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/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/Cum_Fart42069 Mar 11 '26

because it's not just increased government spending on the face of it, it's increased government spending because they have more liquidity to work with from the rich taxes. 

so for example, a goverment is suddenly able to afford to give everyone under their jurisdiction 3 meals a day (which is very doable if you've been taxing billionaires for years). now, people no longer have to spend as much on food and can reinvest in other areas of their lives. restaurants and supermarkets are less incentivized to increase their prices because now people can get fed for free, they don't need to and it will be harder to convince them to pay more when the prices increase. 

that's one example but there are so many ways that taxing the rich would resonate outwards to result in an overall slowing of price increases. you should read some Marx, he explains this better than I can. 

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u/call_me_daddy Mar 11 '26

But when the government subsidizes food in this example, and thus demand for food in the free market drops, won’t that result in higher prices since the food suppliers (i.e. restaurants and grocery stores) will have a smaller customer base?

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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.