Gen Z Americans Don't Have Enough Saved To Cover a Single Month of Spending (fortune.com) 185
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Younger Americans don't have enough saved to cover a single month of spending, showcasing their vulnerability should the economy head into a downturn. Members of the Gen Z generation -- people born after 1995 -- were spending twice the amount they had in savings on average in February, according to Bank of America Institute analysis of internal account and card data released Friday. The ratio has increased in the past two years, and is much higher than for other generations. In part that's because Gen Z consumers, many of whom still hold entry-level positions and make less than their older peers, tend to spend a bigger share of their incomes on necessities including rent and utilities. But they're also more likely to shell out on discretionary categories like travel and entertainment. Spending in non-essentials among that cohort is up more than 25% from a year ago -- substantially above the overall rate.
While the report noted that Gen Z workers are still garnering robust pay gains compared to older groups, it showcases a point of vulnerability as households' views of the economy dim. [...] The Bank of America report also pointed to a worsening labor market for younger Americans. The number of Gen Z households receiving unemployment benefits rose by nearly a third in the past year -- the most of any generation. It also noted that, with underemployment on the rise, that could have long-term career effects for that cohort.
While the report noted that Gen Z workers are still garnering robust pay gains compared to older groups, it showcases a point of vulnerability as households' views of the economy dim. [...] The Bank of America report also pointed to a worsening labor market for younger Americans. The number of Gen Z households receiving unemployment benefits rose by nearly a third in the past year -- the most of any generation. It also noted that, with underemployment on the rise, that could have long-term career effects for that cohort.
Wrong target (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Wrong target (Score:3)
Totally. Suppose the all lived on instant coffee and Ramen noodles, then they would be yelling about collapsing consumer spending, which they already are:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com]
The money is just not with them, it is with billionaires.
Consumption (Score:5, Interesting)
Canada is worse than the USA. Here we have free healthcare but only for people who already have a family doctor, that is old people. We have benefits for fulltime employees that somehow skew heavily towards helping elderly workers with health problems. Young people get 10 + 11 days off work a year. Some older workers get 35 + 11. Housing in far more messed up than the USA and taxes are higher. We also look down on any starter jobs for young men. Any jobs that require physical labour. As a result we have a shortage of plumbers, electricians, natural gas technicians, etc. All the skills that you might need to fix a home.
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We distorted the entire economy so that retired people can quit working
No, we distorted the economy to concentrate wealth and power. We have a tax system where Bill Gates donates a million dollars and a third of that is taken off his taxes. Since his donation doesn't reduce government spending, the rest of us have to pay more taxes to make up for the taxes Gates isn't paying. Taxes are like dividing the bill at lunch, if one person pays less everyone else has to pay more. Or you can order one less pizza and everyone else pays the same amount for a smaller share.
And its not jus
I don't think that's necessarily the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Also we don't look down on starter jobs, those jobs aren't starter jobs anymore they're dead end jobs. Plumbers don't really make all that much money unless they're running their own business and if you're running your own business you're not a plumber You're a small business owner who happens to plumb. If you can make that work by finding clients and competing good on you but there's a lot more to running a small business than just doing the work.
So what you end up with is a bunch of jobs that should be starter jobs leading to better pay but the better pay never comes and you're stuck in now a dead end job.
And it's a new kind of dead end job. And the old days a dead end job just meant you worked for 45 50 years and then retired living just long enough to die without going bankrupt.
These new dead end jobs are doomsday scenarios. Every year you're making less money and you can never keep up with inflation. You end up cutting back your quality of life again and again adding roommate after roommate and dealing with the mess that having that many roommates causes.
It's because America is rapidly becoming a third world hell hole. We could turn it around but frankly we don't want to. It would require systemic changes because automation and process improvements have improved productivity so much that there really isn't quite enough work to go around for all the people we have already. And that was before the huge AI and automation boom going on right now with white collar work.
If it's one thing old people hate it systemic change and are political system puts old people in charge of everything
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There is a fixed amount of housing that becomes available each month.
If that's the case where you live, you need to take it up with local government. They need to allow more building. Where live (Utah, USA) rents have been falling for the last year or so because of the building, and builders are still putting up apartment buildings everywhere so I expect it to keep dropping.
Re:Wrong target (Score:5, Insightful)
Gen X here. When I was in my 20's, we couldn't afford restaurant food, either dine-in or takeout, and we certainly couldn't pay extra for delivery, except for an occasional pizza night. We made ends meet by cooking for ourselves, or resorting to packaged ramen when we had to. We didn't have fancy $1,000 phones in our pockets that we replaced every year. The cost of living back then was more affordable because we didn't spend as much on things Gen Z-ers take for granted.
No, I'm not buying the sob story. When you don't have money, you don't spend it. When you do spend it anyway, you end up living paycheck to paycheck. That's how it's always worked.
You also had much cheaper food (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell as a kid one of the Staples of my Saturday breakfast diet were these giant bags of stale donuts My mom used to bring home that cost a dollar for what must have been 20 or 30 donuts. Nowadays a supermarket dozen is always fresh but it's also $9.
Also I don't think you understand just how much more Gen Z works. Americans are now working more hours than the Japanese and that's not us old farts doing that That's the kids. A lot of them are eating out because they're working 12 to 14 hours a day and they're frankly just isn't time.
I cook all my own meals and is a fuck of a lot more work than people account for. Going to the grocery store buying all the food driving all the way back home because I live in a car-centric society so it's impossible to go anywhere. If you have an apartment you probably don't have room for a nice big fridge and freezer so it's hard to stock up on things. They're just isn't room in the freezer or the fridge. Especially around roommates and their need for food storage.
Cooking takes a lot longer than people think about. It's a mundane task so I think a lot of people don't really account for all the time. All the prep work and the cutting and then the cooking and then the cleaning of everything. Since I started cooking 95% of my meals maybe 5 years ago when COVID hit I also end up doing dishes every other day. I at least have a dishwasher I can't imagine what it would be like without one but it would suck even worse.
And I don't even have to work long hours I'm set up in my career enough that I can just do 40 or so hours a week and be good. But my kid while studying to get in the grad school is doing over 40 a week. I don't have the heart to tell them that thanks to Donald Trump winning the election there isn't going to be money for them to go to grad school...
Re: You also had much cheaper food (Score:2)
I wish I could say that was true (Score:2)
Re: You also had much cheaper food (Score:2)
Seems to me that both you and the parent have points. There is plenty of examples to show that spending habits are skewed, however much of what you say is true also.
I would tack onto this the scourge that is credentialism that effectively forces kids to go into lifelong debt for jobs that demand levels of education far beyond what is actually necessary. That is an insane burden.
I'm in my forties and got to watch as politicians in the 90s offshored basically everything that wasn't nailed down and in so doing
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The demand for college degrees hasn't come from a real need for credentials, but rather, from a widespread *notion* that everybody must get a degree. One of my sons got no college education, the other went to community college and got an associate's degree. Neither have had trouble getting work, with good pay. Yes, there are fields where you need advanced degrees, such as becoming a medical doctor. But most professions, including software engineering, do *not* require a degree, as long as you can do the wor
Re: You also had much cheaper food (Score:2)
Yup, 100% correct. The term to describe this phenomenon is credentialism.
At least here in the UK a lot of it was sparked by Tony Blair demanding that 50% of the population should have university degrees. If that figure seems utterly arbitrary, that's because it is - when asked by journalists at the time he had no answer for how he came up with the figure.
I've heard that in the US, a lot of this is being led by HR departments, but don't know how correct that is.
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I'm sure there are US HR departments that look at these degrees, but most don't. Mostly, as far as I can tell, the notion that "everybody" needs a degree, comes more from the education community itself, and the parents who listen to the hype. There doesn't seem to be an actual driving force behind the perceived requirement, from businesses.
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Your memories of cheap food are anecdotes that don't hold up when you look at actual data. Since 1990, real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) have increased. https://www.aei.org/articles/h... [aei.org] This is true for all income bands, low, medium, and high wage earners. This means that per hour worked, people day have more buying power than they did in 1990.
It's also not fair to compare the price of day-old donuts back then to fresh grocery store donuts today. There are still day-old bakeries today, and they sti
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Have entry level salaries doubled in the past 20 years? Where I work, they've increased about 50%.. far below the increase in real estate. Gen Z is no different than every other generation. There will always be those that are financially irresponsible in their early adult life. I had friends that make really terrible decisions in their 20s and took them to their mid 3
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You're right about real estate prices, they have ballooned. But you don't have to *own* a home to live in one. Rent rates have increased far less, more in keeping with real wages.
You didn't buy your house on an entry level salary either. Nobody did then, and nobody does now.
You also didn't eat out (or takeout) 80% of your meals. That *is* a difference between Gen X and Gen Z. We didn't have payment plans or easy credit, so maybe we were forced to live within our means. But grandma was still right, if you ca
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Most of them don't have $1000 phones, or if they do they were gifts from parents. They don't dine out or get takeaways either, they are more likely to be delivering the takeaway as their side gig.
It's mostly down to the cost of housing and rent. No matter how you try to frame it, that is much more expensive than it was in the 80s and 90s when gen X was buying their first homes.
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Do you have data to support your case? I do. Here's a chart of the top-selling smartphones in the US. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] The vast majority of these phones are in the $1,000 price range, +/- $200.
Data shows that 63% of Gen Z considers food delivery to be an "essential part" of their lifestyle. https://www.escoffier.edu/blog... [escoffier.edu] According to the same article, half of Americans order food delivered at least twice a week, while a large portion of older Americans never have food delivered.
It is st
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This is very true. The good old days weren't so good. We older people just remember them as being "good" because we were children, and our parents generally sheltered us from the stresses of that time period. Real wages have increased, not decreased, over the last 50 years.
Re:Wrong target (Score:4, Funny)
Billionaires don't have money, they just own stocks of companies. As companies make money, they get more stocks as that money is used by the companies for example to get more workers, buildings or machines.
So billionaires don't extract money from the economy, they multiply the available money in economy and distribute it to working class. Companies that get more buildings hire workers to build, companies that buy equipment offer work for factories that make those equipment.
What is extracting money from the economy is the government and normal people. For example when you eat a bread, you destroy wealth by consuming it. When Russia builds a tank and gets it destroyed by Ukraine, government destroys wealth. When you throw your old TV out, that is destroyed wealth. Majority of wealth is destroyed due to health care, especially by old people.
But that is not all of the wealth. We generate more than we consume, so where is rest of this wealth? It is stored in companies. The machines, the walls, patents, etc.. Is is still part of the economy and it is still there, it is not extracted from the economy.
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Cost of living may be higher, but there are plenty of ways they're flat out living beyond their means. What is in their pocket, on their wrist? I'm betting the cell phone, car keys, and even watch is well beyond their means. Further, it's not like it is a one-and-done financial mistake, it's a lifestyle of excessive overspending and upgrading.
I'm a Luddite. I still have a wrist watch my wife bought me 20 years ago. When I take it for a battery replacement, jewelers are surprised to see such an old model in
Re: Wrong target (Score:2)
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It's not billionaires. There aren't enough of them to make a difference. It's the entire top 20% or so.
Re: Wrong target (Score:2)
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billionaires extracting money from the economy, forcing ordinary people to spend the majority of their income on the basics
Jeff Bezos is worth 1M times what I am. Therefore he eats 1M times the amount of Filet Mignon that I do, driving up prices.
Somehow, that doesn't seem right.
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it always amazed me that putting guacamole on bread somehow became a symbol of extravagance
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it always amazed me that putting guacamole on bread somehow became a symbol of extravagance
Well, thanks to Trump's tariffs, it actually is one now.
It's because it came from Australia (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember all that brouhaha over Bud light? The reason that blew up so much is that every single YouTuber and right-wing commentator was going on about it at the exact same time. That wasn't an accident it was coordinated. The same thing happened when the Captain marvel movie came out. My favorite part of that was the number of idiots talking about how they gender swapped Captain marvel because they didn't understand that the DC Captain marvel, AKA Shazam, isn't the same thing as the marvel Captain marvel and that Marvel's Captain marvel was rebooted as a woman back in the early '80s.
But none of these were comic book fans these were provocators and propagandists pushing a set of talking points given to them. Hell we found out that the Russians were literally handing out talking points with Tim pool a famous right wing YouTuber getting hundreds and thousands of dollars in exchange for pushing them.
This is why the left wing gets their clock cleaned. What the left wing should be doing right now is hammering voting rights so they can do something about all the voter suppression from the last election but they don't have that sort of a central command structure that does the research to figure out how to win elections and then hands out talking points that everyone can hammer. So their message ends up completely diluted and basically useless even when they're getting a huge amount of views like how the Midas touch podcast has better ratings than Joe Rogan now.
It's unfortunate but when you're fighting a war it's tough to do without a proper command structure and make no mistake this is a war. Warren Buffett told us that years ago
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Rule #3: SJW's Always Project.
Not sure why you'd think that's an insult (Score:2)
It's like when people accuse me of being antifa. Who the hell is profacist? I mean besides Trump supporters but there are tiny minority.
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Remember all that brouhaha over Bud light? The reason that blew up so much is that every single YouTuber and right-wing commentator was going on about it at the exact same time.
You are confusing cause and effect.
The reason that every un-cowed commentator was talking about it was because it was 1. happening and 2. was completely nuts.
Dude nothing happened until the commentators (Score:2)
Re: It's because it came from Australia (Score:2)
The problem is the left wing lacks (Score:3)
This means they can't effectively use violence. And when they try to they end up adopting a command structure and then turning right wing. It happens every time. Both China & Russia had left wing revolutions that ended in fascist dictatorships.
It doesn't matter how brave you are, as soon as you turn to violence you either get beaten by superior command structure or you turn into a right winger to win.
The only way forward for the left wing is electoral politics, and in Ame
So I do think red states need to bust unions (Score:2)
But Union still have an enormous amount of power because they organize voters which is why, well one of the reasons why, the business in
It's securitization of everything (Score:2)
Decades of letting each and everything that can be monetized turn into a securitized revenue stream has been raising the costs of everything.
It's the MBA way of organizing everything, find out each and everywhere you can pick nickles up in front of steam rollers in government, business, nonprofits, NGOs and finally get to diminishing returns where there's little to optimize and when any part of the chain breaks, there is havoc.
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it always amazed me that putting guacamole on bread somehow became a symbol of extravagance
Smooshed avo on toast is delicious. Ironically avacado in a smoothie shouldn't taste as good as it does, but it does.
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It's not even guacamole. That's got salt and lemon juice.
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It takes 15 years to mature an avocado plant before it will yield fruit. And these people are the ones complaining about waste and the environment. Don't you see the irony?
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a very long time ago, I had a neighbor from one of the Caribbean islands and every Sunday after returning from church she would invite us over for lunch, which was usually something she called buljol, made from shredded codfish, onions, tomatoes and a lot of diced avocado served with a fresh baked flatbread.
little did we know we were eating like kings
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it always amazed me that putting guacamole on bread somehow became a symbol of extravagance
It doesn't amaze me in the slightest. Rich arseholes control a political narrative and rile their base around some made up problem. "No the cost of living isn't out of control, it's the fact that the person is eating an avocado, that's the reason they can't afford a house! Back in my day we didn't eat avocados on toast and we bought houses, what more proof do you need of the reckless spending of the next generation! It's their fault they are poor."
Re:Wrong target (Score:4, Insightful)
The avocado toast is not the reason.
But it is a symptom. For the complete lack of interest up to outright refusal or denial of your overall financial situation. Most people don't even have a rough estimate of monthly expenses vs. income. They know that skipping the daily latte won't buy them a house - but they do not know that it would pay filling up their car once. So they don't realize that that anxiety attack when the reserve light comes on two days before the next paycheck is totally optional. And you won't realize it's a bad decision if you don't even know that it's a choice.
People think of their daily latte or 15 streaming services as "self care" instead of taking care of their mental health.
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George Soros has the answer. Let's give him another medal.
Every thing that's gone wrong since the French Revolution is the fault of George Soros
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The billionaires are our creation and we can destroy them by shopping local.
No, we can't. This is one of those "If everyone would just ..." solutions that is pure fantasy because we lack the means to get everyone to do anything. Amazon does not lack the means to get people to enrich them. Your local business just can't compete with Amazon's marketing budget.
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What difference does shopping local really make when all of the products in the stores come from China?
Re: Wrong target (Score:2)
Give it time (Score:3)
It takes a while to save a useful amount of money. You put aside a little each month, and it grows to a healthy amount after decades. While you are still working an entry level job (according to the summary -they are) you are not going to have much saved.
They are in their 20s. None of us had much saved at that age. I think I still had 3-4 roomates.. and was making wonderfully smart life choices /s
Re:Give it time (Score:5, Informative)
No, things have definitely changed. I bought my first house when I was 26 years old. The price was roughly 3.3x my annual salary.
In Canada (cos that's where I live), that's now a sad, sick joke, with houses costing something like 8x to 10x the average annual salary, and probably 20x to 40x annual entry-level salaries.
The kids are being ripped off even as the oligarchs and tech bros enrich themselves obscenely.
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You are correct. I am kicking myself for not reading about finances earlier. I paid off the loan early because I just wanted to see the amount owed go down and didn't need the money. Total paid was $149k, ending April last year.
I was also saving for retirement all the way along. By the end of last year, total contributions to retirement accounts exceeded what I paid for the house, and the value is of course much higher than that due to market growth. I am currently saving as much as I can to make up for
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The number is not completely irrelevant. I think when we bought, the mortgage rate was around 6% or so. Mortgage payments on $130K at 6% are still going to be a heck of a lot lower than on $900K at 3%. Plus, you'd need to come up with a much higher down-payment, which is often the stumbling block for first-time buyers.
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Right. Hopefully they're living below their means, saving that little bit each month, and staying out of debt.
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They are in their 20s. None of us had much saved at that age. I think I still had 3-4 roomates.. and was making wonderfully smart life choices /s
I bought a condo at 26.
I moved out in 1976 as an 18 y/o. I lived alone in my own apartment in a minimum wage job. Put myself through college, got better jobs, etc etc etc.
Kids today can't do that. College costs too much. Housing costs too much.
Re: Give it time (Score:2)
Had to use that reserve once. Life saver. No regrets.
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What a wasted life.
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Yeah. The pattern is you were lucky and privileged to get a $60K entry-level job, be born at the right time, and have bank of Mom and Dad available to pitch in.
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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
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Not everybody is lucky enough to have parents who can help them out. Not everyone is lucky enough to get an entry-level job that pays way above the median salary for the time.
In many countries, but particularly in the USA, if you start out disadvantaged, you are very likely to stay disadvantaged. Social mobility in the USA is very low and it's keeping millions of people poor. And it's impoverishing the country, too, because countries with higher social mobility tend to be wealthier overall. But unfor
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Yes, the luck was being born at the right time. It was much easier to get ahead in the past than it is now. People could get real jobs with job security instead of having precarious gig employment. And income inequality was lower.
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got my first job 18 years ago. It paid 60k/year.
You do realize $60,000 is far above the average wage in the United States? Much less the average wage of someone just starting out.
marrying a woman who was also a good little worker drone
The adage that two can live as cheaply as one is almost true. Finding a life partner to share the costs is a huge advantage. At least until you have children.
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$60000 is almost exactly average wage today. ~150% of average wage 18 years ago.
I was thinking median compensation since my point was most people don't make $60,000. In 2023 the median was $43,222.81 according to the Social Security Administration. That was 187% higher than in 1991. The average for 2023 was $63,932.64, 206% higher than 1991. In 1991 the ratio of median to average was 72%, it was only 67% in 2023.
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Re: Give it time (Score:2)
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All good points.
Some of this might be down to lack of financial literacy. Millennial here, and I did all of this in the wrong order. No emergency fund the first 9 years out of grad school, paid off a 3.5% mortgage in 7 years just because I wanted to see the amount owed go down, only contributed a little more than required to get 401k match.
Started reading about finances after paying off my house (what do I do with this money?), and I'm really kicking myself for not reading about this stuff earlier. Never
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It's not entirely a bad thing to pay off your mortgage early. But, as you discovered, there are better ways to handle your money. The extra that you put towards your home loan could have earned much more than 3.5% in the stock market. And the mortgage interest is deductible, so the net cost of borrowing that money is lower than a loan for something else.
TL/DR: don't be in a hurry to pay off your home loan if you have a better place to put the money.
Outside of your 401(k) I'd consider something more aggressi
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Ah, should have specified, I'm using the Series I savings bonds. They're indexed to inflation, and the current ones pay 1.2% real on top of inflation. The beautiful thing is they can be redeemed at face value after 1 year and are not marked to market. I'm working to save 4 years of expenses in those, kind of as FU money if I want to go back to school for something else. Recently inherited some money; some of that is going to this, as is a part of my income, but I put more in the 401k.
401k and Roth IRA a
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I'm working to save 4 years of expenses in [Series I savings bonds], kind of as FU money if I want to go back to school for something else.
Fair enough. How you invest depends on what you need the money for, and the time-horizon.
If you want to use the bonds for several years of school, consider a bond ladder. [investopedia.com] I'm not sure whether a 529 plan is relevant, but you might want to check that out also.
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Series I bonds can be redeemed for their book value any time between 1 year of holding and maturity at 30 years, so I don't need to ladder them. Interest compounds tax deferred, is always state tax free, and it is totally tax free when used for qualified educational expenses within certain parameters.
A 529 plan is a good thought, but I also don't want to lock myself in to using this money for education.
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Seconding the thing about 529 plans. They're ostensibly "for college," but can also be almost a back-door second 401k. You can change the beneficiary more freely; use it for other things like vocational programs / trade schools or adult classes*; roll it over to a Roth IRA (after 15 years); or just plain take the 10% penalty & income tax ~~on withdrawn earnings only~~. There's no required minimum distributions like a traditional 401k, so even then it lets you time it for tax purposes if you do treat it
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At the moment, S&P500, MSCI World, etc. aren't a happy place to be in. Maybe check back later.
When the markets are down, consider buying, not selling. You can't predict the bottom, so don't try. Ease in with trades spread out in time. Dollar-cost-averaging is a sound strategy. But combine it with long-term holding to weather out the dips. Historically, the market has gone up over time, and there's no reason to doubt it will continue to do so. You just need to be able to wait long enough for it to happen.
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More of my income goes into the 401k plan at work and a Roth IRA, which are invested 100% in the S&P 500 and a total US stock market index fund. I only started buying savings bonds last year.
The I bonds are something of a cross between a parachute and FU money. Goal is to have four years of living expenses, which would give me the option to go back to school and change careers if I stopped enjoying work. I had a bad spell most of last year; it's looking up now though.
I am definitely loving reduced li
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And risk selling at fire sale prices. No thank you.
An emergency savings account with liquid cash is still the best way to handle unforeseen expenses.
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This. The stock market is the wrong place to put money you might need in the short term.
That said, there are less volatile securities that could be part of an emergency-fund investment. For example, short-term bonds or a mortgage fund. You shouldn't have all of your emergency funds in such investments, but they are good complements to CDs.
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We will be like Russia where we have fake elections and anyone that speaks out gets arrested and sent to camps or thrown out of windows.
What makes you believe any of that? The answer is you have been brain washed. And if you ask Russian they will tell you that. Because they have been brainwashed. The world is run by the people who control and manipulate the flow of information. Which is why people are worrying about immigrants and trans participation in sports.
Instead of worrying about an expensive health care system that produces lousy results with the most deaths from COVID of any country in the world. An expensive retirement system that
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I don't think those are even the big issues we should worry about. This is my list:
1. Sudden death of all humans (asteroid, pandemia, AI, super volcano etc.)
2. Population collapse ( as it has happened with rats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
3. Human workers replaced by automation ( not a problem in itself, but it will cause a lot of suffering if not organized properly )
4. Global warming (which might cause starvation of large amounts of population + natural catastrophes + brain eating mushrooms )
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None of which are likely to be solved by deciding which politicians get elected. They are all, with the exception of global warming. based on speculation
.
Human workers have been replaced by "automation" for all of human history. The notion that there is a limited amount of work to be done in the world and we will run out of things for human beings to do is delusional. Its not clear that there won't be more work for humans created by automation, albeit different work.
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I'm ok paying taxes to fund government programs that keep poor people from starving or provide medical care to those who could not otherwise afford it.
We live in a society. Poverty shouldn't result in death or untreated illness. There but for the grace of God go I, and all that.
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Why have money in the bank for a rainy day when government will pay for free food, free medicine, free condoms, free tampons, free free free.
Clarify this for me: Where are these "free free free" handouts coming from? Are you really suggesting that people plan their needs around handouts? Explain how that works, because I have no idea where I'd go for free anything.
And I can't imagine anyone being against stocking tampons in the girls' rooms: that's just basic sanitation, and decency.
You couldn't feed a dog on what Gen Z makes (Score:2)
Class Issue (Score:2)
How young? (Score:2)
I like having 6 months' salary in the bank, but it wasn't actually a thing for me for a LONG time. Now I have enough to retire above the poverty line and maybe - if nothing goes wrong - to maintain something close to my middle-class lifestyle until I die.
Having four weeks pay in the bank? If you're 'young' (I'd say under 30), that is already AWESOME, especially in this economy. Lots of people live their entire lives on next week's pay, forever giving up a percentage to the credit card companies or worse,
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just show up at the ER with an fake ID they can't trun you away or can they force you to give your real name.
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There tend to be limits on such things though, and four weeks' pay isn't much if you're at or close to minimum wage. Add to that the liquidity requirement of being able to get instant access to your funds in an emergency, and your options are limited.
I actually would say 'in the bank' literally here - in a savings account maybe even losing money against inflation - just because it's not that much money but you might need it within hours if something goes horribly wrong in your life.
But if you can manage th
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You are someone with money. Now imagine not having a credit rating and you can't get a credit card. Or if you can get one, not being keen on the ridiculous interest rates when you can't immediately pay it off. Imagine your current bank balance is "hey, I might make rent this month" or "I'm worried I won't be able to put gas in my car".
People who make minimum wage (or less because they can only find part time work) often don't have credit cards with significant limits, and they'd just get deeper in the ho
Living paycheck to paycheck (Score:2)
It's always been a bad idea. It's just more fashionable today.
It has nothing to do with the cost of living. When I was starting my adult life in the 90's, we made do by getting roommates and not eating out (or getting food delivered). We didn't spend large amounts of money on phone plans or phones.
What we knew, what we had been taught, is that you don't spend everything you make, and you put some aside for a rainy day. That principle hasn't changed.
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Relative price of things has changed is the recent years:
https://howmuch.net/articles/p... [howmuch.net]
Also housing-income gap is now larger than it was in the 90's.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/rea... [voronoiapp.com]
Yeah Starbucks just has to ... (Score:2)
... open in cheaper cities because you have to have that latte special every morning with that gluten-free flatbread. No wait, learn how to constrain yourself and live on the bare minimum to save money for the future. Want to buy a house?
My daughter saves $$, BUT....... (Score:2)
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Why would you do that?
Those investment groups will only give you 70% (or less) than if the house could be sold directly to a move-in buyer through a Realtor(tm). So unless your house has a lot of work which needs to be done to sell it directly to a new buyer, or you live in an area where houses sell very slowly (or not at all) or the house is on land with environmental pollution, or subject to land subsidence going through a real estate agent would be the prudent thing to do.
Every generation starts out this way (Score:2)
Then they encounter their first business cycle recession. Lesson learned.
Monopoly? (Score:2)
Everything has become a monopoly.
Big Pharma
Big Healthcare
Big Data
Big Landlords
Big Food
Break up all the monopolies and the world would be a better place.
Economic Triage (Score:2)
The most important thing would could do to promote affordable housing, building of smaller and cheaper homes, and to make every worker's dollar go further is to end real estate/property taxes. Builders, banks, utilities, government, etc. have made their fortunes over the last 70 years by forcing houses to get larger and larger.
Bigger houses cost more to build, more to buy, more to heat and cool, suffer higher tax bills, and take more money to furnish and maintain. In 1950, the average home size was just u
UBI ... (Score:2)
Re: the new slashdot (Score:2)
New slashdot.. wish it was new and disallowed people to cower behind anonymous posts.
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Apparently, you are.
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Living in "Red Dwarf Star" mode here too. Living of savings and investments acquired over the course of working for a few decades.
Wanting something for nothing is the American Way(tm). Things are marketed to you with that theme in mind.
We don't teach financial literacy in a lot of public schools (Well, some do, but most don't).
There is a reason for this: So businesses can market lucrative products with monthly payments which provide dubious value to the consumer who buys them. Instead of products which migh
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I read all the various financial advice columns every day.
Every fucking day, I read about people who make way less money than we do, yet spend way more on a house than we do, and typically way more on a car payment than we do.
I don't understand it.
The solution is simple: SPEND LESS MONEY. I mean, fucking christ! We make almost $300k/year and our mortgage payment is $1100/month (and that was with money down). We have one $532/month car payment. Even if our income is CUT IN HALF, we will be OK.
Every day, I