Slashdot Mirror
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.'
I'm sure this is completely unrelated to the previous article about our booming gig economy
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
"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.
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.
Don't they just need to wait for their parents to die?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
You don't spend much time on Twitter, do you?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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....
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
and then move upstairs?
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.
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...
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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.)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You assume our parents own homes too.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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.
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.
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.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
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.
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.
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.
The CCC and WPA were pretty nice programs imho.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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".
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
$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)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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 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.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black