CNBC breaks shocking news

Sadly, Millennials aren’t handy. Baby boomers are famous for the idea of being able to fix it themselves. If the dishwasher broke, they fixed it. If the carpet needed cleaning, they cleaned it. They enjoyed doing these tasks on their weekend. That is not the case with Millennials. They don’t care to understand how to fix something.

These are the same people that can't use an iPad unsupervised without somehow getting tricked into sending $2k worth of bitcoin and their SSN to a scammer.

That last article comes sooo close to figuring it out.

Finally, renting allows millennials to live in more desirable or “happening” parts of cities that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for home ownership.

That sure sounds like a fancy way of saying we can't afford to buy houses.

I thought we couldn't afford a home because we bought too much avocado toast?

Around me all the 55+ condos are dirt cheap and price controlled, while the regular condos and sfh are 2-3x price. So, when the boomers want to downsize they can just sell their that the vigorously fought to keep zoned without density to a millennial for a huge profit and then buy a cheap condo (conveniently dense and conveniently 55+) and live off the rest of the proceeds. It’s as if the boomers get to use their kids future earnings as a piggy bank for their retirement. It’s the same story with offloading the climate change impacts of their gluttonous lifestyle to their kids as well. They really did pull up the ladder.

At least in our area, most of the starter homes were purchased and then completely redone internally to fancy up and then flipped. All of the homes went up about $100,000 at minimum because of people trying to profit off the housing market.

Ehhh, I disagree with this a bit. People are still putting LVP instead of hardwood in new builds, with granite instead of quartz countertops, and no fancy heated floors, and the cheapest carpet they can find at Home Depot. I feel like most new builds I see going up are more on the "starter home" side of things, but maybe it's an area specific thing.

The real problem though, is even these cheaper options still end up being unaffordable.

I was fortunate enough to buy a house this year and the options seemed to be:

• Under $250K: needs $100k of work
• $250k to $350k: houses with less sq ft than my apartment that are >80 yrs old
• $350k to $400k: okay house/location, probably with one glaring issue. If you're lucky you'll find one of those 'starter homes' will be here
• over $400k: acceptable
• over $500k: built within the last 15 years

The new starter homes seem to be townhomes, me and my wife considered buying one instead and the market for them was blistering as they were all that most people could afford that aren't shacks/fixer-uppers... and people buying those will usually have to pay steep HOA fees on top of the increased interest rates, which is less going into their equity.

No one is building starter homes and with investing being so more accessible, you might as well do that while living in a nice apartment and wait to buy a nicer house.

Ha, jokes on them. I moved to the countryside, and purchased a former starter home.

The joke on me is that it was 3/4 of a million dollars. I would have not been able to buy it at all if I didn't have the support of my SO, who works full time like me, and my brother AND his wife, who all had full time jobs at the time of purchase....

Six bedrooms, two bathrooms, nearly 2800 sq ft. At least 15 minutes from anywhere, and at least 30 minutes from mid sized cities, and an hour and a half from the nearest major metro area. It's quiet here... Like, weirdly quiet.

Wait, why didn't you get a 34k gift from your grandfather to buy your first property, like avocado toast dickhead did?

Youre just doing it wrong, bro

Mmmm... Avocado toast sounds yummy... Here I go again wasting money on silly things like food. I can't help myself 😭

Ooh, I feel like rent payments should be pretax or tax deductible and it would help a ton of people out.

Someone tell me why that would be a bad idea, I'm genuinely curious.

Someone told me recently that one should only spend max. 1/3 on housing. After showing them the price for housing and the average salary, they connected the dots. But they didn't seem to realize the Elephant in the room. I wonder when society is ready for the elephant.

Also if you own your house you can't tip your landlord

Probably the same reason I didn't - waited too long, and missed the window of affordability.

Yeah the trick was buying a bunch of cheap homes in 2009 and sitting on them.

Seems the ultra rich are doing quit well in this economy by sticking it to the not-so-rich. It's not the economy, it's the money & power that controls the price of everything, including wages, but go ahead and vote for the billionaire guy who says he alone can fix things while planing to rule you with an iron fist. If systemic change is what you want start by running folks at the ground level elections - it takes about ten years to really change things..

Seriously, we are also seeing record high inflation, used to 20 bucks could get me a bunch of drinks, a few microwavable meals to take to work, and some butter flavored Crisco to make my popcorn.

Now it might cover the butter flavored Crisco to make my popcorn and maybe one thing of drinks if it's on special offer. And that wasn't me comparing growing up to now, that's me comparing two years ago to now

Weird to me how hypothetical a landlord's "job" is compared to, y'know, any actual job.

Wait that's what landlords have to do. Idk how it is in America. But in Europe is pretty much a law

Also if you don't want to be stuck in a particular city or neighborhood for long, renting is a better option.

I was happy to rent in my 20s because I'd move to a new town every year, trying to find the one I liked best.

Yeah millennials got over a decade of news headlines like "Millennials are killing X! Millennials dont like Y! MILLENNIALS MAKING FINANCIALLY POOR DECISIONS BY BUYING EXPENSIVE LATE'S AND AVOCADO TOAST!" . I think some of it is pandering "kids these days" clickbait but a lot of it is also disconnect from how things have changed as well as people not understanding how to read data.

The funny thing is the articles didnt stop they just realized that elder millennials are in their 40s and shifted to gen z.

A weird trend I noticed that targets us now is gen Z making fun of millennials. That makes sense they changed what IT is and millennials are no longer with it and some elder millennials may even be their parents. So like yeah young people making fun of the on the way out trends and fashion is par for the course and they arent part of the same generation block so they can just target millennials all at once now. The thing that gets me is Im noticing gen X-ers coming in to join the shitting on millennials and thats just uncool.

Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.

They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master's Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we'd end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.

The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can't pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don't have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.

Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the "young people" in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy's money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.

The target audience for ALL these articles is "daddy", the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.

If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the "millennials" have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that's why they can't stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.

And that's the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.

The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.

So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they're "the help", but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.

Nope. You're "the help". You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It's a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.

So that's why the articles are so "clueless". The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.

They know why you're poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That's not news. They know why you can't buy a house because they made sure you wouldn't have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you're fucked, because they're fucking you.

But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they're liable to read news articles about it. They don't think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You're the help.

Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, "knowledge worker" head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.

But don’t millennials like being able to pick up and move across country at the drop of a hat? It’s flexible! /s

Just listened to an interview on NPR today saying that very thing.

The previous owner of my place "fixed" the front door handle by gluing the mechanism into it. Now if I want to change my locks I have to replace the entire door. Cheers mate.

too much phone, not enough struggling with PDF

Some think "younger people" shun the responsibility property brings with it. And obviously that we spend our money on traveling, Netflix and expensive gadgets instead.

The obvious answer is that she's wrong. By the numbers Millenialls born in 1990 have a slightly higher rate of home ownership (43%) than GenXs born in 1970 (41%). Most of GenZ simply isn't old enough to purchase a home. If we define them as being born 1997 to 2012 then the very oldest of them are 27 with the youngest still being in Middle School! The vast majority of GenZ is somewhere in the middle around 18-24 years old. They either about to graduate High School or College but either way they're not at home buying age yet.

What over supply? You mean all the unfinished Ponzi homes?

It's a distribution thing. In rural and lower populated areas, hone ownership by younger persons is probably higher than 1989 (i remember when, in my home area, a house could be had for ten grand but that was a unimaginable amount of money then and there, more there being the issue than then I guess), but also that large groups of young people concentrated in cities can't afford anything.

I'm 27 and classed as gen z as I was born in 96. I'd class 23 and up being house buying age.