That’s what’s gonna happen here in America. IF and I mean IF your family was lucky enough to have a single home in the family everyone’s going to be living at it. Many aren’t even close to lucky though…I wonder how many more will die on the streets in the coming years.
Maybe gen a will be the ones with the balls to actually rise up, set everything on fire, and kill the people responsible for destroying everything. Because of the rest of us are just sitting around complaining.
I’m gonna be honest, I’m a zoomer (ahhh yes I’m a zoomer, I’m a zoomer, yippee! Everyone look at me, I’m the zoomer) and, looking towards the future, my future, I’m already kinda there. I just think we both haven’t quite hit the critical mass where everyone else is at that point, yet, and I think that the narrative about, you know, why things suck, I think that’s been co-opted with a mixed level of success, forcing people to feel “fine” with their circumstances, or, forcing people to feel personally responsible for their circumstances, as the case may be. I also think there’s a good amount of cynicism about standing up to the US government and institutions, since we’ve been fed a shitload of stuff against that, and then, you know, we’re all fucked and have limited resources and whatever. I also think people are probably too nice for their own good, most people just kind of want to chill, even if that means they’re actually not allowed to chill because they have to work 2 jobs and have no energy and one financial emergency could wipe them out instantly.
I dunno, I feel pretty cynical, but I also feel like things will probably get at least a little bit worse, before they get better. I just hope they get worse in the right way, instead of in the whole like, world ending kind of way. Or, localized apocalypse, kind of way, more likely.
It looks like if gen Z’s massive wave of unionization doesn’t work that’ll be the case. Gen A is likely the water war generation unless we clean up our act enough for it to be gen ß
I have been educating my child on unions and workers’ rights. When he’s old enough, we move on to the proper engineering and maintenance of guillotines.
Occupy Wall Street started strong but quickly decended into uncoordinated nonsense. The initial message was simple, popular, and actionable about how it’s bullshit that global austerity and government cutbacks were hurting the 99% whilst the 1% who caused the crash got off scott free with massive bailouts and tax cuts.
Because it was a “leaderless” collective action it quickly got occupied itself by all sorts of weird and wacky movements who diluted the message and gave the right wing media all the ammo they could ever want to paint the whole thing as “just some crazy hippies chatting shit about communism” or whatever.
It’s pretty typical of movements on the left unfortunately. Everyone wants to be super inclusive so all ideas are equally important and you can’t just dismiss ideas as not being relevant without creating a load of infighting. The alternative however means people with bad ideas (ones who often have more time and energy to boot) can easily take over the conversation and your whole message gets diluted, confused, and easily disarmed by the media.
It is getting to the point that is the only option. Voting doesn’t matter, protesting doesn’t matter, complaining doesn’t matter. Millennials were raised that those are the processes, we have come to realize they don’t work and our kids are being raised with the understanding that that doesn’t work. If they want things to change, and it literally HAS to, that is what needs to happen. Either accept the status quo or forcefully change it. If I understand history, that is the most American thing you can do.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Everything after $999,999,999 should be taxed 100%. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to ever have a billion dollars. All that tax could pay for universal health care, free education, ending hunger, and homelessness. Billionaires are the problem.
So, no corporations and no individual wealth? Who owns a factory or a datacenter? These are fantastically expensive things. A chip foundry cannot exist under these conditions.
This seems like a good place to post this reminder that in the last 50 years income has lost to inflation by 137 points. That’s decades of prices rising faster than wages. It’s not rocket science. They walked away with all of the productivity gains, and gave the entire country a pay cut at the same time. You want a boring dystopia? How about stealing your paycheck a couple percentage points a year until suddenly we realize we can’t afford to live without 3 full time incomes in one household.
Yup, the 137 points is just “core” inflation. Education, Housing, Food, and Cars all come in over that. Which is fine because those aren’t necessary in the US right?
The average new house size went from around 1,000 sq ft in 1910 to 1,500 sq ft in 1970, to 2,000 sq ft in 2000 to aroind 2,400 sq ft today. It’s not easy to buy a new small(er) home and housing prices reflect that
When the Corvette was launched in 1953 it cost $3,490. That’s around $39,000 in today’s money. A brand new Corvette will cost you $70,000
A 1970 Datsun 240z was $3,500, which is $28,000 today. You can buy a brand new Mazda Miata or Toyota GR86 for that inflation adjusted amount
A gallon of milk cost $1.32 in 1970. That’s $10
According to the 1970 census, median household income was $8,730. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $71,000 - which is surprisingly close to the 2022 census’s $70,784 number
So what’s going on and why are people not happy? IMO it’s a mix of
Things are getting nicer, but they’re also getting more expensive. This seems to be a mix of consumer taste and seller side shenanigans. For example, small/mid size cars, which are typically cheap, have had decreasing sales volume for the past 20 years. Enter multiple OEMs de-emphasizing small/mid size cars and leaning into crossovers, which just so happen to cost more. To go back to the earlier housing example, house size has been going up while the average household size is going down. There were 4.5 people per household in 1910. This dropped to 3.15 in 1970 and is down to 2.51 today. In other words, today’s new larger homes have fewer people living in them than 50 years ago. New homes today also tend to be built with nicer furnishings (coming from someone with 1960s builder grade cabinets in their house). Housing is a bit of a mess for a bunch of other reasons too… Zoning, smaller parcel sizes for subdivisions, etc etc
The argument I’ve seen “against” this is to point out that if you want to live like they did in the 50s it’s pretty cheap. It’s a lot of canned food. A lot of stuff you might pay for now are DIY projects (such as clothes repair, house repair, car repair etc.) there’s no such thing as your fancy TV, your Internet or any modern kitchen amenities. Medical assistance is garbage so no wonder you paid less for it. The way you live today is like a king compared to the 50s.
Now it’s still an idiotic argument. Before anyone replies, I don’t agree with it. But it’s what people who can’t handle the OP tell themselves.
I know you said you don’t agree, so this argument is for the hypothetical person who holds that opinion…
With that said. My wife and I crunched the numbers recently. If we lived like people in the 50s, which is to say, we lived as poor as we could and completely wrecked our quality of life (eating as cheap as possible, no Netflix, never eating out, no luxuries at all), we would save like $10k a year. Which means that if we did that for 10 years, we would have enough for a down payment on a house that we would not be able to afford the monthly mortgage on (and a house in that price range would be a wreck in our neighborhood. A standard 3bed 2bath in good condition where I live starts at about 800k).
It’s insane. This isn’t some “just stop eating avacado toast” thing.
Yeah not only that but the obvious conclusion is “well yeah, but why should we hold our standards to the 50s?” Sure we have needs we didn’t then for things like TVs and computers but those same computers have made everything about that 50s lifestyle exponentially cheaper and easier to accomplish. It should be nearly free to live like the 50s but for some reason prices have kept rising.
Lots of the DIY stuff is harder now though. I can change the oil on a ‘00 Civic, can’t on a ‘19. Cars now have complicated and user-hostile electronics - they don’t really want you to fix your own car, phone, TV…
I mend my clothes as much as possible, but fast fashion in the last ten years have seen a race to the bottom on material quality. Clothes don’t always come with extra buttons, the fabric is shit… if you find vintage stuff from even the 90s at a thrift shop it’s obvious. Modern clothing is made to be worn a few times and then thrown away.
Cooking can be still be done cheap (if you enjoy lentils and beans!) but requires time, which is easier if you have a stay at home partner. You also need storage space. There’s been substantial declines in the quality of kitchen appliances and tools imho. I’m still upset about what they’ve done to Pyrex.
Lots of the modern fancy stuff is also somewhat necessary. Internet is required for pretty much everything nowadays. You can go to the library/McDick’s/etc for WiFi, but you shouldn’t be filling out a job app on public WiFi.
After WW2 almost every other developed nation was in ruin. The US was “the only game in town” when it came to production. This caused US labor to be in high demand and priced at a premium compared to places like in Europe or Japan, who were more concerned about rebuilding than exporting goods.
THIS is how a high school dropout could afford a house and a family. Because that high school dropout was basically your only option for labor. As those other countries finished rebuilding a lot manufacturing jobs left and things started to get “back to normal”.
The US was in a unique position but like most things it was just squandered. Now the US is “regressing towards the mean”. This is going to be the new normal because the last 40-50 years was an exception.
correct me if i’m wrong, but these are the colloquial “golden days” that so many want to return to, right? a period which undoubtedly contributed to the presumption of american exceptionalism in the minds of its citizens.
if only there was a way to build a future out of transparency and sustainable systems instead of perpetuating our collective delusions.
I moved from the US to Italy, where everything is cheaper and better quality, and we get free healthcare, free college, retirement pension and six months paid maternity leave. All this on a 35% tax rate. Public daycare is about $300 a month, housing expenses are about half of what I paid in the US, and while groceries are about the same, they are all local, organic, non GMO and -get this - crops are grown for flavor rather than weight. Houses are smaller here and wages are usually lower, but working hours are less and less intense, and the pace of life is much chiller.
That’s true to a point. However bigger effects were the rise in executive compensation, the loss of labor and corporate regulations, and the resurgence of the shipping industry such that it was cheaper to ship from China than to make it in the US. It’s true that demand for US manufactured goods has fallen, but there’s no reason our current Service economy should struggle like it is.
I think attributing the “good years” just to post war production is an incomplete explanation. The real issue is irresponsible private ownership and hobbling the value our economy can create.
Creating true value in our work is possible. Once some types of work are done the output can continue to benefit our society for decades. But a confluence of decisions by private owners have meant often we don’t receive that benefit, and instead it’s siphoned away as profit.
The idea that any working class boomer could raise a family/ own a house on a single income is a myth. That was only true if you were a man, and happened to be white. The federal government built the interstates to the suburbs, the GI bill loaned the money to buy the house, and sent you to college. All to the exclusion of POC and women.
Even the labor unions told black men that you couldn’t be in a union without a job, and couldn’t get hired unless you were in a union. This “golden age” economy was also when a divorced woman couldn’t get a bank account, an apartment, or a job.
The capitalists weren’t sharing more wealth, they were sharing with fewer people.
That’s giving them too much credit. They’re just greedy and trying to manipulate markets to hoard as much wealth as possible and they don’t care what happens to the workers.
Is anyone on Lemmy doing okay? I always come to the comments of these posts and see the doom and gloom. I’m a millenniaI. I paid off my student loans. I own a home I can afford. I’m debt free besides my mortgage. I have an emergency fund. I have a 401k that’s on track. I worked hard and made sacrifices to get where I am. I can only assume there are others out there who have done the same.
Im like you, doing pretty well. The only way this was possible is we have no kids. Kids would have killed us financially and I would be hand to mouth for the rest of my life. Fuck you capitalism, no future labor to exploit from me!
Millennial here. Doing alright. SINK tech worker with no pets.
Was sort of on a track to retire at as early as 45, though recent inflation has made me rethink how much I need saved.
I bought my condo, 1 bedroom + office, in 2016, and it was within my budget and was slightly bigger than apartments I had rented in the past. Back home though I could use my parents garage when needed.
Now I feel somewhat trapped because to get even a small place with a garage (I miss working on my car myself), is prohibitively expensive given how interest rates and house values have changed. Sure my condo is up quite a bit in valuation (something like 50% increase in the past 8 years), but homes have gone up quite a bit more, like 100% increase in some cases. Also my HOA dues just keep going up too, and we don’t have a pool or anything crazy. Not to mention developers in the area grab up small starter homes before they can hit the market, bulldozer them, and drop a mansion on the same land that is completely unaffordable for me.
So my options are stay where I am (and it’s fine for now I guess), or move and expect to have to work much longer, and have a longer commute.
Pretty much checks all the boxes you said. No debt except mortgage. Emergency fund. 401k. HSA. I’m not house poor. These days I can afford pretty much anything I could want in life except for a slightly bigger house :p
But I look at how prices are changing and I’m still worried for the future. Ideally I live another 60 years. Statistically another 40 or so. That’s a long time for high rates of inflation and greed to change things.
Edit: also with all the tech layoffs happening, there’s just an underlying sense of gloom. I’ve been laid off twice throughout my career. Once it took me something like 6 months to find a job. The other time a little under 2 months. Not fun though.
I’m a very late Gen X, my wife is very early Millennial, most of our friend groups are a similar mix… And we’re in the same boat as you. I paid off my student loans last year, my mortgage is bearable, I got laid off a little over a year ago but had the savings to bridge the gap until I found a new job (and landed in a better paying position), and just got back from taking my family to Disney World for a week. But I spent most of my 20s and into my 30s eating ramen, saving up to go to maybe 2 concerts a year, asking my parents for gas money, and truly living paycheck to paycheck. Gradually it got better, but I was lucky to not get sick, injured, or addicted and I do acknowledge just how much of my current situation is due to luck, but I also had to put in plenty of hard work.
Well, that’s great. It’s very easy to make this about you and fail to see what many others face. I hope you never have to face the brutal hardships caused by not being in the right place with the right connections and the other life circumstances that can lock people into a life of deeper or generational poverty. But it could be the tide just hasn’t risen to a level with your head barely above the turbulence stuck treading water with no way out. In an instant, everything could get turned upside down and through no fault of your own, now the world is a different place all of a sudden. But it’s not any different, you’ve just joined the millions of others who got the rug pulled from beneath them earlier than you.
I too have been quite successful in life through hard work, discipline and the right life situations that gave me the opportunities to carve my own path in life doing what I love. I can still see how things have collapsed and I would never question the validity of the millions of others simply because my life experience has been different. This alone makes you venerable to being pushed to the front of the line next.
meanwhile 1000 and 1 Stinkpieces are being written about population decline, blaming young generations for not getting busy while job and housing prospects go down the shitter.
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That’s what’s gonna happen here in America. IF and I mean IF your family was lucky enough to have a single home in the family everyone’s going to be living at it. Many aren’t even close to lucky though…I wonder how many more will die on the streets in the coming years.
Maybe gen a will be the ones with the balls to actually rise up, set everything on fire, and kill the people responsible for destroying everything. Because of the rest of us are just sitting around complaining.
And yes, I admit, I’m in that category.
i’d rather complain than be complacent at least
I’m gonna be honest, I’m a zoomer (ahhh yes I’m a zoomer, I’m a zoomer, yippee! Everyone look at me, I’m the zoomer) and, looking towards the future, my future, I’m already kinda there. I just think we both haven’t quite hit the critical mass where everyone else is at that point, yet, and I think that the narrative about, you know, why things suck, I think that’s been co-opted with a mixed level of success, forcing people to feel “fine” with their circumstances, or, forcing people to feel personally responsible for their circumstances, as the case may be. I also think there’s a good amount of cynicism about standing up to the US government and institutions, since we’ve been fed a shitload of stuff against that, and then, you know, we’re all fucked and have limited resources and whatever. I also think people are probably too nice for their own good, most people just kind of want to chill, even if that means they’re actually not allowed to chill because they have to work 2 jobs and have no energy and one financial emergency could wipe them out instantly.
I dunno, I feel pretty cynical, but I also feel like things will probably get at least a little bit worse, before they get better. I just hope they get worse in the right way, instead of in the whole like, world ending kind of way. Or, localized apocalypse, kind of way, more likely.
It looks like if gen Z’s massive wave of unionization doesn’t work that’ll be the case. Gen A is likely the water war generation unless we clean up our act enough for it to be gen ß
I have been educating my child on unions and workers’ rights. When he’s old enough, we move on to the proper engineering and maintenance of guillotines.
Have you considered teaching him welding and bulldozer operation?
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Occupy Wall Street started strong but quickly decended into uncoordinated nonsense. The initial message was simple, popular, and actionable about how it’s bullshit that global austerity and government cutbacks were hurting the 99% whilst the 1% who caused the crash got off scott free with massive bailouts and tax cuts.
Because it was a “leaderless” collective action it quickly got occupied itself by all sorts of weird and wacky movements who diluted the message and gave the right wing media all the ammo they could ever want to paint the whole thing as “just some crazy hippies chatting shit about communism” or whatever.
It’s pretty typical of movements on the left unfortunately. Everyone wants to be super inclusive so all ideas are equally important and you can’t just dismiss ideas as not being relevant without creating a load of infighting. The alternative however means people with bad ideas (ones who often have more time and energy to boot) can easily take over the conversation and your whole message gets diluted, confused, and easily disarmed by the media.
Lol I’m a millennial too I definitely remember that and it’s not what I’m talking about at all. They just stood around yelling for the most part.
It is getting to the point that is the only option. Voting doesn’t matter, protesting doesn’t matter, complaining doesn’t matter. Millennials were raised that those are the processes, we have come to realize they don’t work and our kids are being raised with the understanding that that doesn’t work. If they want things to change, and it literally HAS to, that is what needs to happen. Either accept the status quo or forcefully change it. If I understand history, that is the most American thing you can do.
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Abolish corporations
So only billionaires can own any type of the means of production? This is an exceptionally dumb take.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Everything after $999,999,999 should be taxed 100%. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to ever have a billion dollars. All that tax could pay for universal health care, free education, ending hunger, and homelessness. Billionaires are the problem.
So, no corporations and no individual wealth? Who owns a factory or a datacenter? These are fantastically expensive things. A chip foundry cannot exist under these conditions.
I don’t think you have a strong enough concept of large numbers to be able to hold a respectable opinion here.
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Workers own the factory. Collectively. Through democratic process of any variety.
It seems US tries to do Russian history in reverse
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This seems like a good place to post this reminder that in the last 50 years income has lost to inflation by 137 points. That’s decades of prices rising faster than wages. It’s not rocket science. They walked away with all of the productivity gains, and gave the entire country a pay cut at the same time. You want a boring dystopia? How about stealing your paycheck a couple percentage points a year until suddenly we realize we can’t afford to live without 3 full time incomes in one household.
Entire country? Which country? We’re talking about our whole western civilisation.
The data I’m using is for the US.
Without violent pushback there is no reason at all to improve things. Cant afford to live?.. fuck you, we’ll find someone who can. Piss off, peasant.
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People who can’t afford three days off work will certainly fare well by not participating in a general strike.
/S
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We could do a general strike.
Where I’m from, the median house price has risen 600% relative to the median income in the past 50 years.
That means the deposit we pay today is the equivalent of the entire 30 year mortgage of the people calling you lazy.
Yup, the 137 points is just “core” inflation. Education, Housing, Food, and Cars all come in over that. Which is fine because those aren’t necessary in the US right?
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Genuine question: I see a lot of posts on both sides on lemmy. Does anyone have a rebuttal/counter argument to this?
Here are five fast examples from both sides
So what’s going on and why are people not happy? IMO it’s a mix of
It goes beyond the cost of goods and gets back to some level of fairness (or a complete lack there of).
The argument I’ve seen “against” this is to point out that if you want to live like they did in the 50s it’s pretty cheap. It’s a lot of canned food. A lot of stuff you might pay for now are DIY projects (such as clothes repair, house repair, car repair etc.) there’s no such thing as your fancy TV, your Internet or any modern kitchen amenities. Medical assistance is garbage so no wonder you paid less for it. The way you live today is like a king compared to the 50s.
Now it’s still an idiotic argument. Before anyone replies, I don’t agree with it. But it’s what people who can’t handle the OP tell themselves.
I know you said you don’t agree, so this argument is for the hypothetical person who holds that opinion…
With that said. My wife and I crunched the numbers recently. If we lived like people in the 50s, which is to say, we lived as poor as we could and completely wrecked our quality of life (eating as cheap as possible, no Netflix, never eating out, no luxuries at all), we would save like $10k a year. Which means that if we did that for 10 years, we would have enough for a down payment on a house that we would not be able to afford the monthly mortgage on (and a house in that price range would be a wreck in our neighborhood. A standard 3bed 2bath in good condition where I live starts at about 800k).
It’s insane. This isn’t some “just stop eating avacado toast” thing.
Yeah not only that but the obvious conclusion is “well yeah, but why should we hold our standards to the 50s?” Sure we have needs we didn’t then for things like TVs and computers but those same computers have made everything about that 50s lifestyle exponentially cheaper and easier to accomplish. It should be nearly free to live like the 50s but for some reason prices have kept rising.
Lots of the DIY stuff is harder now though. I can change the oil on a ‘00 Civic, can’t on a ‘19. Cars now have complicated and user-hostile electronics - they don’t really want you to fix your own car, phone, TV…
I mend my clothes as much as possible, but fast fashion in the last ten years have seen a race to the bottom on material quality. Clothes don’t always come with extra buttons, the fabric is shit… if you find vintage stuff from even the 90s at a thrift shop it’s obvious. Modern clothing is made to be worn a few times and then thrown away.
Cooking can be still be done cheap (if you enjoy lentils and beans!) but requires time, which is easier if you have a stay at home partner. You also need storage space. There’s been substantial declines in the quality of kitchen appliances and tools imho. I’m still upset about what they’ve done to Pyrex.
Lots of the modern fancy stuff is also somewhat necessary. Internet is required for pretty much everything nowadays. You can go to the library/McDick’s/etc for WiFi, but you shouldn’t be filling out a job app on public WiFi.
After WW2 almost every other developed nation was in ruin. The US was “the only game in town” when it came to production. This caused US labor to be in high demand and priced at a premium compared to places like in Europe or Japan, who were more concerned about rebuilding than exporting goods.
THIS is how a high school dropout could afford a house and a family. Because that high school dropout was basically your only option for labor. As those other countries finished rebuilding a lot manufacturing jobs left and things started to get “back to normal”.
The US was in a unique position but like most things it was just squandered. Now the US is “regressing towards the mean”. This is going to be the new normal because the last 40-50 years was an exception.
Thankfully we don’t live in the US then, but these same dark times are washing over us in Europe too :-(
enlightened bit of context here.
correct me if i’m wrong, but these are the colloquial “golden days” that so many want to return to, right? a period which undoubtedly contributed to the presumption of american exceptionalism in the minds of its citizens.
if only there was a way to build a future out of transparency and sustainable systems instead of perpetuating our collective delusions.
I moved from the US to Italy, where everything is cheaper and better quality, and we get free healthcare, free college, retirement pension and six months paid maternity leave. All this on a 35% tax rate. Public daycare is about $300 a month, housing expenses are about half of what I paid in the US, and while groceries are about the same, they are all local, organic, non GMO and -get this - crops are grown for flavor rather than weight. Houses are smaller here and wages are usually lower, but working hours are less and less intense, and the pace of life is much chiller.
Oh wow non GMO groceries what a magical fairy tale land.
That’s true to a point. However bigger effects were the rise in executive compensation, the loss of labor and corporate regulations, and the resurgence of the shipping industry such that it was cheaper to ship from China than to make it in the US. It’s true that demand for US manufactured goods has fallen, but there’s no reason our current Service economy should struggle like it is.
I think attributing the “good years” just to post war production is an incomplete explanation. The real issue is irresponsible private ownership and hobbling the value our economy can create.
Creating true value in our work is possible. Once some types of work are done the output can continue to benefit our society for decades. But a confluence of decisions by private owners have meant often we don’t receive that benefit, and instead it’s siphoned away as profit.
This is the best post on Lemmy. It’s the best way to say this.
The idea that any working class boomer could raise a family/ own a house on a single income is a myth. That was only true if you were a man, and happened to be white. The federal government built the interstates to the suburbs, the GI bill loaned the money to buy the house, and sent you to college. All to the exclusion of POC and women.
Even the labor unions told black men that you couldn’t be in a union without a job, and couldn’t get hired unless you were in a union. This “golden age” economy was also when a divorced woman couldn’t get a bank account, an apartment, or a job.
The capitalists weren’t sharing more wealth, they were sharing with fewer people.
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Okay, and now it’s even worse.
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That’s giving them too much credit. They’re just greedy and trying to manipulate markets to hoard as much wealth as possible and they don’t care what happens to the workers.
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Gen A is just gonna be Gen
Is anyone on Lemmy doing okay? I always come to the comments of these posts and see the doom and gloom. I’m a millenniaI. I paid off my student loans. I own a home I can afford. I’m debt free besides my mortgage. I have an emergency fund. I have a 401k that’s on track. I worked hard and made sacrifices to get where I am. I can only assume there are others out there who have done the same.
Im like you, doing pretty well. The only way this was possible is we have no kids. Kids would have killed us financially and I would be hand to mouth for the rest of my life. Fuck you capitalism, no future labor to exploit from me!
Millennial here. Doing alright. SINK tech worker with no pets.
Was sort of on a track to retire at as early as 45, though recent inflation has made me rethink how much I need saved.
I bought my condo, 1 bedroom + office, in 2016, and it was within my budget and was slightly bigger than apartments I had rented in the past. Back home though I could use my parents garage when needed.
Now I feel somewhat trapped because to get even a small place with a garage (I miss working on my car myself), is prohibitively expensive given how interest rates and house values have changed. Sure my condo is up quite a bit in valuation (something like 50% increase in the past 8 years), but homes have gone up quite a bit more, like 100% increase in some cases. Also my HOA dues just keep going up too, and we don’t have a pool or anything crazy. Not to mention developers in the area grab up small starter homes before they can hit the market, bulldozer them, and drop a mansion on the same land that is completely unaffordable for me.
So my options are stay where I am (and it’s fine for now I guess), or move and expect to have to work much longer, and have a longer commute.
Pretty much checks all the boxes you said. No debt except mortgage. Emergency fund. 401k. HSA. I’m not house poor. These days I can afford pretty much anything I could want in life except for a slightly bigger house :p
But I look at how prices are changing and I’m still worried for the future. Ideally I live another 60 years. Statistically another 40 or so. That’s a long time for high rates of inflation and greed to change things.
Edit: also with all the tech layoffs happening, there’s just an underlying sense of gloom. I’ve been laid off twice throughout my career. Once it took me something like 6 months to find a job. The other time a little under 2 months. Not fun though.
I would of been in your situation if covid didn’t happen and put me around 80k in the hole next to a government that refused aid to me.
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I’m a very late Gen X, my wife is very early Millennial, most of our friend groups are a similar mix… And we’re in the same boat as you. I paid off my student loans last year, my mortgage is bearable, I got laid off a little over a year ago but had the savings to bridge the gap until I found a new job (and landed in a better paying position), and just got back from taking my family to Disney World for a week. But I spent most of my 20s and into my 30s eating ramen, saving up to go to maybe 2 concerts a year, asking my parents for gas money, and truly living paycheck to paycheck. Gradually it got better, but I was lucky to not get sick, injured, or addicted and I do acknowledge just how much of my current situation is due to luck, but I also had to put in plenty of hard work.
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Well, that’s great. It’s very easy to make this about you and fail to see what many others face. I hope you never have to face the brutal hardships caused by not being in the right place with the right connections and the other life circumstances that can lock people into a life of deeper or generational poverty. But it could be the tide just hasn’t risen to a level with your head barely above the turbulence stuck treading water with no way out. In an instant, everything could get turned upside down and through no fault of your own, now the world is a different place all of a sudden. But it’s not any different, you’ve just joined the millions of others who got the rug pulled from beneath them earlier than you.
I too have been quite successful in life through hard work, discipline and the right life situations that gave me the opportunities to carve my own path in life doing what I love. I can still see how things have collapsed and I would never question the validity of the millions of others simply because my life experience has been different. This alone makes you venerable to being pushed to the front of the line next.
Immigration can be used to replenish deficits in the working population.
meanwhile 1000 and 1 Stinkpieces are being written about population decline, blaming young generations for not getting busy while job and housing prospects go down the shitter.