I was at a party one time. Right before covid, so not super recently, but more recent than 20-30 years ago. Older guy was complaining about young people complaining about housing costs. “Just buy a cheap house in %suburb! You could get one for $200,000,” he said.

I was like “uhhh I’ll call that bluff. I’m in the market right now. I’ve been preapproved for $300,000 and I can’t find a house around here. If you can find me a house in %suburb for $200,000, I’ll pay you a $10,000 finders fee.”

This dude spent the next two hours of the party not talking to anyone, locked in on his phone, looking at real estate listings. Then he finally apologized to me and was like “wow, I really didn’t know it was so bad.”

At the same time my grandfather told us we could just buy a used car for $100. He had made his money and did not keep up on how expensive these things are now. So while I agree, I do wish they would maybe accept things are more expensive now.

The problem is definitely both. While the old coots that talk like the guy in the comic might not have directly ripped off everyone (except many have on more personal levels), their ignorance and entrenched positions make it far more difficult to fight the billionaires when there is a massive group of people who are totally unwilling to even admit there is a problem to address.

That old guy in the comic is exactly like my boomer parents.

I understand the sentiment, but the main boomer in my life still thinks I’m lazy despite working 12-14 hours a day 7 days a week.

I found out the other day they also badmouth me and my partner for not having kids. They also think we don’t own a house yet solely because we’re irresponsible.

They also voted for Trump three times and currently believe the economy is thriving better under him than it would have otherwise. They have insane levels of American exceptionalism.

I have nothing in common with them and I will also go practice unplugging a lamp.

We’re not fighting them because they’re rich, we’re fighting the boomer class because they keep giving the billionaires power because they think we’re lazy and billionaires worked hard for their money

The boomer in the comic has already fallen for the propaganda though. Boomers like the one in the comic are helping the billionaire class oppress us. Are we not allowed to point that out?

They are also called the “me” generation back in the '70s.

The thing that angers me the most is that I said to my mom “I’m never going to have a retirement…”

I’m 42, no house, no retirement savings, no 401k, and no way to save for those things. Some weeks I don’t have enough money to buy food.

My moms response was “Oh you’ll be fine! I struggled when I was in my 20s, with both of your sisters, and I turned out ok!”

Yes, it’s true that for about 5 years my mom had it as hard, maybe harder than I do. The difference is, then she met my dad, moved in with him, her money problems disappeared. She then got a better job, with retirement options, and a 401k, and benefits.

Then she bought her own house in the 90s. The seller wasn’t sure if he wanted to sell to her as a single woman. So she said “you can either sell to me, or sell to someone else. The price is the same either way. You may as well just sell now, rather than waiting for the next buyer.”

THATS the speech that got her the house.

Today, you’d get laughed at.

My biggest problem with boomers isn’t their selfish nature, or the fact that they’ve had an easy life. My biggest problem is that they refuse to admit that times have changed. I CAN’T live life the way boomers did. I’d LOVE to wear a suit, walk into a business, demand to see the manager before I even fill out an application and talk myself into a job. I’d LOVE to do that…but thats not how it works anymore! Now you fill an application out online, submit it to an AI crawler that steals your data, be in competition with 500 other applicants, and most of the time never hear back.

I asked my brother in law 10 years ago if he could get me a job at his fortune 500 company. He works there, he’s not the owner, but I was asking him to put in a good word, get my application even looked at.

He’s my age, and this was said right in front of my mom. He said “I couldn’t do that. That would be nepotism”. I said “Yeah. I’m fine with nepotism if it means I canpay my bills.”

And my mom asked if I wanted her to storm the corporate offices of Progressive Insurance, and hunt down the CEO for an interview.

So I just said yes. Not because I think it would work, but because I knew she’d fail spectacularly. Maybe even get arrested on a light charge. Then maybe she’d realize how times change.

But she just said “I can’t always fight your battles for you. This is something YOU need to do.”

God dammit.

I’ve had people your age literally yell at me that this wasn’t the case. XD

I’ve also spent an entire career in academia watching this sort of thing happen.

Oh, look at mr brag over here, with his lack of a life long crippling student debt, and his “ability to work 9 whole hours in a single week”.

I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the system.

The numbers are so far off of reasonable now that I misread it as “$500 a week” and thought “damn, they made $56/hr?”

The problem is all that will do is freeze the housing market. If the prices have dropped through the floor, people just don’t sell (unless they are forced to)

“Pull the plug” is a saying for when you remove someone from life support in the hospital. In dramas, it’s often a middle-aged person doing it to their sick/dying parent.

good thing we got that second taxable income to supplement the rise in capital costs.

Ok , so?

All true. But on the bright side, cats.

Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.

My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn’t anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement – concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There’s access to a nice bike path. It’s not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It’s not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.

I’m significantly older, don’t have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can’t really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they’re moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.

It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn’t possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.