‘Just stop buying lattes’: The origins of a millennial housing myth

Problems of that scale cannot be tackled by changing individual spending. You could move somewhere else (if you can actually afford to do so), but the problem is not limited to one region.

Still, with that background, I do notice things... Like e.g. someone I know who grew up lower middle class in America (n=1, admittedly) being surprisingly oblivious of prices in the grocery store. Buying $7 artisanal ice-cream when $3 ice-cream is just as good - it's literally $100/mo right there, just on one item. Sure, they can easily afford it now, but I wonder if the notion that it costs $100/mo even crosses their mind in any way. I see people who look like they are homeless (there's a big extremely-affordable-housing apartment building next to the store) buying fancy beer... when I was poor I was drinking Bud Light equivalent ;) I am only slightly judging - to each their own, but then, it might indeed cramp your spending elsewhere.

* When the first cars started killing people -> make jaywalking a crime.

* When people take on too much credit card debt -> obviously a problem with financial literacy

* When large companies destroy the environment -> if people just recycled more we could save the planet...

* You're broke in 1990 -> why didnt you get a degree?

* you're broke in 2000 with a degree -> why didnt you get a STEM degree?

* you're broke in 2010 with a STEM degree -> why didnt you get a compsci degree?

* You're broke in 2020 with a compsci degree -> tsk you should have done something useful like machine learning.

Still, being frugal is not a bad advice and will definitely help you save money.

What's the mental health cost though?

That latte or that luxury item can be what keep you sane in a world that become increasingly worse.

Lattes, pr0n, weed, alcohol. They definitely have their pro and cons, but they may be needed at certain times of your life. If they start ruining your life, seek help.

Buy lattes and consider moving to where housing supply is not constrained.

But on a micro level, you can't get around the fact that if you spend $50 on lattes a month, and then you stop doing that, you will have $50 more per month.

And if you spend $50 on buying a luxury brand shirt rather than a $10 shirt, you have $40 less.

If you DON'T spend $50 on lattes, then obviously you can't save that money.

Anything else is self flaggelating excuses about why you need to buy lattes, and why capitalism is bad, and an excuse for your status games or your consumer desires. Fact is, if you buy lattes, you can save that money instead.

Couple that with all time high income to housing price ratios[1], higher than 2008 housing bubble, and the idea that lattes are the problem is asinine.

https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-to-real-estate-ratio/

The truth is that the lower rungs of the economy have been sacrificed in order to cater to the upper classes, and it has been this way since Reagan-Thatcher were in office. This has always existed before, but at no point in time has it been this blatant where failing up because of your social status has been this prevalent for the upper class, and whether it's University admission scams, white collar crime, to economic malfeasance... there is no limit to what length they will go to skew the game in their favour.

I think if people are being honest with their children in the developed Western World is that they should be optimizing them to either take over a family owned and operated business if it exists, or simply to teach them to have skills in which they can bypass the university debt trap and travel abroad and work remotely in order to maybe settle elsewhere, because this insanity has gone on for far too long.

Career building implies their is some integrity in the system but when it's built on nepotism and corruption one has to ask the very obvious question: why is this worth investing my child's life into? And who benefits the most for this?

As a millennial from the US that studied STEM and worked in my field, and eventual became an entrepreneur in fintech and hired both local and international talent: my country failed me every step of the way. It never failed to hinder or prevent my ability to excel in anything that didn't first serve the interests of multinational corporation(s) or the business interests of someone who 'played the game.'

Venturing out on my own and finding my own path in 2012 after paying off tons of student debt was not recreational, it was foreshadowing what I thought was happening in just the US but in most developed nations: self-cannibalization.

Politicians and the Boomers who elected them had access to cheap credit and stable careers that allowed for some savings were able to leverage that and have a glut of viable tenets pay not just for their mortgages by renting out rooms at inflated costs, but their very lifestyle.

It disgusted me to my core how brash and calloused people had become that they'd exploit education and housing to such a degree under the pretense of 'getting mine' when they were handed it on a silver platter all while simultaneously thinking this was achievable based on merit. The last landlord I had literately moved in his ex-wife unbeknownst to us and then subsidized her expenses based on increasing rent costs during COVID as we didn't chose to take advantage of the rent relief option.

I lost all respect for this class of individual and I now want to see them get economically ruined as I think it's the only chance for any level of reform at this point: mass homelessness and unemployment from 2008-COVID onward didn't change anything, a perpetual bondage based University debt system hasn't changed anything, lower standards of living and shorter life expediencies for Millenials and likely Gen Z hasn't either. I've come to the conclusion that nothing less than the significant die off, or in this case financial ruin, of the affluent boomer will lead to any significant reform.

This is still true, though. When I turned 40 in 1994, I decided I had lived with debt long enough. So I sold my plane. my boat and my 2nd house. In the next four years, I paid off the remaining mortgage on my 1st house and installments on my cars and credit cards. Was it hard? Yes, it was damn hard. It's like kicking a habit like a drug addiction, but the drug is easy credit.

I never went into debt again.

Other economists and politicians posit this won't happen and then proceed to do it, and then inflation happens, and then all of a sudden nobody could have predicted it, it is transitory (until it clearly is not), it is caused by Putin (except not according to the fed chair), it is because the economy is in transition, etc etc.

How about, don't pump metric shit-tons of money into the economy and see how that works.

And while you are at it, maybe don't make a campaign promise to end fossil fuels and act all surprised when the prices for fossil fuels go through the roof. I'm as happy as the next person to see the end to carbon emissions, but I don't do everything I can to end it and then whine about it ending .