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

Excellent characterization. This Bach influencer or David Brooks walk into a coffee shop and opine, what are these (mostly women) doing all day? Must be indisciplined spending on coffee.

I feel Gen-X and millennials know in our bones that this stupid advice is path-dependent on a surface of rules that will never happen again. Take one coffee drinker, who in May 2001, might be advised by a financial planner like Bach to buy Enron stock instead of that avocado toast. That advice kept her from having a down payment for 7 years. In 2008, millions like her were foreclosed.

This talk of frugality deserves a fraction of a paragraph before we move onto the serious costs of child care, health care, psychotherapy, alcoholism around you, college loans for people without rich parents, what to do during 3 hours of commuting, losses from Worldcom ($1385 per taxpayer), losses from Madoff ($27 per), losses from the fourth largest investment bank (Lehman Bros) collapsing, etc.

So the latte and avocado toast joke is funny, even with such a dour punchline. This article is good because sometimes I need to be reminded that there’s a fringe who took the joke seriously.

There is always good money to be made in reassuring the haves/rich/nobility/whatever that the wretched lot of the have-nots/poor/commoners/whoever is some combination of divinely ordained, and the latter's own fault.

And conveniently, the former's standards of proof are quite low in this regard.

In the UK - 2006-2008 you could buy a home at a reasonable multiple of earnings and be offered a 110% mortgage with no checks whether that income actually existed. Yes, that was crazy, but many of those heaping criticism on young people struggling to buy nowadays were the ones taking out these mortgages.

Some folks who never struggled really believe that sadly.

I remember the story of a millionaire who put the challenge to rebuild his wealth starting from scratch within a year. Long story short, he failed and learned the hard way everything was saying is bs