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The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

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271–280 of 974 posts

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#271

Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially. They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, and now the Covid pandemic coupled with social isolation and massive unemployment that does not appear to have an end date in sight. Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations, wages are stagnant, school is expensive and social conflict is also currently on deck. WW2 was of course…

> They have endured 2 major, years long recessions,

What are these recessions? I'm an "elder millennial" and the .com bust came while I was in high school. Even entering the job force with a two year degree, I graduated well after it was over. Leaving, the GFC and our current one, but our current one isn't years long...yet.

The GFC was definitely a fucking mess for all of us. I have literally never had a real promotion and it wasn't until like five jobs in that I learned about annual cost of living adjustments. I still don't have a "senior" title despite having worked in industry for 15 years...

I feel like GenX got the biggest shaft. They graduated in the 80s-90s into an economy where unions were in decline and Asia had come into manufacturing dominance. Saw a brief boom in the 90s, only to have numerous accounting scandals destroy any investments they managed to save during that era. Went through the housing boom/bust, then were in their mid careers by the time the GFC hit. Now they are in their 50s/60s with a pandemic and another recession landing, and this recession looks to be inflationary, which means any savings they had is going to get eaten away.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#272
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard Netflix is $12.99 per month currently. So that's $155.88 per year. Over 4 years, $623.52. You didn't pay off $60k in student loan debt and buy a house by refraining from Netflix.

Correct. It was from being very frugal in _all_ areas of the budget. Eating out, entertainment, internet, not taking vacations that wouldn't be financially responsible. Frugal dates, frugal Christmas/holiday celebrations, living in an extremely inexpensive apartment in a not-wonderful area of town. We were pretty late adopters of smart phones because we had cheap flip phones. We gave to charity too. It's all about pr…

The crucial data point is missing: "two very small incomes".

US minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. 2 people working full-time at minimum wage would bring in a household income of $30k per year. But you couldn't possibly pay off $60k in debt and buy a house with that. So your household income had to be much, much higher.

One cannot save oneself into a higher income.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would also be the increase of all kind of death and disablement due to the breakdown of the medical system. So prob 1 month of all emergency cases wouldnt been treated. (Pulling this number out of thin air, maybe somebody has a good source)

That didn't happen anywhere in the world, regardless of the severity of lockdowns.

Good remark. Seems Japan was a bit in trouble: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/24/japa-a24.html

I only remember that northern italy might have had a similiar problem, and I guess Wuhan and wouldnt be surprised about Brasil.

According to media here France choose the 'culling' strategy (or more nobly called age triage) and offered palliative services to people who had covid and were considered too low survival chance.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House prices will never fall significantly. As soon as a house enters the market at anything below the going rate it's bought by a landlord or a rental company. This will keep house prices high forever.

This is demonstrably false. Why don't landlords own all of Detroit, where housing prices have cratered? Housing is a market like any other. The going rate can change.

> Why don't landlords own all of Detroit, where housing prices have cratered?

Landlord in the city here - land speculators and landlords own an outsized amount of housing here. Significant churn is caused by blighted house reclaimation by the city, but that's one of the few driving forces allowing residents to have access to housing stock - and by the time it's blighted, there's a good chance it's not livable without significant investment.

Blight is generated because many properties/locations provide such a low rental income low that non-resident purchasers just buy the land as speculation, often doing no maintenance until the house is no longer livable.

While the previous comment isn't as hard of a truth as it implies, large capital owners rather than those who would reside in a home are increasingly the main purchasers of property, at least in Detroit.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#275

> Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations I harp on this constantly. But housing is not more expensive in the majority of American metros. Adjusted for inflation the median cost per square foot of new housing is almost exactly the same as it was in 1990. (This doesn't even take into account that mortgage rates are drastically lower since then.) We get skewed on this for two reasons. One is because h…

Sure, but post-WWII the federal government injected billions (in 2020 dollars) into the pockets of mostly white veterans to build millions of homes. The federal government also provided generous home loans and unemployment insurance. Today, these policies would be viewed as socialist by the very people who benefited from it the most.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#276

> Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations I harp on this constantly. But housing is not more expensive in the majority of American metros. Adjusted for inflation the median cost per square foot of new housing is almost exactly the same as it was in 1990. (This doesn't even take into account that mortgage rates are drastically lower since then.) We get skewed on this for two reasons. One is because h…

It seems to me that the places where cost of living is still low is places that people don't want to actually live. Whereas in previous generations regular people could afford to live in interesting parts of the country.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#277
post #202

I'm my early 20s and in the UK. I earn more than my Dad who is in his 50s. He managed to get a house, have money left over for an expensive hobby, decent car, the odd holiday etc. I'm a 90th percentile earner. Will 95+ percentile earner in a few years time. Yet it feels like I am not as well off as I should be. I don't live in an expensive area either. Yet I need to save so much money to even have the opportunity to…

I'm no millennial, but gen-X. My brick box is okay. Not as big as the one my parents had, but it's in a bigger city, which really adds to the cost. But my wife and I are double earners, unlike my parents. And we both have really good jobs. We don't have it hard, but we don't drive new cars either; we've got a second hand Prius. The only sign that we've got it good is that our house in Amsterdam is not as tiny as most…

I'm "X" as well and while I grew up it never occurred to me that owning a single tiny home would one day be considered a luxury. I was raised by a single dad who, on one tiny teacher salary ended up with two houses, all sorts of motorized "toys", financial security and a pension by the time he retired.

I probably make 3-4X what he did at the top of his career, and am kind-of hanging on to a house with a tough mortgage and a no-frills lifestyle. My Millennial and younger colleagues' financial lives are even more of a disaster.

I remember when someone reported that GenX was the first generation for a long time whose finances were expected to be on average worse than the previous generation. It looks like this trend has continued at least 2 or 3 more generations. It's not a blip, it's the new actual trajectory.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#278

> Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations I harp on this constantly. But housing is not more expensive in the majority of American metros. Adjusted for inflation the median cost per square foot of new housing is almost exactly the same as it was in 1990. (This doesn't even take into account that mortgage rates are drastically lower since then.) We get skewed on this for two reasons. One is because h…

What about other years? 1980? 1970? I would love to see this data over time. > homes today are substantially larger Is there any availability of smaller homes in actual markets? If I'm a buyer in the market do I even have the option to buy a cheap smaller home?

This is because small and micro sized units are literally outlawed by many local zoning laws country-wide.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#279
post #201
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah "millennials" and "boomers" are turning into loose terms for "young" & "old". I'm Gen X and did not see many of these "boomer" benefits..

It's funny, when we talk abstractly, we can look at the statistics and see that wealth in concentrated in the hands of a small % of people. But then when we break it down by age, or by gender, then suddenly, magically, this wealth becomes distributed to the entire age group, or the entire gender, so that "Boomers" are all well-off, or men are all well-off, when the reality is that it's not even remotely true, and a l…

Do you feel its natural or the conversation is being guided.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#280

Millennials face a very real risk of being a lost generation financially. They have endured 2 major, years long recessions, and now the Covid pandemic coupled with social isolation and massive unemployment that does not appear to have an end date in sight. Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations, wages are stagnant, school is expensive and social conflict is also currently on deck. WW2 was of course…

Not to mention low fertility rates meaning millennials will retire into a society with few young people to support them.
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