You are the chosen one
Have you tried making your sandwiches at home?
Something funny I noticed at my last two jobs. The people who had their financial act together always brought their lunch. The broke people, like me, almost always ate out. Go figure.
Just a constant reminder that gen z home ownership by individuals is up. But who cares, let’s be doomers all the time. The economy certainly didn’t have any effect on anything important like an election or something.
Millennials and on par with gen X. Also top third as a country.
Economist put together a nice article or you can dig through the omb data. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/generation-z-is-unprecedentedly-rich
Your link is paywalled. But I’ve also heard this before and the main reason for this is that we’ve changed how inflation is measured, among other things. I don’t like replying with a half-hour video link but coldfusion’s “why is gen z so poor” Video gives a good overview, also using the article you linked as a source in the video.
Right, so the “where” is the USA.
If we take this definition of the generations and table 12 from here, we can compare the values 16 years apart to see generations at equivalent ages. 2023 is the most recent data on that table, so millennials would be 27 to 42. We can’t match that perfectly with the 5 year bins on the table, so I’ll just average every bin that that generation covers a majority of. With that, we get:
| 2023 | 2007 | 1991 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gen Z | 23.6% | x | x |
| Millennials | 47.9% | 24.8% | x |
| Gen X | 72.0% | 53.4% | 15.3% |
| Boomers | 78.5% | 76.9% | 49.1% |
We can compare generations at the same age by looking along the topleft-bottomright diagonal. This shows gen Z having a lower ownership rate than Millennials did 16 years ago. Millennials were doing better than gen X 16 years before that, but have now fallen behind both gen X and the boomers.
Sure enough, the entirety of the discussion of homeownership in the article you linked is:
American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
Not sure what data they’re using since that doesn’t tally with the above, but that’s still second-worst, and the actual worst is the generation the post is actually talking about.
The wording is highly biased and the article is poorly sourced. Here’s another link for the article referred to: https://archive.ph/wJJZv .
The Fed working papers ctrl-f “generation” -> : https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/has-intergenerational-progress-stalled-income-growth-over-five-generations-of-americans.htm - the pdf paper includes the figures with non-biased language and here’s the conclusion:
Using data from 1963 through 2022, we evaluate whether younger generations are seeing slower income growth relative to the generations that came before. We confirm that there has been a slowdown in intergenerational progress, except for Millennials who saw their incomes grow slightly faster than Generation X but still more slowly than Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. Intergenerational progress has remained positive for all generations. Positive growth has been maintained for Generation X and Millennials in spite of their stalled growth in hours worked. We investigate the role of two potential explanations for perceptions of worsening outcomes for Millennials despite their observed income growth relative to previous generations. First, we find that the higher household incomes of Millennials relative to Generation X, through their 20s, is a result of dependence on their parents rather than a rise in their own market incomes. By age 31, however, less than 10 percent of Millennials are still dependent on their parents and by then their own market incomes exceed that of previous generations. Second, we find that the rising cost of college offsets only a small portion of the income gains achieved by Millennials, especially when accounting for the growing generosity of financial aid. Our results focus on aggregate comparisons across generations, as opposed to direct comparisons between individuals and their own parents. Each type of comparison provides important information about absolute improvements in economic wellbeing across generations. Future research should continue to consider alternative measures of wellbeing for evaluating intergenerational progress, including consumption, wealth and social wellbeing (e.g., Fisher and Johnson 2022). Results on changes in wellbeing over time, including the intergenerational 26 progress made in rising incomes, should inform discussions about how best to promote wellbeing in the future.
Gratitude - I learned something despite the misleading trailhead.
Fuck gen z. Millennials have had it way worse and have been beaten to death by the economy since our late teens.
Also it’s mainly mommy and daddy buying them houses.
They didn’t graduate into the worst economy since the Great Depression, and then when they finally regained their footing get the rug pulled out with covid. And the cost of housing quadruple. Nah. In fact wages skyrocketed under covid if they were lucky enough to get a work from home “job”.
Graduated in 09. No mommy money here 🤷♂️.
Quadruple 🤣. You realize when you say that to anyone educated that are just going to start nodding their head blankly right?
When did you buy? 2017/2018/2019?
The last time I could even think of getting a house was back then, and the prices here went up at least four fold.
Most millennials I know can’t afford houses and never could. If they didn’t buy before covid they can’t buy until the market crashes again.
Also you’re not gen z. The oldest gen zs are like 25… hence mommy and daddy’s money.
Gen z didn’t have a decade of extremely suppressed wages to account for, and if they graduated right into a cush work from home “job” during covid they won’t have any financial difficulties at all. They’re not dealing with the compound lost interest of a lost decade.
Also it’s mainly mommy and daddy buying them houses.
How else can you afford a down payment? I’m a home owning millennial and I’ll happily admit my house down payment was covered in large part by what was left in my college fund. No way I’d just have $50k laying around at age 30, otherwise
And that was ten years ago, when housing was half the price it is today.
You’re extremely privileged. I didn’t have a college fund, I was coerced into taking out a mortgage on my worthless education.
My mom is on the brink of homelessness (she lost the house after dad died) and my dad is dead (thank you for profit american healthcare system). Despite being college educated, the most money I’ve ever consistently made per hour is $25. I’m just barely getting by, and jobs in my field pay less than what I currently make as a valet driver with tips (~35 an hour but half is tips).
Unless I win the lottery or fall into exceptionally lucky circumstances, I will never have a house of my own. And all I want is a simple house with a mother in law apartment so my mom and I can share the house but live in separate quarters.
Being in vermont I’m surrounded by rich people and my job is a pointless job fellating the egos of the rich. They hate us and we hate them.
There are types of loans that require 0% down. It’s difficult, though, because monthly payments will be higher. Still a valid approach in some parts of the country. I managed to buy my first home this way with no help from my parents - and yes it was in the Midwest where no one wants to live.
Hey, graduating Gen Z here, where are those mythical high-paying remote jobs? Hell, where’s somewhere that will actually look at my resume? People that got hired during COVID got laid off and now we’re competing with people who have 2-4 years of experience for a junior position, inflation is significantly higher and paying for college and rent didn’t exactly get easier. How can you look at the current situation and say we have it easy, just because you also had it rough?
I’m not saying there aren’t gen z who are suffering. You’re one of many and I’m sorry for that.
Millennials still, as a generation, have it objectively worse financially.
I protested during OWS and got pepper sprayed for it. I worked for the Bernie campaign just to see the DNC royally fuck their base in the ass no lube. The only peaceful action we have left is a general strike and everybody’s struggling so hard trying to fend for themselves that no one has it in them to organize a strike let alone all the fucking bootlickers who’d be against a unified labor action anyways.
We’re fucked. Violence appears to be the only answer, and for now it’s only the far right with an appetite for it. And they love the state.
This is a super shitty comment you wrote here dude. Gen Z isn’t having life handed to them any more than we millennials did. If anything it’s worse for them because inequality isn’t getting any less striking.
I’m a millennial who has a remote, work from home job, go ahead and shit on my career. Gen Z are our friends and allies in the end, they understand pretty well what we went through and they’ll almost certainly go through worse because gestures vaguely at the state and trajectory of everything. The pain Olympics suck and someone’s suffering doesn’t invalidate yours.
We gotta use the empathy the boomers didn’t, we need to be better and not continue generational infighting or the only people who win are the rich.
Laughs in blue collar. When this country collapses, as it is currently doing, what are you gonna do with the skills from your fancy laptop job?
Data without context is meaningless.
https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation-2023/
26% of adult Gen Zers owned a home in 2023, little changed from 2022. Meanwhile, the homeownership rate for millennials rose to 55% from 52%, and the rate for Gen X climbed to 72% from 70%.
Still, most adult Gen Zers are tracking ahead of where their parents were at the same age. That’s likely because many Gen Z homeowners were able to buy when rates were near record lows.
My local sub shop has great sandwiches for $8
Same. People need to stop buying from giant corporations. Everything they sell is cheap shit sold at a ridiculous price now because investors expect a 30% profit margin.
For real. Who the fuck eats at subway these days, the food quality is absolute shit, they treat their staff like shit, and they charge you more for the pleasure
Who tf pays $15 for a sandwich? Y’all motherfuckers need to learn how to cook.
Yeah y’all need to learn how to be self-sufficient! Look at the people surviving during the Great depression. That’s how we all need to be.
What tf kind of lame ass strawman is that? News flash: its usually cheaper to prepare your own food. Film at 11.
Honestly, yes. We need to learn how to make do with less. We can indulge when times are good, but some people just splurge in good times instead of saving and struggle to make do in bad times.
How much less though? Would you still be ok than less than the bare minimum to survive? How about at the bare minimum to survive? How long should we be put at that level?
I ask because most suffering today is caused by decisions made by people in power, not natural cycles.
Yes let me just grow all the food I need and raise a cow for milk and a sheep to get wool for making my own clothes on my 4’x8’ balcony at my one bedroom apartment.
Not all of us, and I’d argue very few of us proportionally speaking, have all kinds of land to be able to do shit like that. Check your privilege, dude
Oh yeah apartment rentals/living in a vehicle are known worldwide for their spacious cabinets for pots, pans, cups, dishes, bowls, mugs, knives, forks, spatulas, spoons for eating and cooking, cutting boards, flour, sugar, yeast, oven mitts, thermometers, and sinks to clean up and counter space to cook and dry all that is needed for “learning to cook.”
Happy Thanksgiving.
