1000000000000000%
Nothing will piss me off faster than people attacking the work ethic of young people in the US. These poor fucking kids are working 60-100 hours a week for the “privilege” of living in a roach-infested studio, likely with roommates, where our parents could afford a house, education, and family on 40 hours a week.
In-fucking-furiating.
This has been going on since Elder Millennials were the young people.
Nothing has changed- same Boomers at the top, punching downward. Millennials are just older now, so Z is in the spotlight.
Elder millennials like me are either stable, or have dead or dying boomers parents who support them. We’re care taking for the second elderly parent with dementia now. One more to go after that and we’ll split the house sale with siblings and maybe have enough for a meager retirement in 25 years.
If Social Security is gone I’m fucked though.
Not a GenZ, but i feel this. Forget affording a house. If I lost my car I’d be so fucked financially that I’d be in debt for the next 10 years or worse. And I know this because it actually happened to me 6 years back. Couldn’t get to work so I couldn’t make money. Within the span of a few months I was in almost $15,000 of credit card debt on top of a car loan. That’s almost half of what I make in a year I built that up in just a few months just to survive. I’m still in debt from back then and I still haven’t paid off the car and now I’m a little over 30 years old. All while I get to live in a shitty apartment building where half my neighbors are meth-heads while the other half make the meth (nothing against them personally. Except for the dude that bangs on my door at 4 AM) And one might think “this guy probably has a shitty job that doesn’t pay very well” and no, I don’t. I actually have a pretty decent job. I’m a CAD tech for a land surveying company and I’m making the most money I ever have in my entire life. Yet I’m still 2 paychecks away from being homeless.
Sorry, I just needed to rant cuz I’m 30 and tired of being poor.
If I lost my car I’d be so fucked financially
My 80 year-old parents are in this situation. In April they will have been “borrowing” my car for an entire year, because no one will employ them and the gig economy is the only thing standing between them and homelessness.
I’m lucky to live in an area with good public trans, myself.
I remember losing my car (my brother borrowed it and burned out the transmission fucking around. Totaled it. Thanks bro) and just trying to get around on bicycle during commute hours was pretty bad. My town hadn’t heard of bike lanes yet and riding on the street was a good way to get clipped by a pickup. I lucked into a POS Ford that cost $50, was held together with duct tape and I got ripped off, but it ran. Put a new radiator in it, pawned it off on the next schlub, and got something that wasn’t a deathtrap. But those were some rough months.
I’d feel sorry if most understood what sacrifice actually means. If you want to get out of debt, make actual sacrifices instead of blaming it on everything else. Nothing comes easy. Gen Z people have a sense of entitlement and “don’t understand how to manage money.”
How bout stop being children and educate yourselves on what it means to budget (oh, you weren’t taught how to do it in school? Pull up your favorite media consuming app and look it up); what the dollar’s actual value is; what it means to not eat fucking fast food every day (know how to make a sandwich and pack some fruits, meal prep?). How about stop relying on credit thinking its your money while paying the banks the interest you accrue by keeping a balance on your cards (look on your latest credit card and see how much money you’ve given to the banks just to have a “sense of security” through credit, hah) Or buying a vehicle that’s 30% or more of your net income. COME ON!
Stop blaming the world and make it yours.
Or join the military, its actually got all of the facets of turning children into adults… You’ll earn financial freedom through many sacrifices. It definitely will flush out the wannabes and “cant-get-rights.”
Or, you know, just blame everything else and get nowhere. 👍
“Join the military and die for the military industrial complex!”
Do you even know how much an apartment rents for now in most major cities? You know, where most of the jobs are.
In my region the army was how we got to college. Fair trade given 90% of the work we end up doing is sandbags or chasing jail escapees (it’s like search and rescue except everyone’s got guns and the training not to use them).
Sorry your impression is different from my memory.
They have three choices: take out a lifetime of debt for a college degree and likely still not be able to find a job, get exploited for their labor because they don’t have a union (likely working for poverty wages), or fight in some foreign land to further America’s corporate power.
The fact is young people are working harder, for longer hours, more days a week than any since the Industrial Revolution. For that they get the privilege of barely surviving here in the US.
This isn’t their fault. They were born into the shitty country our parents and grandparents created for them.
Tax all wealth over $1,000,000,000 and use the money to increase the social safety net.
Nobody likes hearing the truth. The more defensive the argument, the less you have to stand on.
Generational relative hardship is a thing.
Every generation has had to adapt, period. You can CHOOSE to overcome challenges or let them defeat you. You can CHOOSE to take out a school loan and either have a well thought out plan or fall flat on your face because due diligence wasn’t paid to increase your knowledge in how the area of study will translate into the workforce. You can CHOOSE to take on mountains of debt to “survive” and think 40 hours a week is all the time there is to work. You can CHOOSE to have a child, two, three, four. All choices have risks and consequences. You can CHOOSE to “buy” that $1500 phone when you live paycheck to paycheck. You can CHOOSE to pursue a career in gaming, social media, and the so called “influencer.” But with those choices, you accept the risk, responsibility, and the ownership of them.
Learn what accountability means in your OWN life. Once the problem is everything else’s fault - its time to look at the common denominator.
The only one you have to look at in the mirror is yourself. Do something about it.
Found the boomer.
The cheapest new car (by MSRP, not actual dealer pricing) in America right now is the Nissan Versa… manual.
A manual transmission.
In 2025.
It costs $18.3k.
Before tax and dealer markup.
For this car to be 30% of your yearly income, you would need to make $61k a year.
That’s an hourly wage of $29.33 an hour, after taxes, with a full time, 40 hr/week job, taking zero time off.
Before only federal income taxes, you’d have to make about 72k yearly, a full time 40 hr wage of about $34.61.
If you say the median zoomer is 28 years old…
Then only a quarter of zoomers in America make that much money, or more.
… and the ones that make that much are very likely to have student loan debt at least on par with the monthly payments for that car, if not more.
Oh, and that quarter of zoomers isn’t really a quarter of zoomers, its a quarter of zoomers with jobs, in the workforce.
If you’re unemployed for roughly over 6 months, or disabled or seriously injured or whatever, you aren’t counted as as unemployed, you just fall out of the denominator of the ‘people with jobs / workforce’ equations that are unemployment numbers.
By your 30% metric, the median 28 year old in America who works makes about 47k yearly before taxes, so about $41.5k after just federal income tax, and can thus afford a car with a sticker price of…!
$12.5k.
On Edmunds, I’m getting about 500 cars (all used, none are even ‘certified pre owned’) within 200 miles of me that aren’t obvious repair nightmares, get 30 MPG, and have less than 100k miles on em, which are $12.5k or under.
There are 10 million people in that same radius of which roughly 15% are 28 years old +/- 5 years…
…so…
Thats about 500, roughly affordable to the average person, cars for about 1.5 million people.
Here’s another resource you can use if you’re looking for an affordable car under $12,500. I’m sure we could find more 😉
I guess substantively responding to what I said would be too difficult, because that would involve admitting you are incorrect, so you’ve instead devised an insult in the form of infantilizing, mocking, useless, parental-style advice… doxxing your own location in the process.
Masterful play Mr. Boomer, bravo.
You’re practically the platonic ideal of a boomer.
Anyone got a link to the TikTok video? It’s removed from TikTok from what I could find.
