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As one of the older millennials myself pushing toward 40, I relate to a lot of what's in this article. My wife and I (she's 34) don't have kids, and I'm starting to doubt having them, and I never would have expected that about myself. In high school I told my girlfriend I wanted 3-5 kids, haha. By my mid-late 20s it became clear that would not happen.
The article complains about student debt. We did not have nearly as much student loan debt as the people in the article - seems quite extreme to have $377k worth like the interviewees! My wife and I had $41k combined. We paid it off relatively easily once we did get jobs and I didn't consider it a huge burden to do so...
The bigger problem than our student debt load was that it took us both until about age 30 to find decent jobs to make it capable to pay them off. Both of us bounced around at survival level wages for most of our 20s, it wasn't for lack of trying that we didn't find good ones. About the time I hit 30, I definitely noticed the recovery from the recession happening... seemed like older people finally began to retire, opening up spots.
We are lucky to have health insurance and neither have faced major health problems like people in the article
However, at this point it does seem like we have to choose between having kids and saving for our own retirement because our 20s were pretty much a lost decade. Much to the chagrin of our parents, who don't seem to understand.
We had our kids mid-late 30s.
So did several others we know, including my parents.
I think it's funny when people complain that certain purchases are not wise due to depreciation.
Children are simply cash cows for those that are determined to generate more wealth.
The claim that we need them to pay into Social Security, etc are a joke. Our systems were solvent until the legislators decided to take money from them to invest into their pet projects, which typically waste money.
As one of the older millennials myself pushing toward 40, I relate to a lot of what's in this article. My wife and I (she's 34) don't have kids, and I'm starting to doubt having them, and I never would have expected that about myself. In high school I told my girlfriend I wanted 3-5 kids, haha. By my mid-late 20s it became clear that would not happen.
Hmm, funny to think of Millennials approaching 40. Next Gen is here...I'll need to watch out and not become an obsolte fuddy-duddy, like the old people making jokes about "that wacky Bill Clinton and Lewinsky thing!" I've actually seen a couple web pages with jokes about that as front-line news. I think they were built in 1998 Web tools, too. Built many myself that looked every inch of it, back in IE 3.0 days. I'm GenX.
It took me NO time to find a decent job, that's the biggest difference and called out clearly in this and other articles. I had a professional position waiting for me post-grad that fell through when I got there: no Internet back then, just letters and phones. I found a temp job in a week, made $500 for a week's work, and found a real job couple weeks later (professional). Ditto since. Odds of a kid getting that going now are slim. My buddy's son, about to graduate from Cal Poly, has an internship that I really hope becomes a professional position. He's working for it, though. More industrious than I was; back then, STEM degree was plenty, full-stop.
Too bad about kids. I never wanted any, and live high on the hog as a result with solid retirement savings and plans. It was harder for Gen X than Silent (my parents), same vs. Greatest. We skipped Boomers, though I gather wasn't hard finding a good job '70s-'80s but things changed plenty in those decades, too, w/foreign competition ramping in the '80s and '90s.
Ah: I'm thinking of my friend B, from Down Undah. (Big Software) imported him twenty years ago, he's a walking 1%-type. He's now 41 and 6th child on the way, they're moving to a bigger house (two kids inherited from new wife). I do believe he's a mover and shaker (architect) at a household-name tech firm, and I know what he makes 'cause I helped him negotiate it, and since his wife quit working he's "broke" all the time. Guess they miss that extra hundred thou a year coming in, which graphically illustrates the point. He makes pretty good coin, too, might have broken into the 2%. Guess I'm 3%! But it takes more than that, now, to raise kids in Upper Middle Class.
I don't have much sympathy, really, given his choices (neither here nor there) and a divorce in '14 "cleaned him out" (I watched a quarter-mil$ of his equity go up in smoke to that cow). Children are a train wreck and take enormous money and time, neither of which anyone has anymore. I'm waiting for someone to complain that "having children needs to be more affordable." No, it doesn't: the Invisible Hand of economics is making it increasingly harder to have many children, thank God.
So to that end, there is inexorable evidence that the Haves and Have-Nots gulf is growing, fast. There are immense social problems with that, long term. That Socialist, Robert Reich, is correct about that: I'll give him that (he's personable, intelligent, with pseudo-"compassionate" solutions that are really scary when examined closely). "The Government" is the answer to (almost) nothing, idjits.
We had our kids mid-late 30s.
So did several others we know, including my parents.
My husband had his first kid approaching 40. I was older than 30. I still retired at 55, that’s early enough for me. I paid top notch for childcare in the Bay Area, it costs the same as a private education years ago.
The claim that we need them to pay into Social Security, etc are a joke. Our systems were solvent until the legislators decided to take money from them to invest into their pet projects, which typically waste money.
Sheesh where do people come up with this stuff? Nobody took anything from Social Security for pet projects, it's solvency (or lack thereof) is related to demographics. Social Security Funds are by law invested in U.S. Treasury securities backed by US Government, and they have never suffered a default.
We had out first kid in our later 30's. We now have two. We decided to become a single income family to boot. She stayed home. We waited ten years after getting married because we wanted to get careers going and spend time with each other. Nothing wrong with waiting. We didnt start saving for retirement until our 40's. Right now it looks like we will doing just fine $$$ wise when we finally do retire.
Every generation has a built in excuse. Imagine buying a home or a car at 25% interest in the 70's... because that's what your baby-boomer parents had to deal with. College is a choice. Going to community college the first two years, take CLEP tests, work while going to school (I have an employee going to work full time and is a full time student. She will have zero debt when she is done), go to school in state... It's all a choice. High mortgage rates not so much.
There is no "keeping up" or "falling behind". There is no competition with others. Stop comparing yourself to others... seriously. You didn't "loose a decade" in your 20's. Not one fellow GenX'er I know had it all together in their 20's. Stop it. You simply live in your means regardless of what you have or how much you make.
Oh and kids are really not that expensive. It's an exaggeration. I read somewhere that estimates by "experts" say kids cost $1 million to raise until 18. There is no way we spent any where close to that much.
We had out first kid in our later 30's. We now have two. We decided to become a single income family to boot. She stayed home. We waited ten years after getting married because we wanted to get careers going and spend time with each other. Nothing wrong with waiting. We didnt start saving for retirement until our 40's. Right now it looks like we will doing just fine $$$ wise when we finally do retire.
Every generation has a built in excuse. Imagine buying a home or a car at 25% interest in the 70's... because that's what your baby-boomer parents had to deal with. College is a choice. Going to community college the first two years, take CLEP tests, work while going to school (I have an employee going to work full time and is a full time student. She will have zero debt when she is done), go to school in state... It's all a choice. High mortgage rates not so much.
There is no "keeping up" or "falling behind". There is no competition with others. Stop comparing yourself to others... seriously. You didn't "loose a decade" in your 20's. Not one fellow GenX'er I know had it all together in their 20's. Stop it. You simply live in your means regardless of what you have or how much you make.
Oh and kids are really not that expensive. It's an exaggeration. I read somewhere that estimates by "experts" say kids cost $1 million to raise until 18. There is no way we spent any where close to that much.
One kid in my badmington class is doing exactly this. He is also diabetic. I hear too many excuses nowadays, it’s everywhere I read, it’s the same meme at every forums. Years ago, both of my roommates were doing that. Working full time and going to night school.
I think it's funny when people complain that certain purchases are not wise due to depreciation.
Children are simply cash cows for those that are determined to generate more wealth.
The claim that we need them to pay into Social Security, etc are a joke. Our systems were solvent until the legislators decided to take money from them to invest into their pet projects, which typically waste money.
I feel this way and I don't have the traditional problems that most my age have. I'm 29 and I've never had student loans, I make 60k, haven't had a car payment in 8 years, I have zero debt, minimal expenses, and my housing costs are ridiculously cheap because I live with a roommate who has a great deal on a house rental.
In 2012 when I got my first decent job I thought about buying a house but didn't want over 50% of gross going towards housing expenses so I opted to instead save around 15k in my 401k. Soon after I started maxing out both my 401k and Roth IRA. Fast forward 7 years and I have an amazing 401k balance and I'm about a year away from having a 20% cash down payment on a home. However even with all that, I'd need to cutoff all my retirement savings besides my company match and I'd still be house poor paying about 40% of gross to a mortgage. I'm happy with my current lifestyle but I guess what I'm getting at is making 60k where I live with zero debt and no car payments; and home ownership is still a pipe dream. I can't imagine how others can do it with debt, car payments, credit card payments, and kids. Albeit in those situations there are two incomes vs my single income.
I do live in California which is high cost, but in the Central Valley nice houses can be had for 400-500k.
Like I said, you can thank overly strict land use regulations and anti-development NIMBYs for skyrocketing home prices in California. Even the New York Times has written about it:
...the churning economy has run up against 30 years of resistance to the kind of development experts say is urgently needed. California has always been a desirable place to live and over the decades has gone through periodic spasms of high housing costs, but officials say the combination of a booming economy and the lack of construction of homes and apartments have combined to make this the worst housing crisis here in memory.....
Coastal cities — which tend to have the worst housing problems — have the most scarce land. Still, economists say, the high cost of all housing is first and foremost the result of a failure to build.
To me, a lot of the whole "Millennials" talk is a holdover from the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession a decade ago.
You still see news articles about "Millennials living at home," "Millennials hiding out in grad school," etc. Like you said, the oldest Millennials are in their upper 30s. Most Millennials have probably been out of college for at least five years - many have been out of college for a decade. A not-so-small number of the oldest ones are grandparents themselves.
The Millennials I know that are truly in a world of hurt have other issues besides the economy.
Well, but you admit you live in a depressed area of the country, so that's not surprising that that's your experience.
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