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It’s funny, my father-in-law repeats all the lazy and spoiled talking points about this weak younger generation. The one thing I’ve never heard him complain about?
Avocado toast.
Bro eats that shit every morning.
Ha, my boss gives me this one. “But I’m different,” he says when I tell him about side project stuff like working on my house. I try to tell him… everyone my age I know is like that. They fix their own car/house/electronics and also do some kind of side work. You know how much a contractor costs? Between friends and family, I could be a contractor tomorrow, but not because I want to be. It’s out of necessity. I would love to pay someone else to install floors or do plumbing.
But yeah… all the evidence in front of his face doesn’t hold a candle to whatever Fox News tells him.
650$ to replace a 20$ shower handle cartridge. 500$ to spray down your AC 400$ to replace a 30$ capacitor in your AC 150$ to turn off your sprinkler system valve and blow air through it for a few minutes.
Yeah… I basically do 100% of our home maintenance myself. It’s literally cents on the dollar compared to hiring it out.
Those prices sound… inflated. In our area, service is something like $100/hour for all of that, plus the cost of parts. So I’d expect it to be:
- shower handle - $150-200
- AC clean service - $150 - in my area, there’s a promo $75 AC clean service
- AC repair - $200-300 - extra cost for diagnosis and whatnot; probably done in 2 visits
- sprinkler system - $150 - though why would you pay for it? It takes like 30s to shut off the valve, and you don’t need to blow air through it (I never do)
That said, I still do most of that myself. I hire out the dangerous work (gas lines, electrical breaker box, safety components on car, etc), but I’ll do most of the rest myself, such as:
- oil changes - costs me like $35-40 each time ($25-30 for synthetic motor oil, $5 for OEM oil filters bought in bulk, $10 for air filter from auto parts store); that’s about half the price of oil change places for synthetic
- fixed combination meter in car (Prius) - $100 eBay service and 2-3 hours of work (remove whole dashboard; would’ve cost $1k+ at the shop)
- replace sprinkler heads - $5-10 per head, and about 10 min of work (dig around it, unscrew head, screw new head on, re-pack)
And so on. It’s usually faster for me to DIY since I don’t need to call, change my schedule, etc, I just order the parts and do it when I have time, with a YouTube video showing me what to do. It probably takes me about 2-3x as long as a pro, but generally speaking, that time would be spent with me setting up the appointment, talking with the contractor, etc.
And the flip side of that; paying a craftsman to do the job is 1000% better for everyone involved!
Better for the craftsman. I’m helping someone else stay employed.
Better for my house/car. Let’s be honest, I learn by trial and error.
Better for me. Outside of more basic maintenance, I don’t want to buy all those specialty tools… like that thing you use to pull a shower handle cartridge out.
It’s better for the economy. Putting money in the craftsman’s pocket contributes to the general churn of the economy, and he is more inclined to buy local where I am more likely to end up at a franchise. It’s a little thing I call Trickle Up Economics™.
I’m happy to do the straightforward jobs that if I mess up I’m just inconvenienced. Changing the kitchen faucet? If that gets stalled halfway, I’m doing dishes in the bathroom sink for a bit. (TBH I wish I was 3 inches narrower because my undersink area has a divider between the doors and it was an uncomfortably close fit, including moving 1 boob through the space at a time, not fun).
Electrical? I’ll swap out GFCI outlets but if that doesn’t fix the problem I’m calling a professional.
Painting? Sure, good excuse to get a nice step ladder.
Anything I get stumped on or which takes more equipment than I can fit in my closet (chimney sweep, carpet replacement) gets hired out.
Am considering doing the flooring in my laundry closet, will probably hire it out because I don’t want to deal with moving big stuff.
Am very glad we can afford to do these things instead of deferring maintenance. Am also very glad we were lucky enough to be able to buy a condo when we did. Our mortgage+hoa fee today is 2/3 what rent on our old place is today, and we build equity. And this is a 15-year mortgage, which makes the rent comparison even worse.
Laughs in upcoming brake job and then cries in current bathroom reno diy costs
I mean… yeah? Kinda late to the party though - this has been true for a minute now…
This is hard to read after decades of useful idiots telling me it’s just a blip and everything is OK.
Say it with me: Line. Must. Go. Up! - millionaires who don’t give a fuck.
When do we eat ^the rich^?
We really don’t give a single flying fuck but always nice to be eaten
We need the Rent Is Too Damn High guy to be in high political office to get this shit under control.
What we need is more housing, and that means looser zoning, which means fighting the NIMBYs. I would love to see mixed zoning become a more common thing in the US (and everywhere TBH).
Eh, McMillan is a republican who endorsed Trump. We don’t need him.
We want the legend, rather than the man, it would seem
good luck angering the real estate-owning people without a backup plan
Fuck them. You cant outsource an apartment building to China. Make their lives hell and if they decide being a landlord isn’t worth it and sell their property at a loss then everyone is better off for it
At this point we need somebody who will just come out and say it: it’s everyone else versus landlords.
So your average rent is still only 4% of your average income. You’d still have 48k left over after paying rent.
Different timescale; Average income is annual, and rent is monthly
That’s confusing. Why not use the same time scale? And what country quotes rent monthly? We do weekly here. Monthly rent makes no sense because months are different lengths.
Rent is the US is typically monthly.
As far as potentially stupid things the US does, this is pretty far down the list.
But don’t you also get your pay cheque monthly? You don’t only get paid by your job once a year. So why is the income stated as yearly?
Most people actually get paid either weekly or every other week, rather than monthly. So it really still won’t match up properly.
Most people here just intuitively understand how our pay/bills system works, because we are so accustomed to it. I’m not saying this to be flippant or anything but we have basically two types of standard employment job. We have hourly workers, who typically can tell you their hourly rate, but won’t really know what their take-home for a given pay period will be, due to inconsistent scheduling, tips, whatever, so using the whole year’s income (a number you have to use for taxes anyway, so you definitely know it) makes sense. Then you have people who have fixed hours or who are paid salary, and they usually describe their compensation package annually, because the specific monthly amount doesn’t matter so much as having it consistently, and it’s presented to them by their employer as an annual number because big numbers feel better when all the numbers are pretty small overall.
It makes adequate sense (in an “it functions well enough” sort of way) when you live in it your whole life and are used to it and nothing else, but I can see it being mighty confusing from the outside.
Thanks for explaining
Canada’s also monthly. I’ve spent some time in Aussie land, they do weekly instead.
I prefer monthly so I only have to stress out about being kneecapped financially once a month instead of 4x a month.
It is also not really stupid since most other costs and income are also monthly unless you get paid by the hour in which case it is highly unlikely that you even have a fixed per day or per week income anyway.
Monthly rent makes no sense because months are different lengths.
Eh, we typically sign one-year leases here in the US, so the only real effect of paying 1/12 of the total annual rent amount every month is slight adjustments of the due dates.
Interesting, if you pay weekly here you likely live in a shitty hotel with heroin addicts.
Stupid Americans down voting me 🤣
Where I live rent is usually described in fortnightly periods, despite being paid weekly. I’m pretty sure most of the rest of the west uses monthly, so I don’t think it’s particularly confusing to describe rent that way (at the very least, I wasn’t confused?).
That 50k is pre tax and insurance too
And when Bill Shorten proposed to change the tax system to slow down speculative capital gains that are driving house prices, the people voted for Robodebt Scotty Morrison.
4x in 10 years where I live. I feel like Mr. Krabs in that blurry meme
Ah, but Real Income is up 0.6% over the last fiscal cycle, so why are you complaining?
Judging by the massive price hikes right next to being told that Inflation is much lower percentage-wise than the price increases most people are experiencing, that Official Real Income growth number is based on doing the Maths with an Official Inflation that hugelly underreports real inflation.
Do the Maths with an Inflation figure that’s not as bullshit as the current Official one and you get negative Real Income Growth.
Similarly for GDP Growth, by the way: Official Inflation numbers which understate the real inflation mathematically yield higher Official GDP Growth numbers.
There are very big political reasons to fiddle with the Inflation reporting to make it seem lower because it boosts up several important Economic figures without fiddling with those directly, and the pressure from politicians to do so is probably manyfold the normal in an election year.
It’s DEFINITELY the toast. Have you seen how expensive those fucking avocados have become? Holy shit, man.
Heck mine quintupled in 6 months at the last place i rented
I’m so lucky to live with my parents at 21 because if this were me I would genuinely choose to be homeless. I’ll rent a PO box to use as my address for work and just bum homeless shelters.
I count my blessings every day i am here because i have been homeless and it is no joke. You have to be very strong willed to survive it even with help. I respect your choice but could not go through it again
Been living with my parents for almost two years again. Thought about renovating a connex as a living space for breakfast just yesterday. Might snack on my last marbles tonight.
My rent has gone up 3.4x in the last 14 years. 2010 I was paying roughly $800/mo for a three bedroom house, now I’m paying roughly $2700 for a smaller 3 bedroom apartment.
Even being homeless got more expensive.
I don’t believe average rent was $500 in 1990. In 1995 I was paying $450 per month to sleep on a couch in someone’s house. I eventually saved enough for all of the moving expenses and managed to get a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in a terrible part of town for $485. When I found a roommate I moved to a better part of town and our two bedroom apartment was $700 per month. That was like 1996. This was all in a fairly affordable city. So pardon my suspicion, but I think this post is creating a rosier past than the one we lived through. Also, minimum wage was $4.25 an hour everywhere. Now it’s $15-$20 per hour in most major cities. Overall I think the poor are making more comparatively, but the middle class are worse off, and it’s a shrinking economic status group.
Quick Google for the Census Bureau only turns up median rather than mean:
Median is probably a better value here since it’s going to reduce outlier effects.
Looks to me that median rent in most states in 1990 was closer to $300-400 per month than $500.
$620 for California, which is where I was. I guess some parts of the country are way cheaper, even though I was in a city that was considered affordable in California.
My 2007 apartment was $475. It is now $1,485.
Rents were fairlyish stable until the housing market crash.
That apartment was $790 in 2010. The rent hike was a long time ago, and since then it has just more or less been following inflation/gouging patterns seen elsewhere.
I will acknowledge that shit went crazy after covid too. My rent went up 22% in two years, and house prices were going up hundreds of thousands of dollars within a year.
Yeah that’s true. I was lucky enough to have gotten a mortgage right before covid so I haven’t personal experience on rent hikes as a result, I recognize.
It finally pushed us to get serious about buying, and we bought a home at the end of last year. We were feeling like we’d never be able to afford a house, but we made it happen! We had to move an hour outside of the city, but we still made it happen.
Let’s do the math. At a nice brunch place, avocado toast costs $14.
To make up for the $1,500 increase in rent, you would need to eat 3-4 fancy avocado toasts per day, for an average of 107 avocado toasts per month.
Given these numbers we can assume that you exclusively eat avocado toasts at restaurants for all sustenance. This would negate the need for a grocery budget, which usually trends at about $300/month, giving you the budget for an additional 21 avocado toasts per month, for a guaranteed minimum of 4 toasts per day (128 per month).
So as long as you’re consuming avocado toast below this level, it’s probably not the cause of your financial issues.
You forgot to account for lattes, which are a critical part of the equation.
