America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial Future

Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by test6554 on Friday June 22, 2018 @05:44PM (#17377670)

I'd like to contrast that with my own personal story. After college, I got a job that paid $60K in tech. Wife got one that paid $50K. So similar total income. However, We moved to a city with a lower cost of living and no state income taxes. We lived with family for the first year and saved up enough to put a down payment on a house. We got the house for $160,000 (cheap cost of living for the win). Our mortgage was only $800 a month, but we poured over $4K a month into it and paid it off in 4 years. We did not have student loans, but the extra we paid into the mortgage could have gone toward that. Once the house was paid down, we only paid $5K per year in property taxes for the house. We were living on less than 40% of our income. We both had good health insurance, but there are also high medical expenses.

For us the cost of living of a city and state were game-changers.

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Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by JumpCrisscross on Friday June 22, 2018 @05:59PM (#17377803)

A once-in-a-lifetime domestic relocation credit (which pays for moving costs and your first N months of living expenses in your new place, as well as a return ticket in case things go south) would be a great idea for labor mobility.

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Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by sanderjd on Friday June 22, 2018 @06:03PM (#17377835)

Thanks for sharing your anecdote! A couple questions: how did you pay for college without incurring debt, and what jobs did you get for those salaries in a low cost-of-living (presumably small-town?) area?

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Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by test6554 on Friday June 22, 2018 @06:20PM (#17377969)

My parents paid for the first year and a half, and then I got a job and paid for the rest. Tuition was like 10K per year at a public state school. I also tested out of a couple classes due to advanced placement in HS.

One of us was doing software/web development and another was financial accounting (CPA). This was not a small town, it was a suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. The farther out you move from the city, the lower the cost of living, but we had a 30-40 minute commute.

Neither of us wanted to pay for cable so we saved like $8K over a number of years skipping out on that.

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Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by sanderjd on Friday June 22, 2018 @07:30PM (#17378402)

Thanks for the data points! I suspected one or both of you might have chosen a geographically transferable profession that requires limited or no post-grad like accounting or nursing. I think these are the best kinds of jobs to target. What else fits into this category? Maybe software / web development fits too, though I don't think it's so geographically transferable. I wish teaching (which is what lots of my college friends do) was one of these, but alas, it pays extremely poorly.

I guess outlying suburbs of somewhat-but-but-wildly-bustling metros are viable as low-cost / high-employment places to live, though I'm not sure requiring long commutes that aren't well suited to mass transit is a great solution for most people.

Most people with tons of college debt that I know worked the entire time, so YMMV on that one. The people I know without debt are actually more likely to have not worked (because their parents were paying).

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Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by dllthomas on Saturday June 23, 2018 @11:47AM (#17381773)

> how did you pay for college without incurring debt

Another option for keeping college costs down is to start out at a community college and then transfer. With teachers there interested in teaching the material, the education can sometimes be better than entry level classes at a 4-year school.

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Re:America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial F... by tuesdayrain on Saturday June 23, 2018 @03:25AM (#17380011)

Seems foolish to pay the mortgage off so quickly instead of paying the minimum and investing the rest.

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