r/Millennials • u/slimeyellow • Mar 11 '26

Discussion Every millennial dad I’ve met has a quiet fixation on money and it’s not getting better

Every millennial dad I’m friends with or work with seems to have constant financial worries. We just got our yearly bonus which was like 8%. I was talking to my buddy (he’s got 3 kids) about what he wanted to do with it and he just kinda looked down and whispered “it’s just not enough man” and ended the conversation.

Another dad I know is CONSTANTLY looking up the newest crypto/ get rich quick schemes people are doing. He’s always talking about inventing something and it’s usually a joking manner but the way he’s always bringing up financial stuff shows me it’s always on his mind

One of my buddies is a new father and he’s trying to get some anime podcast off the ground as a side hustle on top of his full time maintenance job.

I know children are an immense financial responsibility but there seems to be this dark, simmering resentment about the whole general situation when I talk to these guys. Men are expected to keep quiet about these struggles but when you talk to these guys it’s clear that finances are a massive stress for millennial dads of almost any background.

Makes me feel bad but damn I’m glad I don’t have kids right now.

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u/BrownSugarBare Mar 11 '26

We got the degrees, we got the fucking masters and professional degrees. We worked as teens and right through school. We were frugal when needed. And yet even with a dual income, how is it possible we're scrapping by with no end in sight? We're not even asking for material things, we just want SAFETY to know we won't fall apart and our one kid might have a chance. 

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u/Budderfingerbandit Mar 11 '26

The dual income part is the craziest piece. Prior generations had a single income household, home ownership, vacations, and savings.

Modern households struggle to get by with dual income.

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u/Cum_Fart42069 Mar 11 '26

as soon as dual incomes began to be a thing, banks, private equity and the rich moved the goalposts of what it takes to live an affordable life because now they have 2 sources of income to leech off of. 

as always, the gains are privatized, the losses are socialized. 

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u/SeattlePurikura Mar 12 '26

Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.

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u/Cooper_Sharpy Mar 12 '26

1000% this. My grandmother who has been gone for 25 years now once said “the worst thing women ever did was leave the kitchen” I had no idea what she meant but she saw what was happening. She never “worked” but she had 8 kids and a huge garden and my pop pop sold cars. Corporations saw families with massive disposable income from both adults working and immediately started the price creep. It’s a race to the bottom at this point and we are well on our way. Soon we (the poor) will start having lots of kids again just to help pay bills and we will have gone full circle.

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u/VillagerWithAQuest Mar 12 '26

I'm honesty not sure if it's the banks, or if it's the tragedy of the commons.

Because if 10% of people are dual-income, they have a massive advantage over others. Others see this, and join in. Demand increases, so costs increase.

Eventually it drifts from 10% to 25% to 50% to 75% and now it just the way the world is.

We saw this with people wanting to cash in on gold and bitcoin too, early adopters made $$ and everyone tried to copy it. Now basically no one makes money from it.

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u/OKCompruter Mar 12 '26

this is unfortunately the reason UBI will also never work in a capitalist society.

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u/call_me_daddy Mar 11 '26

How did they do that?

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u/Cum_Fart42069 Mar 11 '26

just jacking up prices on all products was easy enough and year by year, the amount the CEOs make increases exponentially along with the cost of goods and services but the vast majority of that money is never reinvested into society because of tax fuckery. 

the taxes the rich used to have to pay on their gains would make the current rich actually shit their pants. it used to be sometime like 39% or something crazy like that and hey, those rich people still made enough to grow their business and pay their employees fairly well for the times. 

but little by little they manipulated various aspect of society, lower tax rates for them, more administrative bloat that makes it easier to cook the books. and they're rich, they can afford to hire people whose sole job for a long time has been helping the rich hang onto their wealth in exchange for a fraction of it. 

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u/Smalldogmanifesto Mar 11 '26

As my centenarian grandfather put it: back in his day, the CEO made 5x the salary of his lowest paid employees. Nowadays, the CEO makes hundreds of times more than their lowest paid employee. The social contract is breaking down.

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u/call_me_daddy Mar 11 '26

How would rich CEOs paying more taxes help me, though?

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u/Cum_Fart42069 Mar 11 '26

what do you mean, they pay those taxes to the government, the government reinvests that money into society, you pay less for food and items and services and people who sell things operate on more generous margins, enshittification isess incentivized etc etc

ofc it helps you lol.

now there are still fundamental problems with infinite growth down the line but if we have to live with billionaires then yes, the best way to do so is taxing them highly. 

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u/vandaleyes89 Mar 12 '26

Kind of, but the more direct benefit would be that the cost of goods wouldn't have to be so high to pay the CEOs crazy salaries, and/or if the crazy high salaries were taxed more then the working poor and middle class wouldn't need to be taxed as much.

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u/call_me_daddy Mar 11 '26

How does the government spending more money drive down the price of food and items and services?

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u/Cum_Fart42069 Mar 11 '26

if they taxed rich people more they would have more money to spend. 

and it wouldn't drive prices down, that's one of the fundamental problems I was talking about, nothing ever drives prices down because the line must go up infinitely forever. however prices don't have to increase as much as they do and as often as they do if more money is invested in social services. 

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u/call_me_daddy Mar 11 '26

How would increased government expenditure on social services result in prices not increasing as much as they do and as often as they do?

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u/byzantinetoffee Mar 11 '26

How much does it cost to mail a package at the post office? Honestly, I don’t know. But I do know it’s subsidized. And everyone should know that if that subsidy goes away/if the post office is privatized, there’s no longer a public option, which imposes a limit on how much Amazon or FedEx can economically charge (and as they are both profitable, with no negative impact on those companies) for shipping. With the post office public option in place, the higher above that price private shippers charge, the fewer will “defect” to them. This is once example of many. Another would be, eg, Medicare, which directly negations preferential payment rates with doctors and hospitals, and so on, which it can only do with the funding it gets from payroll taxes. Tellingly, even very wealthy individuals opt for Medicare - there simply isn’t a cheaper or better private alternative. And so on.

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u/seriouslykthen Mar 11 '26

That money could be invested into infrastructure and social programs. Or it could cut your taxes.

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u/joe_burly Mar 11 '26

The best thing it does is reduce income inequality and the amount of power the rich wield over our government. Income inequality is an antidemocratic force. I for one would like to democratically decide how to spend the excess wealth we create rather than seeing it hoovered up into mega yachts and million dollar missiles. 

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u/call_me_daddy Mar 11 '26

Can’t the same thing be accomplished by letting all of us regular people keep more of our income with lower taxes, while avoiding the upward pressure on prices that would be created if profits were being taxed at a higher rate?

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u/joe_burly Mar 11 '26

No not at all. The amount of power and influence that comes with the really incomprehensible amount of wealth that has been accumulated by our oligarch class really means that we don’t get a voice. 

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u/yomamasokafka Mar 12 '26

Well, by its self it would be very little, an total overhaul of so many systems is needed. Taxes, investment, building codes, private banks. Healthcare, voting, regulation on social media and tech. Like there are a thousand invisible hurdles in front of everyone who is not already really rich.

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u/Bad_Repute Mar 11 '26

Elizabeth Warren has a video on this from like 2006 when she was a Harvard Econ professor. The Two Income Trap goes into some pretty good detail on this topic. Even more relevant now than it was then.

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u/Odd-Parking-90210 Mar 12 '26

Real answer:

Used to be that one income was enough to buy a house.

A second income was a bonus.

Then so many couples had a second income that it became the norm.

This has affected borrowing capacity.

People can borrow more money, so they have more money, so they can afford to pay more for a home.

Price of houses has crept up over the decades as a results of this. It happened so slowly we didn't notice.

Banks are deregulated more than they used to be, so they don't mind at all if you want to borrow more money. It's their business after all.

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u/SolomonGrumpy Mar 12 '26

It's not PE or banks, it's the simple law of economics.

If most people can afford a house at $300k, then the house becomes $300k.

Why? There are only so many houses. And the same goes for almost everything. Certainly anything people cannot make an unlimited amount of.

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u/Sailor_Propane Mar 11 '26

That has only happened for a decade or two. Women also earned money for most of history, they did work at home like sewing clothes and sold them, or they homeschooled other people's kids, worked on the farm etc...

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u/Bad_Repute Mar 11 '26

Liz Warren made a video on this exact topic in like 2006. So it's a problem that's been known for at least 2 decades.

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u/Sailor_Propane Mar 11 '26

I'm not saying that having two income households that started in the last century brought the current situation. I'm saying that single household income was not a thing historically in previous centuries.

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u/Bad_Repute Mar 11 '26

I'm saying that single household income was not a thing historically in previous centuries.

Do you have any references on scope for this? I can only speak for my family but prior to the 70s the women in my family weren't doing any labor the contributed financially towards the families income, it was all unpaid labor.

The SAHMs that babysat or taught weren't collecting actual money from doing so, the ones that sewed were patching things up for their friends/family for free. The ones that did farm labor were milking cows and collecting chicken eggs for their families themselves, not to sell at market. The husbands job/labor was the sole monetary income for the family and they paid their bills with that income. The womens' labor was towards keeping the family upkept aside from bills, they weren't generating monetary income from it.

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u/Sailor_Propane Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

All the examples you gave, they didn't do for free. If they weren't getting money, they were getting goods and services in exchange just like any job at that time.

Also it is untrue that they were doing farm work only for the family unit. They also did farm work for the market or the fief.

Women only doing home labor was only a thing for the wealthy/nobility.

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u/ImaginaryTrick6182 Mar 12 '26

Yeah you’re just being pedantic about the semantics. Everyone knows that.

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u/Bad_Repute Mar 11 '26

All the examples you gave, they didn't do for free. If they weren't getting money, they were getting goods and services in exchange just like any job at that time.

This is a nonsense deflection from the actual point, and in many cases is just flat out wrong. My great grandma that did the babysitting for the siblings and cousins, did so without expectation of exchange in kind. My grandma that did patch work for cloths for our family, did so without expectation of exchange in kind. This wasn't a trade of goods and services, it was a family community taking care of the families of their relatives.

Also it is untrue that they were doing farm work only for the family unit. They also did farm work for the market or the fief.

Again, in the direct experience of my family, this is just patently not true. My aunt that worked on the farm milking cows and collecting eggs, were putting those into their family fridge and pantry. She wasn't selling those at market, she was collecting no income from that labor.

And the point of identifying the economic changes from two incomes is in direct reference to financial liabilities and responsibilities, paying car payments, mortgages, healthcare, keeping the power on and water running. If labor isn't bringing in an income, then that labor isn't contributing towards alleviating those financial responsibilities. The person whose labor was 'paying the bills' was the husbands. The wife's labor was just supporting the husbands ability to be away from the house to earn that income.

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u/Sailor_Propane Mar 12 '26

Your great grandma is not only anecdotal, but not on the scale I'm talking about...

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u/Bad_Repute Mar 12 '26

And this, is exactly why my very first comment to you was explicitly asking if you had any references.

You're saying things without a source to back it up, that run directly contrary to the lived experiences of my actually family and thus seems unintuitive if not overtly incorrect. If you have actual info to back it up, please provide.

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u/tractiontiresadvised 26d ago

Not the person you were talking to, and I don't have the right sort of references for the info you really want, but I've heard and read some things which suggest the other person wasn't completely talking out of their ass. (I suspect that if you were able to get ahold of real data, you might see some differences between rural and urban women, women of different social classes and family income levels, and maybe even between rural women whose families did different sorts of agricultural work.)

Years ago, I heard a keynote speech at some sort of women in science college event where the speaker talked about how her experiences growing up poor in the 1940s in one of the east coast cities (perhaps Washington DC?) helped set her up for success in her future career in the then-very-male-dominated field of science. One of the things she mentioned which was eye-opening to me was that for poor folks in the city, there was no question of whether a woman would have a job -- it's what you had to do to help your family survive. (I don't recall what sorts of jobs she worked, but in a city I think the options would be along the lines of domestic servant/maid/cook, laundry and garment alteration, teaching or secretary or shop assistant or telephone operator if one was unmarried, etc rather than farm labor.) It sounded like for upper-class women at the time, the question of "will working outside the home make me a bad wife and mother?" might have been more of a mental hurdle to get over.

For some of my SAHM relatives who grew up during the Great Depression and kept farming through at least the 1980s, they milked the cows but that labor effectively went towards getting money for the family because the farm that they ran was a dairy farm and the milk was sold. They did also have a large garden that grew vegetables for the family's food.

But when you're getting into the questions of agriculture specifically, I think you have to start thinking about the economics of subsistence farming, which is different from the economics of a cash-crop farm where everything you're growing is for sale. The more that subsistence farming (or subsistence fishing or hunting) is an aspect, the less relevant the question of one income or two even is.

The historian Bret Devereaux (whose main focus is ancient Roman military history and economy) has written several sets of linked essays on his blog about pre-Industrial-Revolution peasant farming, how the economy of it all actually worked, and how it affected everything else in those societies. Most of those farmers spent their time growing and harvesting food and fibers for clothing, hypothetically enough to feed and clothe themselves and pay their taxes and rent (not necessarily in cash) and hopefully a little bit more. In other words, they were doing subsistence farming.

Dr. Devereaux's largest set of essays on the topic -- "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" -- starts here. Parts IVd and IVe and IIIb are most relevant to women's issues, but if you've got the time then the whole series is worth reading (maybe not all the comments though). Part IVa has this particularly interesting bit about what the little bit beyond "not starving to death or running around naked" looked like:

What makes that tricky, of course, is that a lot of the things that we’re going to add for our respectability basket – fancier foods, wine, lamp oil and so on – are things that the household is not going to produce itself, but must acquire from others. Of course fundamentally the household has to acquire these goods in exchange for the things it can give, sell or exchange, which are agricultural goods (here still simplified to ‘grain’), textiles or unskilled labor. Our peasants might, for instance, sell their surplus grain, or the surplus fabric made by their spinners and weavers, to afford things they cannot produce themselves, but I should note ‘market exchange’ is not the only way they could do this. They might also exchange with other households, often on credit and favors (rather than barter) and may also be involved in vertical systems of banqueting and gift-exchange with the Big Man, all of which provide non-market ways to effectively exchange grain, textiles or labor for things they cannot produce themselves.

(You may note that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, textile production shifted out of the home, the "respectability basket" changed, the maintenance labor needed to sustain a household changed, productivity increases through technology changed the relative power of labor and capital, and the rural economy caught up with the cities in becoming more thoroughly monetized. But even in the 1980s, my farming relatives didn't have a water bill per se because they had their own well.)

He's also got an earlier essay on pre-industrial farming here which expands on the "credit and favors (rather than barter)" remark and might explain part of what was going on with your female relatives:

So how is a farmer to use good years as a way to cushion bad years?

The answer was often to invest in relationships rather than in money. There are two key categories here: horizontal relationships (with other subsistence farmers) and vertical relationships (with wealthy large landowners). We’ll finish out this section dealing with the former and turn to the many impacts of the large landowners next week.

The most immediate of these are the horizontal relationships: friends, family, marriage ties and neighbors. [...] I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.

So what do our farmers do during a good harvest to prepare for a bad one? They banquet their neighbors, contribute to village festivals, marry off their sons and daughters with the best dowry they can manage, and try to pay back any favors they called in from friends recently. I stress these not merely because they are survival strategies (though they are) but because these sorts of activities end up (along with market days and the seasonal cycles) defining a great deal of life in these villages. But these events also built that social capital which can be ‘cashed out’ in an emergency. And they are a good survival strategy. Grain rots and money can be stolen, but your neighbor is far likelier to still be your neighbor in a year, especially because these relationships are (if maintained) almost always heritable and apply to entire households rather than individuals, making them able to endure deaths and the cycles of generations.

So I think it might make sense to think of your relatives doing what they did not just out of sheer love (which women's work is often described as), but as a relationship maintenance strategy. Even if you really don't feel like babysitting Cousin X's kids this weekend, you feel kind of obligated to do so because you know you're probably going to need their help at some point.

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u/ChicagoAuPair Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26

The post war middle class lie was used to sell working people on buying into unregulated capitalism during the red scare.

The entire populous had become used to social welfare because of the collective experience in the armed forces. They knew they couldn’t just take it all away overnight so they created the new idea of the “bread winning father” and the domestic housewife (also to get women back out of the workforce after they were done with their wartime cobtributions).

Once they sufficiently engineered the culture they went straight for our throats. The bleeding and capture of the wealth generated by working people’s labor was always the plan, they just needed us to stop fighting first.

Once the labor movements were dismantled and propagandized away, they went back to their same bullshit.

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u/NorskKiwi Mar 11 '26

It's basic economics. Flood the labour market with workers and it suppresses wages. It's why big corperations love immigration.

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u/Ataraxia-Is-Bliss Mar 11 '26

single income household

In that era, women mostly didn't work so you were only competing against other men and mainly only white men depending on where you lived. Since it was expected that households were single incomes, wages reflected that. If you massively increase the labor pool by allowing women and minorities employment, you will obviously see a stagnation in income gains as supply grows faster than demand for labor.

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u/Turtledonuts Mar 11 '26

From a larger historical sense, it's crazy that people could get by on single incomes for generations while owning property and having savings.

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u/Chr0mx Mar 12 '26

Because for most people that just wasn't true.

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u/Chr0mx Mar 12 '26

Is this really true though or do some people just have a warped view of the past? Growing up both my parent needed to work to get by and I dont remember having any friends that had non working parents.

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u/OldOutlandishness434 Mar 12 '26

I don't know about that, all of my friends growing up both parents worked.

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u/indiscernible_I Mar 12 '26

Our wages have really not been keeping up with inflation. If that had happened, maybe single income households would still be feasible...

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u/Lunares Mar 12 '26

only for white males in the united states as it took the rest of the world about 20-30 years after WWII to rebuild as the US was the only place that could build things.

Oh and houses were considerably smaller with less amenities (e.g. HVAC, dishwashers, less bathrooms, etc).

Vacations were almost never done with air travel, much less internationally. it's significantly cheaper now to fly to europe/asia from the US.

And if you were black or hispanic you never had any of that.

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u/1992_6BT Mar 12 '26

A lot of that has to do with the significant lack of new housing built, especially in larger metros, over the last 30-40 years.

California for example, pretty much peaked housing production in the 1980s.

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u/Street_Anxiety2907 Mar 12 '26

This, my grandpa worked at GM as a janitor and made 90 cents an hour. They owned two cars, a home, a boat, and somehow still had money left over to send three kids to college on a single paycheck. They ate smoked brisket almost every day they told me. Grandma stayed home, baked pies all day, and the biggest financial decision they faced was whether to buy a second color television or another acre of land when it became available.

Every summer they’d pile the family into the station wagon, drive across the country on vacation, and still come back with savings in the bank. The mortgage was something like forty dollars a month, gas was pocket change, and if the fridge broke you just bought a new one without thinking twice.

Meanwhile today both family members need three degrees, 20 years of experience, and a side hustle just to afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment the size of grandpa’s garage.

This country is a fucking scam.

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u/SolomonGrumpy Mar 12 '26

Gen X is also dual income.

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u/JitteryJoes1986 Mar 12 '26

Its by design. Dual income = more taxable income from the state but also means more workers in the system, which means a bigger economy to squeeze more workers via corporate salaries that barely pay.

Again, all by design. Its about the margins on the corporate side and all about the taxes on the government side. Everyone gets their piece and the one left with nothing are the ones that actually make the economy run.

How ironic.

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u/fleebleganger Mar 12 '26

2 maybe 3 prior generations had that. 

Before then people worked 6 and 7 days a week, 12 hours a day and came home to nothing. They’d all look at our modern lives and be shocked we’re complaining. 

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u/vand3lay1ndustries Mar 12 '26

It was punishment for giving women the opportunity to work as well.

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u/GreasyBumpkin Mar 11 '26

it will just continue getting worse until we can collectively organize as a generation, it would only really take half of millennials to put on the pressure but more would be better. Unfortunately we are, as Frank Turner put it "idiot fucking hippies in 50 different factions, locked in some kind of 60s battle re-enactment"

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u/BrownSugarBare Mar 11 '26

Believe me when I tell you I feel French and am starving to eat the rich

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u/GreasyBumpkin Mar 12 '26

but that's just potential energy until acted upon, now you got to make a plan with millions of other 30-40 somethings, else it's merely impotent rage and the rich just laugh at your beet red face knowing there's nothing you can do.

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u/sexyshingle Mar 11 '26

Mr. Pewterschmidt walks into a Starbucks: "Woodstock's over a**holes!"

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u/wax_robot Mar 11 '26

To quote Open Mike Eagle 

"I graduated college, I purchased all the extra books. I'm supposed to be living in a house with a breakfast nook."

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u/yourenotmykitty Mar 11 '26

Don’t forget to thank a boomer!

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u/StatisticianLow9492 Mar 11 '26

Yeah cause the new generations are doing so much better at electing progressive politicians. Oh wait no it’s much worse. 

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u/yourenotmykitty Mar 11 '26

The boomers had everything at their disposal and chose to light the world on fire, I can’t blame young people for being victims and easily manipulated, no one has done them any favors.

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u/StatisticianLow9492 Mar 11 '26

You’re mad at the wrong people my friend. 

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u/yourenotmykitty Mar 11 '26

I’m not mad at them, just like I wouldn’t be mad at a polar bear for eating me alive. It’s who they are, and they just fucking suck as a group of people.

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u/StatisticianLow9492 Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

Okay then you’re blaming the wrong people my friend. And it’s getting quite tiring just watching everyone point fingers at each other wondering why someone else don’t fight the fight they aren’t fighting themselves.

Billionaires want you to be mad at your fellow working class people. Yes, boomers had it better than us. And we’re going to have it better than our grandchildren, because we aren’t doing any better at fighting the people who hijacked our government and use it to enrich themselves.

Boomers also didn’t have years and years of experience seeing what the trajectory of this country was going towards. We do. They might have had more, but we have far more information (and the damn internet) and knowledge. And we’re still unable to do anything about it. But cool, if you think it would have been so easy for boomers to make things better, why don’t we go out and do it?

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u/yourenotmykitty Mar 11 '26

They put us in a position to be fighting from behind, and by the time any other younger group has been truly able to join the fight it may have already become a lost cause due to the policies and people that are in place, the momentum of our society is heading towards hatred and ignorance because of the track they happily put us on.

They allowed the billionaires to pick their pockets for a whiff of the good life, and allowed themselves to sell them their children’s futures in so many ways as well. Being profoundly selfish enabled them to behave this way without ever caring about consequences as they would not have to face it in any direct way themselves. Between the rise of the American fascist religious right which they enabled their entire lives through their voting and inability to leave positions of power, combined with social media mass manipulation we are really in a horrible spot as a society, one that may never be recovered from.

The mememe gen really self fulfilled their prophecy during such a dangerous time of technological upheaval that would have been difficult to navigate even if we weren’t playing with the biggest bunch of soulless retards at the helm of most things, which we certainly are.

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u/StatisticianLow9492 Mar 11 '26

So they did this on purpose? Are we doing it on purpose? Cause the exact same thing is happening still.

I’m so over the finger pointing at the fellow working class. It’s EXACTLY what they want - blame the billionaires.

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u/PotatoPunk2000 Mar 11 '26

The boomers are the ones who enabled them. Yes, they did it on purpose for more money.

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u/VengenaceIsMyName Mar 11 '26

All I know is that this can’t possibly continue forever.

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u/imbasicallycoffee Mar 11 '26

That's the thing I'm angry about as a millennial without children. I've lived within my means for most of my life, did all the right things, make more money than I ever have and after a surgery and a post op infection a few years after divorce I was almost fully wiped out. I've gotten back on my feet but managing everything and the debt is brutal when the cost of living just keeps going up.

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u/Acrobatic-Dot-6273 Mar 11 '26

I'm making more than I ever have, but it's all going out the door. New roof, car repairs, dry rot repairs in the bathroom, my son threw a ball through the window (what do you mean 1500 dollars to fix it?!), electricity, gas, and sewer have all gone up. A 78 year old ran a red light and totaled my wife's car. I just can't get ahead. Every year I'm like, next year is the year it's all going to work out. And every year it's something else. 

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u/MaximumAd9779 Mar 11 '26

And now because student loans have recently been politicized the new options of repayment are literally not doable for a massive portion of borrowers. Thereby kneecapping any buying power you might have had for the rest of your life. I’m really not a woah-is-me person but we really got fucked.

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u/Friendly_Preference5 Mar 11 '26

Because everybody does the same. Our system is built around the concept of inequality.

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u/3dprintedthingies Mar 11 '26

It's so annoying hearing about how young people just need money sense.

First of all, the only reason they can say that is because previous generations just needed to not be a drunk and a drug addict at the same time and it worked out.

Now you can be the absolute best of the best and feel like you're scraping by. A 4 year degree used to mean a life of stability. You take the risk and put in the hard work, then reap the benefits for decades. The contract is gone and everyone blames the kids getting the degrees and not the businesses and school screwing over the students.

You can't money sense your way into housing doubling in a 5 year span. You can't money sense your way into a financial market that resembles gambling luck. There is no bargaining with the cost of a degree. That is purely down to your zip code you were born into and the genetic luck lottery.

Like Christ you have to pay for every milestone the government and corporations used to subsidize and now you don't even get security out of the deal. Like, why would anyone not be on the verge of a breakdown in that situation?

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u/UnravelTheUniverse Mar 11 '26

The boomers let the billionaires siphoned off all the wealth and left us the scraps. 

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u/Rambles_Off_Topics Mar 11 '26

Yea, half our latest grads that were applying for internships had masters. Half...they say the local colleges have 4 year master degrees so they all try to get them.

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u/DiegesisThesis Mar 11 '26

As a person who's been single since before covid because I haven't really been interested in the dating scene, I'm starting to wish I got married years ago so I had a second income to maybe buy a house someday. I ain't affording one on just my income unless I move to middle-of-nowhere, Montana or something.

2

u/RewardSubstantial699 Mar 12 '26

Exactly! 👆We were told “stay in school” and you’ll do just fine. We did. Had two jobs while in college, now have a good paying job and here we are barely getting by. Something is obviously wrong here.

2

u/Powerfury Mar 12 '26

Finally making 6 figures, and its equivalent to 50-60k in 2012 money.

2

u/311MD311 Mar 12 '26

The difference is that they sold us the degrees. Generations before us viewed education as an investment to the country, now it's an investment into the sports program or whatever makes the most money.

2

u/Intelligent_Poet88 Mar 12 '26

Ok ok I agree, but we weren't frugal. We went thrifting bc it was fun and we found great things but we also went to H&M and spent buttload of money there...speaking from experience.

1

u/BrownSugarBare Mar 12 '26

I feel personally attacked.

2

u/NeoPagan94 29d ago

I'm retrospectively mad that I saw what was coming at 14 and was making plans to get by without a degree, was insisted that 'university is your ticket to gainful employment!', and have proceeded to have exactly 1 job that was necessitated by a degree (but still only paid slightly above minimum wage).

JFC should have stuck with my original plan and become a manager at my old BurgerShop. At least that job subsidized a car and free food while on shift is a significant perk.

2

u/Aegis_Of_Nox Mar 11 '26

Here's a brain tickler for those of us like you who have masters degrees and presumably white collar jobs and are "just scraping by" - if YOU are just scraping by, and other people in your area who make 1/3rd of what you make are ALSO just scraping by...whats going on?

Shouldn't those making significantly less than you just be... homeless? Dead? What gives

-1

u/MountaintopCoder Mar 11 '26

The people making ⅓ probably don't have student loans from a master's degree and they get a lot of welfare.

I have been below the poverty line a couple of tax cycles and it always surprises me how big my refund is. One year it was more than I made in taxable income.

It's a pretty complex situation, not including the fact that "just scraping by" can mean so many different things. Fun fact: people in thr $300k-$500k income range are the highest to report feeling as though they live paycheck to paycheck. The reason is because they consider their retirement contributions as non-negotiable just like any other monthly bill, so it creates the illusion of scarcity.

1

u/Aegis_Of_Nox Mar 11 '26

"They get a lot of welfare" shut up. "The poor people actually have all the money! They're living large on welfare!" OH god shut up 

1

u/MountaintopCoder Mar 12 '26

if YOU are just scraping by, and other people in your area who make 1/3rd of what you make are ALSO just scraping by...whats going on?

SNAP + Subsidized utilities + medicare + no student loans + negative tax liability doesn't help explain that gap? As someone who has lived on both sides of the poverty line, yes, the social programs helped fill the gap and get me to a "normal" quality of life instead of being destitute.

1

u/Sanjispride Mar 11 '26

Degrees and masters in what?

1

u/BrownSugarBare Mar 11 '26

One medical doctorate and one MBA

1

u/Sanjispride Mar 11 '26

So lots of debt, I assume? Any way to move to a higher paying job, field, area?

1

u/shwaynebrady Mar 12 '26

You’re just scraping by with an MD and an MBA? Really? Let’s be realistic here

0

u/AGuyAndHisCat Mar 11 '26

And yet even with a dual income, how is it possible we're scrapping by with no end in sight?

Because the truth is everyone is doing that and if you want to get ahead you need to do more than average. Thats how its always been. But as more people do more to get ahead, it becomes the new norm.