[Flash Walken]

Some will see avocado toast as a metaphor for millennial self-indulgence. But the fascination with this storyline says a lot more about society’s trivial understanding of millennials than it does about these young adults themselves.

Avocado toast is not the problem in today’s housing market. The average Toronto-area house price jumped $181,709 over the 12 months to April 30. That’s 12,114 orders of avocado toast at $15 a crack, or 33.2 orders a day over a year. This brings us back to parental financial help for millennial home buyers. The need is obviously there, but so is the danger of getting millennials into a situation they can’t handle in a financial sense.

As the Manulife survey notes, the increase in parental support for millennials compared with previous generations comes despite a long-term trend toward two-income families. Over the past 40 years, the number of families with two employed parents has doubled. Families often need two incomes to afford a house today.

There’s also a high incidence of precarious work in the millennial generation, which means a lot of people are working contract or temporary jobs. This leads to inconsistent or variable incomes, a problem documented in a recently issued survey that was sponsored by Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Almost 40 per cent of participants said they have experienced moderate to high levels of income volatility in the past year, and two in 10 put themselves in the high or very high category. TD’s summary of the results said people who experienced high or very high levels of income variability are more likely to see themselves as falling behind financially and more likely to report feeling stress about money.

Manulife’s survey reinforces the idea of millennial homeowners being financially vulnerable. Almost one-third of millennials found themselves without enough money in their bank account to cover expenses at least once over the past 12 months, compared with 28 per cent of Gen Xers and 17 per cent of boomers. Millennials were also more likely to say they’d run into trouble making a mortgage payment if the prime earner in their household became unemployed.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...ticle35089740/