I mean, don't get us wrong. We are WAAAAAAY pissed off at the 1% shitlords... but we are also WAAAAAAAAY pissed off at the people that just let shit get this bad just in time for us to enter the "real world." Ya'll watched this happen and, for the most part, did nothing to stop/fix it. Some of you even elected shitheads that accelerated the issues, all while telling us,
"No child left behind,"
"You can do ANYTHING you want!"
"Work hard, and you will be ok! You'll have a house and a car or two, and be able to retire! Just work hard!"
"Going into the military is all honor! You're helping/protecting your country!" Yeah, no, the military in many countries is only interested in protecting foreign investments. I respect anyone willing to go to war to save their people. But fuck the government(s) that lie and then send young men and women off to die for fucking oil.
"The government has your best interests at heart!" Riiiiight is that why they are trying to make it so that if a young woman gets fucking raped and has a nonviable pregnancy come of it, her only choices are risk near certain death or become a felon? Sure.
Naw. Ya'll coulda stopped this train before it was going supersonic, but you didn't. THAT is why we are so FUCKING pissed off at the generations before us.
Must be really old, as Gen X I wouldn't dare tell you to refi with these rates. it's not 2017 anymore. I couldn't afford a house if I had to buy one now.
At 24 I can't afford rent within an hour drive of my workplace. Average rent is $2700/mo (distribution is bimodal really, $2500ish and $3000ish). I could barely afford that if I was making twice what I do now
Where do you live? I am in MD and there are plenty of places that are under $1500 for a 1 bedroom. Still expensive, but nowhere near the number you are talking about.
In NY / LI in an industrial park so anything cheaper than about around 2k is a bedroom with no kitchen, no w/d, or some kind of chop shop tenement housing with 20 bedrooms packed into a normal two story house. Anything listed as cheaper, especially on sites like Craigslist is just scammers who want your SSN and illegally high "application fees" before you even see the place, or they're excluding some deal breaker details (e.g. nowhere to do laundry, no kitchen, roommates, what utilities are included, etc).
I could live around an hour by car away but then I'd also need a car + insurance etc. Funnily enough the lack of a car doesn't really affect my options because of how large of a black hole in cheap housing there is out here. It wouldv also negate the cost savings. The streets are not walkable or bikable - it's all 4+ lane highways, so certain places aren't an option. Currently I take a train+bus+walk but I'm at the whims of those underfunded systems, which have proven unreliable.
I'm 34 with a full time paying job while my wife has 2 jobs. We don't even have 1k between checking and savings after all the bills have been paid. We're one broken bone or ER trip away from a disaster. No need to worry though. I've heard the economy is doing FANTASTIC.
Similarly if your savings account is netting you cents a year. Learn to invest. 5000 is an ok start if you're still young.
Edit: Like the comment below says, I'm not saying it's easy. It's not meant as an insult but as advice.
I didn't open an account myself until actually relatively recently and I'm in my 40s now. I come from a working class background. No one in my family ever invested and it never occurred to me that it was an option. I wish I'd started 10 or 20 years ago.
Common consumer savings accounts at major banks like Wells Fargo are useless and pathetic compared to what they were. You could get almost 8% in the 1980s. It's in the decimals for the vast majority of consumer accounts at the balances 95% of the people have. 0.25% isn't uncommon, and neither is 0.01%.
You might be able to get ~5% on a high yield savings account if you can find one that doesn't have too many restrictions. A decent CMA at a brokerage will probably get somewhere between 2-5%, and many of them operate just like regular checking with debit carts and the like.
Sure, the Big Banks are convenient with ATMs everywhere and all that, but thanks to the vast majority of transactions being electronic, that convenience matters less and less every day.
E: people are sharing banks they know of with good rates, check them out or your local credit union. Stay away from Big Consumer Banking. Their rates are junk.
I don't know why you were downvoted, it's true. This isn't like a bootstraps judgement thing, this is just good advice- high yield savings accounts now are like 4% interest, so that's $200 / yr on that $5k.
This isn't about "finding meaning in life", it's about dealing with a crap hand that was dealt before we even sat at the table. Yes, the ideal approach is to make the best of it, but every step of even doing that is made harder every year and that sucks.
To me, it conveys stream of consciousness in a literary format that wouldn't normally be able to get the same effect across. But damn break it up into 2 or 3 at some point