What Do Millennials Spend All Their Money On? | Hacker News Reader

What Do Millennials Spend All Their Money On?

motherjones.com

71 pointscurtis92 comments

This boils down to the baby boomer generation doing a terrible job at saving for themselves outside housing, and demanding millennials buy them out of their investment. When they don't, they scream "stupid millennial, why don't you just have more money" ... so they can ultimately get that too. They are largely not very desperate, yet still so afraid that even in their later years they horde wealth.

In the Bay Area, I feel like rent or buy, I'm just working hard so the older generation can continue living well off our backs. The vast majority of them have made no intelligent investments or savings other than property. And they are now incentivized to make life as miserable as possible for the next generation, so they can live out their remaining years as well as they are accustomed too. My landlord whined about how she makes so little, whilst attempting to hold onto 2.8mm USD in property.

I find it hard to swallow... but also inevitable.

The cohesiveness of existing communities is always going to be at odds with the ability of new communities to form and take hold. It's almost heartwarming that Boomers built lives they love so much, they're willing to go to such lengths to prevent any change.

I expect the Boomers would have faced the same thing from their parents and grandparents. What saved them was, rather than pushing inwards to city land already occupied by the powerful, they pushed outwards to sprawl, or into racial minority neighborhoods which didn't, at the time, have a legal mechanism to meaningfully resist.

When society saw how destructive this was, it made it much harder to repeat. This is, often, the history of downzoning and the origin of those processes that notify and invite busybodies to stop development. There are moral justifications behind these controls (particularly as they apply to disadvantaged neighborhoods), and to get anything done, we'll have to engage with them.

We're completely screwed now because the door is closed to "urban renewal," and sprawl is at its natural limits (under the levels of investment in public transit currently contemplated), and the impetus to live in cities with these problems is more economic necessity than personal taste.

> they pushed outwards [...] into racial minority neighborhoods which didn't, at the time, have a legal mechanism to meaningfully resist.

AFAIK in the boomer years the prevalent phenomenon was the opposite: minorities moving into formerly majority neighborhoods, and the majority moving out. This was known as "white flight".

You're right, I'm talking about the (mostly stalled) attempt by Gen X to walk back white flight in the 1970s, which is where much of the current thinking and policy around gentrification comes from.

According to Wikipedia, for Generation X "demographers and researchers typically use starting birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960s and ending birth years ranging from the late 1970s to early 1980s."

So any members of Generation X were still children in the 70s or not yet born. I think you mean a different cohort or a different time.

What would flip that back around is remote work. The only reason jobs are in cities is the collaboration effects that it confers on service and thinking jobs. If we can get the technology to completely match or exceed those effects people will have a lot fewer trade offs to spreading out. At the same time, the main reason I would live in a city is access to people that only live in cities (you can have a lot more minorities in dense spaces). I imagine the future could be microcommunities of like minded people, or theme communities (much like we have on the internet now). One can argue that's what the suburban moves in the 20th century was all about. Diversity helps people access like minded people and exposes them to other viewpoints to an extent, but if you can still get the viewpoints why not live in a community of like minded people?

Where are the gay suburbs?

Cities have been densifying since the beginning of humanity...a trend that precedes the very existence of knowledge work. Remote work can only eliminate the usefulness of cities to the extent that work dominates our lives. Are you gonna make play remote too? Dating? Art? Dining? Music? The only people I know who have 100% remote work jobs still live in cities: New York, Miami, Puerto Vallarta, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Bangkok, etc. They're no longer tied to the city chosen by their employer, but they still live in cities.

The utility of remote work is great, but its potential effect on urban form has been greatly overestimated.

Major cities may have densified from the beginning of humanity until downzoning; it doesn't follow that they will continue to do so. We're not talking about living in the woods here; there are plenty of third-string "cities" with cheap real estate.

>Are you gonna make play remote too?

Especially among SF tech workers, play mostly consists of leaving the city for nature sites and hiking/camping/climbing them.

>Dating?

Small cities and towns reproduce at a much higher rate than elite coastal cities. Some of those matches may have been made in college or while working in big cities in early adulthood, but the educated reproduce less. So, apparently yes.

>Art?

Hollywood, television, audio reproduction equipment, the Broadway tour, the music tour, and traveling exhibitions between art museums made art remote. Small, cheap cities often have thriving (though less nationally famous) local theater, ballet, symphony, and opera, as well as visual/performing arts venues capable of receiving more prestigious national tours.

Smaller communities may even have strong community/educational theater traditions and spaces, which while not exactly High Art, are a lot more personal and participatory than anything you'll pay $200 to see in Manhattan. Theater in small cities/suburbs is unique among the art forms in that average people get to work on reasonably high production value projects and present them to their peers and families. Tight real estate markets can't allocate so much space to amateur performance, and it's easier to put an awesome lighting rig in a high school auditorium when you don't have a homeless population.

>Dining

I guess the dining culture is more about what you cook, who you cook it with, hosting potlucks and BBQs and dinner parties in your enormous house and backyard, etc.

>Music?

Any tour that passes through the likes of San Francisco will pass through the likes of Milwaukee, and if not it'll certainly go to Chicago, an always-fun and usually-accessible jaunt from smaller Midwestern population centers.

>Are you gonna make play remote too? Dating? Art? Dining? Music?

Do you really think all of those only exist in cities?

Do you really think the quality of those found in non-cities even approach that of cities?

Maybe you have some alternate theory as to why remote workers overwhelmingly choose to live in cities?

https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/how-manage-remote-team/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/02/04/the-t...

Have you ever left the city yourself? There's great food everywhere. The best food I've had has been outside of cities. There are art galleries at every college and some outside of them too, but even if cities have "better" art, I'm fine with just getting it from the internet. Same for music - Woodstock took place on a dairy farm. I'm not sure of the exact intent of "play" but things like hiking trails and snow tubing hills are found outside cities, along with again the internet. The only point here that might make sense is dating, if you assume a higher density of people means a higher chance of finding the right person for yourself, but it also means more competition.

If you want alternate theories, one influence could be that cities having higher populations means that among the group of people who have remote work, more of those people will live in cities. Also, someone who works as a programmer likely had to move to a city in the first place to get a job and wouldn't want to move out immediately after being used to living there. There are likely other factors too but I'm really not seeing how the quality of food and entertainment is supposed to be better enough in cities that it would be a driving factor.

The trade-off of some additional convenience living in the city might give you, for always having to be on the look out for pickpocketers, no outdoor privacy, not being able to feel as safe being out at night, having to pay for parking or use public transportation (I'd rather not have to only take home from the grocery store as much as I can fit in a backpack and then have to carry around a gallon of milk on the way home), having to deal with aggressive panhandlers and drug addicts asking you for money all the time, and higher cost of living among other things, isn't worth it to everyone, even if that's hard to believe for you. I've spent a fair amount of time in cities and I know that the negatives I listed are enough for me personally to not really want to live in one if I don't have to.

Quality and diversity - the further out you go the more conservative heavy you get, and the more focus on schools and churches as community bases.

Can you explain what was destructive about sprawling outwards?

Sure. Cars kill about 40,000 people directly through collisions, and many more through the environmental toxicity of tailpipe emissions, before we even consider climate change. A built environment where cars are far and away the best option for getting around exacerbates these problems. More sprawl generates more traffic, meaning cars need to run and produce emissions for even longer to go the same distances.

Infrastructure like water and sewer is naturally cheaper at higher population densities. Low density municipalities are finding they don't have be tax revenue to maintain what they've built.

Then there's the environmental destruction inherent in clearing literal green fields for greenfield construction projects.

Then there's the social decay and public health crises like opiate addiction that come when a town built around a small collection of employers loses one or several of its major employers. People don't want to leave these places because they have family ties, so dysfunction festers and enters negative feedback loops. In cities, the same people could stand a chance of obtaining other jobs while still in proximity to their families, and benefit from government services will funded by the industries that didn't evaporate.

I've been seeing this for a while and predicting it for a good decade or so, but I think the next political divide will be young vs old, instead of right vs left. Boomers have done a million things to fuck over everyone that comes after them, and it's gonna take a while for it to happen but the younger generations are gonna start pushing back.

Anecdotally it already happens. I attended a Bernie Sanders rally here in Seattle and it was interesting to see the hordes of millenials cheering and chanting the whole time but go completely silent when he starts talking about the importance of social security. Millenials don't care about social security and it would probably be a net benefit for the majority of them if it went away, because the system as it is structured is just a massive wealth transfer to boomers which will be completely neutered by the time they are eligible for benefits.

The capped real estate taxes (in CA) is a perfect example of this.

The debate annoys me. Housing has become more expensive and food, including eating out, has become cheaper. Yes, a totally financially responsible person should be minimising eating out in order to save. I do this. I'm on close to average full time wage. Even though I'm saving very carefully, it's still going to take me a lot longer before I own my own home than an average wage earner from the previous generation.

Yes, stop buying avocado every day, if you do. But also, Australian housing needs to come down in cost if you don't want people like me to be renting forever.

It's not the end of the world if I rent forever, but it is a bit sad. Everyone else got to own a home, why should that be so much harder for me?

Not to mention that it takes considerably greater qualifications now to earn an average wage compared to the past. So I'm starting later and with student debt.

I don't want to completely absolve myself of agency. I plan on doing the best I can with my situation and I will probably own a home one day. But is it unfair? Yes. There really is no argument.

Us modern folk have it easier in many ways, but in terms of home ownership we're not hallucinating that it's harder. Wages aren't going up as fast as house prices, and that's really what it comes down to.

> why should that be so much harder for me?

And my friends*. My social group (25-30yo) is generally pretty morbid about the whole situation and most are resolved to wait for some sort of bubble to burst in Australia. Investing in other markets which are stable and easy to enter in the meantime.

It's interesting to read an American perspective from outside of the largest cities. I wonder if Australia's more spread out nature and few high density cities skew the problem more here.

I'd propose a hypothesis that yes it does, for a couple of main reasons:

1. Concentration of job market - a lot of industries only exist (or at least, in a large enough volume) in the larger cities (e.g. financial services, tech). I'd say this is largely coupled to the location of higher education, where there is (relatively) less tertiary education once you leave the major cities.

2. Desirability of location - infrastructure and general "way of life" tends to lead people to wanting a more coastal existence. Australia didn't have the boom of city development in our regional centres, look at towns that are considered large in rural Australia, and they barely compare to even the outer suburbs of the major cities.

As much as our deputy Prime Minister would argue "just move to the country", it's not a realistic statement without addressing massive shortcomings in the long term planning of our rural areas.

Much like ECMAs reply in this thread, I've also resigned myself to pretty much never owning a home. Although I earn enough to get by on, I'm out 80-90% of my weekly income in rent, power, internet, and food leaving practically nothing to save. I hardly ever eat out, thought I had a decent job and try to put as much as possible in high interest, but every time I look in my savings and think yeah that's looking good, I check house prices and a deposit has gone up another $1500 on what I've saved. It's debilitating, a feeling that I'm literally putting in all this work for nothing. Sadly, it's not just living close to the city anymore, anywhere within a few hours of Sydney is ridiculously expensive. Much like you, I'm not too concerned about carrying on renting, and I have time to wait out the market, but if this trend continues I feel like my whole generation will be permanently locked out of the market, and hence out of one of the most effective retirement savings vehicles the system has.

Sydney prices are absurd. Keep saving and wait for interest rates to rise. If they ever go to the 17%+ territory which we had back in the 90s then there'll be a country wide firesale, and you'll be sitting pretty with your cash savings.

It won't need to be 17% this time around, that's for sure. Just to give people a sense of the magnitude of the debt Australians are in:

- When mortgage rates 'peaked' in 1989 at around 17%, aggregate interest payments ate up about 6% of aggregate household disposable income.

- When mortgage rates 'peaked' in 2007 at around 9%, aggregate interest payments ate up about 11% of aggregate household disposable income.

We're more indebted now than we were in 2007. An external shock that causes mortgage rates to rise by as little as 1% (relative to incomes) will probably be enough to trigger our long overdue 'Minksky moment'. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsky_moment

Interest rates would rise so high only after a significant increase in inflation, which means that your cash savings would fall in real value as well.

> “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he said. “We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high. They want to eat out every day; they want travel to Europe every year.

The modest house where I grew up in the D.C. suburbs (1,150 square feet, three bedrooms, built in 1950s, okay school district) is estimated on Redfin around $600,000.[1] That's a $120,000 down payment. According to the article, millennials spend $3,100 a year eating out. Even if they cut that out entirely, it'd take them decades to save up that down payment.

The cost of housing and rent has gotten so out of control in major metro areas that the usual frugality tips don't make much of a dent. What good does cutting out your $4 latte out do (maybe $100 per month), when your rent is $2,500 month for a 1BR?

[1] My parents bought it in 1990 for $175,000. People in my dad's line of work certainly don't earn 3.5x more than what they used to back then.

>What good does cutting out your $4 latte out do (maybe $100 per month), when your rent is $2,500 month for a 1BR?

Easy solution: live with roommates. Cohabitation isnt the ultimate indignity, people are choosing to spend $2500 or more when they could spend less than half that. Even in Manhattan you could live uptown and pay less than that living alone, and be able to catch an express train downtown during the week. With a roommate your rent might even be sub 1k.

I know plenty of yuppies living beyond their means, spending $3000/mo on tacky "luxury" apartments, without much leftover even for things like $4 coffees. Cant say i feel too bad for them.

Or live alone somewhere far from the city center. Get a dumpy apartment in Worcester or Hoboken or [insert cheap city near your metro] and spend a couple hours on the train. Wont be fun but you sure wont be spending 2.5k on rent.

My wife and I once shared a 420 square foot apartment in New Rochelle, NY with our newborn so we could pay for her final year of law school tuition without taking loans. So I know there are things you can do to save money. At the same time, I don't want to hear boomers talk about millennials' spending habits. My parents certainly never lived with roommates in their late 20s, early 30s.

Sharing your apartment with your newborn is terrible. It's so much easier when you get them their own space early, no hearing all the crying in the middle of the night and all.

Preferably across the hall. Really cuts down on shared-wall noise.

I've not only always shared an apartment since college, I've shared rooms.

Millennial, two STEM degrees, live in a 2nd-tier city, and likely a decade more before I can afford a down payment.

So uhhhh....checkmate?

To be fair you don't actually need 20% down. It's recommended but hardly the norm. Plenty of people will do 5 to 10% down. Veterans need as little as 3%.

It can seriously hinder the quality of your bid however. If you're putting 5% down and competing against people putting 20% or even straight cash you're in serious trouble.

Why would the size of the downpayment affect your bid? Isn't that between you and your loan officer? Does it affect how the seller gets paid?

Regardless of reality, sellers see the buyers as being less serious and/or more likely to back out of a deal with a lower down payment.

As someone who bought their house with a smaller than normal down payment it was quite frustrating. I wound up starting to bid much higher than I wanted in an effort to put more room between myself and normal down payments

Note that this only really matters in a hot market where sellers can pick and choose

As a veteran homeowner I can tell you I paid 0 down on a Fixed rate.

Try it now as a first time homeowner.

That used to be very easy to do, but got harder after 2008.

Did mine in 2013

It's expensive to go under 20%, whether in interest rate or insurance.

This depends on specific circumstances. If the house appreciates quickly you can discharge PMI early. And how much house you buy.

Sort of. There are minimum time requirements for PMI no matter how quickly a house appreciates.

Depends on the State.

And depending on your credit PMI isn't that much per month. It also goes away once you've paid enough to hold 20% equity.

Fannie Mae has 3% as well and you can roll your student loans into it if you want via SoFi.

What does that do for bankruptcy rules? Sounds either very good or very bad for people with unmanageable student loan debts.

i generally agree. i think theres some penny-wise pound-foolish thinking going on among people who are critical or eating out or buying lattes. it may sound stupidly tautological, but i think the way to get rich is focus almost entirely on boosting earnings, since that has much less of an upper bound than spending does a lower bound. or course theres more than one way to do it, and i think it would certainly be more satisfying, once accomplished, to accumulate wealth by careful, daily effort rather than managing to find some firehose of money. but it seems like most of the time it tends towards the latter.

Are you sure that's not the availability heuristic talking? People who accumulate wealth gradually over a lifetime of not getting lattes don't make for flashy stories, and by definition aren't flashy themselves. In addition they tend to be older, because that takes time, meaning that in any crowd that skews younger, the wealthy people will likely have taken the maximized earnings path.

im basing it on everyone who i know who is rich or poor? its almost always what they do for a living, not how frugal they are. but i do agree that you can be smart with a modest income and end up with alot of money!

You don't know about the people who are wealthy through frugality since they aren't flashy.

I think millennials simply earn less. That has cut them out of balancing a mortgage and child care while having a stable job. It's pretty easy to work on cutting out lattes and eating out while increasing your earning potential though. I don't think daily frugality comes at the cost of improving your skills or position.

I would never have been able to buy an apartment if my parents hadn't put up their own house as collateral. The bank required 20% at the time, but with the collateral I only needed something like 5%, which I could afford. I had no issues paying the down payments, which came to about the same as I used to pay in rent. A few years later I had paid down enough that they could take off my prents' home from the collateral, and 10 years later I had something that had increased 100% in market value.

I imagine most millennials aren't lucky enough to be able to do this.

Property prices in popular metros mean they should probably be looking elsewhere, but the list of attractive places probably isn't that long. Detroit, maybe? Baltimore?

Minneapolis

Here's the part of the article where they answer the question in the headline:

About $1,000 more on health care.

About $1,500 more on pensions and Social Security.

About $2,000 more on overall housing (rent, maintenance, utilities, etc.).

About $700 more on education.

Healthcare, higher cost because of aging boomers. Pension/Social Security, boomers again Housing, caused by over investment by boomers that is encouraged by generous tax incentives by boomers.

Seems boomers are to blame.

Not sure why you're being buried. Part of the ACA was to increase the burden on younger, healthier people.

> About $700 more on education.

More importantly, the vast majority of boomers didn't spend anything. "The overall college enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds increased from 26% in 1980 to 41% in 2012."[1] The lost leverage by having taken on these costs at a young age, by a much larger portion of the population, seems to be directly responsible for the struggles of the millennials. The indebted people with student loans are left with no ability to say no when they feel they are getting a raw deal.

[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/c-span/20...

Every time I mention to people that a home is almost always a depreciating asset in Japan, someone always thinks that's stupid and inefficient and obviously a bad thing. But if your housing is an appreciating asset then so is almost everyone else's. That means your primary cost of living is going up, and your wages (or return on other assets) better keep up with that rate of increase. That's a lot of pressure on new entrants, especially in a country where family has an ever-diminishing willingness (and ability) to take care of its own.

I'm a millennial, who's just leaving university and coming into the job market. I was lucky enough to pick a degree with actual job prospects, so I'm earning a decent wage.

However, there is no chance of me buying property in my country anytime soon (probably for at least a decade, if I'm lucky). At the current rate I could max save at, I'll only come within striking range in 50 years.

To be fair, buying fresh out of college has never been that realistic. The more interesting question to me is, if I can maintain my current spending under future raises (and shovel the difference into an investment account), will I come within striking range in a decade or so?

The answer is, I could come within striking range of a 20% down-payment on current prices, but once I factor in 1) the 10-15%/year price increase every year, and 2) the 10-15%/year rent increase chipping away at what I can save, it's hopeless.

I'm kind of thinking about investing (part of) this fund in REITs, so that I have exposure to the same growth I'm trying to compete with. However, this precludes the only truly winning scenario (I have a lot of cash available during a housing market crash).

I have no idea where your native land is, but you could go against mainstream with a house boat. I'm trying to get a SV refugee camp here in North Florida around housing in the St Johns. In Florida if you are a resident, you can park your boat on the river. So if we can co-op a boat community on the river complete with WiFi broad band, I think we could all live happily ever after.

You can get a liveable boat with out a shower, used without a shower for 7k US. Think microhouse with Manatees in the winter.

If you'd like to live in Palatka FL contact me: virmundi at gmail.com.

I would like to see median incomes compared instead of averages. I suspect that the trend indicated in the article would become even more pronounced.

lotta knee-jerk boomer hate responses so far.

I'm not a boomer.

I have recently bought a house and will be a slave to the bank for decades.

But: I don't live in a major tech city = house prices are cheaper.

I rented for years and years slowly building a deposit before looking for a house.

I had ZERO expectation of buying a house on leaving university. Why would I expect to do that?

I didn't and don't buy retail coffee every day. (in fact i don't buy retail anything everyday day).

In my twenties computer games used to cost approx the same as aaa console games, none of this freemium/app pricing schemes also DVDs/CDs were full priced, no free streaming. And because I couldn't afford more stuff the answer was to just buy less.

slowly slowly.

yeh but you also just said youve resigned to being a slave, and I'm not going to bash our generation for wanting to imagine a world where we are not slaves to a bank forever.

I chose to live in a village in another country than my native country with one of the reasons being I could pay my house cash. This world is already there if you are more flexible about your location. Luckily I do not generally like cities at all and never did.

well, i want to imagine a world where i've got a solid gold toilet but it ain't gonna happen.

> It's not because houses are more expensive: the average house costs about a third more than it did in the 80s and early 90s

For what it's worth, this whole 'Avocado toast' thing comes from the "Australian Housing Affordability" 'crisis' that's going on at the moment, where housing prices have raised 70% just in the past 5 years alone.

What's the cause of the increase?

Inorganic population growth by immigration. There are heaps of millionaires in China and the banks are giving them quite some leverage.

- pensions being invested in real estate

- overseas investment

- generous tax incentives where you can reduce your taxable income to zero, "negative gearing"

It is really rather funny moving to the bay area and making a very high salary that still comes nothing near the kind of money you'd ever need to buy a house. People are buying houses cash and bidding over asking and it would still take me over a decade just to make the 20% downpayment. It makes me really not sweat 10-20$ spent on something I might enjoy, like a coffee or ice cream.

Yeah it use to be IPO and buy a house.. harder nowadays.

Rent

Real estate in Australia is a giant house of cards, that appears to be slowly reaching its peak. Eventually something will give.

- higher interest rates

- change in government taxation

- inability for people to pay higher rents

Rent and student loans

So, it seems millenials are quite frugal after all, and previous generations aren't as much.

I save most of it. Stock market etc.

>In the Reagan era, this age group spent 91 percent of their income. Today's millennials spend only 81 percent of their income.

What the what?!

I guess it means they are saving a greater percentage of their income. Is that so surprising?

Not clear if it includes compulsory retirement savings though. In Australia you get 9% of your salary paid into a retirement savings account. If the "income" figure includes things like that then that might explain the higher apparent savings rate.

I think both numbers are really high.

Really? I'm a millennial on about average wage and I save about 35 percent of my income. I consider myself quite frugal. My biggest expense is rent, which is about 25 % of my after-tax income. It seems pretty hard to do much better. I could provide a breakdown of my finances, which I track fastidiously. I cook all my own food and bring lunch to work every day. My weekly grocery bill is $70 USD. Those savings rates seem normal to me.

I have the added expense of flights every now and again since I'm working in the US but my girlfriend and family are in Australia. It's a temporary arrangement. But without that my savings rate would only be a little bit higher. Maybe 45% instead of 35%.

>My biggest expense is rent, which is about 25 % of my after-tax income.

Yeah, you're not on average wage. HN is awfully biased, and I'm certain almost none of us here have actually lived on minimum to average wage for a long time.

Include comment about personal experience under this post.

Well, it is technically possible he is at the national average income (not the median wage) and lives in a place where rent is way more affordable than the cities most of HN lives in. U.S. GDP per capita is $55,836.79. That is $44,558 after taxes in Knoxville, TN (I am picking a city, but it could be more extreme, he could work remotely from a rural area in the U.S. or from, say, Belize). This means 25% towards rent is $1163. So, in Knoxville, Zillow says that is a 3 bedroom home.

More realistically, that same amount is a small studio in e.g. Austin, TX.

Now, the trick is that the average income might be $55,836.79, but the median personal income is ~$41,520 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

Seems accurate to me. Local average individual income where I live is about $48,000 or $41,000 after-tax. 25% of that leaves you ~$850/month for rent. I see all kinds of listings at $575/month not including utilities. Assuming the parent is including utilities, $275/month for those should be sufficient.

I know that would not be possible in all markets, but it would take the same HN bias you mentioned to think that everyone lives in SF or NYC.

I'm on 55k USD per year pre-tax which is about average (mean) wage I believe.

I am not renting my own place, I'm in a share house. My rent is US$900 per month (including utilities).

A more accurate calculation shows that this is about 27% to 28 % of my after tax income.

This isn't just discretionary spending, it's total outflow of money earned (presumably after tax). They mentioned costs of housing, insurance and student debt repayments in the article as growth factors.

Thats what I thought, still seems insanely high to me, but I also dont have any student debt or a car.

You know the median millenial salary is like 28,000, right?

Avocado toast

Bullshit.

> it would cost more than 57,000 avocado toasts to buy a loft in Detroit.

But also, while the joke implies that Millennials are stubbornly, consciously making the mistake of living lavishly instead of frugally a) avocado is nutritious (has Big Food has warped the national discourse so much that health is seen as an extravagance?) and b) capitalism encourages buying; it’s highly hypocritical to expect those who earn less to opt out of this model.

To provide some context: this was famously mentioned as the reason why millennials can't afford property in Australia.

Artisinal avocado toast.

(Artisinal? "It’s like stuff you would normally buy, but it costs a lot more. And it has ingredients from places I haven’t even heard of, like Detroit.")

> And it has ingredients from [artisanal] places I haven’t even heard of, like Detroit.

Ah, yes, 'du-twah'.

http://www.smashedavoproperty.com

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