> He didn't splurge on excessive travel, electronics, cars, etc. lived a modest life.
This, I think, is the biggest hurdle for most people. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but few are willing to sacrifice the short term pleasures and status of their consumption. See also the infamous "avocado toast" debate, which, from my personal experience with fellow millennials, had a lot of merit as a criticism.
The working/middle classes are getting screwed by housing, childcare, education, and healthcare costs that are a greater proportion of income than past generations. Avacado toast is not the problem.
In Australia, I find the Childcare is interesting. Federal government subsidises childcare significantly, like 90%.
But commercial real estate hunts out childcare providers like gold mines because you can't move your childcare to just any building. At a rough guess, $20 a day of almost every child placement is going to the landlord.
Say you want to start a childcare business. You can't just run it in any old shopfront. Some kids match their parents 40 hours a week.
So there are standards regarding kids in daycare, including the requirement for an outdoor space for play.
Now this can't be achieved in all cases but you better have a good reason. And if your competitor has an outdoor space you know where parents are likely to take their kids first.
Well, the needs are similar even if the reason is different. Parents want to know their kids will not go wandering, so yeah, it very much is a "detention" centre in the sense the kids will be detained there until pickup.
If you've ever been to a daycare centre... it pretty much is a prison. For little kids. With hopefully caring guardians and an exercise yard. :-P
And if you've ever known a 2 year old, some of them can be little sociopaths at times.
In southern California, a starter home goes for $800k or more. Which means it will be a jumbo loan, which means you will likely need the full 20% down. So around $160k plus $3,500 a month. ($1,000 of which is for property taxes and insurance).
Just for the down payment, that's 73 years worth of avacado toast at a slice a day. Millennials must be eating so much avacado toast.
And that's for a house that was built in the 80s and the boomers selling it paid $75k and whose property taxes are still capped at a max growth rate of 2% a year.
So don't live in Southern California? This is exactly the type of sacrifice people refuse to make to which I refer.
"Avocado toast" is a metaphor for conspicuous consumption at the expense of savings and investment.
Ex: $20 avocado toast at a brunch restaurant is absurdly unnecessary given the available options for sustenance.
No one actually believes avocado toast alone is what prevents younger people from getting ahead. Show me a young person making over $40k per year and I PROMISE you I can find savings opportunities in their spending habits. This, coupled with long term compounding of returns, does make a real difference over the course of a life.
Millennials are far more likely to change cities than their boomer or gen-x parents.
Avacado toast or not, I'm not sure the data is settled on whether millennials waste more money than boomers or gen-xers. They just waste it on different things.
Show me an older person making over $40k and I promise I'll find savings opportunities for them as well.
The price of a median house has gone from 3.6x the median salary to 5x. The ratios are worse in the cities that have added the most jobs. Framing this as a failure of personal behavior is missing the point. The current generation has to work harder than previous generations to achieve the same thing.
The biggest hurdle is rent followed by health care.
Most people could live like a monk and not save anything substantial.
If everyone did suddenly adopt those saving habits, it would crash consumer spending and launch the economy into a death spiral, and those exact "frugal poor" people would be the first victims.
The infamous "avocado toast" debate has absolutely no merit as a criticism.
I see a bunch of people who are so disheartened with their prospects of buying a house etc that they are YOLO/FuckItAll regarding money.
There was a HN story a few onths ago saying they are borrowing big to gamble on the stock market. And why not? They have little money. To go bankrupt is not much of a loss compared to a potential financial lotto payoff. I wouldn't try it, but I see why some think that way.
This, I think, is the biggest hurdle for most people. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but few are willing to sacrifice the short term pleasures and status of their consumption. See also the infamous "avocado toast" debate, which, from my personal experience with fellow millennials, had a lot of merit as a criticism.