insensitive prick.

Re: If you have a job, get a plan.

[Pfhorrest]

Tell that to the 225 million people who make less than me. Them first.

Re: If you have a job, get a plan.

[Pfhorrest]

Household income figures are around twice personal income figures because the average household is about two people. The preceding numbers are personal income figures because we're talking about just one person. All your numbers are doubled because you're looking at households instead.

Re: If you have a job, get a plan.

[Pfhorrest]

Also, I explicitly said you're probably thinking household instead of personal income THREE REPLIES AGO. Maybe learn to read comprehensively.

Good for you

[ishmaelflood]

That's a pretty impressive savings rate. A bit of history. A friend of mine lived in rented accommodation, all his working life. His theory was that his savings were going up faster than house prices were going up. He was right, sort of, and they were able to retire five years sooner than me. (he's a lot better at investing and was paid far more than me). But they still have the hassle of landlords, and anything they do in the garden is short term.

On the other hand I bought a house early on and now have another as a weekender. I think overall he's better off financially and has more free time, I spend my spare time thinking about gutters and solar panels and vegetable patches.

Re:Thank your parrents

[_Sharp'r_]

Most Americans are in both the top _and_ the bottom quintile of income over the course of their life.

There's tons of mobility between income ranges. Pretty much anyone who is willing to work hard and not at a disabling level of stupidity can become at least upper-middle-class over time. 73% of Americans spend time in the top 20% of income earners.

Bit whiiny

[ishmaelflood]

I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or bought me stuff. They did bring me up to be self reliant and independent. So why don't you try that?

Oh for fucks sake

[ishmaelflood]

"Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s" I'm 56, recovering from cancer, working three days a week, I'm paid a lot in a safety critical job and I do well from my investments. Absent the worst case scenario I'm good for another 5 years of productive life. Yes, I'd love to be thirty again. Yes I'd love to have only one medical issue at a time. But... them's the breaks.I'm certainly not basically useless.

One word

[sproketboy]

FAIL

Ha got it in one

[ishmaelflood]

My first house was frankly a bit nasty. The children seem to think their first house should be like the one I live in now, in a nice part of town. They drive shiny cars. I drove a Toyota Corona for 12 years. In fact the /unemployed/ daughter in law seems to think their first house should be BETTER than the one her parents live in.

Fuck i'm going to laugh when I die and she discovers she's getting $10000 and a big fuck off from me.She's expecting a house.

The other one's OK, even with a newborn baby she does part time work. Her bf built a house that is bright and shiny and not well made in a new suburb, which is probably a good long term plan..They do have $5 coffees and $20 brunces and shiny cars, so I don't exactly think they are on struggle street, despite the whingeing.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[_Sharp'r_]

"A million dollars only gets you a tiny studio here, because the demand to live here is so incredibly high and land is _artificially_ limited."

There, fixed that for you. :)

There is as much physical land available to build in SF as there is in the Phoenix Metro area (the tribal lands surrounding PHX constrain building in a similar way as the water does around SF), but in PHX if you want to build something higher density, or on existing land, you can, but in SF you legally can't without getting all the neighbors (who already own their property and thus don't want to see property prices go down, ever) to agree.

As a result, one has super-high housing costs and the other one doesn't. The system is literally designed that way.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[_Sharp'r_]

The price of the median home has increased, even adjusted for inflation. That's true. What you're missing is why that's true. Because people have been able to buy them and wanted them, houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.

So yeah, if you want to buy the "same" house as they bought in 1970, you'll pay way less now adjusted for inflation than they did at that point in time, but nobody wants that size/cheap of house anymore because they've been able to afford nicer ones. Even if you just want the same size house, but with all the new amenities, it's still less expensive per sq. ft. now, $109 vs. $118 in 1970, inflation adjusted.

This complaint is like saying food costs for Billionaires are much higher than those for welfare recipients. It doesn't take into account what's actually being purchased.

Re:Thank your parrents

[Razed By TV]

Right, they came over unencumbered, verses inheriting a family already mired in poverty.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

...houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.

Whilst I can find articles to see where you got this idea from, this doesn't quite pass the smell test. This is true only for new homes (i.e. the well off to construct new dwellings) and if you include established homes and the number of children per adult this picture changes.

Here is a page showing the trend of less people per household in the US over time. It may seem like there has been an improvement in living space per person (again check for all residences and not new ones in your stats), but to me it just means that adults are sharing space in the cities that don't really want to and can't bring up kids like they could in the past for financial reasons.

Re:Thank your parrents

[vlad30]

No they saw something better and wanted it bad enough to do something about. The same as the one kid in a poor family who sees his only way out is to escape the family holding them down. It can be done they have to be willing to do it

Re:Thank your parrents

[Anonymous Coward]

"In other words, you're willing to sacrifice people's futures because they had unlucky or unwise parents?"

You are being an idiot. Their PARENTS sacrificed their children future, not the GP. And even THAT is a stretch. I had a crappy up-bringing. Both parents were alcoholics. Siblings became drug addicts. Poverty followed them -- not me.

I finished high school, went to community college then 4 year. It took me 7 years for a 4-year degree because I was WORKING while going to school. I didn't want to be in massive debt when I finished. It worked. I graduated debt free.

With regards to luck -- providing you follow a few rules, you will never (at least not for very long) live in poverty:

Finish High School
Finish College
Don't have a kid before finishing school
Don't have a kid before marriage

Follow those simple rules and you will rarely, if ever, find yourself in poverty.

capitalism is working!

[Reverend Green]

Soon we'll all be destitute and precariously housed. Cool, right? Now if only we could turn it up a little a more and get some mass starvation. The "free" market demands it!

Re:House? What about retirement?

[fermion]

This is my interpretation of the data. The living space in houses over the past 100 years of so has double from an average of under 1000 square feet in 1900 to 2000 square feet today. Over the past 50 years the living space has increased by a third. The 'living space per person has doubled' figures comes from the fact that the average number of people living a household has also shrunk, causes the average living space to double.

Furthermore, the inputs to the cost of a house that will automatically increase as the area of the house increases only make up about 40% of the total costs. So a third increase will at the most increase the costs by 15%.

Much of that cost, arguably, should be offset by efficiency in home building. For example, although building times vary widely from year to year, for the past 40 years it has taken 6 months to complete a single family home. The average 500 square foot increase in size has not significantly increased the time to build the house. In addition, lot costs are 20% of the total costs of the house. In my area, 100 years ago even a modest house sat on 4,000 square feet of land. In the 1950's, that was down to 3,000 square feet. Most houses I have seen built lately sit on less than 2,000 square feet. No one wants big yard, just big enough not build their 4,000 square foot three story townhouse. That, in itself, probably cuts the cost down at least 5% of the 15% increase due to the bigger house.

Then there is the 'nicer part' For the outside of the house, those costs are about 10% of the house. As we said, the outside tends to be smaller, so it can be much nicer at the same costs. The inside of the house is about 20% of the costs. Again, efficiency gains should be able to make the inside much nicer without significantly increasing the costs.

As far as your billionaire food bill comment, I will simply say this. When I was kid, though i had some money, I could hardly afford a bag of chips pr fast food. Now, anyone but the poorest kid has a dollar for a bag of chips of $3 for a happy meal. To put in other terms, my current TV has 4 times the area of the TV we had when I was a kid, and it is color as well, yet it costs less.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[TheRaven64]

The problem is the rate of change. If house prices drop significantly, then you have people with negative equity and so they can't easily relocate for a job, can't remortgage (so may be stuck with very bad terms on a variable rate mortgage), and so on. If property prices go up too much, then the income needed to save for a deposit goes up a lot as well. Ideally, house price inflation, retail price index inflation, and wage inflation would all be the same. Unfortunately, each one of these is smaller than the previous one currently and that leaves you with a situation where owning property is more lucrative than working.

Re: Thank your parrents

[Nuklearwanze]

Non-american here (from Austria). Isn't it a crime to beat your kids in the US, too. Here beating children is a SERIOUS offense - and rightly so. And i'm not seeing us doing so badly on an economic and social level. It's usually a better idea to spur children's will to get better education by making them curious - not afraid...

Is this really that much of a problem in the US?

[Qbertino]

This is a serious question. As somebody who lives in Germany where everything that can be regulated is regulated - and I mean *everything* - building my own home is a massive hassle and something of a burocratic endeavour on top of the work needed to do the actual building. We have rules for the angle of roofs - they aren't allowed to diverge off certain angles as not to disturb the overall appearance of settlements (no joke!).

But my understanding of the US is that you can go out into the countryside, buy a few acres of land for what basically amounts to a handful of bucks, get one or two shipping containters, plant them in the middle of said property and call it a home and then slowly start building away, cutting away windows, laying floors growing your garden and no "Bauamt" (Building Authority) will come bugging you with regulations about fire-safety, wether the fire-extinguisher is hanging at the correct position or sanitary conditions are up to modern regulations or if the containers fit the general regulated aestetics of the area.

AFAICT from across the pond building your own microhome in the US amounts to simply getting off your lazy ass, start doing it and having some patience as you wittle away and a chain of projects to build it. This is next to impossible in Germany, if you don't want to enter a legal gray area with some risks attached - which some people do.

Am I getting something wrong here? Please enlighten. How easy is it to build your own home in the US, just the way you like it with no authorities coming to bug you with details on how you are alowed to do it?

Re:Thank your parrents

[allcoolnameswheretak]

This is how people you fight poverty. Maintain the family unit, help your children to become more successful than yourself.

The problem is that the newer generations always have it harder and harder to build a fortune. Taxes on everything only continue to rise, at least in Europe. Bracket creep makes current middle incomes being taxed like high incomes 40 years ago. Income from investments that you made with your savings from your salary which was already taxed are taxed again. Previous generations had the luxury of only paying taxes on their income once.

Hell, in the 50's to 70's the first thing you did in Spain before getting married, was buying a house or flat, almost everybody could afford one even with a middle income. Now it's almost prohibitive to own anything. You get the feeling the truly rich people and the politicians who are sucking up to them want everyone else to stay down. Getting wealthy not allowed! Here's some more taxes for you!

Re:Thank your parrents

[allcoolnameswheretak]

My parents helped me with my first down payment. I will be helping my kids.

You're lucky to have parents who are organized and financially savvy. Not everyone is so lucky.
My stepfather took a huge loan and bought himself a Mercedes and rented a huge flat as soon as he had a job. Had been caught in the dept spiral since. He simply never cared or thought about money. Anyhow, he separated from my mom when I went to college. I payed for everything myself by working part-time jobs through all my years as a university student.
With money and savings, I had to start from scratch and be self-reliant.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[drinkypoo]

You can blame the banks, and they bear some of the blame but not all of it.

Right, you can also blame the politicians who bailed them out in exchange for nothing. But mostly you should blame the banks. They wrote a bunch of mortgages they knew would fail so that they could foreclose on a bunch of properties and then sit on them. The banks are refusing to sell the property for what the market will bear because if they do that, they have to admit that home values are much much lower than they claim, and then their valuations (which are based in large part upon that ill-gotten property) will plummet. In addition, the banks get a piece of almost every new home built in the form of financing, both during construction and then again when it is purchased. Keeping an unnaturally high rate of turnover in the housing market is profitable for the banks. And since We The People paid for those houses they refuse to sell for market value, they're not losing any money by holding them vacant until people trash them and steal all the metals and fixtures.

There is, IMHO, no *technical* barrier to supplying a house for less than $100k almost everywhere in the USA.

No, the barriers are all legal and/or political. It costs literally more in permit costs and mandatory connection fees to build a single bedroom home in Lake County, CA than it does to buy the materials, so basically the only thing that you can reasonably build any more is a housing development or similar (like a time share complex.) The problem there is that every one of those which has been built in the last decade has been a scam based on selling shit shacks to the stupid. For example, inadequate site survey. One home in a local development got literally ripped in half by the land settling.

Re:Thank your parrents

[mjwx]

Never mind all the Asian boat people from the 70's who came with only rags. I knew one who beat his kids for anything grade less than an A. Both kids are now successful engineers.

For an Asian kid, there are only four career options:
1. Doctor.
2. Lawyer.
3. Engineer.
4. Disgrace to the family.

Re:Is this really that much of a problem in the US

[Osgeld]

you just cant plop a box down and start living in it, we have pretty strict building codes

and that land that cost a few bucks is typically hundreds of miles away from anything, meaning water, power, sewer etc ... you can do it but it doesn't appeal to many people

Re: Thank your parrents

[sycodon]

And you will teach your kids not to do that and help them out.

Just because he was a Fail doesn't mean you have to be

Re:Thank your parrents

[Patent Lover]

Refugees are given plenty of help from the government and charitable organizations. Not so much blacks.

Phone costs more than downpayment!

[RuffMasterD]

How much did you say smart phones cost in the US? Let me see, US median house sales price as of April 30 2017 = $244,800. Therefore ($244,800 - $10,000 down payment) / 20 phones = $11,740 per phone. Holy shit that's expensive.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[MorePower]

I've heard ideas like this a lot recently, but it's bullshit. I could never afford the same actual house that my parents owned 30 years ago, despite the fact that the structure is now 30 years older than when I lived there.
According to Zillow, that home has 1500 square feet, and it's located on a .25 acre lot. Such luxury is well beyond what I, someone who barely makes six figures, could possibly afford. Instead i limp along, struggling to afford a 1000 square foot townhouse with no land in a much less desirable neighborhood than where that house we had when I was a teenager is.

It's not what you earn - it's what you have left

[erp_consultant]

We live in a society where status and instant gratification are paramount. I'm not just picking on Millenials here - because I see this kind of behavior from all age groups. In the old days, people would save up for things. If you saw someone driving a Mercedes that was a real achievement. Today, any schmuck willing for fork over $400-500 a month can drive one.

For many people it's more important to LOOK rich than to BE rich. Looking rich is easy. You just go out and lease cars you can't really afford and put everything else on revolving credit. Instant status. Here's the problem: all your money is tied up in rapidly depreciating "assets" (and I use that term very loosely). Building wealth requires discipline and sacrifice. Unless you inherit money or win the lottery there is no shortcut. If you want to own a home then you have to sacrifice in the short term in order to save enough money for the down payment. That's the hard part. Once you get enough for the down payment, paying the mortgage is just like cutting a rent check except that you're paying yourself instead of the landlord.

But it's really hard to do since there are so many traps set up that suck wealth away from you without you realizing it. Leasing cars is one of them. If you have a business and can write off the cost of the lease then leasing a new car makes financial sense. Otherwise, get a 3 year old car for about half the price and buy it don't rent, I mean lease, it. And hang on to it for at least 5 years. That alone will probably put about $15,000 dollars in your pocket at the end of the 5 years.

The other thing is take a close look at how you spend your money on non-essential items. Do you really need 300 channels and 1 Gigabit internet service? Is it absolutely necessary to have the newest iPhone every 2 years? Is it practical to spend $300 on a pair of sneakers? Expensive vacations every year? Eating out a restaurants 3-4 times a week?

Now I'm not suggesting that we should live like hermits and drive rusty, broken down, unsafe vehicles. All I'm suggesting is a little restraint. Drive a Ford instead of a Mercedes. Eat out once or twice a week instead of every night. Pass on the Air Jordans. Those kinds of small sacrifices will enable you to save your money and buy a home. Don't think rich. Be rich.

Re: Thank your parrents

[PlaynBass]

The beatings will continue until morale improves. Or is it: The beatings will continue until morals improve. Damn, I should know this stuff...

Re: Housing is so expensive

[PlaynBass]

Housing is so expensive because the developers & builders make more money wasting resources by building huge, energy wasting "palaces" that only the rich or obsessively over-leveraged can afford. HOAs exacerbate the problem with wasteful regulations for the sake of boosting property values. The average person, especially millennials, have nothing to buy if they could, because the so-called marketplace does not serve them. The marketplace only serves the wealthy and those concerned with amassing wealth. It does not solve society's problems.

Re: Thank your parrents

[ArmoredDragon]

Or, I understand economics and I know how to leverage what I have.

B.S.

[rsilvergun]

every High School in America has a mandatory econ 101 class that covers personal finances. It also indoctrinates kids into what can only be called the Cult of Capitalism. Seriously, when I was in school we were taught Capitalism & the Free Market like it as a religion. No competing theories, not even a discussion of how our government intervenes to keep the whole thing from shitting the bed every 10 years.

Re:B.S.

[djinn6]

every High School in America has a mandatory econ 101 class that covers personal finances.

Mine didn't, and I went to of the top tier schools in the US.

Re:B.S.

[Quirkz]

I had an economics class, but it had absolutely nothing about personal finance in it.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[_Sharp'r_]

Just a guess, but you must live in the Bay Area or NY or someplace people have elected folks to prevent growth.

Try looking at the rest of the country.

Your grandparents earned more

[rsilvergun]

adjusted for inflation. Assuming you're younger than 50 that is.

Re:Your grandparents earned more

[Cederic]

One grandparent didn't work. With 8 kids, she was kind of busy.
One was a cook in a cheap restaurant.
One worked in a bakery, then drove a bus.
Don't know what the other one did; he was retired then died.

They didn't get out of work benefits, they didn't get tax credits, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have a telephone or a television for a long time.

They did get council housing. My mother's parents lived in the same house throughout her whole life though, they couldn't afford to do anything else.

Do cooks and bus drivers get paid less now, adjusted for inflation? I have no idea. I do know they have a substantially higher quality of life with far greater access to information, entertainment, education, travel and social mobility.

Don't go telling me my grandparents had it easy. Economics aside, one of them lost an eye during World War II and one of them liberated Bergen Belsen. They literally had to fight for a living and coped with it in a way today's youth really should be striving to match.

Re:Your grandparents earned more

[rsilvergun]

a. Restaurants are cheaper than cooking now. Well, the kind of cheap crap ones Millennials eat at are.

b. The fact that it was even possible for your grandparents to raise 8 kids on 1 blue collar income doesn't strike you as odd? Go read Liz Warren's "The Two Income Trap". Pirate it if you have to.

c. "Council Housing" tells me you're British (or there abouts). Meaning Single Payer medicine.

d. Hell yes cooks & bus drivers make a _lot_ less. Buddy of mine is a bus driver. His Mari age fell apart because he couldn't make ends meet.

e. That's the trouble, your grandparents _didn't_ have it easy. We live in a horrible world where luck, hardwork _and_ a shitload of help is needed to succeed. When they came back from the war they felt they were owed something. And they were. But not because they fought a war (which was mostly the ruling class trying to grab money and power from other members of the same class and using your Granddad as a pawn). They're owned something because they're human. If you rely on any other justification for being owed a good life somebody is gonna take it away from you sooner or later. Because at the end of the day the only thing we really have is our humanity.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[istartedi]

You're in Lake County? Small world. You must be referring to that development over by the hospital in Lakeport. And yeah, Lake County needs housing to replace what was lost by the fires; but not that kind of housing.

you are what you eat

[nten]

Why? Wouldn't things be better if you helped kill and eat the fuckers who are taking more than one chair? Bourgeoisie tastes like veal I bet, but with more prozac and Viagra in the marbling.

Re:you are what you eat

[Opportunist]

Could I just kill? I have a rather selective stomach.

Re:House? What about retirement?

[MorePower]

Nope, Southern California here. Plenty of building and development going on all the time. Still can't afford the house I lived in as a teenager (which was also in Southern California).

Re:Thank your parrents

[HornWumpus]

I'm sure the Brits have the equivalent of family trusts. Nobody that plans, pays inheritance taxes.

Programming and learning

[Tenebrousedge]

I'm a self-taught programmer, or at least working towards being one. I think that it's probably descriptive if I say that I need to reread GoF, and I need to make a serious attempt on Knuth at some point. To my mind, programming education is insane. If you want to be a good programmer, you have to make that an explicit goal, and probably prioritize that above getting real work done unless you're very lucky. Most people seem to enjoy making things other than programming their hobby, and perhaps even most programmers. It's not necessarily everyone's idea of a fun Sunday to teach oneself about trie structures or binary searches, and it's easy to not use those things in one's day-to-day coding. Conversely, most employers are unwilling or uninterested in teaching people new programming skills, and while universities tend to provide a decent set of fundamentals with which to build a knowledge of programming, having plunked one's buns in a seat for four years says nothing about one's ability to learn programming independently.

Generally, I tend to take the long view, that if it takes 10,000 hours of actively trying to be better at something and a good helping of native talent to get there, then probably most people are never going to do so, and it's best to learn to live with that. However, to the degree to which there is an issue with programmers not knowing their trade, I think I would have to put the first blame for that on the industry rather than the individual.

Found the DeVry MBA

[Hognoxious]

Debtors? LOL.

Re: Thank your parrents

[ArmoredDragon]

You aren't leveraging what you have if you're sitting on 63k in a future down payment. Do you even know what "leverage" means in this context?

I'm talking about leveraging my knowledge, idiot. And that $63k I have started from zero.

Re:Most politicans say they want affordable housin

[DarthVain]

You forgot a big one. Real Estate agents, who in many places have a monopoly or at very least a large advantage over the entire housing market, both yours and they other guys, are both highly incentivised to make housing as expensive as possible, and to keep people buying and selling as much as possible because they each make about 3% off whatever that value is during that transaction...

On a house that say costs 100,000 that is only about 3k, however on a house that is 800,000 that is 24,000$ for that one transaction (x2 for both agents!), so there are a lot of real estate folks getting rich right now...

its sad

[norweeg]

how many boomers, or as I call them, old people will castigate us for what they perceive to be our wanton spending habits when the reality is that the only reason my husband and I could afford a home was because we graduated without student debt (him, scholarship, me, rich parents who paid 100% of my tuition). Of our friends and acquaintances in our peer group +/-5 our age, exactly 5 own homes, the rest just get by renting. Instead of blaming us because we like coffee and avocado toast, maybe step back and realize that the entire system has been stacked against us by your generation. If I didn't have loved ones who are boomers or older, I'd say I can't wait for you all to die so my generation will finally prosper.