I was going to but then I saw an avocado toast and now I can’t afford a house. Silly me.
Mmmm… Avocado toast sounds yummy… Here I go again wasting money on silly things like food. I can’t help myself 😭
Pfft that’s stupid. Everyone knows millennials prefer to rent because settling down just doesn’t fit our lifestyle, bro.
Plus we aren’t “handy” enough to deal with all the work of owning a home.
Just kidding, it’s because we’d rather be driving for Uber or something, I don’t know.
Point is, we’re just lazy, entitled, inept children.
Sadly, Millennials aren’t handy. Baby boomers are famous for the idea of being able to fix it themselves. If the dishwasher broke, they fixed it. If the carpet needed cleaning, they cleaned it. They enjoyed doing these tasks on their weekend. That is not the case with Millennials. They don’t care to understand how to fix something.
These are the same people that can’t use an iPad unsupervised without somehow getting tricked into sending $2k worth of bitcoin and their SSN to a scammer.
Boomers invented using several different screws in a device to make it unfixable, and then making sure it broke in a year or two
Yeah, the shit they fixed was generally just a motor and some bearings, maybe with some simple electrical switches. Everything was simple and made as durable as possible because that used to be a selling point.
Modern appliances are specialized computers with moving parts that are designed with cheap, flimsy pieces that are only meant to last until their warrenty period runs out. One minute after that and its all “replacement parts? You mean call our service dept or buy a new one, right?”
Lots of boomers fixing modern machines out there? Somehow I bet they are still talking about that one time in 1983 when they changed out the belt in a dryer that had 6 parts total and had been working for 23 years. Yeah, congrats. You did a simple thing to a simple machine.
Boomers created the current system where you can’t “just fix” your dishwasher. The old dish washer at my parents can be fixed with a screw driver and a ¢25 washer from home depot. The newer ones are all glue, one way plastic clips, and stickers that say it can only be repaired by a certified repair shop. I get kinda what they are saying but the change didn’t happen in a vacuum. I used to repaired computers for a living and I noticed year after year computers became more difficult to repair. For most laptops you can’t just open them up and swap out bad parts. It’s all glued together and has micro components that need to be resoldered to the motherboard. Great for size but impossible to repair outside of the manufacturer. I mean for fuck sakes their are billion dollar military equipment that can’t be serviced without the manufacturers help. It’s all a scam to keep us dependent on corporations.
The pixel watch is so bad that if you crack the screen, Google tells you to throw it away and buy a new one. Apparently even Google themselves can’t repair that.
In my experience, boomers pay someone else to fix it, then say they did it themselves. Gen x are the do it yourselfers.
My parents’ washing machine broke when I was probably like 8 or 9. I helped my dad fix it over a weekend; it cost like $20 and took us a few hours over the course of Friday and Saturday, not counting a couple of trips to the hardware store. We didn’t need much in the way of tools other than a Philips screwdriver and a socket set. That washer is still working today, 30 years later.
Contrast that with the washer I bought when we moved into our home five years ago. It broke a month ago, and I didn’t even have the tools required to open it. The defect was with the motherboard, the tech discovered; and it would cost $550 to get a replacement made since the part was discontinued three years ago. That replacement would be ready in a month. Or I could spend $600 to buy a new machine.
We live in a very different world.
Not to mention… you can’t fix modern appliances. They’re built to be replaced.
PLUS if you’re working multiple gigs to make ends meet over 40 hours a week, the last thing you want to do on your free hours off is try to take apart your dishwasher
This. My uncle used to have a garage and already in the nineties was complaining that fixing cars was about to become impossible due to the addition of electronic parts that were black boxes to him. 30 years later and we live in a world where obfuscation is done on purpose.
Edit: we must start a movement of open source appliances. Cut out the middleman, buy directly the parts and assemble the thing yourself, so youu know exactly how to fix it later on. If it works for 3d printers why can’t it work for kettles and dishwashers?
I thought we couldn’t afford a home because we bought too much avocado toast?
And Starbucks. Remember had we invested in Starbucks instead of buying it, we’d be bagillionaires like heroes Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who totally got rich the same way.
That last article comes sooo close to figuring it out.
Finally, renting allows millennials to live in more desirable or “happening” parts of cities that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for home ownership.
That sure sounds like a fancy way of saying we can’t afford to buy houses.
I bought a house because I hate being beholden to unreliable landlords. Shoddy maintenance, selling the place, neverending rent going up every year. Been there, done that.
Dude…you think your landlord is loosing money? You’re subsidizing all his expenses with the house and paying a nice extra on top of that. That’s what rent is!
- You’re paying someone else’s mortgage
- Could be kicked out for no reason
- Can’t modify your home
- In the end, all that rent money goes towards nothing for you.
Enjoy not actually owning anything.
It’s been a decade since I paid off my mortgage. So I’ve kept track of my expenses (tax, two plumber visits, two HVAC visits, air filter replacement, etc. Those expenses have averaged out to me paying only $250 a month on average for the last ten years (no mortgage payment anymore). To be fair, I did spend a lot I’m not counting on solar panels, because a landlord would never have bothered (tenant pays the electric bill, so no incentive to help the tenant reduce that). Even when I had a mortgage, the figure was like 1500 a month.
Meanwhile, a couple of identical houses in this neighborhood are listed on Zillow for rent for $3000 a month. When I bought I’m sure rent would have been 1.5k a month, but the rent goes up over time and a decent mortgage will not.
I never understood this “never ending expenses” stuff. Over the last 25 years, between renting and owning I can recall only a handful of expenses, and half of them were elective that a landlord would either not let me do or at least made me pay for it.
I don’t understand why this idea angers people.
I think it’s the arrogance of thinking that your experience is the norm. A great deal of people who rent have shitty landlords who will only do the very bare minimum of maintenance and only begrudgingly at that. And most people who have a house with a mortgage have much lower expense than those who rent. Mostly due to the fact that mortgages stay the same over the time you are paying them and then they go away once you’ve paid them off and (unless you are lucky enough to be rent controlled) rent usually continually goes up yearly or bi-yearly.
Expenses to maintain a house should not be so overwhelming that renting is more cost effective. If that were the case how would a landlord make any profit?
It’s more likely that you were just particularly bad at homeownership. That’s on you, not owning a home in itself.
I’m a millennial and own a home and can fix things. I do get experts in sometimes when I am less familiar with the job. What I found was that the previous boomer owner did a lot of things wrong. I can find the code violations, but may need an expert to come up with better solutions. I shadowed my electrician and don’t need him anymore. Still have my plumber in a bit for now.
The previous owner of my place “fixed” the front door handle by gluing the mechanism into it. Now if I want to change my locks I have to replace the entire door. Cheers mate.
In my house (just bought it, renovating) the light switches by the front door seemed kind of loose behind the cover plate. Finally got around to looking at it and found that the switches and their plate are attached to the wall only with caulk; the metal box they’re supposed to be screwed to was somehow pushed a few inches into the wall. For bonus points, one of these switches produces a few seconds of loud humming when flipped followed by the main circuit breaker tripping.
Their is a fault in the circuit. What is the switch supposed to control? Had the same thing with the circuit for the lamppost. The wire for it wasn’t buried deep enough by the previous owner and became compromised over time. For the plates, they make longer screws and also spacers for times when the box is seated too recessed. If you don’t have those on-hand, you can remove the box and seat a new one properly, but that can be a lot of trouble depending upon the circumstances.
Acetone removes glue typically. Sometimes, when you think something is glued in hard, there is an extra screw that you missed.
My garbage disposal just broke. Turns out that the previous owner rigged the dishwasher drain in-line after the disposal, so that there is a chance that disposal water can kick-back into the clean dishes. Fixing that currently.
The kitchen hood vents into the attic, so have to fix that. The owner created a nest of electrical wires in the attic as well, so ended up creating a channel for them and organizing them so they are fastened nicely to the joists.
They created an unstable loft in the garage, so had to demo it since it was ugly as well. The list goes on and on.
