Two consequences:
- really tough discussions with some friends and acquaintances once I realised their parents heavily subsidized their way of life while they were putting the social persona of young working adult being independent and nagging me about when I was going to buy my first car or why I was always the one who made it through the whole night with one glass of beer
- really hard to move up in the adequate social circles and no care-free attitude which led to a much harder job hunt, grimmer prospects in relationships (partly cost me the love of my life) and way too much stress to be healthy
I don't blame people for being helped though, that's not my point.
With regard to the job search, work on reducing stress. That carefree attitude that helps in getting job offers is directly (and sometimes geometrically) proportional to your ability to recognize all of the good things you have at any given moment. Sometimes that includes changing (not lowering) expectations.
I say all of this with the caveat that 1) fame and fortune are overrated as human goods, especially by young people; and 2) I am neither famous nor wealthy, but I am exceedingly happy with my life compared to my 20s. I'm now in my 50s and generally successful in curbing my urge to bail out my 28-year-old daughter out of the messes she sometimes makes.
Edit: But I have been there a couple of times where it was help her or she ends up on the streets.
I'm sorry for that. I can sympathize slightly. Rich people really don't get it.
Yeah. Me last week on the way to a strip club: 'Who's paying for this taxi? Are we going far? Do we have to pay to get in?'
Fried (girl I ALMOST dated): 'Oh my god you're SO cheap, you're such a killjoy, just stop worrying about the money blah blah blah.'
Yeah, I probably should've relaxed and been more sociable. But it's easy for them to say that stuff, when their parents pay for their 400$ a week apartment in the city. Meanwhile my parents in their 60s struggle to figure out how they can ever retire without starving. Plus there's the 3+ hours a day lost to travel and the inconvenience of sharing a house with someone else.
I'm not poor, I was born in a first world country and am very lucky. But people whose parents pay for their housing don't get how easy they have it even above people like me. I could start working full time and get a nice apartment close to the city no problem. But then I won't be saving any money, won't be going back to university and doing a PhD, won't be starting my own business, and won't be helping my parents retire.
I could continue to work less and try to start my own business, which is what I've chosen. But this way I don't get my apartment in the city and can't blow money on taxis and strip clubs and cocktails all the time. I can't even get my car fixed right now.
My housemate is a smart and capable person with a pilot's licence, but after trying to get into a pathway to a good job for years (you need more than just the licence), started working full time in a warehouse to make ends meet. I've seen how he feels after work every day, he's not happy. I don't want to stall my life any longer.
I try to remember that at least I'm not starving in Africa, and I don't blame my lack of a girlfriend or better friendships on money. But you can be socially impaired by having to pay rent, and it does suck when those little things happen.
Seriously, screw Melbourne house prices and screw the politicians and lazy rich leeches that made it this way.
Have you considered not having a car? It saves a lot of money - and a lot of stress.
I set aside some money to buy a car last year, but never did. I liked the way that money looked in my bank account a lot better. Plus no petrol costs, or licensing costs, insurance, parking...
Not sure where you are in melbourne, but it's pretty practical to get around there without a car. Might require a tram ride to a train station though.
Seems like s/he's not actually the love of your life if s/he's willing to ditch you because of lack of money.
One can always refuse help.
1. Parents can't afford to help (although that doesn't stop them offering).
2. I don't feel good about it. It's my choice to live in an expensive city - there is no reason at all I can't live somewhere less expensive - so I should be able to do it on my own. This is partly a pride thing but also I just wouldn't feel good taking money from family so that I have the budget to enjoy myself and socialise more. The people I know who have their parents help with rent either have decent paying jobs and want to have a really nice lifestyle (i.e. they really don't need that money) or are students who refuse to get a part time job (no excuse for that particularly when you're on your first or second masters).
My father especially has always been a "live within your means" guy, and his intention was always that I should choose somewhere to live and work that I could afford on my own.
Well, to make it short (it would take a book to get into the details and the analysis) my parents had their first child for the wrong reasons. That backfired later on when the unresolved conflicts and the toxic relationship between all of us degraded the family's capacity to face challenges in an healthy way and I had to take/was given the black sheep role. A vicious circle of saviour/victim had been in place from an early age and I was too young as a child to escape it (even though they were adults they were too young as well to get around it without outside help which they didn't think they needed at that time).
They were 36 when I was 18. Mother divorced biological father when I was 7 and he died some months later in an accident that was covered as a suicide (go figure). So, something was always fishy in how we interacted with each other. Mother remarried a man who was courting her in their high school years. Turns out he was an alcoholic like my father was. Not the stereotyped violent alcoholic. The sad kind, the one we ignore the changes in behaviour and the fact he is lying at 2 in the afternoon on the bathroom floor, haha let's laugh about it. Alcohol wasn't the problem, it's the facade and the make-believe game that everything is alright that is messing up the relationship. The man is okay but totally lacks the ability to express feelings (I won't go into his family situation but it explains some of his behaviour of course).
So I was the silent kind about all of it but unexplained anxiety and inadequacy took its toll on the way we built the family (but I was too young to get that and thought I was the one who was malfunctioning) (which I was anyway but it was not completely my fault) and how we/I expressed our/my needs/wants/desires. Of course both me and my brother were told we were `mature for your age`. Which can have the same consequences as those children obliged to take on their parent's emotional responsibilities and play the parents.
That's just a very rough picture of the whole thing. My brother suffered from it as well but in a different way (much more closer to them but he messed up his studies nevertheless) (I finished my BS anyway, yada me) (I was the one sent to shrinks of course) (I really dig the role theory in psychology). And then there's the whole taboo thing about money in society in general and in my family in particular.
So why didn't they help ? Because they didn't and couldn't know how. And because I couldn't ask them and didn't dare ask them. For example I spent a year eating sugar on bread and ketchup on pasta. Lost a teeth in the process :D Don't do that :).
Sorry, it must be even more teasing now than before. That's because these kind of stories takes time to write down in a way that makes sense and english isn't my first language so I can't fiddle too much with nuances.
edit: to clarify things: yes they could afford to help. I don't think that once I had my first job they would have helped me money wise on a regular basis but when I was in HS and uni they definitely had the resources to do so.
Based on the how much rent is in Boston are, there is a strong , strong, strong incentive to rent out. I could make about 3x my mortgage/fees by renting my place in cambridge which I bought early part of this century (of course where would I live...).
Since we have about 50% owner occupied, and the tenants are paying a lot, so they expect a lot.
Its becoming a city for rich people and students. I can understand the resentment. I think it hurts the region.
Most of the value is directly related to the limited supply. San Francisco and the Bay Area is a perfect example, where ancient dilapidated rooms are rented out for prices more than quadruple that of other cities.
My rebuttal: Buy your own property if you don't like it, or move some place else.
Don't get me wrong, I recognize the need for something like basic income, but rentier capitalism is suffocating peoples lives right now, and I have a hard time seeing how universal basic income is going to stop that.
Average after-tax income doesn't go up under any sane UBI scheme; it's redistributing income (ideally, primarily capital income—gains, rents, and otherwise).
> how long would it take for those with monopolies on basic needs to raise the prices?
Unregulated monopolies on basic needs are a problem that needs addressed either through regulating the monopolies or breaking then up, independent of UBI.
That said, redistribution will result in relative inflation of prices of goods disproportionately demanded by lower income segments, even in a competitive economy. The increase in nominal prices should usually be less than proportional to the increase in income, barring hard supply constraints that aren't addressed by the reduced demand for higher-end goods.
Median probably would. Mean probably breaks even, yeah, at least first-order.
It's no such thing; not remotely. BI isn't new money, it's simply a redistribution of money from those with more to those with less. It won't increase the money supply and thus doesn't cause inflation.
This comes up in every BI thread, and I can't wrap my head around it. All the sensible proposals seem geared so that if you have income from a job, most of the BI amount will be recouped from your taxes. So, for most people their purchasing power would go up only slightly or not at all.
Think about the extremes: if you make a comfortable income (say, at least 2x the median) your taxes should increase to recoup most or all of the BI subsidy, so your purchasing power doesn't change. If you choose to leave your job and live off the BI, your purchasing power goes down (drastically!) and you won't be in a position to inflate prices on much of anything.
At the other end, if your income is zero and you receive BI, your purchasing power goes up, but you still won't have a huge amount of money to throw around. And in the developed economies, at any rate, we suffer from over-production of basic needs stuff, so I don't think demand would exceed supply for basic things like flour, rice, toiletries, etc.
Analyzing the middle few percentiles of the income distribution is tougher, but for any scheme that increases taxes along with BI it's hard to see how it could possibly cause inflation to increase by more than a point or two.
How could you POSSIBLY have interpreted what I said as that it was my idea to go there, let alone that it was a date? You've also assumed it was a strip club of only females.
Regardless, I'd be open to the possibility that you should mind your own damn business. Nobody involved cares for you to judge them for their job or the way they express their sexuality.
I didn't touch the stripper, but the girls did. I didn't pay to have her rub her boobs in my face, but the girls did.
I'm not saying something can't be sexist if a girl does it, but I am pretty sure it blows that commenter's assumptions out of the water. I actually hadn't yet said that they were female strippers at that point either.
Personally I don't like the idea of assuming a stripper doesn't like their job or is being taken advantage of or objectified. I don't see why it's any of our business to tell them how to feel about their job or make assumptions.
I'm late 20s, and don't have as many friends as I used to in my early 20s. But the ones I do pay their own way. I just can't relate to a grown adult living it up on their parents money.
I do sometimes feel uncomfortable working in software though - I'm from a solidly lower class background, and the vast majority of the people I meet grew up middle/upper middle class. I'm on a middle class salary now, but I don't have the accumulated wealth of the previous generation behind me. My mindset is so different. I'm more ambitious, more protective of my free time, and much more frugal.
I'd like to think that if the generation before me had some money knocking about, that I'd have the same attitude. Let them spend their hard earned money on a cruise or a holiday, rather than supporting their grown children who are already well into adulthood themselves.
If I'd been born less intelligent or if I didn't have an interest in computers or I'd decided to go teach or write or do a dozen other things I might be dependent on my parents. I don't think there's anything shameful about that. Unfortunate perhaps but not shameful.
It's also no big secret that parents often support their children far beyond the school time if they are not able to apply for student loans (Bafög).
Btw, BAFöG has been such a successful model for Germany that one wishes every country would introduce such a system.
It is a surprise to me that it's also common in Germany though: the perception that it is a 'renters'-country led me to believe that the rents were relatively affordable (as a result of protections like rent control). But I guess even "relatively affordable" can be challenging for an under-25 in today's economy.
I wonder if it's paying security deposits or first / last deposits. When I was 23, paying rent seemed doable, but digging up 3 months of rent all at one go was terrifying.
That's rent without roommates. I suspect people are sharing the rent with 3 other people, so $3,000 a month is about 1/3 of their rent.
... which is exactly how I did it from 22-24, not sure how I forgot that.
If that's the case, we should welcome parent->children transfer of wealth to balance out the situation of two generations, no? Some people might prefer government to do this, but that is just a different mechanism (with lots of political opposition) to achieve the same end goal - wealth transfer from boomers to millennials.
As I said, there can be different mechanisms for wealth transfer from boomers to millennials. Govt directed programs (means-tested or universal) might be preference of some and might even perform better, but they also tend to have a lot of political opposition.
So while we are gridlocked on other fronts, its better to see some transfer happening between parents and children.
As an urban 20-something, my parents helped me my covering the lion's share of my college costs. Once that was over, it was an unspoken agreement that I was completely on my own. Fortunately, I graduated with a job offer in hand as a SWE in the city of my choice, but that is far from the norm for the graduating classes in many majors.
If anything, I find the provided numbers feel too low - $250 a month in many metro areas is unlikely to be 'make it or break it' numbers (by my estimation). It's more that their parents are subsidizing a lifestyle in those urban areas.
At any rate, it's hard to blame people for getting help from their parents, though I can't say I would be excited to do so for my kids after a certain age (though, of course, I don't have any).
I'd also be proud to be able to help my theoretical children, so it's easy to see the "other side" of the argument as such.
For example, parents providing their child with first month's rent/security deposit for the first place after college I wouldn't say is indicative of "financial dependence". Especially considering the data was for 2013 when getting credit for short term loans as a young person was even harder than it is today. Feels more like another dressed up "entitled millennials living off those hard working boomers again".
Am I wrong to assume that it isn't the career choice so much as how wealthy the parents are?
*For large values of "nobody" and "you"
BTW, cars are an enormous cash sink. I saved a ton by buying beaters and doing most repairs myself. I still drive a beater :-) and fix it myself and it's amazing how little it costs.
I've had my current beater for 25 years now, and it still starts as soon as I turn the key. It's a fairly simple car, and easy to fix.
Being a beater also means I don't carry comprehensive insurance. Adding up those premiums saved over the years would probably buy a purty nice new car.
The secrecy of financial help is a really important claim because it affects how under-resourced college grads plan their 20s; irresponsible of the authors not to footnote this.
Yet, how is that surprising? You're taking four years to complete a degree program that provides you with no (measurable) practical skill.
Eventually, I got a job as a developer in a mid-size city, making decent money relative to cost-of-living and not having to have roommates because I was spending only ~33% on rent. Though I'm not swimming in money, I have become financially independent as much as any wage or salaried worker is able.
Though in my outlook I never really subscribed to the notion that all problems are fixable by pulling oneself up by their bootstraps, I'm realizing that this held true in my case. And as I get older I am finding it harder and harder to sympathize with my peers who've learned less marketable skills and are now living many three or four to an apartment in economic insecurity, or have moved to urban centers or boomtowns chasing their dream yet aren't much better off. Those who continuously receive assistance from their parents do not mirror my own experience, as any money my parents lent me was sorely missed and paid back at first opportunity, while those who are doing this on their own are making little measurable progress to attain a better quality of life, notwithstanding their best intentions.
It's unfortunate that one's socioeconomic wealth still so strongly predicts their own wealth, It's unfortunate that certain systems perpetuate structural problems, and some people never get the chance to climb out of poverty, but some others are afforded a way up and choose not to pursue it.
