[Torture]

Originally Posted by Shazam

Yeesh.

Here's things to understand:

It's expensive to own property. You have to save and sacrifice to own property. You have to have a good job. You might need a mate with a good job. It has always been like this. Yeah hey back in the 70s you could buy a place for $30K, but you made $8000/year. And eggs were 50 cents a dozen. Yes kiddies, inflation is a real thing.

And don't feel bad if you rent. Only 63% of Canadians own their place.

Yes post-secondary costs money. Yes you should get all the financial help you can. This is not the time to expect rugged self-sufficiency. Yes you might end up with some student loans. I ended up with $18K in loans, I paid it off in 5 years. This was before the litany of tax credits for tuition BTW. Whatever. It will still be a great financial decision on your part. Just take something that has a chance of you getting a job.

Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps amiright? OK Boomer.

Only a third of millennials own their own home, compared with almost two-thirds of baby boomers at the same age. It will take a millennial on average 19 years to save for a deposit, compared with three years in the 1980s. A third of millennials will, it is predicted, have a lifetime of renting with less space, poorer conditions, longer commutes and more insecurity than the baby boomers experienced.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...ional-fairness

Americans between 18 and 34 are earning less today (after adjustment for inflation) than the same age group did in the past. A typical millennial averaged earnings of $33,883 (in 2013 dollars) between 2009 and 2013. That was down 9.3 percent (after adjustment for inflation) in just a decade and is the lowest since 1980. Older Americans have fared considerably better; earnings of all full-time workers were roughly flat between 2000 and 2011.

Still more striking is that millennials have endured falling earnings even though they have attended college in record numbers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/o...llennials.html

"There's really very little evidence that millennials are any more spoiled or any more entitled than any generation of young people that came before," he says. "But there is a mountain of evidence that things are objectively harder for us."

Healthcare, housing and education are more than five times more expensive than they were for our parents. There are fewer steady jobs. Wages have stagnated since the 1970s. I mean, I can go on and on and on. And so its weird that we're constantly talking about how millennials should do this differently, and millennials should do that differently. But we don't talk that much about, hey, the country around us can do some things differently, too.

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/07/57630...nd-the-economy

But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...merica/592336/

In 1980, Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust was on the radio, The Empire Strikes Back was in theatres, and the average Canadian between the age of 18 and 35 was making $34,200 a year. (That’s in today’s dollars, adjusted, not what was on their paycheque, according Statistics Canada.)

In 2016, as we were downloading Drake’s One Dance, and streaming Star Wars: Rogue One, the average Canadian between 18 and 35 was making $34,300 — a difference of … $100.

Average wages for people between the ages of 18 and 35 have remained stagnant for nearly four decades.

By comparison, people in the 35-through-50-year-old age group were making, on average, $49,500 in 1980. By 2016, their average income rose to $57,200, a $7,700 jump, according to Statistics Canada.

Those between the ages of 51 and 65 saw even bigger gains. Average salaries for that demographic were at $46,700 in 1980 and had jumped to $54,700 by 2016, an $8,000 increase.

The millennial salary stagnation is also happening at a time when benefits, such as dental care and Defined Benefit Pension Plans, are being pared back or even eliminated by employers, giving those older generations an even bigger financial leg up.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/natio...the-rest-of-us

Yes, all (except one) of these articles are about the US and it's less extreme in Canada. But anybody that doesn't think there are structural issues that have made it more difficult for millennials to get ahead in life than it was for boomers has their head planted firmly in the sand.