Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
You sound salty. What budgeting software do you use, out of curiosity? I find without auto import support for my transactions and debt tracking, it felt way more challenging to get my finances in lime to save up.
I swapped to Mint at the time (though it’s shutting down now RIP) and having that ability to see every penny we were spending lined up really helped a lot in terms of tightening the budget up to improve our ability to save.
We squeezed another $300/month out of our budget, pushing us up from $400/month to $700/month and that effectively halved our time to hit out goal.
There’s just so much random shit people seriously don’t think about as expenses adding up. My quick energy drink I’d often grab with a snack in the morning otw to work barely registered on my radar, but it was $5 or whatever a day, 3-4 days a week, which adds up to nearly 90 bucks monthly.
Just ordering a bulk box of energy drinks instead and remembering to grab it otw out the door was saving me like $50 a month.
If you don’t have specific budgeting tools installed and actively used, you don’t really have a leg to stand on (yet) when complaining about cost of living.
Go start there, run the numbers and import your last couple months transactions, and if you truly can’t see a few hundred bucks a month you can squeeze than I can sympathize with ya.
No.
Cool. Once in a while we can afford to go out to a restaurant if we can put enough towards healthcare bills, credit card bills and student loans that month.
During the year abd a half we saved, we only ate out a couple times total? Our anniversary and Christmas. Maybe on my birthday too IIRC.
So yes indeed, while saving money you diont waste it on frivolous stuff like eating out, that is 100% correct and very normal.
Cool. We don’t have anything left to save. If you can save $700 a month by only going out to eat twice in a year, you must be going to extremely expensive restaurants.
But hey, maybe you’re not thousands of dollars in medical debt. We are. I’m looking forward to you telling me that that’s my fault for getting sick.
That sucks mate, the US Healthcare system is fucked.
$700/month in savings is very solid though, and that’s after paying off existing loans as part of our budget.
Great, but your claim was better budgeting software was the problem. It’s not the problem for many, many people. Debt is the problem. So is the fact that over 60% of Americans can’t afford to save anything because all of their money is gone to pay bills, rent and debts once they get paid. And better budgeting software won’t pay off debt if you aren’t paid enough to do it. Nor will it pay inflated rent. And it certainly won’t get you a house.
We’re lucky enough to already have a house and we still had to take out a HELOC on our mortgage just so we could cover other costs.
We don’t buy endless luxuries. We don’t buy the latest goods. My computer is from 2015 and was a gift. My phone is from 2018. My car is from 2016 and I only bought it (used) because my 2002 car’s engine block cracked. Our kitchen is not filled with high-end brand name foods. Yes, we very occasionally do something fun as a family. Should my child never get to have fun just so we can somehow magically save $700 a month through budgeting software?
If you use budgeting software and truly can’t find any highlighted costs you can actually cut, and despite that can’t afford to save money, then you have my sympathy, that sounds shitty and challenging.
My point is and continues to be if you complain about cost of living but you don’t use freely available budgeting tools, I won’t sympathize with you (yet), because every grown adult should just be doing that. It’s a basic part of life and being an adult that people just don’t bother doing.
Itd be the equivalent of someone complaining their car doesn’t work but then admitting they’ve never checked their oil.
If you talk to any financial advisor, having a budget system is always step 1, so if a person hasnt dine that yet, their complaints just sound like whining to me as the person hasn’t even done the absolute bare minimum step 1 yet to try and address or even understand the problem.
I assume such a person doesn’t want to put any work in to get out of the hole they dug themselves into.
IF they do have a budget and their costs simply are just that bad, and they’ve already cut every single cost they can, then they have my sympathy as that means they actually are trying.
But unfortunately, after working with a LOT of people in various industries who complain about these issues, it has become abundantly clear that most people just want to complain and not actually do anything about it, and just keep wasting money.
I don’t know your situation, but I’ve worked with so many people and so so so few of them even could hold a convo about budgeting, let alone talk about what tool(s) they use and tracking solutions they leverage.
So I now, after many many years of seeing how awful everyone seems to be at budgeting, just assume the average person is completely incompetent when it comes to managing money as the default.
For every 1 person I meet who has preferred budgeting tools, I have met dozens and dozens that couldn’t even explain what a tax bracket actually means or is.
So I just assume the average person is at that level for finances. No hate, it’s just facts that most people just… don’t know or care to know how money works, they have other priorities in life, like family and their jobs and hobbies, /shrug