re: Why do old people go to the default argument of $6 coffee when talking about affordability

quote:

---

It’s literally a bunch of comments like “I better get my money first”.

---

Is it? You say they just moan about SS being reformed.

You understand that for retirees, or near retirees, the 14th Amendment has SS obligations to them more or less locked in? It really is not a matter of choice, theirs or yours. So when you talk about reform, you're addressing particulars for the < 55y/o cohort.

quote:

---

It’s my money that you are receiving now and I will do anything in my power to stop giving it to you

---

Which is exactly zip. Zero. Nada.

quote:

---

Just worry about your fat arse not dieing 6 months in

---

Learn to spell before shite talking.

It helps to better get your point across

quote:

---

Sorry but your money was already spent

---

You do not understand SS. Nor do you understand the nature of a debt obligation.

As soon as you purchase a 30-yr treasury bond, your money is spent by the government. However, in concert with that spending, the government issues you an IOU stating its obligation to repay principal with interest. SS structure is identical.

quote:

---

I expect the Government to figure out how to pay its debts with the money it currently collects from the General funds without raising taxes.

---

Sorry, but math is undefeated.

You aren't "fixing" SS without raising taxes, cutting benefits/raising the retirement age, or both.

quote:

---

of craft breweries and wineries, how do young people afford that stuff?

---

You do realize these places are going broke because young people don’t drink their products

Some of yall are really out of touch with reality

Craft breweries were started and made popular by current 45-55 year olds 10 years ago - so pretty much Gen X and have fallen on hard times

The winery industry is in a severe downturn because of under 50 folks are not drinking wine

quote:

---

What actual facts are you referring to

---

The facts that young people aren’t spending more of their money on drinking and soda

And the fact that college age kids still drink cheap alcohol

quote:

---

My 21 yo daughter just paid cash for a nice used car with 40k on it. I will say she used $6k that the insurance paid after a wreck but the other $20k came out of her savings account. She has been working since she was old enough and put back a minimum of 25%, she also thinks door dash and expensive coffee drinks are a waste of money and only for rare treats. She plans on putting 20-30% down on a house within the next couple years.

---

People who live like Boomers lived end up with the same financial lifestyle.

The problem with the younger generations today is that they think they know how older generations lived, but they really have no idea.

My parents bought exactly one new car their entire lives, and they never financed one. That one new car was a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle that they drove for 22 years and then passed down to my sister when she turned 16. My dad replaced it with a used truck.

Mom was 39 and dad was 40 when they bought their first house.

We rarely ate out growing up, my mom cooked. And then depending on what dinner had been, we ate leftovers for a day or two. We wore hand-me-down clothes, rode second hand bikes, buying shoes was kind of a big deal—not a Coal Miner's Daughter type of big deal, but if we all got new shoes at the same time I would overhear my mother talking to a friend about how expensive it was later.

Until I was 10 we lived in a house that was probably no more than 1300 square feet, one bathroom for four people (five by the time we moved out of it). No central air. We had an attic fan that we would run with the windows open in the summer and a single window AC unit that only my dad was allowed to touch. No cable t.v., we had rabbit ears and tin foil. We had to wait until Sunday night after a certain time to call grandparents, when the rates went down.

No one I knew at that time ordered food to be delivered. Later in the 80s we knew one family who would order food to be delivered (other than Dominoes pizza, which everyone would do occasionally by that time) and the general consensus of everyone else we knew was that that was egregiously frivolous.

And we weren't poor. We were middle class. We went to a private school. Very few of my classmates lived any other way than exactly the way we lived.

It was just a completely different mindset. People were just a lot more loathe to spend money on unnecessary things, even if they had it to spend. It was considered ostentatious and therefore in bad taste.

My parents didn't drink, but they did smoke. So were there exceptions to that rule? Sure. But the mindset of drinking and smoking was different back then too.

What I think is that consumerism and marketing hadn't had as much of an effect on my parent's generation yet, but as time went on, it gained more and more influence over people.

I'm Gen X. Consumer marketing no doubt affected me more than the Boomers. And it affected them more than the Silent Generation. Etc.

Fast forward to now, young people are seeing so many more ads and are exposed to so much more of that stuff than really anyone's ever been exposed to before. They see t.v. reality shows about people buying houses so that they can tear half of the house down and rebuild it into a custom home and they end up thinking that that is normal and that they should be able to do it too.

My wife works with graduate student aged kids and many of them either get married before they finish school or have it timed so that they get married immediately following graduation. She hears many of them talk about house hunting and she says they don't have any concept of taking what's available. They think they are supposed to be able to find exactly the house they want in exactly the area they want and they are confused and frustrated when they can't. When she suggests to them that they start out with a condo or move further away from their ideal location to find something they can afford, she says they just give her a blank stare like they don't understand the words she's saying.

quote:

---

Millennials and zoomers care a lot less about German engineering and granite countertops than their parents did/do

---

All millennials care about when house shopping is kitchen size and outdoor areas