And what’s with all these millenials cleaning their clothes?! Why not turn them inside out and get another few days of use!

If you have to tighten the belt to Victorian era corset levels to get a house in the first place, you’re going to be royally screwed when the first major repair happens anyway.

Because when a writer complains about millenials buying avocado toast as the reason they can’t afford a house, it’s damn difficult to NOT imagine the writer’s monocle popping off of his face in shock and disgust as he types it.

Also important to remember that in Sydney current home prices average $1,000,000. That means that a million dollars gets you a pretty average house that’s not particularly close to employment centers. So this guy is even more of an asshole than you’ve given him credit for.

Totally concur with this reading. I also suspect he has some friends or acquaintances who have maybe fallen on some “hard times” (maybe not quite millionaires anymore) and unwisely continue with their former spending habits. Then he clucks his tongue and says ‘kids these days.’ When you’re rich, everything you see is…

No, it deserves to be mocked. Certainly some people have extravagant spending habits and some of those people are millennials, but to reduce the financial difficulties of an entire generation of people who came of age during the near equivalent of the Great Depression to bad spending habits is at best useless and at…

Yes, very much this. And what the hell good is a minimum down payment if your job isn’t stable and you have no second income, no rich friends or relatives, to boost you through the lean times? Cradle-to-grave jobs went extinct at least two generations ago and they ain’t coming back.

Being aware of where your money goes and reducing the amount of that money going to expensive items that could be substituted for less expensive items in order to reach a specific long-term goal seems to be getting a lot of hate in your article. Why is this such an offensive idea?

I don’t mind it as long as they don’t think they can lecture people about things they have no real concept of. Saving money when you have an unbreakable safety net and unlimited line of credit you never have to repay is very different from the experience of people who need to watch the cost of their breakfast every…

That’s an attitude that every old person has about every young person in every generation ever. The problem is that now we have more wealth inequality in the world than at any time since the French Revolution (see Pikety).

My guess is that he has seen some young people eat at the same places he has and assumes that all young people in all places eat at expensive restaurants when the fact of the matter is that the young people he is in contact with probably come from wealthy families that subsidize their avocado toast and coffee habits. …

Actually he’s also conveniently skating over how much it costs to rent an apartment. If you are paying 35-40% of your income on rent, easily done in the Bay Area, saving for a down payment of over $125k for a $1M house in SF or over $725k in some nearby counties is out of reach for a lot of people.

How many examples do you need to string together to get it working? $4 coffee a day takes it down from 13 years to 11. Whoop de fucking do. These arguments are just here to publicly shame the poor for occasional luxuries that have no lasting impact on their actual financial situation.

It would just take you 13 years. Even in the extreme case of eating Avocado Toast every single day for $20 a plate, it would take you 5000 days (13 years and 8 months) to save up enough for buy a rundown 2-bed 1 bath for $100,000 after taxes.

Wait, I was under the impression that being born rich meant that I was exempt from personal fiscal responsibly, while simultaniously giving me to right to yell at everyone else to be more fiscally responsible?

Tell that to the old guy who didn’t do any of that and just hit up his grandfather for a huge loan.

You left out: be born into a wealthy family. It’s so easy!

It’s a question of scale. If you’re tens of thousands away from even a down payment for a house, the occasional $20 avocado toast isn’t going to make or break things -that- much faster.

Pretty much! So easy, right?

Financial advice to live by: