See! You’re not THAT poor. Just give it another few decades!
Dear Mainstream Media: Does anyone but you believe your lies?
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.
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.
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)
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.
Translation: Please no revolution.
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.
Oh nice, you found 1 family that this is relevant for. Now call that family “all millennials”! Proper journalism right here.
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
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.
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…
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.
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? ▔\▁((.′◔_′◔.))▁/▔
Thankfully as we’re all breaking into our 40s, we have finally reached a point our society expected of us by 25. All it took was the slow deaths of our families.
But our kids are gonna be fucked! Thanks boomer for telling us that should make us feel better like it apparently did your generation.
Big reason I’m not having kids. Oh I’m only starting to feel relatively stable in my late 30s?! Why would I ruin that now, kids cost well over 800k, I can’t afford my house and one kid, let alone 2
First millennials were mocked for wanting part of The American Dream; now Millennials are being mocked for a few of them having a bit of it from the “COVID+inheritance” effect.
The WSJ should be ripped asunder. It is an insult to line birdcages with it.
mocked at times for being perpetually behind in building wealth
but that was you guys who did that. you know that, right? it’s important to me that you know that.
nice star in your name
Ok, lemmy crybabies. Me and my millennial friends all graduated from a university in Europe. None of us were born rich, but we’re all well-off now. By now everyone lives in different country, works in a different field, but literally everyone can afford a mortgage, a car, a ski trip, and maybe for their partner not to work for a few years if kids would be born.
Yet, imagine that, nobody really planned for their career to be lucrative. People just did what they thought was interesting and did it well. Only one dude was after money. He went into banking and now probably makes close to a mil annually.
I reiterate. All that was necessary for a financial success was to find an interesting job and do it with passion. To me this sounds like a communist dream.
And yet lemmy keeps telling me every day that it could only be possible if all of us were born rich, or sucked to corpos or whatever. You’re just a bunch of sore losers, lemmy.
Enjoy your holidays and think about your life choices.
don’t feed the troll…
My life choices have been good. After all: I’m not a callous cunt like you.
Also European here. And just to bring some more up to date examples.
My colleague bought a nice big flat some 5 odd years ago. If he wanted to buy the exact same thing today, he literally wouldn’t be able to afford it, not even with much worse terms. For the same money he’d need to move to some small dinky house in the countryside.
My aunt bought a flat 7 years ago for almost 1.5 million CZK, and then 2 years later one for 2 mil. Today, they’re both worth at least 10 each.
Income has not grown like that in the past decade. These are arguably successful people that literally wouldn’t be able to recreate their success today, only a few years later. Shit’s going down hill and it’s going down hill fast.
So for me and my GF, buying a house is a pipe dream. We just about manage renting our current flat, which is already cheap, we both earn comfortably above average and she even works overtime often enough. Buying a house or having a child are literally crippling decisions.
How much are you paid to troll? Just curious. Sounds like an interesting job I could do with passion.
Or do you just say dumb shit for your own sexual gratification?
Yeah where do we find these interesting jobs? Is there a guy handing them out somewhere?
To be fair, there a lots of interesting jobs out there, you just don’t know they are interesting because they sound boring, or because you only see them if you have experience in some boring job.
Europe, lmao
Wow, it’s amazing g that you and your friends are a globally representative sample of millenials, despite all going to the same university. I wonder what would happen if different people have different life circumstances? Well, good thing we don’t need to worry about that since you and your friends are doing okay.
I choose to believe they are a troll, because I still at times need to convince myself someone isn’t actually that maliciously ignorant.
brainrotting the middle to late gen a is a problem too! /j (mostly)
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.
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.
Brian whatshisface killed more Americans than Bin Laden .
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.
