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Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

bloomberg.com

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Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#221

Post by claudiulodro »

couldbewrong113 wrote: post #40

"Housing and food are two areas where millennials have spent less than previous generations." Spending less on food I would believe; we have tremendous abundance and it's inexpensive relative to everything else. Housing, though? That...doesn't seem correct, unless they're including in the calculation millennials who live with their family and pay nothing for housing. Can anyone point to a reference that backs up the…

I don't have a reference, but it doesn't sound far-fetched to me. Student loans eat a lot of money that could be spent on housing, and also lots of people have roommates to lower their housing cost.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#222

Post by Ericson2314 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #218
Ericson2314 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generations are a bullshit idea from the marketing/advertisement cesspool to give themselves makework. The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous, but this stuff has so pervaded pseudo-intellectional relms of media that, yes, real scientists at the real US government have stooped to using them. Are they the original "fake news"? *I should point out that the "boomer…

> Generations are a bullshit idea from the marketing/advertisement cesspool to give themselves makework No that's not where they originated from. > The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous Named generations don't have a constant period. (They tend to run between about 12 and 25 years.) > I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did r…

> 12 and 25 years

Still a low spread. No overlap is also weird, insofar that generations are supposed to be real phenomena and not just an arbitrary division.

> No that's not where they originated from.

How much does their current incarnation owe to whatever came before?

> The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet.

You need to look at that children/potential mother rate. Constant means pure echo. Secondary crest further either shows we have more mothers and they mimick their own mothers in having more kids, a true cultural inheritance, or it shows that there is enough variation in maternity age that generations are sufficiently convolved such that no 1 generation begets the next. Those two can maybe be teased apart by combining the per-whole-population and per-potential-mother rates to get the mothering/potential mother rate.

Has anyone actually done any of these statistics?

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#223

Post by xemdetia »

matte_black wrote: post #161

Will the generation that comes after millennials be even poorer ?

I feel like that is a given based on what I have been seeing right now. If people are already redlining spending/debt without savings any financial leg up that they can provide their children is that much less. If anything I am anticipating a decline in people pursuing college as those children who see lives defined by student debt as just not worth it, but the current jobs market does not have a ton of high paying positions for high school educated workers. In a sense because I have education and specialist skills I feel like I am part of the group pulling up the ladder behind me when it comes to knowledge work.

If the next generation is even net poorer the property asset appreciation train might finally crash though, and I'm of mixed opinion if that is going to have a net good outcome, or if the front is going to fall off two generations from now.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#224

Post by will_brown »

eppsilon wrote: post #183
will_brown wrote: post #126

Baby Boomers are directly responsible for all the debt in the country, they invented it to pay for their lavish life styles they couldn’t afford and so they invented debt to kick the can down the road to future generations, and payment has come due. 1950 federal debt was ~$250B now $21T. Credit cards didn’t exist before baby boomers now $19T in consumer debt. Student loans didn’t exist before the boomers, now it’s mo…

The US' national debt was 89% of GDP in 1950. Now it is 104%. [1] I somewhat agree with you (there was a long period in between when the debt-GDP % was much lower), but the current situation isn't as dire as you suggest. 1. https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to...

>but the current situation isn't as dire as you suggest.

But I didn’t say it was dire, that’s you reading “dire” into facts and numbers, which should be telling.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #222
dragonwriter wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generations are a bullshit idea from the marketing/advertisement cesspool to give themselves makework No that's not where they originated from. > The idea that demographic trends are descrete or have some sort of constant period is ludicrous Named generations don't have a constant period. (They tend to run between about 12 and 25 years.) > I should point out that the "boomers" are real insofar that birthrates did r…

> 12 and 25 years Still a low spread. No overlap is also weird, insofar that generations are supposed to be real phenomena and not just an arbitrary division. > No that's not where they originated from. How much does their current incarnation owe to whatever came before? > The Millennial/Gen Y group does correspond to a boomlet. You need to look at that children/potential mother rate. Constant means pure echo. Second…

> No overlap is also weird

Several generation labels have overlap (recently, the “Xennial” group overlapping Gen X and Millennials is an example), and the boundaries are recognized as fuzzy, anyway.

> You need to look at that children/potential mother rate.

For what end? The boomlet absolutely occurred (the attribution of it as an echo boom is occasionally made, but isn't really signficant or essential.)

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#226

Post by dahfizz »

mjevans wrote: post #215
huehehue wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only need enough of an analysis to get a catchy article heading. Every day it's either "millennials are rich" or "millennials are poor". Millennials are poor: ~10% have $15k saved up https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/a-growing-percentage-of-mill... Millennials are rich: ~47% have $15k saved up https://www.sfgate.com/personal-finance/article/Millennials-... Avoid articles that stereotype any generation, because the…

Maybe 30-50 years ago having 15K saved up was rich. What can 15K get you today? An OK used car, maybe, and it's like 1/10th of the down-payment that's expected on a house that's still too far away from work, which you can't expect to stay at because no one has a stable career anymore.

Where do you live? I bought a car that was <2 years old with <30k miles for just under 8 grand. You can easily find good cars for less than $15k. In fact, 15k is nearly enough for a brand new nissan sentra. And with a median home price of $200k, $15k is nearly half of a down payment if you want to avoid mortgage insurance, and is plenty if youre willing to take on mortgage insurance.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#227

Post by mjevans »

dahfizz wrote: post #226
mjevans wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 30-50 years ago having 15K saved up was rich. What can 15K get you today? An OK used car, maybe, and it's like 1/10th of the down-payment that's expected on a house that's still too far away from work, which you can't expect to stay at because no one has a stable career anymore.

Where do you live? I bought a car that was <2 years old with <30k miles for just under 8 grand. You can easily find good cars for less than $15k. In fact, 15k is nearly enough for a brand new nissan sentra. And with a median home price of $200k, $15k is nearly half of a down payment if you want to avoid mortgage insurance, and is plenty if youre willing to take on mortgage insurance.

Arguably the price of the car is still near enough to estimate; 15K being a median figure in the ballpark.

It's also not JUST the home price, it's the career, being able to expect to stay in the same area for a long time and generally do well.

I happen to live near Seattle, but I think the same could be said of a majority of the 25 most populated metro-areas in the US, if not a similar proportion of cities in most other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

I'm extrapolating that any place with >5% population growth over the ~10 year period is in a similar bind due to various policies.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#228

Post by dsfyu404ed »

stevewodil wrote: post #69
acconrad wrote: post #18

It's painful to see that younger people are worse off - poorer and life expectancy I see is down again. I thought we were trying to give our children a better life? How did we become so narcissistic that we don't even want to make future generations better off?

Current life expectancy data is plagued by the recent increase in drug overdoses and suicides. Not saying that there isn't a problem or that we don't need to fix those issues, but aside from those life expectancy is doing fine

I wouldn't say that. Per TFA on the subject that also reached the front page the decrease is 0.3yr. I wouldn't call that "plagued".

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#229

Post by mrskeltaljuice »

SeanAppleby wrote: post #209
esotericn wrote: post #16

I think the term "poorer", and the monetary analysis done here, is too high level to extract real meaning. The average young person/couple that I know are able to do and buy far more than their parents (e.g. eat out, order takeaway, take holidays, go to bars, buy things for hobbies, buy clothes, ...). They just don't own property and have no path that leads there. In some sense you could say that they have higher inc…

Hackernews is probably also an extremely skewed financial cross-section. Most of my friends from my higher education and career, as well as everyone I know who I've heard mention hackernews, are like you said, making more than their parents and enjoying a higher quality of life but still not planning on buying property because housing costs are too high in cities. But if I go back to the town where I grew up, most of…

This has been on my mind for some time. Coming from a lower middle-class background in the midwest, and currently working for low wages, I use HN comments to get a feel for how 'the other side' thinks.

It's surreal to how alien a lot of the perspectives on HN are, even though many people here come from a similar background to mine.

Re: Fed Says Millennials Are Just Like Their Parents, Only Poorer

#230

Post by [deleted] »

gnicholas wrote: post #191
aglavine wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that they eat out and order takeaway because they perceive that they never going to save enough money to afford a house.

A friend of mine complains about the young SV crowd that decry unaffordable real estate but also drive expensive cars. I think this is the same motivation that you describe, but on a grander scale. In this case, they're playing the startup lottery, and if they win it won't matter if they drove a Honda or an Audi. And if they lose, they'll have to leave SV when it comes time to buy a house. I don't personally subscrib…

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