[timun]

Originally Posted by Finger Cookin

Judging by that handy chart, most of the userbase is from 3 or more generations ago. From today.

And this is precisely why so many here have been essentially saying "I don't know what people are talking about, my grandparents had it much tougher." Because their grandparents—and mine too—grew up in the Great Depression or earlier. When people are saying "2-3 generations ago" they mean Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, not grandparents from the Silent Generation or before...

"Real" wages in Canada have been stagnant since about 1976. The average Canadian has faced ever-increasing costs of living, and thus the standard of living has slowly but surely been getting ####tier and ####tier ever since. Nominal wages have been up, and disposable (after-tax) income has been going up, but Millennials and Gen Zers face far higher costs for pretty much everything other than consumer electronics.

Originally Posted by opendoor

Technological advances will always ensure that by some objective standards, life is always getting better. Medical advances, improved consumer goods, etc. will always make things better in a sense. But in broader terms, when I look at my parents' trajectory, it's pretty clear to me that there's a significant difference between then and now.

They were born in the mid-1950s to working class families and their lives basically went like:

-graduate university at 22 with almost no student debt (despite their families not really being able to contribute much) and walk into solid careers upon graduation

-buy a house at 23 which cost about $210K in today's dollars. Yes, rates were higher, but even at peak rates their mortgage payment would have been about $2K in today's dollars. And yeah, it was a relatively modest house, but today that exact same house is worth well over $1M and would require a mortgage payment of about $5K.

-have kids starting at 25

<clipped for brevity>

Is that doable for someone coming out of high school now with similar effort and aptitude? Not remotely. Yeah, if you're a high enough earner, but my parents had normal jobs. Their trick was generally living modestly in their 20s -> 40s and saving money, but housing has become so expensive, that you simply can't pull that off through saving.

Ha, here's mine:

My mother graduated high school and went straight into the workforce with a white-collar clerical job, which paid over double the minimum wage at the time. For reference, there's a 30-year age gap between my mother and me, and a couple years between myself and my sister. My mother, a few years into her career, made $6/hr in 1976; adjusted for inflation that was $24/hr in 2006 dollars. Those 30 years later, with a post-secondary education, I made $18/hr and my sister—with only a secondary education—made $7/hr (minimum wage). Let that sink in: inflation-adjusted for the same age, I made 25% less than my mother did, and my sister—with the exact same high-school-diploma qualifications—made 70% less than she did.

My dad did a year-and-a-half of general studies at the UofC before dropping out. His tuition was about $250/semester. Mine, 27 years later, was ~$2750. He made $3/hr (minimum wage) at the time; I made $5.90/hr (minimum wage). He needed to gross 83 hours' worth of wages to pay for a semester of university; I had to gross 466 hours to do the same.

They got married at ages 23 and 24, and bought a house at ages 27/28 for $172,000 in 2023 dollars. I bought a comparable house at age 29 for $543,000, in 2023 dollars. The value of that comparable house is now over $680,000. The very idea that the average 28-year-old could afford that is laughable.



As compared to the age I'm at now, and adjusted for inflation, I do make quite a bit more money than my parents did. About 65% more than either of them individually did at the same age. But I also have a post-secondary education that neither of them ever completed, and have worked my ass off to progress to this point. They settled down and had kids; I haven't. My mother was a strict nine-to-fiver her entire career; I worked more OT in the first couple years of my career than my mother did in her entire career. My dad worked a lot though (and still works actually, even after "retirement age"), unfortunately with not a lot of monetary gain to show for it. Inflation-adjusted he makes about 13% less than he did in 1990. I'm definitely in far better financial shape than they are now, but frankly in my opinion that's more on them being spendthrifts and extremely poor financial planners than it is on external pressures.

By comparison my sister, still without a post-secondary diploma, makes an inflation-adjusted 30% less than my mother did at the same age. Fortunately her husband makes roughly... triple what she does, and about 70% more than I do. So as a couple all-in-all they're doing okay, haha.