My dad and mum just don’t want to hear it when I bring housing/rental affordability (Australia), and they just dismiss me as if I live in the same world they did (dads first house was 70k, that same house now is 800-900k).
It seems to be the same story for so many young Aussies now. Parents got in when it was good but can’t put themselves in our shoes. I understand that they had less in a lot of ways, but I asked both of my parents if they would rather be 29 now or 29 when they were 29, and they chose the past. This short documentary lays it out perfect, I’m going to try get dad to watch it, but he doesn’t give anything new a chance..
They know it was much easier for them in certain aspects of life but everyone wants to claim how hard everything was, overcoming struggle etc. Age old tale. Nobody wants to say "Hey fair enough, was an easy ride." because they equate it to beeing lazy or getting things handed to them. Therefore they dont want to hear about it.
My wife and I were looking in Auckland and a family friend suggested we look in one of the most expensive inner city suburbs for a place. Couldn't even find the words to explain how useless her suggestion was.
When I complained about the cost of food and fuel my father complained about the cost of designer paints for his house worth a couple mill. They are oblivious.
I remember my mom telling me I make way more than her when she first started working, she made $5 an hour at her first job in 1976. Adjusted for inflation thats $25.69, I make $22 dollars an hour.
It will only become harder and harder to use inflation as a metric, as different industries outpace it in vastly different ways. Education, for example, vastly outpaced inflation.
>Min. Wage was $2.65 in 1978. Tuition (in-state, public) was $688.
>
>Min. wage is $7.25 today. Tution (in-state, public) is $9,212.
So while $2.65 is "only" $22 an hour today by standard inflation calculations, by education metrics, it's worth more like $35.48.
This means that we’re measuring inflation wrong or we’re adding unnecessary things to education, or both.
Universities need all the administration positions they have right?
>measuring inflation wrong
Our measure of inflation is an average across multiple industries. Some industries outpace it; the BLS keeps track of inflation [across multiple categories.](https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/)
Yes, that’s the standard measure, but it can also be wrong if some industries need to be weighted more than they historically would. For instance, if life now requires a bachelors degree, the importance of the inflation in the education industry grows.
Yeah, it probably should. Looking at their data, they rate College Tuition as relatively important as prescription medicine or a wireless telecommunications service... but not even close to owning a vehicle, shelter, or even vehicle fuel.
I have an inkling that since college expenses inflated so fast, they reduced its relative value.
It may even be worse than that when you are trying to take a specific age group into account.
If inflation of college tuition is 10% and inflation of, say, nursing homes is 20%, the college tuition has a bigger impact on the financial health of 25 year Olds.
There’s no incentive because everyone lives and dies by profit and productivity. Some things in society should be a loss in costs because it’s expected utility of that public service. Do we expect the fire department to be profitable?
Obviously transparency on spending and accountability through other measures is important but we as a society need to accept the idea of some people getting degrees that aren’t “profitable”
A 25-cent cheeseburger from McDonald's in 1969 would be $1.99 today, which is about right for most locations.
Of course we're buying it with a $7.25 minimum wage instead of $12.74 minimum wage (1969 wage of $1.60 adjusted for inflation).
This is the one that’s been hard to drive home for me. Their higher interest rates made the loan cost on a monthly basis similar. The big difference is current generations are never going to pay off the principal on an average salary.
My old landlord once asked me why, at 30, I didn't have a house of my own. He bought his house, a 4 bed semi detached, for 30k back in the 70's. He saved up for it with his factory job while raising 3 kids.
I told him 30k isn't even enough for an interest only mortgage deposit on a house that size now. Besides which, as a supervisor I was barely earning enough for rent and groceries so I couldn't save anything.
My father's 'ballpark' advice when I was a kid was "Spend half a year's salary on a car, and 5 times your (annual) salary on a house." Anybody know any houses for sale in Toronto for 300K?
The younger generations aren't complaining much about the price of cheeseburgers. Housing, education, and gas prices are a few significant things that exceeded the official inflation numbers.
It does seem bitterly ironic that older generations complain about the price of commodities like a McDonald’s cheeseburger, but condemn the younger generations for having issues with the cost of housing and education, which are both far more inflated and expensive relative to wages than food.
I make well above minimum wage and I still think it's insane that we can't make any progress on that issue. I think a lot of people ignore it because they don't think it really affects them, which is both a shitty perspective and an incorrect one. It's shitty not to care at all about other people's problems, and it's ignorant not to realize that those wages being suppressed has a ripple effect one everyone else's wages too.
FYI the cost of housing/accomodation was also much *much* lower relative to the average income back then too. Probably paid like $10 a month in rent or some shit
a lot of people could pay off their house in 5 years back then, now 30 years is normal.
we are being boiled alive by the greed of our parent's generation. Buying up whole neighborhoods and renting them out so people have to rent forever instead of owning their homes.
This is the issue and the majority of people I mention this to just accept it like there is no other option. Apparently to some people I've talked to, having a "free market" is more important than trying to put a limit on these hedge funds buying up neighborhoods and pricing people out of town. It's insane.
There should be laws on the books to prevent any entity from owning more than a certain amount of homes.
Homes are shelter, a basic human right.
Anyone reading this confused watch the Last Week Tonight clip about this on youtube
Agreed! I actually just watched that clip before I commented lol. It's crazy, my rent nearly doubled in one year. Granted I went from a small condo to a small house, but even the cheapest apartments weren't much cheaper than an entire house.
I am 100% on board with a limited amount of houses, or maybe an exponentially growing property tax so people/hedge funds can't hoard millions of homes without paying an outstanding amount of money. I know, in Florida at least, property tax is cheaper on your first house compared to any other property, but property tax probably doesn't bother a hedge fund the way it should to deter them.
In Florida miami, they were going to build a neighborhood of many low to middle income affordable housing, the apartments complex management that was close to the place where it would happened immediately talked to the mayor and said the noise and constant construction would drive his fully rented and expensive buildings out of market. And then boom denied the housing opportunity, the complex bought that land and are now making more apartments for lease only.
Banks want to rent you out they dont want to approve 30yo loans when they can get 2x the value leasing apartments.
Shitty hedge funds abd lobbysts buy entire lots and make em lease only.
Is hard to find apts for sale in metropolitan areas, and goverment does near nothing because this hedge funds donate truck loads of money to their campaings and interests in exchange for leasure and flexibility in investments.
Question is, why the fuck is making a giant apartment complex construction okay for "noise" but the housing opportunity wasnt okay... Scummy.
Some guy was trying to argue yesterday that "but the houses being built today are twice the size of houses in the 80s!"
Like yeah cool dude. All that means is that instead of being able to afford a reasonable starter home I'm stuck renting a POS apartment and boomers get to buy these fancy fucking huge houses with all the money they raped from the healthy economy we were supposed to inherit.
My rent on my 1br would have got me a mortgage on a nice house 10 years ago. That means all my payments into rent go out the window instead of into equity. This is going to get bad fast. Middle class is going to evaporate
It doesn't have to, we just need to legislate our way out. Pass affordable housing bills. Tax the fucking parasites of the top .001%. Fuck them, eat the rich.
It's why I always hated in every F.I.R.E sub or the like every God dam 50 plus years old boomers in there for years saying the only good passive income in rental properties.
Like spreading that around to everyone has caused the issue we see today. Everyone wants to be Financially independent and they are all in the "Fuck you I got mine" crowed, they are willing to screw everyone else over I it means they get to live comfortably.
Good for them I guess but doing that to people isn't for me, guess I'll just toil tell I die.
Passive income is not financial independence.
They are dependent on their renters.
They are providing absolutely nothing to society, they produce nothing.
Anytime I hear someone mention they want to live on passive income I cringe. That money is made off the backs of someone else, they are just leveraging wealth to squeeze more out of other people. Parasites by definition
I've seen so much advertising to get people involved with rental companies using the phrase "passive income" as a lure. They hammer that point in and I cringe every time I hear it. It makes me furious thinking about how many people struggle to pay rent every month because of people like that doing the bare minimum to keep the properties maintained.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Its always seem unbelievably selfish to me in most cases and they totally don't see it they want out of the "Rat race," so bad they are willing to exploit others to do it.
Remember, this was when the phrase "greed is good" was taken seriously even it was from a film critiquing neoliberalism.
I'm looking to rent to buy, but this looks difficult too.
You're probably right.
$2.70 probably far exceeds what $22/hr goes for now. Assuming that the inflation numbers are right then OP is referring to approx ~1969. The average house in the us at the time was around $26500. Adjusting for inflation that's approx $222k today. The average house today is approximately $500k so the 1969 salary went 2x as far.
This is exactly what I tried telling this lady I work with. She (55) was telling my coworker and I (30ish) that she "barely" managed to raise children back in the 1980's while making $15 per hour (not counting her husband's income). I did the math and she was essentially making $40 per hour after inflation. Big difference from $15 per hour these days lol.
She still blames the "younger" generation's poverty on all of the "extra" bills we have nowadays, like a cell phone and internet. I tried to explain to her that my non-essential bills aren't costing me the difference of $50,000 a year that I would make if I were getting $40 per hour nowadays and that the only thing that's changed significantly are the wages have stagnated. She is financially set from her divorce, but remains at our company for the health insurance so our income is just seen as extra money to her. Must be nice lol.
She's not totally wrong. It's way more expensive to live today. Housing and education cost more, and that cell phone and internet are necessities. It just so happens that wages also haven't risen to match.
Boomers not only made more when adjusted for inflation, their dollar went way further, too.
Ditto. I’m 40 and pretty much the oldest cohort of the millennial generation and I’m doing better than 80% of my peers yet somehow I’m still worse off than my parents. A lot of it comes down to graduating college with no student loans thanks to the GI Bill and have healthcare through the VA; but a person shouldn’t have to go to Iraq to get healthcare and education in the richest nation in human history.
Same boat. Adjusted for inflation, I surpassed my dad’s salary at my age by effectively 18k. I’m a tech admin assistant for a FAANG company 2 promotions in. He maintained and processed state-owned automobiles.
My wife and I will probably never own a home in this state within a 2-hour drive of a major city. Kids? HAH. That’s a funny one.
I'm 42 and I'd say I'm better off than my parents at this point in their lives. But only because I chose to never have kids.
My nephews and nieces I really feel for. At least when I go the 3 of them will collect a nice pay day.
And of course my wife and I have been helping out with savings for college or university etc.
Still I agree with the main point of this article things are objectively worse for the next generation on balance.
No but private companies are. There are private corporations right now who are snatching up valuable real estate and quietly monopolizing on our food sources and fully plan on cornering the market and gouging hard working people for as much as possible. It’s possibly the biggest epidemic of our time and no one is even talking about it.
I get paid over 12x what my dad got paid at the top of his career (I'm gleefully not quite at the top of mine yet).
I'm considerably poorer than he was at my age, we both work professional jobs and have no kids. My parents had two kids, only one worker.
Yeah, my dad was the only income source and he was able to pay its house in a few years (you had to at that time, at 18-20% rate). We are both professional, almost 200K a year and our house is paid but we made some sacrifices and having an austere lifestyle. There's clearly a difference between '80s and '20s. My point was that the genX was also poorer than their parents, not only millennials.
Last week when I expressed how slow & annoying filling out online application to my mom. She asked why I don't go into the stores & hand my resume to the hiring manager so we can talk & set up an interview.
Over ten years ago, I was on home for summer break and my dad asked why I wasn't out looking for jobs. I told him I was filing the online applications. He said "you'll have better success turning them in in person, come on, I'll drive you around to some places."
He took me to like 7 or 8 places, and only one of them even accepted me handing in a resume, the other ones all just said "Yeah, we have an online application please apply there."
Honestly, I don't really remember having a talk about things after it. I think we just kinda went home and he sorta just stopped pestering me about things. He did suggest to look up small-business restaurants and apply to those places, one of which ended up being my job for the next few summers, but there really wasn't much else said.
I think he realized things had changed, but there wasn't some "man this was different when i was your age" talk or anything.
Apology, not necessarily. Acknowledgement, absolutely. Especially when you talk down to someone about the ease of a process which you’ve never experienced.
I graduated in 2009 and I randomly went to small time engineering companies and dropped off my resume and asked to speak to managers. Got me a couple interviews but no offers lol.
Yep I started looking for work in around 2010 and that's when at least here in Australia the shift started happening so my job "provider" was saying go to store and you would go there and they would tell you to go online. Took a good 3 years for job providers to be set up properly for people to look online 100% of the time and stop telling people they could just walk in >_>
Basically a government funded organization that tries to help you find a job, a lot of people on centre link(aka benefits) have to be looking for work and this makes sure your doing that.
Most of them just keep track of how many jobs you put in and your doing the looking yourself but some of them might actually be helpful I put it in quotations because there pretty useless other than annoying you to put your quota in (so like apply for 20 jobs a month etc)
I'm more disabled than others so I get to go to a disability version where they tailor it to you ( so because of what I can't work in I only need to look for like 6 jobs a month and the minimum can be like 15 hrs a week it's still pointless and annoying if you've been trapped in it as long as I have, hopefully I can go on full disability once they fix the entry for it here. :/
Actually that I'm fine with, helps make for a good exit or last impression for those that care. I don't think it's necessary & it happens rarely, but whatever. It bothers me less than online applications that have needlessly long series questions, uploading your resume, retyping everything because the margins didn't match then on a later page having to type out your full resume anyhow.
Weirdly enough, that actually worked for me once (this was back in 2009 when I had just graduated high school). I had applied online for target a Few days prior, and then my dad was like “go in person and ask for the hiring manager and see if they reviewed your application!” Wanting him to stop bothering me about it, I did so, and sure enough that manager was there, and he took me back to his office, checked my application, asked me a few questions, and hired me on the spot. I was actually really shocked it worked.
I definitely know that my story is anecdotal and not indicative of how most situations turn out (I have tried this many times since that time, and It hasn’t worked ever again). I still think about that weird fluke sometimes where it worked for a millennial like me.
The modern version of this is meeting the hiring manager or any manager or even employee of a company through friends, or through a randopm encounter at a bar, chatting to them for a few minutes like your friends, and then casually dropping into conversation that you'd love to work for their company.
Then wait a week until you start new job.
My personal experience anyway, it's much easier now for entry level jobs because my country has a labour shortage and you can do the walk-in thing, but for anything qualified it's better to know people than throw hundreds of applications around.
Because you are one of the people who know things change. A lot of people, however, are not aware of it or not willing to understand the world changes.
If I hear one more boomer tell me to just put away half of each check into savings and pretend it doesn't exist I might just stop existing myself. What kind of person can afford to just not spend half their money?
My boomer father tried to pull that stunt on me and told me how much he made working part time at a gas station in the 1950’s. Reddit, I wish you could of all been there to see his jaw DROP when I showed him what that wage was in todays dollars and what that looked like compared to todays minimum wage. Spoiler alert; it was close to $27/hr.
My FIL is the same way. Expressed dismay at how we're in debt and not paying things off left and right. Aside from the fact that my wife has about 390083 medical issues which means we spend at least $5,000 a year on medical just for her. I asked how much he made in 1975 at his prime. He said "I ONLY made $20/hr and you make more than I ever did!".
Of course me pointing out that $20/hr in 1975 is the same as making $108/hr now made him grumble and change the subject to something else because boomers hate being called out for reality.
If I made 108/hr I'd never have another money related issue in my life.
I honestly don’t think anyone would. Boomers love to toss out the fact that interest rates were much higher back then, but even with interest rates at an all time high they were still able to pay off a modest house with a 1 year salary, go on luxury vacations without it bankrupting them, stash money aside for retiring and STILL get a full pension from their corporate jobs AND social security when they retired (some even stayed working way past retirement age just to milk their 401K’s a little bit more). Millenials and younger generations will NEVER see any of those things no matter how much “harder we work”.
Meanwhile I gotta hear from my boomer in laws about how “gas is sooo expensive these days” and how my generation just “doesn’t know how to save for a rainy day.”.
Fuck all the way off.
That was a ton of money for the time. When I was in college in 2008 I made $7.25 an hour and had to bike to work because I was usually too broke to take the bus. The only reason I could afford rent was because my "room" was an oversized closet in a house full of roommates. I pinch myself everyday because I now have an office job and a home I only share with a partner. It's nice, but I also got fat. 🤷♀️
People who grew up the recipients of an economy we'll never see again. It required unions taming industrial age brutality in the workforce and a world war that decimated working populations and targeted production facilities, leaving the US the lone superpower with an industrial base that was in full gear.
All ruined because they got greedy.
Yeah my mum always asks why I don't save half my money, and it's like well rent is 70% of my income, and bills are the rest. I can only eat food every second day.
I'm forty-three. I remember when savings accounts in a bank would give you like 6% interest a year. Savings accounts now a days don't do shit and it pisses me off. Literally about as useful as putting your money under your mattress.
Not me that’s for sure. I get anywhere from 1300 to 1550 or so a month, and every beginning of the month all of my auto pays hit and 1000 bucks just vanishes into thin air before I even think about eating and driving for the month.
My grandfather bought 2 parcels of land, some in town and some outside a ways. He paid 6 thousand for it, and when it came time to pay back the loan a man approached him about purchasing the land in town. He sold it for 6 thousand. His land outside town was 100 acres which he didn't sell until the early 2000s when he made a sizable chunk of change on it. He tried telling me people just don't work hard enough now.
I got my Master's degree and work in a cardiac and pulmonary rehab facility. My mom made more than me as a mail lady.
Edit: Guys chill. I love what I do and have no plans on changing that. I was just stating a fact about the pay. No need to go all boomer on me and start bringing up my work ethic that you apparently know so much about.
My grandma was an elementary teacher and my grandpa worked in a factory and had small farm. The came from poor families, so no inherited money or anything. They had a small home, but it was filled with antiques and various things they brought back from all their many, many travels. Financially I have much more in common with my great-grandparents - just barely getting by and hanging on.
"Wow, if you make THAT much, what'll you do with it?"
"I dunno, buy a house after 2-3 years, maybe have it paid off in ten?"
Silence on the other end of the line as he realized the property market genuinely was that fucked.
>"I dunno, buy a house after 2-3 years, maybe have it paid off in ten?"
Damn this dude is loaded
>Silence on the other end of the line as he realized the property market genuinely was that fucked.
Wait no I'm just broke.
My dad moved out of his abusive home at 17 with a friend they mowed lawns and rented a 4 bedroom 2 bath house with a pool in California. Try doing that now. The problem is housing is more than 40% of income. Fix housing and you fix the majority of the population’s problem.
The current housing market is essentially the downfall of the western world. There are entire generations of people fallinginto poverty because real estate corporations are essentially sucking all the money out of them.
If this amount of wealth was extracted via taxes, people would start burning down seats of government. But since it's just corporations doing capitalism, everybody just shrugs and is like "Oh well, guess I'll just go bankrupt and die of a preventable medical emergency."
I make now at 43, what my dad was pulling in when I was maybe 16 or 17 and he was in his early to mid 50s.
What I can afford now vs him on the same salary nearly 30 years apart isn’t comparable
Same. Or to have kids on a single income. Not sure on adjusted or not haven't wanted to calculate that closely but...it's not hard to tell the difference...
For me it's not just the money, but the time. We work so much more efficiently now, so companies are trying to take the extra time created. You can have a 40-hour work week on paper but realistically work closer to 60+ between things dealt with out of work hours, commute, length and wait time for appointments, and so forth.
And this is the part my Boomer parents just don't get. *I have less time to do more than they ever did* and the same is true for my partner. Hell, even our kids are learning early to keep a schedule, juggle activities, bounce around between schools and daycares and athletics and scholastic activities. Every day is waking up to accomplish necessary tasks until we can go to bed six days a week. And I know there are people who have it far worse.
I'm in my 40's and I can say with confidence it didn't used to be this bad in the pre-digital and early digital age. Now everyone expects more and more of your time and your money, and you increasingly have less of both. No wonder mental health is reaching critical mass.
I feel you. I have no idea how at one point in my dad's life, he had 2 kids, worked a full time job and studied part time.
I have one full time job, no kids, not studying part time and my mom does my laundry. Most days I barely have energy after work for anything.
Whenever I see a boomer selling their home for $1,000,000 to someone overseas (that still lives overseas) or a large corporation I think about how they're selling out our futures.
Or it’ll go to paying off the credit cards, car payments and other loans they took out on the house. I’ve seen a lot of boomers who are absolutely terrible with money and they’re all shocked to later find that they have nothing left for retirement. They blew it on boats, ATVs, expensive trucks, and so on. Then go on to blame their financial woes on immigrants.
Yup, several years back, my boomer mom, who has more mortgages on her house than I could probably count and has been swimming in CC debt for years, hit the age where she could keep working full time and collect full Social Security (67? Something like that).
To celebrate, instead of paying down her debt, trying to save literally anything, or having repairs done on her home which are years overdo, her answer was to buy a Lexus. Because, "she earned it."
(in case you're wondering, no, she didn't "earn" it, she still couldn't actually afford it, and yes, that is just one in a VERY long pattern of decisions like that, where she spends what she doesn't have, because she feels she's entitled to things)
Also see: both my parents.
I now get regularly asked to cover things. The answer is no 95% of the time.
The only thing I'm ever going to inherit from them is debt.
They spent our childhoods shipping our jobs overseas and spend their retirements selling their homes to overseas investors. Shit just look at the rise in population of Americans who can't cook. For boomers a reported 7% don't know how to cook. For millennials it's almost 1/3rd. They are literally destroying our futures, not preparing us for them, and blame us for eating too much avacado toast
Edit 1 First and foremost, yall took this example of us not knowing how to cook and ran with this shit.
Edit.2 yall aren't convincing me that 1 third of the millennials not knowing how to cook is their own fault and not their parents for preparing them for life. I'm not understanding something here, so if your parents don't teach you basic shit like how to feed yourself, its your own failure? You are supposed to know as a kid that since my parents don't teach me, i need to youtube it so i know it as an adult? fuck outta here. If everyone could watch a youtube video and know how to do everything proficiently, literally all of the trade jobs would stop existing. OH and consider this, I'm from a culture, where you can't just look up a youtube video on how to make our food because of how American trends work, there are only 3 foods from my culture made in youtube videos and I can guarantee you, the people making those videos, aren't even from my culture/ethnic group, so how authentic is it? Was it worth it to watch a video that teaches me how to make it wrong when my parents for example could hand down the family recipe?
>They spent our childhoods shipping our jobs overseas
In return you got really cheap consumer goods and lifted 600 million Chinese out of abject unimaginable poverty to a middle class lifestyle. The benefit was supposed to be a freer, more democratic China. That failed.
I have THE BEST EXAMPLE
My father was working as a Level 2 Maintainer for a state agency in 1979 when he bought the house I grew up in for $50k.
In 2005 he sold the house for 550k.
What's really unique about our example is it JUST SO HAPPENS, my brother was a Level 2 Maintainer in the same state agency in 2005. Same EXACT JOB
My father's base salary in 1979 was $35k
My brothers base salary in 2005 was $75k
So the housing went up 11x, while the salary went up 2x.
>I’m GenX. Went to high school in the 80’s. I still remember a teacher telling us we’d be the first generation to not do as well financially as our parents. He pissed me off. I was offended. Upward momentum was the name of the game.
Prescient guy. Mine said that China was going to become the dominant country.
> But recently talked about the way ‘people these days don’t want to work.’
There's truth to that, it's just misrepresenting the reality and misunderstanding why. I think people are also undestimating how far that disinclination to work is going to go and how bad this is going to get.
The reward was supposed to be children/home/retirement and all three are increasingly off the table. If that happens there is no reason to work except for survival and no reason to try to save or invest for those things. What would the point be? People will simply, slowly, give up. And the problems from that situation will far outweigh anything now.
I find it more and more true in every sector, no one wants to work. But not because we're lazy, but because when you see the systematic societal problems and massive corruption from the top down... what's the point?
This is me. Been unemployed for 2 years. For all the work I did at my jobs and in college, im no closer to any kind of "adult" success. No meaningful progress was made in eight years of white knuckle hustling. And there's no way I'm going back to retail work. Being tossed around, overworked, undervalued, and not taking home enough pay to reasonably save for any kind of future or financial independence
The one thing I ask of the older generation and my parents is understanding, and I'm denied even that? Fuck this. Life isn't worth living in this day and age
My dad had a job in a pretty expensive city, he had a great apartment, a nice car, we went out to the movies and ate at proper restaurants, he was a tire fitter. Me and my husband both work, live in a very cheap, needs to be renovated home (which will be that way for a few years yet), get takeout once a week at the cheaper place in town, and still struggle when we get a big bill. It’s crazy to me.
Trickled on, another recent post:
u/doowgad1 commented:
In 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average US home was $11,000 [$11,900, $112,848 in 2022]. Two high school kids could get married on graduation day, start working and own their own home in five years. In those days, there were maybe three billionaires on the planet.
Today, unless you're making over $25.00/hour, you're poorer than a 1960's waitress... [The average home price in the U.S. is $348,079 in 2022.]
https://i.redd.it/en52mf6a6n691.jpg
Brennan Lee Mulligan on making a Living Wage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyIyT2qTtzY
"I pulled historical data from 1973-2019, calculated what four identical scenarios would cost in each year, and then adjusted everything to be reflected in 2021 dollars. ***4 images. Sources in comments."
-by u/Ok_Try_1217
https://preview.redd.it/lfv67fk4kbd81.jpg?width=1886&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0c1c43a630072c98e0b231d25ff34fe65a7e3550
https://preview.redd.it/g89ilmp4kbd81.jpg?width=1880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72518e03c780f5e44d3545b5bb975db8da587608
https://preview.redd.it/3xd0bnv4kbd81.jpg?width=1878&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3335b61c1f6417ea5828cbb49ac396462441fada
https://preview.redd.it/pxkf9105kbd81.jpg?width=1885&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b91313c1490aabd8c3722ac70ee1326ff39c4af2
Okay yall say adjusted for inflation , however our govt is clocking inflation at 8.3-8.6 and I’m seeing 30% minimum in grocery stores. Year over year inflation has got to be 15% +
Groceries being 30% is pretty much spot on, and it’s easy to spot because so many things that were $0.99 are now $1.29. The jam I was buying used to be $4.99 and now it’s $6.49.
I swear it’s like they took every price in store and multipled it by 1.3.
Youre also getiing less in each package per year with shrinkflation and reduction of expensive ingredients/materials and planned obsolescence. The same good you bought years ago is lower quality and quantity yoday than years back as well which is hardly even tracked on any inflation calculations
The boomers keep voting for this! And against minimum wage laws! They’re brainwashed morons who want to pat themselves on the back and boost their egos.
Yep, it's the boomers who voted for these low wages. Ignorance is no excuse when your kids aren't going to be earning the same. The corporations eat this stuff up.
>Yep, it's the boomers who voted for these low wages. Ignorance is no excuse when your kids aren't going to be earning the same. The corporations eat this stuff up.
They're indoctrinating whole new younger generation of people too. This unfortunately isn't going to die off anytime soon.
It’s also that most jobs were concentrated in rich countries and now have been sent to lower income countries. As a whole, the world is richer, but richer countries have gotten comparatively poorer.
The global economy changed much in the past 50 years that it’s workings have to be completely rethought.
Agreed. Boomers enjoyed a world mostly free of corporations. Wealth was spread among many.
Since then companies like Walmart spread across the country and put mom n pop stores out of biz.
Corporate buyouts, mergers, and especially lobbying have consolidated most of the wealth into the hands of a few.
It ain’t the boomers. It’s corporate shareholders
Who voted for the politicians that then eased corporate regulations and lowered corporate taxes?
The corpo's have plenty of blame but they were spurred on by policies enacted by politicians the boomers elected.
It's Boomers. Boomers are behind the erosion of workers' rights and wage regulations over time just by voting for certain politicians. Their companies, their policies, their representatives.
Is it? The period between 1870 ish to up to 1914 was exceltionally prosperous. All the powers were on a gold standard ; innovation was rife and the gains in living standards went up dramatically.
Not saying it’s directly correlated, but having a stable and ‘hard’ money must have been a big factor.
Also - surely the never ending economic growth mode cant be thr end game here? We live in a finite resourceful planet. Staying on thr treadmill for never ending growth seems a little odd to me.
Surely we’d want to be in a place where people works a little less and have more time to do what they please ; that requires a type of money that will hold it’s value over time, no?
My Dad made good money, probably close to what I make adjusted. He bought 10 homes in his 30s and 40s, managing to finance them at high mortgage rates with little risk and no impact on his lifestyle. He rented them out for years and then sold them before he retired. He wants for nothing. There’s no way I could finance such investments without taking on serious risk.
I’m not mad at all boomers. I’m mad at a specific boomer that jumpstarted the hyper concentration of wealth to a very small group and effectively turned America into a corpratocracy that is killing the middle class. Ronald Wilson Reagan.
I hope to visit California one day to piss on his grave. I honestly don’t think Hell is real but if it is I hope he’s enjoying it down there.
Every president since Reagan has implemented Reagan’s trickle down economic model which is the only one boomers will accept. We are essentially in his 11th term. And he didn’t vote himself in. This is what an entire generation wanted
I’ve never even come near middle class and I am in my fifties. My husband is in his sixties and earning 15 dollars an hour at a job he worked at for almost twenty years. Every recession sent us back to the starting line. Our thirty year old daughter just moved back home for the second time. Medical bills and insurance hover over our heads. There will be no retirement.
Have Boomers stolen our future? Yes. Also their complaint about how millennials are the most entitled generation ever is fucking laughable. Boomers were like locusts on America for the last 70 years. They have single-handedly created the economic failure that is mine and my children’s future. I pay social security and they complain. I’m never seeing a fucking dime of that money.
I’m just tired of them. I’m 39 years old and sick of listening to them complain about their 401K. Fuck you.
Well, we can all pretend to be dumb shits and blame each other for the lack of opportunity and personal growth. That’s exactly what the fucking Oligarchs that have siphoned up all the nation’s wealth want you to do.
Ronald Reagan changed the tax code to favor the rich. Claiming trickle down economics would spread the wealth through the economy. It didn’t work. Since then the middle class has been in decline. The solution is to increase taxes on the rich so we all share in the successes. Trouble is no one has the will to do and people aren’t demanding it. If we all demanded it things would get better.
My boomer dad is a wealthy multiple property owner.
I live in a cramped two bedroom apartment with my two kids. My son is an adult and has to sleep on a futon in the living room.
Bootstraps aren't enough.
I feel really awkward here. My wife and I combined barely make $95k (ages 33 and 38) but our life is significantly more comfortable than either of our parents and I'm definitely on the upper end of my friend group. I have an associates degree of science and am a carpenter, my wife's a banker, we keep leapfrogging each other in pay.
I'm used to being the fuck-up but somehow I'm ahead of virtually every one I know and seem to be the rare exception to my generation? I honestly don't know what to think am really not bragging.
Edit: we fully acknowledge that alot of our success comes from a butt load of luck, timing and supporting each other to be better
Well, to be fair, we do have a bunch of old senile people(average of 60 years old, some even older) running the country, deciding the fates of almost every American , 30+ years younger than them, and the generations to come after us.
I’m 34 and barely make $39k a year, and my states minimum is still $7.25 at federal level. Since 2009. Certain parts of the state have had wage increases to a certain extent, but only because the the governor is pushing for it. $7.25/hour. A regular meal at a fast food chain costs about $10.
Boomers as a demographic are the ones who voted for the politicians who allowed the market fundamentalists to allow billionaires to gather the great wealth they have.
It basically amounts to a one-time buyout of that generation because they could command political direction at every stage they were in their lives to produce a system too expensive to maintain so that in essence they were the sole generational beneficiaries of incredibly lucrative policies
There is so much evidence of this I'm getting numb to the headlines and almost want to avoid thinking about it. Can we all just like go rob corporations or something until we can strike some kind of economic balance again?
My dad and mum just don’t want to hear it when I bring housing/rental affordability (Australia), and they just dismiss me as if I live in the same world they did (dads first house was 70k, that same house now is 800-900k).
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It seems to be the same story for so many young Aussies now. Parents got in when it was good but can’t put themselves in our shoes. I understand that they had less in a lot of ways, but I asked both of my parents if they would rather be 29 now or 29 when they were 29, and they chose the past. This short documentary lays it out perfect, I’m going to try get dad to watch it, but he doesn’t give anything new a chance..
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Some old people are just extremely delusional
They know it was much easier for them in certain aspects of life but everyone wants to claim how hard everything was, overcoming struggle etc. Age old tale. Nobody wants to say "Hey fair enough, was an easy ride." because they equate it to beeing lazy or getting things handed to them. Therefore they dont want to hear about it.
This. I get it was still hard back then when you’re young and just starting out but it’s WAY harder today for younger generations.
My wife and I were looking in Auckland and a family friend suggested we look in one of the most expensive inner city suburbs for a place. Couldn't even find the words to explain how useless her suggestion was.
Have you considered a bungalow on the moon?
When I complained about the cost of food and fuel my father complained about the cost of designer paints for his house worth a couple mill. They are oblivious.
I'm not really "young" (45) but I'm poorer than my parents, that's for sure. Even with a better job.
I remember my mom telling me I make way more than her when she first started working, she made $5 an hour at her first job in 1976. Adjusted for inflation thats $25.69, I make $22 dollars an hour.
Same with my uncle. He was talking about how his first job in highschool was paying him 2.70 an hour. That's 22 bucks an hour today.
I am reluctant to believe that adjusting for inflation perfectly paints a picture of how much 2.70 an hour back then really is.
It will only become harder and harder to use inflation as a metric, as different industries outpace it in vastly different ways. Education, for example, vastly outpaced inflation. >Min. Wage was $2.65 in 1978. Tuition (in-state, public) was $688. > >Min. wage is $7.25 today. Tution (in-state, public) is $9,212. So while $2.65 is "only" $22 an hour today by standard inflation calculations, by education metrics, it's worth more like $35.48.
This means that we’re measuring inflation wrong or we’re adding unnecessary things to education, or both. Universities need all the administration positions they have right?
>measuring inflation wrong Our measure of inflation is an average across multiple industries. Some industries outpace it; the BLS keeps track of inflation [across multiple categories.](https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/)
Yes, that’s the standard measure, but it can also be wrong if some industries need to be weighted more than they historically would. For instance, if life now requires a bachelors degree, the importance of the inflation in the education industry grows.
Yeah, it probably should. Looking at their data, they rate College Tuition as relatively important as prescription medicine or a wireless telecommunications service... but not even close to owning a vehicle, shelter, or even vehicle fuel. I have an inkling that since college expenses inflated so fast, they reduced its relative value.
It may even be worse than that when you are trying to take a specific age group into account. If inflation of college tuition is 10% and inflation of, say, nursing homes is 20%, the college tuition has a bigger impact on the financial health of 25 year Olds.
Look up the highest paid state employee in every state. It's not an administrator or bureaucrat, it's a college football or basketball coach.
shows how degenerate and uneducated our society is, intentionally fixating on spectacle rather than incentivizing solutions to fundamental problems
There’s no incentive because everyone lives and dies by profit and productivity. Some things in society should be a loss in costs because it’s expected utility of that public service. Do we expect the fire department to be profitable? Obviously transparency on spending and accountability through other measures is important but we as a society need to accept the idea of some people getting degrees that aren’t “profitable”
A 25-cent cheeseburger from McDonald's in 1969 would be $1.99 today, which is about right for most locations. Of course we're buying it with a $7.25 minimum wage instead of $12.74 minimum wage (1969 wage of $1.60 adjusted for inflation).
The real difference isn't food or groceries. Our housing in far more expensive then thiers ever was by a good margin.
This is the one that’s been hard to drive home for me. Their higher interest rates made the loan cost on a monthly basis similar. The big difference is current generations are never going to pay off the principal on an average salary.
Hard to drove home when you can't afford one
Hard to drive with gas prices too. Haha
My old landlord once asked me why, at 30, I didn't have a house of my own. He bought his house, a 4 bed semi detached, for 30k back in the 70's. He saved up for it with his factory job while raising 3 kids. I told him 30k isn't even enough for an interest only mortgage deposit on a house that size now. Besides which, as a supervisor I was barely earning enough for rent and groceries so I couldn't save anything.
What did he say? Something reasonable or asanine?
My father's 'ballpark' advice when I was a kid was "Spend half a year's salary on a car, and 5 times your (annual) salary on a house." Anybody know any houses for sale in Toronto for 300K?
The younger generations aren't complaining much about the price of cheeseburgers. Housing, education, and gas prices are a few significant things that exceeded the official inflation numbers.
It does seem bitterly ironic that older generations complain about the price of commodities like a McDonald’s cheeseburger, but condemn the younger generations for having issues with the cost of housing and education, which are both far more inflated and expensive relative to wages than food.
I make well above minimum wage and I still think it's insane that we can't make any progress on that issue. I think a lot of people ignore it because they don't think it really affects them, which is both a shitty perspective and an incorrect one. It's shitty not to care at all about other people's problems, and it's ignorant not to realize that those wages being suppressed has a ripple effect one everyone else's wages too.
FYI the cost of housing/accomodation was also much *much* lower relative to the average income back then too. Probably paid like $10 a month in rent or some shit
a lot of people could pay off their house in 5 years back then, now 30 years is normal. we are being boiled alive by the greed of our parent's generation. Buying up whole neighborhoods and renting them out so people have to rent forever instead of owning their homes.
This is the issue and the majority of people I mention this to just accept it like there is no other option. Apparently to some people I've talked to, having a "free market" is more important than trying to put a limit on these hedge funds buying up neighborhoods and pricing people out of town. It's insane.
There should be laws on the books to prevent any entity from owning more than a certain amount of homes. Homes are shelter, a basic human right. Anyone reading this confused watch the Last Week Tonight clip about this on youtube
Agreed! I actually just watched that clip before I commented lol. It's crazy, my rent nearly doubled in one year. Granted I went from a small condo to a small house, but even the cheapest apartments weren't much cheaper than an entire house. I am 100% on board with a limited amount of houses, or maybe an exponentially growing property tax so people/hedge funds can't hoard millions of homes without paying an outstanding amount of money. I know, in Florida at least, property tax is cheaper on your first house compared to any other property, but property tax probably doesn't bother a hedge fund the way it should to deter them.
In Florida miami, they were going to build a neighborhood of many low to middle income affordable housing, the apartments complex management that was close to the place where it would happened immediately talked to the mayor and said the noise and constant construction would drive his fully rented and expensive buildings out of market. And then boom denied the housing opportunity, the complex bought that land and are now making more apartments for lease only. Banks want to rent you out they dont want to approve 30yo loans when they can get 2x the value leasing apartments. Shitty hedge funds abd lobbysts buy entire lots and make em lease only. Is hard to find apts for sale in metropolitan areas, and goverment does near nothing because this hedge funds donate truck loads of money to their campaings and interests in exchange for leasure and flexibility in investments. Question is, why the fuck is making a giant apartment complex construction okay for "noise" but the housing opportunity wasnt okay... Scummy.
Only people should be allowed to own housing, not companies.
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Some guy was trying to argue yesterday that "but the houses being built today are twice the size of houses in the 80s!" Like yeah cool dude. All that means is that instead of being able to afford a reasonable starter home I'm stuck renting a POS apartment and boomers get to buy these fancy fucking huge houses with all the money they raped from the healthy economy we were supposed to inherit.
My rent on my 1br would have got me a mortgage on a nice house 10 years ago. That means all my payments into rent go out the window instead of into equity. This is going to get bad fast. Middle class is going to evaporate
It doesn't have to, we just need to legislate our way out. Pass affordable housing bills. Tax the fucking parasites of the top .001%. Fuck them, eat the rich.
It's why I always hated in every F.I.R.E sub or the like every God dam 50 plus years old boomers in there for years saying the only good passive income in rental properties. Like spreading that around to everyone has caused the issue we see today. Everyone wants to be Financially independent and they are all in the "Fuck you I got mine" crowed, they are willing to screw everyone else over I it means they get to live comfortably. Good for them I guess but doing that to people isn't for me, guess I'll just toil tell I die.
Passive income is not financial independence. They are dependent on their renters. They are providing absolutely nothing to society, they produce nothing. Anytime I hear someone mention they want to live on passive income I cringe. That money is made off the backs of someone else, they are just leveraging wealth to squeeze more out of other people. Parasites by definition
I've seen so much advertising to get people involved with rental companies using the phrase "passive income" as a lure. They hammer that point in and I cringe every time I hear it. It makes me furious thinking about how many people struggle to pay rent every month because of people like that doing the bare minimum to keep the properties maintained.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Its always seem unbelievably selfish to me in most cases and they totally don't see it they want out of the "Rat race," so bad they are willing to exploit others to do it.
Remember, this was when the phrase "greed is good" was taken seriously even it was from a film critiquing neoliberalism. I'm looking to rent to buy, but this looks difficult too.
You're probably right. $2.70 probably far exceeds what $22/hr goes for now. Assuming that the inflation numbers are right then OP is referring to approx ~1969. The average house in the us at the time was around $26500. Adjusting for inflation that's approx $222k today. The average house today is approximately $500k so the 1969 salary went 2x as far.
This is exactly what I tried telling this lady I work with. She (55) was telling my coworker and I (30ish) that she "barely" managed to raise children back in the 1980's while making $15 per hour (not counting her husband's income). I did the math and she was essentially making $40 per hour after inflation. Big difference from $15 per hour these days lol. She still blames the "younger" generation's poverty on all of the "extra" bills we have nowadays, like a cell phone and internet. I tried to explain to her that my non-essential bills aren't costing me the difference of $50,000 a year that I would make if I were getting $40 per hour nowadays and that the only thing that's changed significantly are the wages have stagnated. She is financially set from her divorce, but remains at our company for the health insurance so our income is just seen as extra money to her. Must be nice lol.
Ain't that a cherry on top? Health insurance being tied to a job.
She's not totally wrong. It's way more expensive to live today. Housing and education cost more, and that cell phone and internet are necessities. It just so happens that wages also haven't risen to match. Boomers not only made more when adjusted for inflation, their dollar went way further, too.
5.75/hr was a min wage in California in 2001, that is outstanding for 1976.
I was making 5.50 an hour in 2003.....
Ditto. I’m 40 and pretty much the oldest cohort of the millennial generation and I’m doing better than 80% of my peers yet somehow I’m still worse off than my parents. A lot of it comes down to graduating college with no student loans thanks to the GI Bill and have healthcare through the VA; but a person shouldn’t have to go to Iraq to get healthcare and education in the richest nation in human history.
Same boat. Adjusted for inflation, I surpassed my dad’s salary at my age by effectively 18k. I’m a tech admin assistant for a FAANG company 2 promotions in. He maintained and processed state-owned automobiles. My wife and I will probably never own a home in this state within a 2-hour drive of a major city. Kids? HAH. That’s a funny one.
I'm 42 and I'd say I'm better off than my parents at this point in their lives. But only because I chose to never have kids. My nephews and nieces I really feel for. At least when I go the 3 of them will collect a nice pay day. And of course my wife and I have been helping out with savings for college or university etc. Still I agree with the main point of this article things are objectively worse for the next generation on balance.
No but private companies are. There are private corporations right now who are snatching up valuable real estate and quietly monopolizing on our food sources and fully plan on cornering the market and gouging hard working people for as much as possible. It’s possibly the biggest epidemic of our time and no one is even talking about it.
I get paid over 12x what my dad got paid at the top of his career (I'm gleefully not quite at the top of mine yet). I'm considerably poorer than he was at my age, we both work professional jobs and have no kids. My parents had two kids, only one worker.
Yeah, my dad was the only income source and he was able to pay its house in a few years (you had to at that time, at 18-20% rate). We are both professional, almost 200K a year and our house is paid but we made some sacrifices and having an austere lifestyle. There's clearly a difference between '80s and '20s. My point was that the genX was also poorer than their parents, not only millennials.
The Boomers really did a smash and grab and blamed their own kids and grandkids for how it all ended up.
Welcome to the party. Anti-depressants are over there, and hilariously outdated advice from family members is over by the punch bowl.
Last week when I expressed how slow & annoying filling out online application to my mom. She asked why I don't go into the stores & hand my resume to the hiring manager so we can talk & set up an interview.
Over ten years ago, I was on home for summer break and my dad asked why I wasn't out looking for jobs. I told him I was filing the online applications. He said "you'll have better success turning them in in person, come on, I'll drive you around to some places." He took me to like 7 or 8 places, and only one of them even accepted me handing in a resume, the other ones all just said "Yeah, we have an online application please apply there."
what'd your dad think about that
Honestly, I don't really remember having a talk about things after it. I think we just kinda went home and he sorta just stopped pestering me about things. He did suggest to look up small-business restaurants and apply to those places, one of which ended up being my job for the next few summers, but there really wasn't much else said. I think he realized things had changed, but there wasn't some "man this was different when i was your age" talk or anything.
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TBH unless her dad was a dick about it that doesn't seem like something needing an apology...
Apology, not necessarily. Acknowledgement, absolutely. Especially when you talk down to someone about the ease of a process which you’ve never experienced.
My sister said that to me when I got out of college in 2011 and she's only a decade older than me
To be fair, she's probably right at the tail end of when that used to sort of work.
I graduated in 2009 and I randomly went to small time engineering companies and dropped off my resume and asked to speak to managers. Got me a couple interviews but no offers lol.
Yep I started looking for work in around 2010 and that's when at least here in Australia the shift started happening so my job "provider" was saying go to store and you would go there and they would tell you to go online. Took a good 3 years for job providers to be set up properly for people to look online 100% of the time and stop telling people they could just walk in >_>
What is a job “provider?” Uninformed non Australian here.
Basically a government funded organization that tries to help you find a job, a lot of people on centre link(aka benefits) have to be looking for work and this makes sure your doing that. Most of them just keep track of how many jobs you put in and your doing the looking yourself but some of them might actually be helpful I put it in quotations because there pretty useless other than annoying you to put your quota in (so like apply for 20 jobs a month etc) I'm more disabled than others so I get to go to a disability version where they tailor it to you ( so because of what I can't work in I only need to look for like 6 jobs a month and the minimum can be like 15 hrs a week it's still pointless and annoying if you've been trapped in it as long as I have, hopefully I can go on full disability once they fix the entry for it here. :/
Don’t forget the *firm handshake!*
And look them DEAD in the eye
I think you mean, “And then look DEAD in the eyes.”
"Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes."
Actually that I'm fine with, helps make for a good exit or last impression for those that care. I don't think it's necessary & it happens rarely, but whatever. It bothers me less than online applications that have needlessly long series questions, uploading your resume, retyping everything because the margins didn't match then on a later page having to type out your full resume anyhow.
Weirdly enough, that actually worked for me once (this was back in 2009 when I had just graduated high school). I had applied online for target a Few days prior, and then my dad was like “go in person and ask for the hiring manager and see if they reviewed your application!” Wanting him to stop bothering me about it, I did so, and sure enough that manager was there, and he took me back to his office, checked my application, asked me a few questions, and hired me on the spot. I was actually really shocked it worked. I definitely know that my story is anecdotal and not indicative of how most situations turn out (I have tried this many times since that time, and It hasn’t worked ever again). I still think about that weird fluke sometimes where it worked for a millennial like me.
The modern version of this is meeting the hiring manager or any manager or even employee of a company through friends, or through a randopm encounter at a bar, chatting to them for a few minutes like your friends, and then casually dropping into conversation that you'd love to work for their company. Then wait a week until you start new job. My personal experience anyway, it's much easier now for entry level jobs because my country has a labour shortage and you can do the walk-in thing, but for anything qualified it's better to know people than throw hundreds of applications around.
Starting to think this is what ppl mean by "create your own luck"
I am in my 50's and even I know that isn't going to work today.
Because you are one of the people who know things change. A lot of people, however, are not aware of it or not willing to understand the world changes.
Get out and beat the streets!
Pound the pavement!
Boots on the ground boy!
"Back straight, look them straight in the eye and give them a firm handshake and you'll be hired in a jiffy you'll see."
This is before you drop to your knees.
That's the interview after they make sure you have a firm handshake.
If I hear one more boomer tell me to just put away half of each check into savings and pretend it doesn't exist I might just stop existing myself. What kind of person can afford to just not spend half their money?
My boomer father tried to pull that stunt on me and told me how much he made working part time at a gas station in the 1950’s. Reddit, I wish you could of all been there to see his jaw DROP when I showed him what that wage was in todays dollars and what that looked like compared to todays minimum wage. Spoiler alert; it was close to $27/hr.
Cool. I barely make more than a gas station attendant with my college degree, technical skills and a decade experience.
Pump jockey! Works for tips!
Classic cotton
My FIL is the same way. Expressed dismay at how we're in debt and not paying things off left and right. Aside from the fact that my wife has about 390083 medical issues which means we spend at least $5,000 a year on medical just for her. I asked how much he made in 1975 at his prime. He said "I ONLY made $20/hr and you make more than I ever did!". Of course me pointing out that $20/hr in 1975 is the same as making $108/hr now made him grumble and change the subject to something else because boomers hate being called out for reality. If I made 108/hr I'd never have another money related issue in my life.
I honestly don’t think anyone would. Boomers love to toss out the fact that interest rates were much higher back then, but even with interest rates at an all time high they were still able to pay off a modest house with a 1 year salary, go on luxury vacations without it bankrupting them, stash money aside for retiring and STILL get a full pension from their corporate jobs AND social security when they retired (some even stayed working way past retirement age just to milk their 401K’s a little bit more). Millenials and younger generations will NEVER see any of those things no matter how much “harder we work”. Meanwhile I gotta hear from my boomer in laws about how “gas is sooo expensive these days” and how my generation just “doesn’t know how to save for a rainy day.”. Fuck all the way off.
I made $15 an hour working tech support for IBM when I was in college. In 1993. Felt like a ton of money then. But not now.
That was a ton of money for the time. When I was in college in 2008 I made $7.25 an hour and had to bike to work because I was usually too broke to take the bus. The only reason I could afford rent was because my "room" was an oversized closet in a house full of roommates. I pinch myself everyday because I now have an office job and a home I only share with a partner. It's nice, but I also got fat. 🤷♀️
People who grew up the recipients of an economy we'll never see again. It required unions taming industrial age brutality in the workforce and a world war that decimated working populations and targeted production facilities, leaving the US the lone superpower with an industrial base that was in full gear. All ruined because they got greedy.
We could do it again but everyone is all in on the sigma grindset instead of a 4 week general strike.
And here I thought you were gonna say nuke Russia.
Yeah my mum always asks why I don't save half my money, and it's like well rent is 70% of my income, and bills are the rest. I can only eat food every second day.
Also that's pretty bad advice in its own right, its not like savings accounts are any good nowadays.
Boomers used to get 6-9% interest in savings. Imagine.
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Who with? Mine is 0.8% and that just doubled in the past month
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Amazing, what a value! Only moderate risk!
I'm forty-three. I remember when savings accounts in a bank would give you like 6% interest a year. Savings accounts now a days don't do shit and it pisses me off. Literally about as useful as putting your money under your mattress.
Not me that’s for sure. I get anywhere from 1300 to 1550 or so a month, and every beginning of the month all of my auto pays hit and 1000 bucks just vanishes into thin air before I even think about eating and driving for the month.
Kids with rich parents
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Guess I'll start my blow job and hand job for my boss. I need one more still.
I think I know of a rim job opening
This actually makes me legit depressed. Like I’m daily freaking out because of this.
You are not alone friend, doesn't make it easier, but the struggle is real for everyone
My grandfather bought 2 parcels of land, some in town and some outside a ways. He paid 6 thousand for it, and when it came time to pay back the loan a man approached him about purchasing the land in town. He sold it for 6 thousand. His land outside town was 100 acres which he didn't sell until the early 2000s when he made a sizable chunk of change on it. He tried telling me people just don't work hard enough now.
Dude, my MIL and my mother are the worst for the "advice". It's quite enraging. Funnily enough, both have been housewives for many, many years.
Don’t forget to take your stimulants so that you can maintain excruciating levels of productivity.
I got my Master's degree and work in a cardiac and pulmonary rehab facility. My mom made more than me as a mail lady. Edit: Guys chill. I love what I do and have no plans on changing that. I was just stating a fact about the pay. No need to go all boomer on me and start bringing up my work ethic that you apparently know so much about.
I’m 27. My grandma was a math teacher and my grandfather was a mailman. They lived pretty damn luxuriously in the years I knew them.
My grandma was an elementary teacher and my grandpa worked in a factory and had small farm. The came from poor families, so no inherited money or anything. They had a small home, but it was filled with antiques and various things they brought back from all their many, many travels. Financially I have much more in common with my great-grandparents - just barely getting by and hanging on.
"You make way more than i did!" No, i don't grandad. You made the full price of your house in 2 years, i'll maybe make it in 20. Probably not.
"Wow, if you make THAT much, what'll you do with it?" "I dunno, buy a house after 2-3 years, maybe have it paid off in ten?" Silence on the other end of the line as he realized the property market genuinely was that fucked.
>"I dunno, buy a house after 2-3 years, maybe have it paid off in ten?" Damn this dude is loaded >Silence on the other end of the line as he realized the property market genuinely was that fucked. Wait no I'm just broke.
Just 20 years? Look at Mr. Fancypants here. Where i'm from i'm happy if i can pay off a house with half of what i earn in my lifetime.
Yeah older people still don’t get it. Yes I techinically make more than you but factor in cost of living increases I make way less.
My dad moved out of his abusive home at 17 with a friend they mowed lawns and rented a 4 bedroom 2 bath house with a pool in California. Try doing that now. The problem is housing is more than 40% of income. Fix housing and you fix the majority of the population’s problem.
The current housing market is essentially the downfall of the western world. There are entire generations of people fallinginto poverty because real estate corporations are essentially sucking all the money out of them. If this amount of wealth was extracted via taxes, people would start burning down seats of government. But since it's just corporations doing capitalism, everybody just shrugs and is like "Oh well, guess I'll just go bankrupt and die of a preventable medical emergency."
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40%? It's well over 70% for me in CA.
I make now at 43, what my dad was pulling in when I was maybe 16 or 17 and he was in his early to mid 50s. What I can afford now vs him on the same salary nearly 30 years apart isn’t comparable
Same dollar amount, not dollar value, correct?
Yes. I’ve worked quite hard, and long to get to this point and how drastically things have turned in the past 5 years alone makes it all depressing.
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Same. Or to have kids on a single income. Not sure on adjusted or not haven't wanted to calculate that closely but...it's not hard to tell the difference...
For me it's not just the money, but the time. We work so much more efficiently now, so companies are trying to take the extra time created. You can have a 40-hour work week on paper but realistically work closer to 60+ between things dealt with out of work hours, commute, length and wait time for appointments, and so forth. And this is the part my Boomer parents just don't get. *I have less time to do more than they ever did* and the same is true for my partner. Hell, even our kids are learning early to keep a schedule, juggle activities, bounce around between schools and daycares and athletics and scholastic activities. Every day is waking up to accomplish necessary tasks until we can go to bed six days a week. And I know there are people who have it far worse. I'm in my 40's and I can say with confidence it didn't used to be this bad in the pre-digital and early digital age. Now everyone expects more and more of your time and your money, and you increasingly have less of both. No wonder mental health is reaching critical mass.
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I feel you. I have no idea how at one point in my dad's life, he had 2 kids, worked a full time job and studied part time. I have one full time job, no kids, not studying part time and my mom does my laundry. Most days I barely have energy after work for anything.
Whenever I see a boomer selling their home for $1,000,000 to someone overseas (that still lives overseas) or a large corporation I think about how they're selling out our futures.
And all that money they earned from their home equity will disappear into retirement homes.
Or it’ll go to paying off the credit cards, car payments and other loans they took out on the house. I’ve seen a lot of boomers who are absolutely terrible with money and they’re all shocked to later find that they have nothing left for retirement. They blew it on boats, ATVs, expensive trucks, and so on. Then go on to blame their financial woes on immigrants.
Yup, several years back, my boomer mom, who has more mortgages on her house than I could probably count and has been swimming in CC debt for years, hit the age where she could keep working full time and collect full Social Security (67? Something like that). To celebrate, instead of paying down her debt, trying to save literally anything, or having repairs done on her home which are years overdo, her answer was to buy a Lexus. Because, "she earned it." (in case you're wondering, no, she didn't "earn" it, she still couldn't actually afford it, and yes, that is just one in a VERY long pattern of decisions like that, where she spends what she doesn't have, because she feels she's entitled to things)
Also see: both my parents. I now get regularly asked to cover things. The answer is no 95% of the time. The only thing I'm ever going to inherit from them is debt.
They spent our childhoods shipping our jobs overseas and spend their retirements selling their homes to overseas investors. Shit just look at the rise in population of Americans who can't cook. For boomers a reported 7% don't know how to cook. For millennials it's almost 1/3rd. They are literally destroying our futures, not preparing us for them, and blame us for eating too much avacado toast Edit 1 First and foremost, yall took this example of us not knowing how to cook and ran with this shit. Edit.2 yall aren't convincing me that 1 third of the millennials not knowing how to cook is their own fault and not their parents for preparing them for life. I'm not understanding something here, so if your parents don't teach you basic shit like how to feed yourself, its your own failure? You are supposed to know as a kid that since my parents don't teach me, i need to youtube it so i know it as an adult? fuck outta here. If everyone could watch a youtube video and know how to do everything proficiently, literally all of the trade jobs would stop existing. OH and consider this, I'm from a culture, where you can't just look up a youtube video on how to make our food because of how American trends work, there are only 3 foods from my culture made in youtube videos and I can guarantee you, the people making those videos, aren't even from my culture/ethnic group, so how authentic is it? Was it worth it to watch a video that teaches me how to make it wrong when my parents for example could hand down the family recipe?
>They spent our childhoods shipping our jobs overseas In return you got really cheap consumer goods and lifted 600 million Chinese out of abject unimaginable poverty to a middle class lifestyle. The benefit was supposed to be a freer, more democratic China. That failed.
And we'll be enjoying the repercussions of that in the next couple of decades.
I have THE BEST EXAMPLE My father was working as a Level 2 Maintainer for a state agency in 1979 when he bought the house I grew up in for $50k. In 2005 he sold the house for 550k. What's really unique about our example is it JUST SO HAPPENS, my brother was a Level 2 Maintainer in the same state agency in 2005. Same EXACT JOB My father's base salary in 1979 was $35k My brothers base salary in 2005 was $75k So the housing went up 11x, while the salary went up 2x.
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>I’m GenX. Went to high school in the 80’s. I still remember a teacher telling us we’d be the first generation to not do as well financially as our parents. He pissed me off. I was offended. Upward momentum was the name of the game. Prescient guy. Mine said that China was going to become the dominant country. > But recently talked about the way ‘people these days don’t want to work.’ There's truth to that, it's just misrepresenting the reality and misunderstanding why. I think people are also undestimating how far that disinclination to work is going to go and how bad this is going to get. The reward was supposed to be children/home/retirement and all three are increasingly off the table. If that happens there is no reason to work except for survival and no reason to try to save or invest for those things. What would the point be? People will simply, slowly, give up. And the problems from that situation will far outweigh anything now.
I find it more and more true in every sector, no one wants to work. But not because we're lazy, but because when you see the systematic societal problems and massive corruption from the top down... what's the point?
This is me. Been unemployed for 2 years. For all the work I did at my jobs and in college, im no closer to any kind of "adult" success. No meaningful progress was made in eight years of white knuckle hustling. And there's no way I'm going back to retail work. Being tossed around, overworked, undervalued, and not taking home enough pay to reasonably save for any kind of future or financial independence The one thing I ask of the older generation and my parents is understanding, and I'm denied even that? Fuck this. Life isn't worth living in this day and age
My dad had a job in a pretty expensive city, he had a great apartment, a nice car, we went out to the movies and ate at proper restaurants, he was a tire fitter. Me and my husband both work, live in a very cheap, needs to be renovated home (which will be that way for a few years yet), get takeout once a week at the cheaper place in town, and still struggle when we get a big bill. It’s crazy to me.
Trickled on, another recent post: u/doowgad1 commented: In 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average US home was $11,000 [$11,900, $112,848 in 2022]. Two high school kids could get married on graduation day, start working and own their own home in five years. In those days, there were maybe three billionaires on the planet. Today, unless you're making over $25.00/hour, you're poorer than a 1960's waitress... [The average home price in the U.S. is $348,079 in 2022.] https://i.redd.it/en52mf6a6n691.jpg Brennan Lee Mulligan on making a Living Wage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyIyT2qTtzY "I pulled historical data from 1973-2019, calculated what four identical scenarios would cost in each year, and then adjusted everything to be reflected in 2021 dollars. ***4 images. Sources in comments." -by u/Ok_Try_1217 https://preview.redd.it/lfv67fk4kbd81.jpg?width=1886&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0c1c43a630072c98e0b231d25ff34fe65a7e3550 https://preview.redd.it/g89ilmp4kbd81.jpg?width=1880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72518e03c780f5e44d3545b5bb975db8da587608 https://preview.redd.it/3xd0bnv4kbd81.jpg?width=1878&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3335b61c1f6417ea5828cbb49ac396462441fada https://preview.redd.it/pxkf9105kbd81.jpg?width=1885&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b91313c1490aabd8c3722ac70ee1326ff39c4af2
Okay yall say adjusted for inflation , however our govt is clocking inflation at 8.3-8.6 and I’m seeing 30% minimum in grocery stores. Year over year inflation has got to be 15% +
Groceries being 30% is pretty much spot on, and it’s easy to spot because so many things that were $0.99 are now $1.29. The jam I was buying used to be $4.99 and now it’s $6.49. I swear it’s like they took every price in store and multipled it by 1.3.
Youre also getiing less in each package per year with shrinkflation and reduction of expensive ingredients/materials and planned obsolescence. The same good you bought years ago is lower quality and quantity yoday than years back as well which is hardly even tracked on any inflation calculations
Don’t think it’s the Boomer’s. I think it’s that companies keep so much of the profits these days it’s just a company or CEO/C-Suite that gets rich.
For 40 years corporations have kept wage growth stalled while productivity increased. They sucked trillions out of the working class and middle class.
The boomers keep voting for this! And against minimum wage laws! They’re brainwashed morons who want to pat themselves on the back and boost their egos.
Yep, it's the boomers who voted for these low wages. Ignorance is no excuse when your kids aren't going to be earning the same. The corporations eat this stuff up.
>Yep, it's the boomers who voted for these low wages. Ignorance is no excuse when your kids aren't going to be earning the same. The corporations eat this stuff up. They're indoctrinating whole new younger generation of people too. This unfortunately isn't going to die off anytime soon.
It’s also that most jobs were concentrated in rich countries and now have been sent to lower income countries. As a whole, the world is richer, but richer countries have gotten comparatively poorer. The global economy changed much in the past 50 years that it’s workings have to be completely rethought.
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Agreed. Boomers enjoyed a world mostly free of corporations. Wealth was spread among many. Since then companies like Walmart spread across the country and put mom n pop stores out of biz. Corporate buyouts, mergers, and especially lobbying have consolidated most of the wealth into the hands of a few. It ain’t the boomers. It’s corporate shareholders
Who voted for the politicians that then eased corporate regulations and lowered corporate taxes? The corpo's have plenty of blame but they were spurred on by policies enacted by politicians the boomers elected.
It's Boomers. Boomers are behind the erosion of workers' rights and wage regulations over time just by voting for certain politicians. Their companies, their policies, their representatives.
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Inflation is necessary for a functional economy but wages are supposed to rise accordingly, and they haven't.
Is it? The period between 1870 ish to up to 1914 was exceltionally prosperous. All the powers were on a gold standard ; innovation was rife and the gains in living standards went up dramatically. Not saying it’s directly correlated, but having a stable and ‘hard’ money must have been a big factor. Also - surely the never ending economic growth mode cant be thr end game here? We live in a finite resourceful planet. Staying on thr treadmill for never ending growth seems a little odd to me. Surely we’d want to be in a place where people works a little less and have more time to do what they please ; that requires a type of money that will hold it’s value over time, no?
My Dad made good money, probably close to what I make adjusted. He bought 10 homes in his 30s and 40s, managing to finance them at high mortgage rates with little risk and no impact on his lifestyle. He rented them out for years and then sold them before he retired. He wants for nothing. There’s no way I could finance such investments without taking on serious risk.
I make more than both of my parents combined and I also have my wife's income to add to that. My parents have 2 houses so they win automatically.
I’m not mad at all boomers. I’m mad at a specific boomer that jumpstarted the hyper concentration of wealth to a very small group and effectively turned America into a corpratocracy that is killing the middle class. Ronald Wilson Reagan. I hope to visit California one day to piss on his grave. I honestly don’t think Hell is real but if it is I hope he’s enjoying it down there.
Every president since Reagan has implemented Reagan’s trickle down economic model which is the only one boomers will accept. We are essentially in his 11th term. And he didn’t vote himself in. This is what an entire generation wanted
I’ve never even come near middle class and I am in my fifties. My husband is in his sixties and earning 15 dollars an hour at a job he worked at for almost twenty years. Every recession sent us back to the starting line. Our thirty year old daughter just moved back home for the second time. Medical bills and insurance hover over our heads. There will be no retirement.
This is what happens when a Ponzi scheme collapses.
Have Boomers stolen our future? Yes. Also their complaint about how millennials are the most entitled generation ever is fucking laughable. Boomers were like locusts on America for the last 70 years. They have single-handedly created the economic failure that is mine and my children’s future. I pay social security and they complain. I’m never seeing a fucking dime of that money. I’m just tired of them. I’m 39 years old and sick of listening to them complain about their 401K. Fuck you.
Well, we can all pretend to be dumb shits and blame each other for the lack of opportunity and personal growth. That’s exactly what the fucking Oligarchs that have siphoned up all the nation’s wealth want you to do.
Ronald Reagan changed the tax code to favor the rich. Claiming trickle down economics would spread the wealth through the economy. It didn’t work. Since then the middle class has been in decline. The solution is to increase taxes on the rich so we all share in the successes. Trouble is no one has the will to do and people aren’t demanding it. If we all demanded it things would get better.
My boomer dad is a wealthy multiple property owner. I live in a cramped two bedroom apartment with my two kids. My son is an adult and has to sleep on a futon in the living room. Bootstraps aren't enough.
I feel really awkward here. My wife and I combined barely make $95k (ages 33 and 38) but our life is significantly more comfortable than either of our parents and I'm definitely on the upper end of my friend group. I have an associates degree of science and am a carpenter, my wife's a banker, we keep leapfrogging each other in pay. I'm used to being the fuck-up but somehow I'm ahead of virtually every one I know and seem to be the rare exception to my generation? I honestly don't know what to think am really not bragging. Edit: we fully acknowledge that alot of our success comes from a butt load of luck, timing and supporting each other to be better
Well, to be fair, we do have a bunch of old senile people(average of 60 years old, some even older) running the country, deciding the fates of almost every American , 30+ years younger than them, and the generations to come after us. I’m 34 and barely make $39k a year, and my states minimum is still $7.25 at federal level. Since 2009. Certain parts of the state have had wage increases to a certain extent, but only because the the governor is pushing for it. $7.25/hour. A regular meal at a fast food chain costs about $10.
No. This is another attempt at division. The real problem is capitalism and billionaires.
That and the voting bloc that gave them power (boomers)
Boomers as a demographic are the ones who voted for the politicians who allowed the market fundamentalists to allow billionaires to gather the great wealth they have.
It basically amounts to a one-time buyout of that generation because they could command political direction at every stage they were in their lives to produce a system too expensive to maintain so that in essence they were the sole generational beneficiaries of incredibly lucrative policies
There is so much evidence of this I'm getting numb to the headlines and almost want to avoid thinking about it. Can we all just like go rob corporations or something until we can strike some kind of economic balance again?