I'm more having a quiet giggle about what appears (from here in Australia) to be a rather noticeable wave of media coverage and memes from the US regarding "Smashed avo on toast"!
My girlfriend will violently disagree with me, but I think avocados are a bit ick really, and yet affording an actual _house_ anywhere near where work is is basically an impossible dream for nearly everyone I know... and my being able to afford one has nothing to do with my breakfast habits (or frankly, the fact I skip breakfast everyday)
Don't smash the avocado. Cut it up in slices and put it in a toasted baguette. Add sliced cherry tomatoes (yellow ones are best), salt, olive oil, and onions. Maybe some cheese of your choice (provolone or feta) too if you would like, though not necessary. Delicious.
My girlfriend say she loves your thinking, and she thinks feta is the best choice! I might have to have a go at this again, but I've always found the texture just so... odd!
The smashed avo thing is really just saying that buying your breakfast each workday at $10/pop is another $2.5k/year extra you could save for a deposit. That something that seems so inconsequential does actually add up a little bit. It's not saying "1 avocado = 1 house", as all the recent histrionics seem to have assumed it to be.
This kind of petulance is why millenials have the rep they do. 2.5k would be in addition to what else is being saved, obviously. Only the most rampant idiots genuinely think the original statement meant that you could buy a house solely on breakfast money.
Right, and look I completely get that line of thinking; but pretending that it's solely down to not "saving" enough when the price-to-income ratio is so skewed in this country, with basically zero wage growth for most industries especially those that young people go into seems a little disingenuous.
Look, I'm a senior software engineer earning an excellent salary, and at the end of the day I can afford property if I wanted to, but the sheer amount of debt required for it in 2017, coupled with the ratio above, and the honest-to-god feeling that the young are being plundered in service of the older (I'm not saying that's actually the case, but that is certain how it can feel. See the last two budgets for why), and then being told to "buck up and save more"... you can understand why it feels kind of bullshit, right?
Conversely, the young have always been plundered for the old. The old have always held the political reins. This is the bit that millenials are missing. The Xers before them were plundered and misunderstood by the old. The boomers before them were plundered and misunderstood by the old. It's not new, and the millenials aren't experiencing something that hasn't happened before. As a very simple, short example: when have post-boomers in Australia ever experience conscription? We've been involved in a few wars, but the last conscription was of the boomers, in the Vietnam war.
Yes, housing affordability is terrible in this country at the moment. But if you could choose between being a young boomer (with no foreknowledge) and being a young millenial, you'd be insane to choose the former. Especially if you're a woman or a minority. My mother was born in mid-1946 (a literal post-war boomer) and was a teacher in the 1970s, and was legally paid 2/3rds of what male teachers earned, simple because of her extra X chromosome. This is the kind of thing that never gets mentioned when millenials are bitching about how much worse they have it now; they never mention all the advances that have happened in the interim. However boomers have been through that. They know what it was like before. And that's why they grumble about millenials. Is it fair? Probably not, but neither is the millenial picture of boomers.
If you can only save $2.5k a year, and you're spending that instead on breakfast rather than other things, then you clearly don't have the will to save even if you earned a lot more.
Are you aware that 'being poor' existed before the modern era? And that it's normal for young adults to have a below average wage? And that while the percentage of people renting has increased a little recently, it's not that much higher than 70 years ago?
My girlfriend will violently disagree with me, but I think avocados are a bit ick really, and yet affording an actual _house_ anywhere near where work is is basically an impossible dream for nearly everyone I know... and my being able to afford one has nothing to do with my breakfast habits (or frankly, the fact I skip breakfast everyday)