I keep on having this debate with my dad. He’s 73 and I’m 37. One night he was like “people from your generation want to buy a ‘starter home’ and a vacation home, and then a few years later buy a bigger home!” and I was like “no one in my generation is even thinking about buying a vacation home when they can barely make a livable wage in a lot of fields.” Teachers make about $25/hour (about 35-40k/year) and they deal with tons of shit from the faculty, state, and students themselves. I was making $112k/year working in IT and could barely afford to live by myself in or close to Manhattan.
Edit: just for context, my rent was $2500/month for a 500 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment about 30-45 minutes from Manhattan. The sales tax rate in NYC is 10%. A burger and a beer can easily cost you $20.
The (boomer) generation holds bizarrely strong biases, it could be they subconsciously they do it to avoid admitting they’ve screwed their kids with their political votes, or more likely they simply only care about getting their own and aren’t thinking far enough ahead to realize their being snookered and driving the bus off a cliff.
I worked for Disney+ (got laid off about a month ago) as a Linux Systems Engineer, so it’s not like I worked for a small company doing Windows desktop support (I was making 50k/year doing that in NYC, $30k/year doing the same thing about 3 hours south in NJ). It is a significant amount of money, but the taxes screwed me, I’d only see about 85k of it, couple that with 10% tax on everything and the increased prices of living in the most expensive city in the US and it’s not as much as you think it is. About 60% of my monthly income went to rent and bills.
I keep on having this debate with my dad. He’s 73 and I’m 37. One night he was like “people from your generation want to buy a ‘starter home’ and a vacation home, and then a few years later buy a bigger home!” and I was like “no one in my generation is even thinking about buying a vacation home when they can barely make a livable wage in a lot of fields.” Teachers make about $25/hour (about 35-40k/year) and they deal with tons of shit from the faculty, state, and students themselves. I was making $112k/year working in IT and could barely afford to live by myself in or close to Manhattan.
Edit: just for context, my rent was $2500/month for a 500 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment about 30-45 minutes from Manhattan. The sales tax rate in NYC is 10%. A burger and a beer can easily cost you $20.
The (boomer) generation holds bizarrely strong biases, it could be they subconsciously they do it to avoid admitting they’ve screwed their kids with their political votes, or more likely they simply only care about getting their own and aren’t thinking far enough ahead to realize their being snookered and driving the bus off a cliff.
$112k/yr is a crazy amount of money; I also work in IT in a pretty high up position, I wish I even made half that…
Depends where you live too
Yeah, in Manhattan that’s like middle class. Making that in a rural or suburban area and you’d be considered wealthy.
I worked for Disney+ (got laid off about a month ago) as a Linux Systems Engineer, so it’s not like I worked for a small company doing Windows desktop support (I was making 50k/year doing that in NYC, $30k/year doing the same thing about 3 hours south in NJ). It is a significant amount of money, but the taxes screwed me, I’d only see about 85k of it, couple that with 10% tax on everything and the increased prices of living in the most expensive city in the US and it’s not as much as you think it is. About 60% of my monthly income went to rent and bills.
Fair enough! I got offered a job at Nintendo once, probably should’ve taken it in retrospect :(
Yeah, big companies are good but also kinda suck because they lay you off at the drop of a hat as soon as they don’t make as much as they expect.
Same.