If the cost of housing increases faster each year than your annual salary, it doesn't matter a damn what fraction of your salary you manage to hoard in a year, you still aren't buying a house. But that salary can handle vacations and coffee just fine.
I've gone from paying zero attention to the cost of things to budgeting
This is different from coffee and toast. Going to the pub with the mates can be a social obligation, whereas coffee on your own is not.
If you are asking your collegues to skip hanging out and vacation with their friends, you may be asking them to stop having those friends. Sure, maybe they are the wrong friends. Just noting this is a much bigger ask than not having coffee and toast by yourself.
Are there a lot of people (or even any) doing that? Are there a lot of people who don't have bread to eat refraining from having their cake?
People have drastically different interpretations of what it means, and end up arguing over that instead.
Nobody disputes you can save $X/day buy not buying avocado toast and coffee. Everything else is people shadowboxing with themselves.
I agree with you that people's spending habits don't make sense. I see young people complaining about having to live with their parents when near their 30s who still think a two week vacation with a nice rental and eating out ever night is a basic human right. I'm constantly horrified how many people simply cannot cook their own food. The wouldn't know how to make a good rice and beans dish if they had to.
But the part you're missing is that our current system cannot survive without this spending. That FAANG job that paid you so well, where do you think all that cash came from? My friends making money for insta are basically making that money selling avocado toast.
If people started living like their great depression era relatives they wouldn't be able to afford houses because our entire economic system would break down.
Perhaps in the past the destitute poor could find some free escape valves to this end, but modern urban society limits access to the social interactions and natural resources that made them possible.
It is a fallacy to suppose that living a monastic life would save enough money to get out of this extreme situation. Even discounting the mental imbalance it would cause, if your income is so limited, the meager savings of suppressing these small luxuries would not radically change your financial situation.
Anecdotally, I used to have neighbours who would order food delivery religiously, multiple times per day, every day. It must have costed a small fortune. Not enough for buying a home, but enough to do something better with.
More importantly, there are tons of people who do live fiscally responsible and still can't afford basic necessities (let alone avocado toast).
The owners of UK property may be members of my parents' generation, but they have very little in common with my parents; that money is not coming to me. (And while you could blame them for not jumping through the right hoops to have been eligible for Thatcher's right to buy, I don't think it's fair to say that working-class people should have known to bet a multiple of their net worth on decades of incredibly stupid housing policy).
> The global poor still need their check, unless you don't acutally care about fairness.
Sure, and I'm all for measures to help with that - I've voted for increased aid and will continue to do so. Using the global poor as a reason I can't criticize those with massive unearned wealth is pure whataboutism.
Step 1. Assume they're spending $20k a year on Starbucks.
Step 2. Tell them not to do that.
Step 3. Pat yourself on the back and award yourself the nobel peace prize for solving poverty.
There's a reason it's unpopular. It's too obvious to be useful and it's almost always used as a strawman counter-arguement to any actual solutions regarding any real economic problem.
You're not telling it to somebody holding an avacodo toast in their hand complaining about how poor they are. You're telling it to people who can't even afford that. It's extremely condescending and arrogant of you.
So what?
I, being fairly young, think that fulltime jobs paying a living wage ought to be normal. Many don't - https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2020/home.htm
Some people are going to overspend and be careless with their money, but that's not the core problem in the US. The core problem is unfairly low wages for many workers.
People who know how to save money on the big stuff and spend money in the places where it gives a high return on joy are the ones doing it right. "It's your duty to be miserable because you're poor" is the most backwards attitude imaginable.
Sure, the math doesn't add up. An avocado toast and a coffee every morning won't add up to a real estate deposit. But that's not the point; the point is that people who are barely making ends meet having avocado toast at a coffee shop have the wrong mindset. I'd argue they are barely making ends meet because they're having avocado toast at a coffee shop, and multiple other expenses they can't responsibly afford. I've worked with young people barely making any money out of school, who still religiously went to the pub with their mates for the proverbial pint, and never skipped on Costa del Sol holidays.
I grew up in a lower-to-middle middle class household. Eating out was something we did on special occasions (some birthdays, high school graduation, etc). Travel and holidays were limited to the one holiday a year, to a beach 45 min away from where we lived. It does seem like young people these days have an incredibly distorted sense of what they "deserve" or what they can afford or what's "normal".
Now after decades in tech, a couple of stints at FAANG, I'm pretty comfortable financially. There's a lot of things I can afford in the strictest sense of the word (a 300k Lambo, a boat, whatever), but I know better than to spend money on things I don't really need just because I have enough money to buy them.
Love avocado toast but are on minimum wage? Go to the store, buy bread and avocado, make your own goddamn toast, and organise a picnic with your friends in the nearest park.