It was through these discussions and sharing of perspective - just one man's view of the world - that I was taught to value health, happiness, and appreciate a life not defined by the materialism that could've been a real sink-hole for me if I'd tried to achieve even greater "status" than he did.
Just to put a last bit of context on it, every five years of so my parents would think about getting a used Corvette convertible, but they could never justify what seemed like such a wasteful purchase...by comparison, my Dad drove a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup, purchased new, babied as a second vehicle, until eventually selling it with 80,000 miles on it for 3x the book value sometime around 2010.
I'm a big-time car guy and have dreamed of a Lamborghini Countach since forever. But now, having lived in the "real world" for over a decade, I'm just happy to have a nice 4-banger Toyota with good air conidtioning, tinted windows that gets 30 mpg when I keep my foot out of it. Looking at 2008, all I can think about is how greed is a terrible, toxic basis for a value system.
People look at the past with rose colored glasses.
2) The % of the world living in extreme poverty has declined dramatically in the past half century.
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-...
The story of the last 50 years is really about members of the western middle class finally having to deal with competition from the rest of the world due to globalization. While this has certainly had some downsides for the western middle class it has been an INCREDIBLY HUGE BOON for everyone else. It's very hard to overstate how fast east asia has transformed from poverty to relative wealth and how good this has been for hundreds of millions of people.
Go look at a picture of what Shanghai looked like in 1990 vs today: http://gizmodo.com/5558350/shanghai-skyline-before-and-after
But it's a massive improvement if you talk about the numbers who were living in poverty and now aren't.
Much progress. Much yet to do. Both are true.
Having seen the changes over last 20 years in India, the middle class is now a lot vulnerable and in the fix with absolutely zero safety net. The earning power of the middle class might have doubled but the expenses and the standard of living has increased manifolds, thus pushing them further to the bottom.
They've also both had work most of their adult life, and their pensions funds have always done well on the stock market, whereas my wife has been without a job since the financial crisis hit and government in the Netherlands went in austerity mode.
I have had more employers in 15 years of work than both of my parents accumulated over a combined total of nearly 80 years. I have never, ever been promoted within the same company, but I have been summarily tossed to the curb for no individually-attributable reason--along with several of my office-mates--a total of four times.
I have a lot of envy for what the Baby Boomer generation already got, and in combination with the condescending attitude they have (in aggregate) towards the younger generations, it fuels a lot of resentment.
Their formula of education plus hard work equals success has not been even remotely accurate for me. Education plus hard work equals screw you, buddy, because I already got mine. Enjoy your layoffs and unaffordable housing and tuition increases well in excess of inflation and slashed employer-granted benefits and mountains of political debt, because your parents have decided to sell their house at 20x what they paid for it, buy a plush RV, and split their well-funded retirement between any convenient US state and Snowbirdland, Mexico.
And what really kills me is that I have never seen anyone from my parents' generation working particularly hard. Maybe they did all that before I was born, and just coasted along afterward? Maybe I don't really know what hard work looks like?
Well, anyway, thanks for all the inter-generational tension, Boomers. We'll air it out by having Thanksgiving dinner at your house again this year, because none of your kids can afford homes big enough to hold everyone.
That and we can't afford to have our own kids...
To be honest that wasn't _all_ our savings, and they were already spent on the house of course, but it was a financial loss equal to most of our original savings.
Sure, you're paying more than you would have if you waited, but you were happy to pay XXXXUSD per month to have somewhere to live, and your relative mobility has actually increased if we assume that the housing market fell by a flat percentage.
After the 2008 crash, I was planning on moving, but abruptly changed my plans when I lost close to a 80K on the value of my home.
Fast forward 6 years and suddenly the market was showing signs of rebounding. I had always been in contact with my real estate agent, but I was considering a large scale remodel and staying put where I was. My agent offered to start looking for something that I might like.
A year later the process went shockingly fast. I was assuming the house would sit for a while since the market was still pretty soft. I cleaned and de-cluttered my house and it went on the market. Within hours I had two listings for the next day - which ballooned to four the morning of. When I got back, I had two offers. The house was on the market less than two days.
I credit the ability to sell my house and make a few grand on it to my agent. It was priced and marketed really well by him and his company. This is the second house he's sold for me. The other house was on the market at the height of the housing boom and sold in less than a week.
And I don't believe those actually exist any more.
Also, I no longer trust the justice system to protect my rights as a property owner. Having been primed by software-based DRM to not want to buy something unless I can truly own it, I find that land property in the US is often heavily encumbered with covenants, regulations, local ordinances, mortgage terms, and recurring taxes, to the point where it feels like paying rent and signing a lease feels less restrictive.
I don't get this. If you rent instead, you'll just be sinking monthly payments into that (maybe more, maybe less than with buying).
And there's no need for a job that lasts 30 years, you just need to keep the ability to make the payment every month. But that is also true when renting.
Anecdotally, I have realized more value per dollar spent on rented homes than on purchased homes. If I had never purchased a home in the past, renting instead, I believe without a shred of doubt that I would have a greater net worth today.
I cannot make a rational case for home purchase now, because I cannot guarantee so many years of steady paychecks within an acceptable commuting radius of any home I could buy. Look back 30 years before now, to 1985. How many jobs existed then in the U.S. that no longer exist now? Do you think you can predict what the job market will look like in 2045?
If your job was to make buggy whips, would you feel safe making a 30-year financial commitment in 1890? Perhaps, but the Ford Model T came in 1908. Technology develops faster now. I get the impression that jobs that don't even exist this year may become obsolete before 30 years elapse, and yet employers still routinely hire based on specific experience rather than aptitude or trainability.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that I will never take on debt to buy a home again, and I don't expect to ever be able to afford to buy anything without doing so.
The problem comes when the town's economy crashed (because the buggy whip factory was the big business), or the nation's economy crashes (recession/depression/downturn/whatever), and I have to sell my house. Then I can really get burned.
And the next problem: When I buy a house, I can't be sure what the economic environment will be when I need to sell it.
I would say that, over the long haul, if you live in a town where there's enough variety of employment that you can probably continue to find work even if you lose your current job, most of the time owning your own house is a net win. (Be sure to hear all the caveats in that sentence!)
I do know for certain that I will never sign another mortgage for as long as I live. Those lenders can go FOADIAF.
https://thezikomoletter.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/you-are-nat...
meanwhile, parents' mortgage is from the 1980s or 1990s and easily affordable in today's money, even if their nominal market value takes a slump, the mortgage is easily covered and the rebound in values 3-4 years later will put you far ahead again. if you were smart enough to hold steady or even double-down when the financial markets were down, well then you're even richer today.
it was essentially a transfer of wealth from one generation to well-positioned members of the previous generation, and of course bankers/traders. but it wasn't a conspiracy... some people are just better positioned for and better able to see a massive market shift like that.
i personally lost some (not that much) money during that time, and my parents gained money. ultimately their money is my money so i'm fortunate in that regard, but the same exact thing happened to me. i did everything 'right', including saving and investing, and still got somewhat shafted personally due to a combination of extrinsic market forces and personal decisions.
Is it primarily an issue of where they're spending the money?
i've got some perhaps surprising news for you, my young friend... 20 years ago was 1995.
sure we didn't have broadband and fancypants angular.js but i'm pretty certain developers were around waaaay back during web 1.0 (to use a turn of phrase).
Are we?
This report outlines how STEM wages have stagnated since about 2000[0]
2015[1] CS graduates have starting salaries that are about 4% lower than 2014[2] graduates. Do that for a few years and it adds up.
Anecdotally, I am a "Senior" software engineer that has been writing software for nearly 20 years (professionally 10), work for a household name software company on the east coast, and having trouble affording any real estate in the area without an insane commute.
[0] http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...
[1] https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/...
[2] https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedFiles/Content/static-assets/...
Yes, tech workers are very underpaid, even if their pay is good relative to the rest of the economy right now.
My question is more that I would be very interested to see data supporting the idea that there has been a large drop in developer salaries.
I'm at a multiplier between 2-4x U.S. median household income and based on listings I see I feel that range is very good but not "oh my gosh howdeedodat?!?" for developers. Hired.com, for instance, sets the floor for jobs it will show right around 1.5x median income ($75k).
Real wages in the economy are stagnant and we in technology may be sitting on the sundeck of a sinking ship so I understand the "higher up in the stack but the stack is collapsing" aspect of your argument. That said, I totally disagree that a bus driver in 1981 was better off than a software developer in 2015 - there's just no way that makes any sense.
Your average tech worker makes, what? $150K per year? That would equal $51K per year in 1980.
Median household income in 1980 was $16K. Your dad had a pretty awesome salary for being a laborer.
Per Zillow, the median home value in San Francisco is $1,117,300. For the rest of the USA it is $188,900.
If you are willing to drive 2 hours each way to work, and live in the middle of nowhere, you can pay the low price of $630,000 in Gilroy.
Things are crazy here. If you don't live here it can be hard to understand.
Working from those numbers, the bus driver math still doesn't work.
1. I was not particularly well off in my 20s, nor were quite a few of my friends. Yes, the ones who went to law school did pretty well. To be sure, student debt was a vastly smaller problem them.
2. A large number of the people I deal with, and who are within five years of my age either way, are parents of young adults in the work force. There may be occasional bemusement by the younger generation's expectations, but I don't see much resentment.
3. Most of the boomers barely made it into the long economic expansion that followed WW II (though on the other hand you can say we owe our existence to it). You could see things getting tighter and tougher by the beginning of the 1970s. The consumer goods we could afford were a lot shinier and nicer than what our parents had, but the economic security was harder to come by.
For me tech will make you either much poorer or much richer than your parents.
We are clearly in situation no. 2 and these are exactly the periods in history where revolutions start. When the rich get so greedy they make people's quality of life decrease in a broad scale they invariably are tamed by violent uprisings.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...
(That said, I suspect most of us HN readers will not be poorer than their parents. Tech is an area of boom in an economy of bust, after all, so factor that in when reading responses on here)