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So just keep adding more roommates to deal with never ending housing bubbles? Why not just take this all the way and have everyone live with their parents until they're 35? Why not grandparents too? Because that's the end game here.
My point was that high housing and transportation costs are the reason why young people of this generation are so poor. Stop blaming phones and video games they're peanuts.
Apparently you didn't think things through all that well as you worked toward your degree. The cost of living wherever your particular degree mandates that you live didn't magically jump to $500,000 per apartment overnight. Sounds like you're working in either a very large metro area or an island paradise. Sorry, but you should have known what you could expect for a salary and balanced that with the typical cost of living in areas with the type of jobs you qualify for.
Where I live, many young adults are able to afford to own homes.
I know several people forced into early retirement who aren't doing well. They expected to have 10 more years to prepare for retirement and found themselves out of a job. I'm a little worried myself. I'm 55 and have less than $400K in my IRA. I have 12 years to figure this out and it took me almost 20 years to save the first $250K on an engineers salary. I may just have to work until I die if social security goes bankrupt. I never wanted to count on it but I'm there. My IRA won't last me 10 years without it unless something happens to allow me to max out a 401k for the rest of my career. With it I can handle about 25 years of retirement before I'm out of money. I'd rather be 35 and just starting to save than 55 and doing damage control.
I know what you mean, believe me. My husband said the other day, "My gosh, I'm going to be working till I'm 75 years old."
When did the 18-34 cohort ever have a high net worth?
Why would anyone think that cohort would have a high net worth?
Why shouldn't the oldest cohort, who spent their lives working and accumulating wealth, have the highest?
My thoughts exactly. They're just starting out. Why would they expect to compare favorably to people who have been working and saving since before they were born?
My parents bought their first home in 1966 in a Chicago suburb, when they were 24 and 23
And my parents were well into their 30s before they bought their house in 1964. Not even the 60s were halcyon days of nectar and ambrosia.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaggy001
And you think that we had any money when we were 18-34?
Try inflation rates up to 20% and mortgage rates up to 17%. Try pay raises that didn't cover inflation so were really pay reductions.
You got a pay raise?
I didn't start earning real money until I was about 35. It was my choice, to pursue the career I did, so I'm not whining about it. But the economic upheavals of the late 70s and early 80s didn't help much, because the newspaper industry, heavily dependent upon advertising dollars and discretionary spending, contracted in the 80s and 90s.
When I bought a house, at age 33 after 12 years of saving, the interest rate was 8.75 percent. Can't imagine what the 20-somethings would think about that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scottkuzminski
I take it you are a boomer ....that time was the late 70's.....stagflation......however, jobs were not outsourced at that time, factory jobs(and unions) were humming full bore, etc
Consult your history books. Industry was contracting right and left in the late 70s, especially heavy industry (steel, auto, manufacturing). And before Reagan and his trickle-down economics took over, the economy's contractions had trickled down to other sectors dependent upon a workforce with discretionary dollars to spend.
You're not that much younger than me. The economy was recovering, slowly, by the mid-80s, but interest rates were still high. Recovery took awhile to trickle down to the working class.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FeelinLow
You youngin's are the ones out buying 500 dollar cell phones every few months, 5 dollar lattes every few hours, and getting 100s of dollars of tats every few weeks.
And my personal experience says that is absolutely wrong. Where I earned my degree is actually more important than the degree itself. I'm not currently using my degree professionally. But it still opens doors any time I need to do so.
Not one peep from the anti-education crowd about the fact that a degree like mine is simply unattainable for everyone except the children of the wealthy. (Short of racking up six figures of debt, of course.) And it wasn't unattainable a generation ago. A meaningful discussion about that might cause people to reexamine their political outlook.
Plenty of stereotyping about how millennials aren't capable of putting down the XBox long enough to find a job to pay for school, though. No lack of sanctimony or indignance (particularly about trades). That's for sure.
The trust funds of all ivy league schools, and most private schools, support a large number of charity students who never saw the inside of a prestigious prep school. Of course, they select those students from the intellectually elite, which many would see as "unfair."
Also, I once heard a guy with two Nobel Prizes state flatly that where you got your undergraduate degree was irrelevant.
So just keep adding more roommates to deal with never ending housing bubbles? Why not just take this all the way and have everyone live with their parents until they're 35? Why not grandparents too? Because that's the end game here.
My point was that high housing and transportation costs are the reason why young people of this generation are so poor. Stop blaming phones and video games they're peanuts.
No, not more and more roommates, just a sensible number. If an apartment costs $500k, then the easy solution is to not buy one, but to shack with 2-3 others and split the rent.
I bought my current home in 1994. At the time, the best rate I could get on a 15 year mortgage was 8.5%. The 30 year mortgage rates were running around 9.25%. Less than half of the purchase price of my home was what I paid for it, the rest was interest. If you are not paying cash, home prices in the last 5 years have been as low as they have been in twenty years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by im_a_lawyer
I need to have a roof over my head. Apartments where I live average around $500,000 each and go up much higher for places where you could actually raise 2.2 kids.
Meanwhile...
... no I can't move to Kansas because jobs for my specialty would be scare to non-existent over there.
Subtract another 15-20% of their income due to the huge expense that is car ownership. Remember when USA had one of the best public transit systems in the world? Not anymore. Better spend thousands driving everywhere.
It's not the iPhones or Xboxes.
If you're really spending 15% of your income on car ownership, all I can say is sell the car and call a cab.
I bought my current home in 1994. At the time, the best rate I could get on a 15 year mortgage was 8.5%. The 30 year mortgage rates were running around 9.25%. Less than half of the purchase price of my home was what I paid for it, the rest was interest. If you are not paying cash, home prices in the last 5 years have been as low as they have been in twenty years.
Well, this depends on how much you borrow and how long it is before you sell the house or otherwise pay it off. If you do like my stepmom did and put down 70% of the purchase price, even though technically not paying cash, mortgage rates make much less difference than they would if you borrowed more. Similarly, if you sell it sooner, interest rates make less difference because you aren't paying interest for as long.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
If you're really spending 15% of your income on car ownership, all I can say is sell the car and call a cab.
Why? Cabs can cost more than car ownership if you need transportation enough, such as 2-3 times a day and 20+ miles each day.
Why? Cabs can cost more than car ownership if you need transportation enough, such as 2-3 times a day and 20+ miles each day.
I think you're missing the point. Vehicle ownership shouldn't cost 15 percent of one's income -especially not if the person has a degree and is living in an area where apartments cost $500,000.
I think you're missing the point. Vehicle ownership shouldn't cost 15 percent of one's income -especially not if the person has a degree and is living in an area where apartments cost $500,000.
Why shouldn't they? A single person making $50k/year and spending $7500/year on a car is not unreasonable. They do not need to buy an apartment, so how is that relevant?
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I know several people forced into early retirement who aren't doing well. They expected to have 10 more years to prepare for retirement and found themselves out of a job. I'm a little worried myself. I'm 55 and have less than $400K in my IRA. I have 12 years to figure this out and it took me almost 20 years to save the first $250K on an engineers salary. 
I may just have to work until I die if social security goes bankrupt. I never wanted to count on it but I'm there. My IRA won't last me 10 years without it unless something happens to allow me to max out a 401k for the rest of my career. With it I can handle about 25 years of retirement before I'm out of money. I'd rather be 35 and just starting to save than 55 and doing damage control.
