See! You’re not THAT poor. Just give it another few decades!
Partner and I are millinials, household income ~200K, one child, excellent credit, no debt. Partner’s standards are a tad high but I’m unusually spartan with some minor capital expenditures, so I feel we balance out.
I grew up middle class and on paper we put my parents to shame, nevertheless they built a huge house, had three kids, five cars, fed the family… while my partner and I struggle to find a home while paying for one kid.
Something doesn’t add up.
That said I do wonder if it would basically be impossible to top the boomers on wealth and cost of living. Think back before WWII and how hard was it on the average joe, probably a lot harder than we want to admit. The boomers mighta hit the jackpot and millennials are stuck basically with the expectation that we should do that well while also footing the bill for all of the “progress” they have made since the 60’s.
Don’t get me wrong, there has been real progress but there has been a lot of “progress” in the wrong directions as well, in some cases 180°. Millennials have been paying for it our whole lives, and I don’t think we are ever going to really come out ahead, we’ll bust our asses to break even but honestly I’m okay with that if it sets our children up to have a better life.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/
Prepare to get mad
That makes sense. I plugged in what I think my dad was making in 95 and it was quite a bit more than I’m making now. Explains the big house, kids, etc.
ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
Yeah i earn more than my parents combined for my entire childhood but guess what gobbled that shit right up.
The house i grew up in cost $20,000.
The one my husband and i bought cost $1,000,000.
Both 3 bedroom postwars in slightly dodgy neighbourhoods yaaay inflation
For the curious: $1,000AUD in 1980 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $5,125.00 today, an increase of $4,125.00 over 44 years. The Australian dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.78% per year between 1980 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 412.50%.
This means that today’s prices are 5.13 times as high as average prices since 1980, according to the Bureau of Statistics consumer price index. A dollar today only buys 19.512% of what it could buy back then.
The entire article is more than mildly infuriating. They’re interviewing the well connected and winners of the economic lottery. Furthermore there’s no mention at all of what that period of depressed earnings does to long term financial gains. With bias like this I don’t even trust their numbers for things like adults reporting they’re doing okay. Another day, another bullshit piece of economic propaganda.
Oh nice, you found 1 family that this is relevant for. Now call that family “all millennials”! Proper journalism right here.
Well, they did technically just say “millennials”.
They omitted the modifier “a tiny fraction of”, but that’s assumed
Strong disagree. When someone says “humans”, does that also imply “a tiny fraction of”? I think that this quantifier is very significant, and needs to be included. Otherwise it becomes misleading.
I’ve read the article. It goes into detail in the stats across the entire generation. It talks about the big rise in both median and average household wealth for millennials between 2019 and 2022. It also acknowledges that the gap between 20th percentile and 80th percentile for millennials has grown to the largest in history for any generation.
It’s the rise in house prices and the stock market. For millennials who already owned that stuff before the pandemic, and in a position to take advantage of the huge salary gains from the great resignation, the last 5 years have been a financial boon.
Alright, cool. That’s quite well and good, then.
Still though, is this perhaps how the article starts off? If so, it might still be a bit misleading for those who don’t read all the way through. Not everyone is as thorough as you. ❤️
Have to admit I am a millennial who signed up to buy an apartment just as the pandemic started and we had just had our first baby. It was a bit sweaty there for a second, but I was very fortunate to land a job that pays very well. But yeah, it was hard for a bit. Was out of work for 9 months during 2022. Got through some good games in my Steam library though! 🙃
Yeah it’s a somewhat standard reporting structure, of an intro paragraph about the stat, 4 paragraphs about a specific person’s journey from unemployed college grad living with parents and mowing lawns for extra cash to becoming a CFO in the span of 15 years, and then a longer description of what the stats show, then placement of those stats in context comparing to Gen X and Boomers, and important caveats in what the stats actually mean (unclear whether this makes millennials better off when they’re expected to face higher lifetime costs on housing and healthcare). Then it dives back into the anecdotes, including how most rich millennials perceive the fragility of their own financial position.
Here’s an archive.is link:
https://archive.is/Gr6qG
It’s also just math working. The older millennials should be millionaires or close to it in order to be on track for retirement. A 401k is going to make people look wealthier than a pension.
Titles accurate, I thought I’d have some stability by now when I got out of college
Yeah, because their parents are dying and leaving their kids an inheritance.
Generational wealth is a huge cancer on the system that isn’t talked about enough. You can’t fix wealth inequality with nepo-babies running around.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t get an inheritance when my dad died. I got a little run down house in a farm town and the balance of a workers comp settlement. There’s a big difference between that and people inheriting enough that they never have to work a day in their lives.
No it isn’t the same, but it is something. I’d sleep a lot better knowing I at least had a run down farmhouse on the way instead of working until I die to pay the rent.
The irony is that I only got that house because my parents divorced and I only got money because my dad was injured badly at work. His bad fortune was my good fortune. I would give it up in a heartbeat if it meant he didn’t have to go through that pain.
Y’all got an inheritance? All I got was a funeral bill.
my parents asked me for loans
:: cries in having poor parents ::
Ahhh they surely saved from not buying avocado on toast.
All they did was stop their once a week Starbucks and they became executives!
Stop it! The avocado toast shit is so old, my wife’s mom repeated it like it was a clever joke two years ago
Spoken like someone that’s a little too attached to their avocado toast.
Guilty as charged. I buy $4 avocados in the winter because I’m rich as fuck.
Not really. I buy them when they’re $1 or less, in season. I’ve never even made avocado toast for real. I cut them in half, score them, then squeeze lime juice on plus salt or Tajin. Scoop them with a spoon. So delicious.
Nice, that sounds delicious. I’m actually guilty of enjoying avocado toast every now and again. There is a “everything bagel” seasoning at Trader Joes that goes super well on top. The funny thing is I had no idea what avocado toast was or that it was a thing until boomers started bitching about it. Sounded good so I tried it lol
That everything bagel seasoning is the shit. Kinder’s is a brand I hadn’t seen until recently and their seasonings are awesome. Not full of sugar which I hate. They’re a bit pricy but they come in big-ass bottles
I’ve had some Kinder’s stuff. Most were really solid.
This is" true" for a (tiny) subset of the Australian population. I know that I straight up sacrificed my 20s to an engineering degree and fifo job and now, at 35 I have comparable material wealth to my dad when he was my age (who was a sheet metal worker in a major city). But even still, the tiny population who did what I did will never get another run at what should’ve been the best 15 years of their life.
I’m unconvinced that my decision was better than the ones my (much poorer) friends who now have families made…
As an American i know exactly what I did wrong to not make comparable money to a tradesman of my parents generation. See I should’ve become an engineer, but instead I became a female engineer, which apparently in my location poses wildly different employment opportunities
what you don’t want to be secretary at an engineering firm? why else would you get an engineering degree? ▔\▁((.′◔_′◔.))▁/▔
We seem to have followed a similar path, but I am quite satisfied. I do have a family though, so maybe that’s what does it….
It sucked making sacrifices in my 20’s, but looking at where I landed, I would not change it if I could. Would you?
Don’t get me wrong; We are nowhere close to rich, but we managed to buy a decent house and not having to wory about the price of groceries and the bills every month, and that’s all we really need.
Early 30’s for reference.
I’m not sure I could be happy if I hadn’t made the choices I made, poverty felt like a prison so I did what was necessary to set myself up. I played the hand I was dealt and I think I played it reasonably well, but if I was born in easier times I’d have definitely made different choices.
I don’t the insinuation that “millennials had the opportunity to achieve wealth like their parents” these type of articles make, it feels dismissive of the sacrificed youth and relationships.
Dear Mainstream Media: Does anyone but you believe your lies?
Guess I missed the memo
A lot of this is on paper. For example, if they’re calculating potential retirement age based on stock market returns then they may be in for a rude awakening if the longest bull run of all time (minus the covid disruption) ends. But what are the odds of that, right? Surely housing prices will also rise forever too.
Translation: Please no revolution.
Is this the beginning of the framing of “Look how good you have it. You don’t need to murder CEOs.”?
It was already happening. Plenty of people were insulting those complaining about the cost of living, saying things like “What do you mean? The economy is doing fine.” In Canada the finance minister called it a “vibecession”, implying it was all in our heads.
All these people are talking about asset prices while we talk about the cost of living.
I mean when you get down to it vibes are a major cause of many (usually smaller) recessions. Doesn’t mean he has to be a dick about it tho.
When we think cost of living we mostly think about rent and cost of food. The rich don’t pay rent and food is a tiny fraction of their budget, so obviously they don’t complain.
“Look how good everyone is doing. Oh, you’re not doing good? You must be lazy, pull up those boot straps!”
Trump is coming to power again, so the WSJ has to switch back to selling the idea that everything will be okay.
Maybe if we just go around shooting everyone whose better off that ourselves then one day we’ll all be equally poor and miserable.
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Wasn’t Thompson living in a different house than his wife and on the way to a divorce when he died? That’s not better off, that’s just richer.
My highschool civics teacher, who once told the class that everyone becomes more conservative with age and income, will be pinning this to the wall of the classroom.
I don’t understand this. The older I get, the more angry I get at the system and want to tear it down 🤔
He’s a boomer and his brother is a small business owner. Their only hardships have come from petty disputes with the township over signage. This same guy, without any irony, said that the only unions we still need anymore are teacher’s unions. Surprised that bootlicker didn’t include police unions.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you public schools teach liberalism. This happened while the science teachers would tiptoe around outright saying that climate change was real.
Cool now show my parents equivalent you know the person who left highschool, had 3 kids by 30 didn’t work till 50 and still hasa house, car retirement.
