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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.
Millenial here, not in tech. SINK. Skilled blue collar labor. Not union (for now...my next job I want to get in a union shop). I work hard, but I was also very lucky.
The #1 thing I did, by far and away, to crawl out of the grinding poverty that I was born into, was to leave my shithole Southern state and move to California.
I now make enough money that I'm on track for my own retirement, and I'm also funding my parents' retirement. I'll be a millionaire within a few years if things stay on track.
I did NOT pull myself up by my bootstraps. I worked very hard, had a government social system designed to support me rather than keep me down, and had several lucky breaks. Now I pay a shit ton of taxes and I'm glad to do so. California has been VERY good to me, and whatever taxes they feel entitled to is okay by me.
There are plenty of people in your situation (I'm also one of them), but the fact is that (unless you're at the very top of the pyramid) nearly everyone (including people like us) is a bit worse off than they would have been at a comparable stage in life 30 - 60 years ago.
I had to work hard and make sacrifices to make it, however with my qualifications my parents (and even moreso my grandparents) generation would have just walked into secure, high-paying jobs with real prospects of advancement. Instead I've got to constantly be switching jobs and looking out for myself in order to not fall behind. I know the rules of the game, so I do what I have to do.
Now just imagine people who 50 years ago would have been 'making it with sacrifices and hard work', since (virtually) everyone is now a bit worse off, their situation has shifted to 'underwater despite sacrifices and hard work'.
TLDR: The average millennial is poorer than past generations and it's harder to make it than before. This doesn't mean that there aren't large amount of individual millennials (like us) who DO make it, although even for this group (unless they are at the top of the pyramid) it's harder than before.
You're literally in such a small minority in the US it's not even funny.
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.
Congrats, you're above the curve. For now.
How do you think you will do with a decade of 30% inflation?
That seems fanciful. You can get decade long mortgages right now for under 6%.
We haven't even begun to see just how fucking bad this incoming depression is going to be. We've staved it off for a long time by wildly printing money and shoving it anywhere it will fit since 2008 but that's over now.
It's going to be really, really fucking bad, and the cratering of the real estate market will only be the beginning. China is already feeling it.
During the last Great Depression, real estate was a hedge for the wealthy as they pulled out of the retail-overleveraged stock market that was starting to wobble while being at an all time high after the spanish flu, was mainly due to everyday joe investors with no fundamental understanding of company valuation investing in the financial recovery once everyone stopped dying all over.
DOES ANY OF THIS SEEM FAMILIAR?!?!??!
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.
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.
Yup, living my best life after getting married. Two kids, two cars, and a house in the suburb. I worked my ass off through my twenties and only in my mid thirties did it start to all come together.
Why is it all so great? Wife had a windfall from her mother who died from cancer as well as from her grandparents who passed away soon after. Bittersweet, mostly bitter. It doesn't feel right to me most days, but at least our children have a good chance to get there faster than we did. For us we don't have to worry about retirement as long as we keep that money invested, and the world doesn't go sideways.
I think if childcare and college were free people could basically have the same benefit. That money can go into retirement and a mortgage instead.
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!
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.
Being comfortable doesn't garner attention or internet points. It also doesn't make for good discourse. Lemmy along with most social sites bias the discussion to how poor things are to make it seem like everyone is on the verge of homelessness. While it's not representative of the real proportions, it's still capturing the downward trend of CoL and income getting closer. Hopefully the squeaky wheel gets some reform, but the trend has been happening and identified for decades so that further compounds the doom and gloom.
Housing is in not great, but I hoesntly don't think we should be in a society where buying a full sized house on a starting salary is something everyone should be able to achieve. Not because I don't think people deserve housing, but because it's not a sustainable goal. There should be nicer affordable housing with higher density. I think part of the expectations or entitlement comes from consumerism making us feel like we should all have that house and car. If there was enough inventory of big houses with yards for everyone, I can only imagine the suburban hellscape we'd need to accommodate. Every city will have to look like suburban LA and the transit infrastructure will be a standstill.
FWIW, I'm in the boat where I'm doing okay SINK and targeting early retirement. But it did take discipline and working in a position with some upward mobility. I live in a town house with shared walls (not great). But I have peers who make 1/2 as much as me with budgets of spending 2-3 times the cost of my townhouse just so they can get their ideal vision of a home. They could pull it off, but they'd also be living on a razors edge and one step from financial ruin.