re: How can the average person afford to live?

quote:

---

I knew reality would trigger your libtard arse

---

Reality? The reality is your post history is just mouth fart noises and occasionally a post that pegs you as likely some type of real estate subprime mortgage puke. And you would be the cult45 listless vessel that calls anyone and everyone that doesn’t suck trump cock like you a libtard. Bro, you’re a joke, to everyone on TD.

See student loan “forgiveness “

quote:

---

We went ten years after that with zero vacations. We drove old second hand cars, and we could only afford going out to eat about once per month.

---

That sounds terrible. You should have worked harder earlier in life so you could have had a more lucrative career from the start.

quote:

---

Zoomers and millennials have no coping skills and see themselves as perpetual victims.

---

Yes. Yes they do.

quote:

---

It's true that wages haven't kept up with housing increases, but it's also not as bad as you are painting it.

---

It’s worse! This is from your link:

quote:

---

If you adjust for inflation, the median income of Americans has only increased by 33%. The median housing prices, however, have increased by 60%. It’s even worse when you look at the income of younger adults. For instance, the median income of people between 25 and 34 only increased by $30 in 44 years (1974 to 2017). It’s no wonder homeownership rates among Millennials are lower than for previous generations.

---

quote:

---

You’ve repeatedly argued that everything happening now has already happened before. You’re wrong, simple as that.

---

This is your problem. You are irrational, ridiculous, and incapable of understanding the world you live in.

Do you think when talking about a $25T economy and a person says, "it's cyclical, this isn't new" that they mean everything single fricking thing is exactly like it has been?

And why do you gloss over the data that proves your thesis wrong, that is dwarfs BlackRock's impact on the market?

For whatever reason, you need to feel like a victim. Unfortunately, that's become a national pastime. We now celebrate victimhood. It's weird.

quote:

---

Cell phone is probably a necessity nowadays, and internet

---

I don't know that I agree with that. I don't see any reason why someone can't have a land line and an answering machine in 2023. Hell, people under 40 don't check voice messages anyway.

Email, o.k. But most people have some way to check email at work, and the only truly essential emails someone needs to check are those related to work anyway. And if special circumstances arise and you aren't allowed to handle personal business at work you just go to the public library.

quote:

---

Average family between cable, internet, phones, and streaming spend thousands more on just those things that weren’t even available to their parents....Complain that older generations had a better deal all you want, but younger people at least need to acknowledge that they are in no way living like the older generations did at their age.

---

Totally agree. I don't think those things are necessities. I think they are so common that people THINK they are necessities and they think they are odd things to talk about not having, because it's true that pretty much everyone does have them, but I don't really think they are. I think people could get along surprisingly well without them with some fairly minor albeit perhaps frequent inconveniences.

I posted on another post that I was born in 1970 and spent half my childhood in a house that was no more than 1500 square feet (and honestly I'm not sure it was that big). One bathroom for two adults and three kids. No cable t.v.—we just put tin foil on the antennae and could sometimes get three channels. No central air—had an attic fan and a window unit in the den that only my father was allowed to turn on. Obviously no one had a cell phone...we had one phone in the whole house mounted to the wall in the kitchen. We could only call the grandparents on Sunday nights when the long distance rates went down, and only then occasionally, and my parents watched the clock during those calls. I shared a room with my brother from the age of 5 to about 12. My mother lived to age 82 and my father lived to age 66 and between both of them my parents bought exactly one car brand new in their whole lives...a 1963 Volkswagen Beatle, and my dad was still driving it 22 years later when my older sister got a driver's license and he passed it down to her. We shared it, she and I, until she went off to college and she got a new used car to take to college. We didn't get cable t.v. until I was 12. Eating out was pretty rare. We did not waste leftovers and ate them until they were gone. I knew exactly one family growing up who would pay to have food delivered to them other than pizza and it was considered by other families to be an extravagant waste of money. My whole childhood I don't remember seeing anyone pay for a cup of coffee any more expensive than one you would buy at a gas station. Almost no one I knew bought a cake for an occasion from a store...everyone's mom made homemade cakes for birthdays, etc. I don't remember anyone ever buying a bottle of water my entire childhood. My parents would have simply laughed at the idea of signing us up for some kind of "travel ball" and paying for all of the expenses associated with all of that. We wore each others hand-me-down clothes, played with hand-me-down toys, drove hand-me-down bikes and vehicles and thought nothing of it. I slept in the same twin sized bed my entire childhood, used it through college, took it with me after college, and only got rid of it when I got married at age 27. Getting a bicycle was a big deal and once you had one it was a primary source of transportation. It's how we got to and from (rec league) baseball practice, school, swimming at the city pool in the summer (only one neighborhood in the whole town had a neighborhood pool and only a couple of kids I knew had one in their backyards)...basically all transportation related to leisure activities. Speaking of which, once kids got to high school, they all got jobs to fund their leisure activities and pursuits. I got my first official, taxed W-2 job at age 14.

So you are 100% right. Life is just not like it was back then. People feel so much more entitled to so many more luxuries. I understand why, but younger people do need to stop and think about how much more convenient and comfortable most of their lives are compared to people 50 years ago even if it is more difficult for them to buy a house.

Which again, I'm not entire convinced that there's nearly as much difference as is commonly held when you scale back the size of the house and consider interest rates. Even as badly as Biden has aggravated inflation it's still not as bad as it was in the late 70s/early 80s. In 1980 inflation was 14% and interest rates were over 16.5% in 1981. That's over 2 1/2 times the interest rates now. So even if the inflation adjusted home prices per square foot were somewhat higher, you have to factor in the effect on the mortgage of an additional 10% on the interest rate.

quote:

---

People today don’t have the same opportunities that their parents did and instead of facing that fact, you call it whining.

---

No, they don't. Generally speaking they have much greater opportunities.

quote:

---

But you ignored what the link said about home SIZES. Yes, the prices are 60% higher, but the houses are also 47% bigger.

---

What difference does that make if young people can’t afford to buy them anyway?