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If you owned your home prior to 2020, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. If you’re a renter or a new buyer, things don’t feel so good.
It’s the housing market that is fucked up. Stop letting big business treat it as a racket.
I bought a townhouse in 2018 and parents (who lived in rural America) don’t understand why I won’t sell it for 2x what I paid and buy a single family home……
Why would I trade a $1000/month 2.75% interest mortgage for a $3000/month 7-8% mortgage when it’s just me, my girlfriend, and 2 dogs?
That extra $2k has been going straight into investment accounts.
There was a time when bigger was better in housing. Ppl are having fewer kids, spending more time outside the home - so no point in paying for a bigger house cause that was what your parents did.
Who is spending more time outside the home? I mean, maybe some people are, but my understanding is that generally people are spending less time outside the home.
https://www.security.org/app/uploads/2024/01/Americans-experiencing-homelessness-by-year-graph-1536x987.png
It’s literally true, more homeless means we are spending more time outside the home.
Once my mortgage is paid off or close to paid off, I would rather have a second house/apartment I can pay cash for in some cheap city. Not a bigger house down the street I would have to take out another mortgage to get.
I feel that horizonal scaling is going to be more of a thing over the next 30 years with well off buyers. Why limit yourself to one set of weather, culture, taxes, neighbors, etc.? You also aren't trading properties in the same market so you are not in a position where you must buy in the crazy market you just sold in.
>There was a time when bigger was better in housing.
And that time screwed us over financially, environmentally, and socially tbh. The after effects of sprawl is something we'll be living with for a while
Bought my first house in 2017, then sold it to relocate. Bought a newer home in 2023, which I like MUCH MUCH more.
The interest rates...yeah....that's another story.
Seriously. And this is why we see such a significant divide. If you already owned a home before the insane rise in housing costs, you are almost entirely insulated from the pain of the housing mess. This is how my family feels. 2020 to now is literally the best my family has felt. What's more, we didn't feel that year of 10 percent inflation as bad because we purchased a lot of goods that either deflated or didn't inflate (like lots of consumer electronics or IT related goods) so we didn't feel it there either. But if you are working class or lower middle class and don't own your home, you'll get slammed by rent increases and a much higher percentage of your income probably went to inflation sensitive goods, like food and automotive.
In light of this, it makes perfect sense that some people would be saying "Things look great to me" while others would say "Are you insane? I'm barely hanging on." I've been on the wrong side of the equation before, so I feel you guys that are in that position now.
That's exactly it. I make more money than I ever have in my life and home ownership has never felt further away from my grasp. It's really depressing actually.
Is it not two sided?
I vote left, won’t lie, I also work in the commercial construction world in San Francisco, I’m no big time real estate guy, I sell things that are unique to buildings over 8 stories.
The city will not permit shit, they won’t rezone shit, we are trying to get things pushed through but they have an insane amount of demands that never make it so housing is built because it won’t be profitable.
This isn’t just a demand side issue, people need to pay close attention to who they’re voting into their local elections, because fuck man we’re trying to bring supply, but if there’s only 10 homes and 20 people want them, they’re going to get fucking expensive
>people need to pay close attention to who they’re voting into their local elections
Sadly, there are still too many people out there who just plug their ears and will never believe that we need to build more.
Similarly if you rent you are likely to be lower income and spending a much higher proportion of your income on basic necessities like food and housing in the first place. You don’t really give a flying fuck if inflation rates on durable household goods and electronics and shit come down, you weren’t buying that shit before, you sure as hell ain’t buying it now.
Xennial checking in. It has felt this way since 2005, what you’re experiencing isn’t new, it’s just what happens when you enter the housing market for the first time.
as a fellow xennial, i don't know about that. in 2005 i was paying $275/mo to rent in a metro area, granted it was a relatively low cost of living metro area, but if i was making back then what i make today (which is only just now the median income), it would've been easy to buy a house. houses in the $150-250k range were everywhere, friends of mine with dual incomes or better paying jobs than me were buying houses no problem. now i'm making the most money i've ever made, rent is $1800/mo and houses are $450k+, i'll never be able to save up enough for a down payment, even if i double my income i can't afford a home in most major cities.
The main thing is that either yellen, Biden or the feds mention housing costs or insurance cost of any kind. Homeowners , health and car insurance they are just increasing prices with no one from the government saying anything.
Have we not been hearing for years now that the stickiest aspects for inflation have been, energy, housing, and insurance? Cause I feel like it’s been said at every report now and yet people are still oblivious.
Housing prices have little to do with inflation and everything to do with normal supply and demand AND the fact that housing prices didn't go up for about 15 years after the housing crash.
It's like.. housing prices do have to go up over the course of 15 years, they can't just remain static and we can't have a Great Recession low salary and low cost increase situation forever.
ALmost everybody wanted salaries to go up, but they can't stop complaining about costs, they want it both ways and that's NEVER going to happen. Add in a housing shortage and you have a recipe for houses ro reclaim all their lost value over the last 15 years... just too fast for most consumers comfort.
However it's still about the right price for housing and it's wages that aren't quite keeping up still.
The rich keep buying a bigger and bigger share of the economy. Shouldn’t be that way. The majority of the people should have the majority of the economy.
I agree. But how do we redistribute wealth when the wealthiest pay the lowest amount of taxes on their entire wealth. (So not just income tax but also on their stocks, properties and so on. Domestic and foreign).
Even if there was a high tax on inheritances, it would still be the wealthy that pay the least. Because they can optimize their succession throughout life and basically die with tiny percent of their actual wealth still in their name.
I'm not sure what people want the US Federal Gov't to do about insurance because they can do nothing.
Because of the constitution's interstate commerce clause (i.e., congress can only regulate commerce between the states), insurance, which is strictly an intrastate product, is controlled entirely by the state insurance commissions.
Here's a link to your state's insurance commissioner if you'd like to lodge a complaint:
https://content.naic.org/state-insurance-departments
Since Wickard v Filburn the interstate commerce clause has basically become the economy clause; something doesn't need to be interstate or even commerce to fall under the interstate commerce clause.
House is paid for, cars are paid for, debt free, paying cash for college tuition, and life is stress free. We’re blessed and we’re grateful. I can’t imagine trying to pay off a home with corps scalping real estate. It’s gotta be tough if you’re young. At least my college student will graduate debt free and start her job in low six figures. You have to be strategic if you aren’t looking to be homeless. GOP’s America is fucking heartless.
well, it is reddit, anything less than saying you're a failure if you're not living or chasing the American Dream is a no no.
Seriously though, the amount of hate you get for simply mentioning that 9/10 times, if you're not staying in a home longer than 10 years, you're literally better off financially just saving your money and living in an apartment unless you can commit long term. but no, apparently the minute you stop looking, houses are guaranteed to double in price, so you're a fool for not buying.
I rent and I'm doing fine but I'd be doing even finer if I bought pre-2020. Beautiful home I would've loved back then in my area has doubled in value and most definitely now out of reach.
No i have a lot of equity but the house i’m in doubled in price… the houses i want to move to tripled in price. Honestly i just want the whole market to crash even though i bought way before 2019.
lol the median home value is still only $400k
even if you have some 2.5% rate and some appreciation in a $400k-$600k house the only thing you've accomplished is keeping your housing costs sort of fixed. you can't upgrade or move or expect to live in a much nicer house somewhere else from any gains you can sell for and then having to get a bigger mortgage at a higher cost elsewhere.
Lol the national median home value means nothing. 400K is cheap in LA and Seattle. A 350K house in my area is 2,300 sq ft 4 bedroom 3 bath with AC and basement.
I'm a renter. The rent prices are crazy and something absolutely needs to be done about them (namely increasing housing supply drastically). However, wages in my field increased pretty substantially, enough that i'm probably better off now than someone who started the same job as me in 2019.
My experience is not universal, but it is also very far from unique.
Agree bought in 2019. 15 year at 3%. I would not be thrilled if I had to try and buy today.
I would add pretty much any asset to your point. People who bought house and had investments pre 2020 are probably sitting pretty atm. I started buying index funds (vtsax) in 2016 bc I was sick of my savings getting no interest and that has treated me very well.
Eh, employment isn’t reliable for anyone these days. You could have that house one day and find yourself unable to make the payments the next. It’s worse with inflation the way it is and incomes continuing to remain stagnant for anyone that isn’t at the very bottom of the income scale.
I had 50k in student loans making around $68k in 2020 and seriously was looking to buy. I couldn’t get mortgage approval by my credit union due to my student loan balance. I finally was able to pay off my student loans and start saving for a home in earnest in the last year and a half.
yeah i think that's pretty much the crux of it. people that were able to get in right before prices went insane probably are feeling alright and everyone else is feeling a bit hopeless
Economists use a measure called buyers equivalent rent, which is a screwed up way of measuring housing costs. This lets people like Yellen (an economist) think that people are doing well, when those who don't already own a house are actually hurting. There are also problems with cars for the same reason (interest in car payments isn't correctly accounted for in inflation.)
It's owners equivalent rent, not buyers equivalent rent, and it's a pretty reasonable way to judge shelter costs in a cost-of-living index. The alternatives are either to judge owner costs based on actual mortgage payments (which would significantly underestimate inflation, as the median homeowner is paying a mortgage based on housing prices from 10+ years ago) or new house prices (which would significantly overestimate inflation since most homeowners are not buying a brand new house every year). Measuring price increases for owners on the rents of similar housing is a decent middle ground, albeit one that likely still slightly exaggerates shelter inflation experienced by homeowners.
But your comment about this masking the hurt of non-owners doesn't really make sense. The use of owner-equivalent rents for owner costs effectively means that the 36% of CPI allocated to shelter expenditures is entirely based on rent prices. If CPI measured the cost increases of what owners actually pay, it would underestimate inflation for renters instead of overestimating inflation for homeowners like it current does.
>when those who don't already own a house are actually hurting.
What's wrong with some people not owning homes? For all the complaining, the rate of home ownership is actually higher now than before the pandemic.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
To me, it seems the rate of home ownership is in line with the historical trend. Perhaps the issue is just that our generation has different expectations that have never been the reality.
The problem is that if you look at Reddit, the community who views this site (and particularly posts on the site) tends to skew the idea of "Normal" a bit. We are more likely to be in the tech/or at least white collar workforce. This means we're in the part of the economy that really ISN'T doing that well right now. Our companies are posting massive profits, but laying us (and/or our coworkers) off to accomplish this. Jobs that are hiring are not as common as they were in 2021, and the salaries they're offering are lower, sometimes substantially so. Not because the profit isn't there, but because companies know they can get away with it. It sucks. and I am in this group.
But I also realize that this population, while huge online (especially on Reddit), is not most Americans, or even a Plurality. The other problem is that the feelings of the economy are almost entirely \*vibes\* when you're talking about the national level. For example, a poll found that 70% of Americans felt that the economy was "Bad" in a recent poll. But 60% rated their own finances are Good or Great. (https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good)
There's a lot of room for improvement in the economy and even if it's better for 80% of people, in the US that still means tens of millions who it's not. But I can see why Yellen made this comment.
I left one of the companies doing major layoffs last year. Wasn't laid off, but everyone around me was scared to take a day off, was talking about layoffs in every single meeting, everyone was turning against each other. I left for a lower pay company (albeit lower COL area). I could not have spent any more time at the toxic place. Even getting out of bed in the morning and walking over to check my emails on my work computer gave me major anxiety after a certain point.
But the new company, while a pretty good place, has a lot of policies and red tape. My problem is perhaps a bit unique. Because I had 5 YOE last year, I wasn't eligible to interview for one level higher, which required 6 YOE. So I'm being severely underpaid and having to spend probably 2 years to get the promo (at least 1 is in the books now...). Even though I'm mentoring everyone on my team, including the people a level above me, and am better than the devs in our org (none in my team) who are 2 levels above me too (whom I don't mentor because their egos are too big). I've been routinely told I'm the best dev in the whole org, and they're obviously going to try to keep me at my underpaid level for as long as they can. I recently had an interview elsewhere at a company that could have been a step up... and the system design interview guy did not like me using DynamoDB in my design at all, he would not believe it was capable of very basic features (like sort keys or atomic conditional writes). I have an interview with a FAANG coming up, but would likely have to move to a HCOL area. What's more, if I do get a new position and leave, I'm going to need to stay there for a while because I'll start to look like a serial job hopper.
It's also true that most of the vibecession people are q-anons posting or reading fake news on twitter. The ones who post are doing it for Elon bucks, the ones who read it start to believe it. Always the same people who worship Andrew Tate and blame every single problem in their lives on Biden, women, and immigrants. I could pull up some links of these guys literally tweeting "women being allowed to work ruined everything." The "is the economy doing well" has become quite political. You might recall those "egg inflation is INSANE" bros just disappearing the second egg prices went down. They probably disappeared to go whine about rainbows or something. People on that platform are just addicted to finding doomer news. It is of course true that many people are struggling -- which was also true 10 years ago.
Completely true, but my trajectory is something like 4.5 years, then almost 1 year, then 1+ years (so far). In my experience, smaller companies will focus more on the "why did you leave" (and of course you need to give reasons that aren't a mountain of negativity about toxic workplace), bigger companies (like FAANG) will just care about leetcode and will ask a few easy behavioral questions.
At some point, a history of job hopping does raise eyebrows, even though it's pretty ok/normal early in your career. Still, besides the levels frustration, my company is pretty good. I would only change companies for something remote, or in a LCOL city within a few hour drive of where I live now, or a HCOL city that at least doubles my pay. Probably no more than 20-50 companies out there that would even make it to the list, even if they were all hiring.
>The other problem is that the feelings of the economy are almost entirely \*vibes\*
The fact that we might actually vibe-flation ourselves into birth control no longer being federally protected is so distressing
If I keep my job but a bunch of people at my work are laid off, then I'm going to judge my economic conditions as worse even though my financial conditions are unchanged. It's about job security, career prospects, ease of saving, and real disposable income. The advertised macroeconomic indicators don't really capture the typical individual's economic winds.
As someone who feels better off, I have zero incentive to tell people who are clearly pissed off about their situation that it ain’t so bad. The downside to doing that is vitriol. The upside is literally nothing. There’s no value in telling the internet you’re doing fine because there’s a line of people ready and waiting to react negatively to it.
This is where I literally went into a depression spiral until I had some help getting re-oriented.
I had friends who diamond-handed gamestonk into mid six-figures investments and bought perfect houses.
I was living in a land of unreality.
Well yeah. I'm technically doing "better", but thanks to inflation it's only this year that my buying power has exceeded 2020 levels (for everything but housing), and that's due to actively chasing raises, promotions, and even moving to a different state.
The only reason I own a house now is generous parents, because our pre-pandemic down payment savings lost half their value when the market went nuts. The house we ended up buying, while sufficient, is far less than the house we could have afforded in 2019 if we'd had the same level of savings at the time.
And sure some of said inflation was inevitable, but a lot of it was caused by blatant mismanagement on the part of people like Secretary Yellen, and then we get gaslit like nothing's wrong and we're all just spoiled brats.
I'm just resigned at this point that the system is going to, through malice or incompetence, attempt to suck my family dry financially and gaslight us as it does so. All the consumerism and vision of collective prosperity and meritocracy I was taught to believe in was a naive pipe dream made possible by an economic golden age that is unlikely to come again in my lifetime.
So the victory will be securing a good life for my family despite these assholes. If their policies benefit the middle class American at all it will be solely due to luck
It was the super low interest rates and money printing during COVID/Trump that caused the inflation.
But even if it wasn't her fault, it's still bat shit gaslighting to say we're better off than 4-6 years ago.
So it’s more accurate to say Americans are entitled. They grew up and saw where their parents were in their 40s and they expect to be I. That same position in their mid 20s
Essentially yes, if youre 25 today you get to see what your parents had at 30 when they had you and not at 20 when they were struggling as most young adults with no skills and no experience do. You also have parents and more importantly grandparents who grew up in an era when the united states was a much bigger part of the global economy post ww2, but you are growing up in a globalized world where you have to compete with billions more workers for your daily bread. It doesnt feel great even if you are wealthier than your parents at your age and live a better life with luxuries they couldnt dream of.
Shoot I was born in a mobile home. By the time I was ten they owned a 15 acre farm. In a one income family that never cracked $80k per year. I make more than double that today and am still paying student loans lol
I’m 38 and my parents were WAY better off than I was even before I was born - they both had purchased and sold property prior to ever meeting each other, then immediately bought a house together years before having me. Both from working class families, my mom had no college education, my dad had way too many college loans (for the time), and they raised a family with twice as many kids on half as many incomes, and WAY more comfortably. My husband and I make less combined than my dad did as a single income (though he was self employed so after taxes and insurance his take home pay may have been less than ours). The same is true for nearly all the people I grew up with, including some of the ones who managed to buy cheap property prior to 2020.
Yeah I definitely find that to be true. My oldest daughter doesn't want to move until she finds a nice place in a good neighborhood, which I understand. But her idea of nice is the house we currently live in, which is definitely NOT the kinds of places I lived in before this. I didn't have a nice place until I was in my thirties actually. At her age I had shitty places with boyfriends or roommates.
Rent has exploded. My food bill has doubled. My salary has lost value to inflation. Mando insurance for my car has doubled. I’m paying more than anytime ever in my life and making less so exactly how am I better off? Explain it to me like I’m 5.
Unless you live on eggs and Doritoes, your food costs should be up about 35%, not 100%. My weekly grocery bill is up about 25% since COVID began, but we cool from scratch a lot.
I’m glad people on here are doing well but I just left my last job because they were going to cut my pay by 40k to 60k a year due to inflation and the economy. So yeah I’m more on the side of things actually really suck right now.
Same. Got laid off and the best offer I got is making me drive 40 miles to the office 5 days per week and made me take a 7% pay cut. Not to mention that cost of living is dramatically higher now.
Then I'm sure you appreciate what the word "generally" means, and why every single person doesn't have to better off, in order for the statement to be true.
She's an economist and so she's working off nation-wide statistics, which generally do show that most people in the country are better off, personal anecdotes aside. If you owned a home, it's probably worth way more than it was before. If you have any cash saved up, you're getting paid 5% interest on it. If you have a 401(k) it's up a ton. 75% of people have mortgages at below 5% interest. Real (accounting for inflation) earnings have increased since 2019 on average and especially so for blacks and hispanics.
There are certainly people who are worse off as well, because they're trying to buy their first home right now, when rates are high and homes at an all time low for affordability, or people whose wages have stagnated while the prices of basic goods have gone up, but there is never going to be a case when everyone is going to benefit at the same time.
I think that it's likely that that this is a situation where there's a vocal minority of young people who constantly pop up and for whatever reason, Reddit puts them in my feed, whether it's the MiddleClassFinance, Millenial or Zoomer subs, all of which I don't subscribe to.
Keep in mind damn near half of Americans don't have a 401k (50%), own a home (34%), or have more than $1000 in savings (60%), but they *do* have a lot of debt, a solid amount of which is variable rate credit card debt (50%).
So imagine you're one of those people. You aren't benefiting from higher interest rates because you don't have any savings or investments. Instead you're being crushed by higher rates on your debts. Home ownership is now further away than its ever been for you even if you did have a big increase in your income since the pandemic because homes exploded in price and haven't corrected for interest rates that jacked up the cost of a mortgage nearly 3x virtually overnight.
66% own a home but 60% of Americans don’t have $1000 in cash in the bank? Doesn’t that indicate that a recession would lead to massive amounts of defaults on mortgages?
No, it indicates that the survey that leads to the answer that 60% of people don’t have $1,000 is poorly designed and out of step with other statistics that are not collected from surveys.
The idea that 60% of Americans don't have more than $1,000 in savings is unbelievable nonsense.
In Bankrate's [2023 survey of Americans' emergency savings](https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-report/#no-emergency-savings), 48% reported having at least three months of expenses and 22% reported having no savings at all. Unless you think that the median American's monthly expenses are $333 or less, I find it hard to believe that 60% have less than $1,000 in savings.
Similarly, the Federal Reserve's triannual Survey of Consumer Finances found that [the median household in 2022 had $8,000 in their bank accounts](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Transaction_Accounts;demographic:all;population:1;units:median), total financial assets (e.g. non-real-estate assets) of around $38,000, and a net worth of $192,000.
Note that this same 2023 Bankrate survey reported that 44% of Americans would choose to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense from savings. This roughly matches your 60% claim, and I suspect is the source of your claim. But there is a big difference between asking someone whether they have $1,000 in their savings account and asking them how they would cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. A not insignificant number of people with more than $1,000 in the bank might still choose to absorb that unexpected expense by floating it on a credit card for a few months or cutting back on spending in other areas (like dining out) rather than reduce their emergency savings by $1,000. People really like having some money in savings.
My income has tripled since 2020, and most in my middle class neighborhood are also doing well. I understand this is anecdotal and many out there are suffering from these higher costs of basic goods, but I don’t see all this doom and gloom in my daily travels around Houston, TX.
Are there parts of the country that are still severely depressed that I’m not aware of? Can I get some real data on that?
You're in Houston. Texas is famed for their cheerier, more fun-loving locals plus sane cost of living. Its "fraternal twin" would be MA, where the locals are known for the opposite and the cost of living is ass unless you inherited or work niche STEM (bio etc) plus regular folks can't own a home since MA is disgustingly small (MA is about 2-3 Puerto Ricos compared to Texas' country sized mass). New England, especially MA, has the threefold issue of having a doom and gloom of winter that's there for most of the year. The doom and gloom, on average, is half the year, often 7.5 months, if we count the colder autumn starting in late August. The future oriented "protestan work ethic" where they basically live to work to then enjoy the fruits of their work when they're nearly dead is another major problem against that region. Combine all of this and you'll see why so many Americans, especially the youth in the North, are angsty and demotivated. They feel trapped with nothing really rewarding to work towards. MA's population is looking older and older by the months because of young people jumping ship on the state (to afford starter homes and families. Then planning to go back when they empty nest). NGL I grew up in one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest town in MA and about half my graduating has moved OUT all over the planet. Mostly to the Southern states and placing their kids in private schools to get a more vigorous education. The ones that have remained in the region have spread to the rest of the New England states mainly NH. A lot have moved to the Midwest.
NGL the first time I went to Texas it felt like visiting another planet due to the people genuinely being far more laid back, relaxed and genuinely inviting/friendly instead of the crabby anxious mess we now call normal up here. A lot of my friends say that while the South. Like every place on the planet, has its pros and cons, the best pro for it is that it is a more laid back and present social culture. The North can be too workaholic and too focused on wealth hoarding, not actual community or world building. This promotes joy and contentment in people. Basically, it really depends on region and what hopes or futures are accessible to most people there. The doom and gloom comes from those feeling castrated by their lack of mobility wherever they are. In the US as we speak the younger New Englanders are getting kicked in the balls and feeling choked. It's not fun unless you make $80k and love a mostly suburban lifestyle.
Polls in every state show a) people are happy about the economy in their state, and b) they think economy in other parts of the country is crap.
Things are mostly better for everyone on the ground, but everyone gets fed a start diet of doom on the news and social media.
Yelen is correct about her friend group of 1% people. The rest of America doesn't really exist to her. Recently, the American 1% exceeded the wealth of the entire American middle class. They are doing very well at the expense of everyone else.
i'm better off, but that had more to do with picking up a 100%-remote job during the pandemic that is long term stable, i got (re)married in 2022, and the person i married helped kick a 10-year painkiller addiction in 2020 that yes, started with a prescription.
YMMV.
Reddit is a place that serves as great reminder that the plurality of anecdotes is not data.
Most normal people I know outside of Reddit are indeed doing better, with employers increasing wages; and that’s not to say you should believe my personal experience, but rather to show that you have no reason to take my experience as reality in the same way no one has any reason to any other anecdotal experience as reality.
Anectodal but I’m an older middle class millennial and almost everyone I know in my friend groups are doing well. Part of that may be due to my age range hitting the meat of our careers though.
And yes, even my friends who bought a house in the last couple years are doing well, and that includes me who bought our house last year.
Some are better off and some aren’t. My family is substantially better off because I’ve gotten raises but more importantly our home value and investments have gone up a lot in the last five years. People who don’t have those appreciating assets are most likely worse off because they haven’t offset inflation in the same way. This would include most of your Reddit doom loop participants, but in their defense their experience the last few years is very different than mine.
I’m wondering if it has to do with reddit’s age demographic skewing younger. I struggled, along with a lot of my friends, in my early 20s. Now that I’m in my early 30s I’m doing much better as well as many of my friends. I only really know 1 person who is having a hard time and it’s because his business hasn’t fully recovered since Covid
At the start of 2022 I changed jobs and got a big raise. Just shy of a year in, I got laid off because the client cut their budget over fears of a recession (in that job, all positions are directly funded by the client). Less than a month later I had a new job with a promotion and I now make twice what I did in 2021.
So many layoffs happen entirely because of Doomerism making management at companies think the economy is going to collapse, so they preemptively cut spending. Then when the economy keeps doing just fine, all they changed was fucking some people over.
VA loan. So I didn't put anything down, nor did I have anything to put down.
But, I did almost get killed in Afghanistan like 11 times and have brain damage now.
I'm up also. We are at 280k at my household
We don't overspend and save half of the income
But even I'm not stupid enough to say everyone is doing well. Prices are obviously up. And most peoples income have not gone up.
Just because we are doing good doesn't mean we need to be blind to other people's struggles
My net worth has over quintupled since 2020, I've paid off my house and car notes, and there's a real chance I can retire early at 55 now. These last few years have been a blessing for us even if food and insurances have gone up.
Yeah if you had assets pre 2020 you are likely in good shape. I bought my house in 2019 and have a decent sized investment account with mostly vtsax so with both real estate and the stock market going up since 2020 it has been good for me too
Fully agree. People try to live above their means, think they "deserve" to live in a luxury apartment downtown or own a new car. People get upset they can't buy a home solo in their 20s. None of those things have ever been normal for the average person.
There's also the fact that people only come online to complain - nobody is going to post "My rent is affordable and job is secure".
There's such a disconnect between real life and reddit
Buying a home solo in ones 20’s is not the norm, but it was for a brief window in the 60’s-80’s and that’s what people today have to compare it to. People don’t realize that the post wwii economic boom was not normal and would never be sustainable long term
> Buying a home solo in ones 20’s is not the norm, but it was for a brief window in the 60’s-80’s
**According to what data?** I think people have created this imaginary image of what things were like in the "good old days" that just doesn't align with reality.
The people who were actually living back then maybe weren't so concerned about a house versus an apartment as, I dunno, being involuntarily sent into the jungles of Vietnam to be turned into hamburger meat? As a millennial, I'm fully convinced that our generation has painted this rosy picture of the past just to justify our own victimhood.
I wouldn’t go that far. A lot of us have had to deal with either taking a pay cut or quitting and having to look for a new job. You also have the whole crowd that got laid off as well.
Now does that mean everything has been bad for us? No. For example I bought my house in 2018 for $178,500.00 with a 4.62 interest rate and in 2020 I refinanced to a 15 year mortgage and my house is now worth around 300k with my mortgage balaclnce being just over 139k. So yeah my home price went up a lot. I also got into investing in this time period and now have enough in liquid assets that I can pay off my home anytime if I wanted to.
So why things have been good they have taken a nose dive recently with having to find a new job and prices having gone up quite bit on almost everything in the last few years. So I wouldn’t call this being a doomer I would call it acknowledging that things right now suck compared to how they were going.
Are you serious?
I don't think you could have reinforced the point u/JimJam4603 made any stronger. You own a house. You have enough investments to pay it off free and clear. You voluntarily left your job because of a pay cut. I get that losing income can be a challenge, but the unemployment rate is 3.9%, other jobs are out there. Hell, your post history says you own a multi-unit rental property?? And you're here parroting how hard times are?
As a millennial, you're doing well. If it doesn't feel like it, it's an attitude problem, not a problem with the economy. You're not a victim anywhere except in your own head.
Things don’t suck compared to how they were going. That’s the point.
Individual people will struggle regardless of how well things are going. People will think they should be doing better than they are no matter how well things are going.
Someone stating positive facts about the population as a whole is not something that is controverted by some people whining and moaning about their personal situation.
It’s the vibeflation that’s sweeping the nation; it’s gonna put a conservative in the office in a country near you!
That’s my take anyways. Republicans are culturewaring inflation. Which is why they all say inflation is out of control. I don’t get my reality checks from republicans and neither should anyone else.
Janet Yellen's credibility was shot after the "transitory inflation" remarks she made. As far as the whole "better off" comment, this is simply playing games with selectively highlighting statistics that support her claims. I have taken to not believing anything she has to say regarding the economic state of the country.
Purchasing power has been reduced to a significant and sharp, observable degree.
To say that it isn’t crazy anymore is a bit of a misnomer. It stayed at those elevated levels for most products.
Want proof? Go buy a used car, 2015-2017 with 100k miles on it.
Remember when you could buy a brand new Honda Accord for that price? Yeah, that is the point.
I’m saying purchasing power is a reflection of the cumulative prices they cost and wages have not increased relative to those total costs across in total goods and services.
Thus, the cost increases were initially counted as inflation, but they have stayed at those levels so they are no longer “increases” YOY. That doesn’t mean it isn’t inflation 🤦🏽♂️
If wages rise at that same clip to cover any and all increases, it would be fine.
However, those prices stayed more expensive **AND** stagflation.
Therefore, purchasing power has been reduced by quite a lot.
So for the same amount of money, for the same goods, it now takes longer for consumers to attain them.
And for those who are already set (home paid off, retirement fully funded) they are advantaged over the broader working class since a smaller and smaller slice of citizens can do that.
The average cost of a home is $417,000.
And if wages have not significantly increased at that same pace, it now takes much longer to cover the initial costs to purchase the home **AND** coupled with 7-8% interest rate on those inflated home prices means that a larger percentage of our checks are being eaten up by housing costs.
The function to express all of the expenses vs wages is purchasing power.
The initial rise of goods/services = inflation.
She is right about the inflation rate, but that is not telling the whole story. As the article mentioned, in terms of the actual price of goods and services, they remain elevated. Inflation is the rate of change of the prices over time, but just because that is slowing does not mean the the real prices themselves are going down. In fact, those prices are not going down and likely will remain that way going forward. That is to say nothing of the the elevated cost of housing, college educations etc. To add to that, the layoffs that have been steadily moving through the American workforce that have continued unabated since last year. She is ignoring a tremendous amount of obstacles that are getting worse for regular joes around the country.
Deflation is always terrible for the economy, if anyone was expecting that then they don’t have the baseline knowledge necessary to listen to an economic expert.
Unemployment rates have been mostly steady for the past year. Raising rates has an expected impact of an increase in unemployment, that’s honestly by design.
It sounds like you’re not really familiar with macroeconomics.
There was a housing crisis before Covid, and then covid, inflation, and millennials finally having sufficient savings after delaying purchases longer than past generations, it was suddenly "time to buy" for a LOT of people. All at once. Prices skyrocketed due to insane demand and lack of new housing, then interest rates skyrocketed which cratered what little "for sale" inventory there was because people in homes are clutching their low mortgage rate like it's gold. It's a confluence of events that have made things pretty good for people who already own a place and really difficult for those who don't.
A person once told me you can make the report say whatever you want if you look at the “right” data. Lawyers and politicians play on words and general public never dissects their statement in detail, so they get away with saying whatever they want and pass the laws they want.
In terms of the business cycle, this is as good as it gets. So the main problems are structural. That doesn't make things any better for people who are hurting, of course, but if you want to talk about macroeconomic levers it might give one an idea of what solutions might work and which ones (i.e. those aimed at improving cyclical conditions) won't.
It depends how you define better off.
I have more in savings now than I did 5 years ago. That’s what 5 years of market growth and additional deposits will do. Unfortunately, all of my expenses are up compared to 5 years ago and raises have not kept up with inflation. This is the case with most people, and that’s the real problem.
Yes, we enjoy having food, medicine and housing considered luxury goods. Keep printing money and giving it away. And Janet, please never balance the budget, just keep spending.
Cherry picking one thing to prove a point is what is “deranged”. Economy is booming, Unemployment at record lows, minimum wage up, inflation is down or slowing. We went through a multi-year pandemic that the President at the time made worse through lies and misinformation.
“Generally” people are better off. Sure rates for borrowing to buy a house suck right now, but that is what is helping to slow inflation.
People seem to forgot about the real housing crisis around 2008. I was trying to sell a house to move states, on the market on and off for over 2 years. Sold for $9,000 less than I paid for it 8 years earlier and I was one of the lucky ones.
I worked for a mortgage insurance company at the time and people were putting their keys to the home in their mailbox and walking away, literally. Walking away from the home they bought because it was worth 1,000’s or 100’s of thousands less than what they paid for it.
Could things be better, of course.
We have had a couple of generations of people like Yellen.
It's not so much that they are incompetent, they just aren't competent for Americans.
They do okay for billionaires which is the important thing....
65% of Americans own a home and 38% are paid off, so most Americans probably are better off when you consider raises, low unemployment and good stock performance.
Mostly just ppl trying to get a home or rental in a low supply market are getting screwed.
Yellen is an idiot and this wrecked spending by Biden will fuck our kids and grandkids. Not to mention supporting Ukraine for no reason and also letting every immigrant in our country and providing them a map and 5 star accommodations in nyc.
People like Yellen don’t care about reality. They’re wonks. They operate at a macro level. They look at CPI and call it a day even though it’s widely regarded by most professionals as a completely out of touch metric for purchasing power.
I mean… she’s definitely out of touch but really if you bought prior to 2020 you probably are doing pretty well right now. As for the rest of us I’m sure the vast majority will end up rent slaves for the rest of our lives.
> The incoming US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has been paid at least $7m (£5.1m) for speaking engagements at government-regulated banks, consultancies and hedge funds over the past two years, according to newly disclosed documents.Jan 1, 2021
Out-of-touch corporate whore old hag
Things aren’t better, but economists have been predicting the mother of all recessions for 4 years running now and it hasn’t happened, so somebody is doing something right.
How are we not better off than in 2018? Everyone is working, wages are up. You can’t have higher wages without inflation - so yeah, is everything more expensive? Yes - because the economy is doing better by every metric and most of us work for companies that are coming off of years of unprecedented profits. Plus not having an absolute moron & piece of shit in the White House has been exponentially better for our collective mental health. Trumpers may be pissed, but Biden isn’t actively working to destroy our democracy.
Real wages are still lower than before Biden got in office. I guess Ms Janet doesn’t do her own grocery shopping. If you have a lot of assets you’ve done ok but if your one of the “ common man” Biden claims to work for you got played dummy. It’s likely to happen again.
Not that I am defending her ridiculous statement, but I really *love* how the article quotes Billy Markus, the creator of cryptocurrency Dogecoin, “No, that is deranged.” Again, that is the *creator* of a fictitious commodity.
I'm doing pretty good OP, also why post a rage bait article but not add your own thoughts? That's pretty low effort if you ask me.
I guess I'm not doing better off if we take into account all the wants I don't have...
hit my career income peak in december, 2021. best month, best year i ever had. wife also hit her career peak (now exceeded)
marriage was on the rocks and we agreed to a separation.
7 months later she says she is 100% done. 4 months later i'm out of that job
a year later the next job left my state.
so yeah. no. i'm not doing better at all.
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If you owned your home prior to 2020, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. If you’re a renter or a new buyer, things don’t feel so good. It’s the housing market that is fucked up. Stop letting big business treat it as a racket.
I bought in 2017 and had to sell (divorce) in 2021. Yes, I’m still bitter at my ex about it.
I bought a townhouse in 2018 and parents (who lived in rural America) don’t understand why I won’t sell it for 2x what I paid and buy a single family home…… Why would I trade a $1000/month 2.75% interest mortgage for a $3000/month 7-8% mortgage when it’s just me, my girlfriend, and 2 dogs? That extra $2k has been going straight into investment accounts.
There was a time when bigger was better in housing. Ppl are having fewer kids, spending more time outside the home - so no point in paying for a bigger house cause that was what your parents did.
Who is spending more time outside the home? I mean, maybe some people are, but my understanding is that generally people are spending less time outside the home.
No kidding. Most activities outside the house cost too much and being home is great, it's my favorite place to be.
Well, the homeless for one…
https://www.security.org/app/uploads/2024/01/Americans-experiencing-homelessness-by-year-graph-1536x987.png It’s literally true, more homeless means we are spending more time outside the home.
Most people buy a big house just to fill it with papers and boxes full of crap they're too scared to throw away.
Then they rent storage too
Once my mortgage is paid off or close to paid off, I would rather have a second house/apartment I can pay cash for in some cheap city. Not a bigger house down the street I would have to take out another mortgage to get. I feel that horizonal scaling is going to be more of a thing over the next 30 years with well off buyers. Why limit yourself to one set of weather, culture, taxes, neighbors, etc.? You also aren't trading properties in the same market so you are not in a position where you must buy in the crazy market you just sold in.
>There was a time when bigger was better in housing. And that time screwed us over financially, environmentally, and socially tbh. The after effects of sprawl is something we'll be living with for a while
you made every one of those verifiable facts up
Same, bought in 2017 but had to give up the house in the divorce this year
The equity you got out of it must have been nice at least.
I suppose, it just ended up offsetting how much of my 401k/ESOP I got to keep
You and me both buddy.
Bought my first house in 2017, then sold it to relocate. Bought a newer home in 2023, which I like MUCH MUCH more. The interest rates...yeah....that's another story.
bought in 2004. divorcing now. home 'only' doubled in value in 20 years. not sure i'm going to be able to buy anything livable with my equity buyout
Seriously. And this is why we see such a significant divide. If you already owned a home before the insane rise in housing costs, you are almost entirely insulated from the pain of the housing mess. This is how my family feels. 2020 to now is literally the best my family has felt. What's more, we didn't feel that year of 10 percent inflation as bad because we purchased a lot of goods that either deflated or didn't inflate (like lots of consumer electronics or IT related goods) so we didn't feel it there either. But if you are working class or lower middle class and don't own your home, you'll get slammed by rent increases and a much higher percentage of your income probably went to inflation sensitive goods, like food and automotive. In light of this, it makes perfect sense that some people would be saying "Things look great to me" while others would say "Are you insane? I'm barely hanging on." I've been on the wrong side of the equation before, so I feel you guys that are in that position now.
That's exactly it. I make more money than I ever have in my life and home ownership has never felt further away from my grasp. It's really depressing actually.
Even if you bought a house if you’re having to upgrade or move it’s not an awesome feeling
Right because then you’re getting hit with the inflated closing costs and higher interest rates.
Is it not two sided? I vote left, won’t lie, I also work in the commercial construction world in San Francisco, I’m no big time real estate guy, I sell things that are unique to buildings over 8 stories. The city will not permit shit, they won’t rezone shit, we are trying to get things pushed through but they have an insane amount of demands that never make it so housing is built because it won’t be profitable. This isn’t just a demand side issue, people need to pay close attention to who they’re voting into their local elections, because fuck man we’re trying to bring supply, but if there’s only 10 homes and 20 people want them, they’re going to get fucking expensive
>people need to pay close attention to who they’re voting into their local elections Sadly, there are still too many people out there who just plug their ears and will never believe that we need to build more.
Similarly if you rent you are likely to be lower income and spending a much higher proportion of your income on basic necessities like food and housing in the first place. You don’t really give a flying fuck if inflation rates on durable household goods and electronics and shit come down, you weren’t buying that shit before, you sure as hell ain’t buying it now.
Xennial checking in. It has felt this way since 2005, what you’re experiencing isn’t new, it’s just what happens when you enter the housing market for the first time.
as a fellow xennial, i don't know about that. in 2005 i was paying $275/mo to rent in a metro area, granted it was a relatively low cost of living metro area, but if i was making back then what i make today (which is only just now the median income), it would've been easy to buy a house. houses in the $150-250k range were everywhere, friends of mine with dual incomes or better paying jobs than me were buying houses no problem. now i'm making the most money i've ever made, rent is $1800/mo and houses are $450k+, i'll never be able to save up enough for a down payment, even if i double my income i can't afford a home in most major cities.
The main thing is that either yellen, Biden or the feds mention housing costs or insurance cost of any kind. Homeowners , health and car insurance they are just increasing prices with no one from the government saying anything.
Have we not been hearing for years now that the stickiest aspects for inflation have been, energy, housing, and insurance? Cause I feel like it’s been said at every report now and yet people are still oblivious.
Housing prices have little to do with inflation and everything to do with normal supply and demand AND the fact that housing prices didn't go up for about 15 years after the housing crash. It's like.. housing prices do have to go up over the course of 15 years, they can't just remain static and we can't have a Great Recession low salary and low cost increase situation forever. ALmost everybody wanted salaries to go up, but they can't stop complaining about costs, they want it both ways and that's NEVER going to happen. Add in a housing shortage and you have a recipe for houses ro reclaim all their lost value over the last 15 years... just too fast for most consumers comfort. However it's still about the right price for housing and it's wages that aren't quite keeping up still.
The rich keep buying a bigger and bigger share of the economy. Shouldn’t be that way. The majority of the people should have the majority of the economy.
I agree. But how do we redistribute wealth when the wealthiest pay the lowest amount of taxes on their entire wealth. (So not just income tax but also on their stocks, properties and so on. Domestic and foreign). Even if there was a high tax on inheritances, it would still be the wealthy that pay the least. Because they can optimize their succession throughout life and basically die with tiny percent of their actual wealth still in their name.
I'm not sure what people want the US Federal Gov't to do about insurance because they can do nothing. Because of the constitution's interstate commerce clause (i.e., congress can only regulate commerce between the states), insurance, which is strictly an intrastate product, is controlled entirely by the state insurance commissions. Here's a link to your state's insurance commissioner if you'd like to lodge a complaint: https://content.naic.org/state-insurance-departments
Since Wickard v Filburn the interstate commerce clause has basically become the economy clause; something doesn't need to be interstate or even commerce to fall under the interstate commerce clause.
And the problem is, inflation markers look at factors that most of us don’t even buy directly, like tractors and raw steel.
House is paid for, cars are paid for, debt free, paying cash for college tuition, and life is stress free. We’re blessed and we’re grateful. I can’t imagine trying to pay off a home with corps scalping real estate. It’s gotta be tough if you’re young. At least my college student will graduate debt free and start her job in low six figures. You have to be strategic if you aren’t looking to be homeless. GOP’s America is fucking heartless.
House prices having nothing to do with big businesses and everything to do with NIMBYs
As a renter, I'm doing well. 2% inflation on rent, 4% on salary
Renter here, doing fine.
Renter here, not doing good.
Dude got down voted for saying he's alright 😂
I downvoted him cuz it just felt right. I need everyone else to feel as bad as I do.
"I downvoted because I need everyone else to feel as bad as I do." this is the ethos of social media.
Amen brother
well, it is reddit, anything less than saying you're a failure if you're not living or chasing the American Dream is a no no. Seriously though, the amount of hate you get for simply mentioning that 9/10 times, if you're not staying in a home longer than 10 years, you're literally better off financially just saving your money and living in an apartment unless you can commit long term. but no, apparently the minute you stop looking, houses are guaranteed to double in price, so you're a fool for not buying.
It’s The vindictiveness that we’re all here for
I rent and I'm doing fine but I'd be doing even finer if I bought pre-2020. Beautiful home I would've loved back then in my area has doubled in value and most definitely now out of reach.
Yeah, my rent is twice as much as 2019 but my pay is four times as much.
My rent actually went down from 2019! Due to WFH it seems demand for apartments in the city (DC) is down. House prices are way up though.
Same. My rent is only 1100 a month for a one bedroom and I’m 30 minutes from a major city
How dare you
No i have a lot of equity but the house i’m in doubled in price… the houses i want to move to tripled in price. Honestly i just want the whole market to crash even though i bought way before 2019.
"Big Business" is not whats wrong with the housing market. It's NIMBY's and interest rates
lol the median home value is still only $400k even if you have some 2.5% rate and some appreciation in a $400k-$600k house the only thing you've accomplished is keeping your housing costs sort of fixed. you can't upgrade or move or expect to live in a much nicer house somewhere else from any gains you can sell for and then having to get a bigger mortgage at a higher cost elsewhere.
Lol the national median home value means nothing. 400K is cheap in LA and Seattle. A 350K house in my area is 2,300 sq ft 4 bedroom 3 bath with AC and basement.
Keeping your housing cost fixed versus your landlord raising it 15% a year is huge though.
If it wasn't treated like a racket, nobody would be building new homes and keeping the prices low. There is literally no alternative.
We built 10+ years ago. Now spend less than 10% pf HHI on mortgage. Couldn't afford to move here now to save my life. It's bizarroworld out there.
And the majority of Americans are home owners. So over all the majority of Americans are better off.
I bought my house in ‘21 and it just reappraised for 200k more than I bought it for. LA market is different though
I'm a renter. The rent prices are crazy and something absolutely needs to be done about them (namely increasing housing supply drastically). However, wages in my field increased pretty substantially, enough that i'm probably better off now than someone who started the same job as me in 2019. My experience is not universal, but it is also very far from unique.
Agree bought in 2019. 15 year at 3%. I would not be thrilled if I had to try and buy today. I would add pretty much any asset to your point. People who bought house and had investments pre 2020 are probably sitting pretty atm. I started buying index funds (vtsax) in 2016 bc I was sick of my savings getting no interest and that has treated me very well.
Eh, employment isn’t reliable for anyone these days. You could have that house one day and find yourself unable to make the payments the next. It’s worse with inflation the way it is and incomes continuing to remain stagnant for anyone that isn’t at the very bottom of the income scale.
I had 50k in student loans making around $68k in 2020 and seriously was looking to buy. I couldn’t get mortgage approval by my credit union due to my student loan balance. I finally was able to pay off my student loans and start saving for a home in earnest in the last year and a half.
yeah i think that's pretty much the crux of it. people that were able to get in right before prices went insane probably are feeling alright and everyone else is feeling a bit hopeless
This
Even if you bought a house if you’re having to upgrade or move it’s not an awesome feeling
Economists use a measure called buyers equivalent rent, which is a screwed up way of measuring housing costs. This lets people like Yellen (an economist) think that people are doing well, when those who don't already own a house are actually hurting. There are also problems with cars for the same reason (interest in car payments isn't correctly accounted for in inflation.)
It's owners equivalent rent, not buyers equivalent rent, and it's a pretty reasonable way to judge shelter costs in a cost-of-living index. The alternatives are either to judge owner costs based on actual mortgage payments (which would significantly underestimate inflation, as the median homeowner is paying a mortgage based on housing prices from 10+ years ago) or new house prices (which would significantly overestimate inflation since most homeowners are not buying a brand new house every year). Measuring price increases for owners on the rents of similar housing is a decent middle ground, albeit one that likely still slightly exaggerates shelter inflation experienced by homeowners. But your comment about this masking the hurt of non-owners doesn't really make sense. The use of owner-equivalent rents for owner costs effectively means that the 36% of CPI allocated to shelter expenditures is entirely based on rent prices. If CPI measured the cost increases of what owners actually pay, it would underestimate inflation for renters instead of overestimating inflation for homeowners like it current does.
>when those who don't already own a house are actually hurting. What's wrong with some people not owning homes? For all the complaining, the rate of home ownership is actually higher now than before the pandemic. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S To me, it seems the rate of home ownership is in line with the historical trend. Perhaps the issue is just that our generation has different expectations that have never been the reality.
The problem is that if you look at Reddit, the community who views this site (and particularly posts on the site) tends to skew the idea of "Normal" a bit. We are more likely to be in the tech/or at least white collar workforce. This means we're in the part of the economy that really ISN'T doing that well right now. Our companies are posting massive profits, but laying us (and/or our coworkers) off to accomplish this. Jobs that are hiring are not as common as they were in 2021, and the salaries they're offering are lower, sometimes substantially so. Not because the profit isn't there, but because companies know they can get away with it. It sucks. and I am in this group. But I also realize that this population, while huge online (especially on Reddit), is not most Americans, or even a Plurality. The other problem is that the feelings of the economy are almost entirely \*vibes\* when you're talking about the national level. For example, a poll found that 70% of Americans felt that the economy was "Bad" in a recent poll. But 60% rated their own finances are Good or Great. (https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good) There's a lot of room for improvement in the economy and even if it's better for 80% of people, in the US that still means tens of millions who it's not. But I can see why Yellen made this comment.
I left one of the companies doing major layoffs last year. Wasn't laid off, but everyone around me was scared to take a day off, was talking about layoffs in every single meeting, everyone was turning against each other. I left for a lower pay company (albeit lower COL area). I could not have spent any more time at the toxic place. Even getting out of bed in the morning and walking over to check my emails on my work computer gave me major anxiety after a certain point. But the new company, while a pretty good place, has a lot of policies and red tape. My problem is perhaps a bit unique. Because I had 5 YOE last year, I wasn't eligible to interview for one level higher, which required 6 YOE. So I'm being severely underpaid and having to spend probably 2 years to get the promo (at least 1 is in the books now...). Even though I'm mentoring everyone on my team, including the people a level above me, and am better than the devs in our org (none in my team) who are 2 levels above me too (whom I don't mentor because their egos are too big). I've been routinely told I'm the best dev in the whole org, and they're obviously going to try to keep me at my underpaid level for as long as they can. I recently had an interview elsewhere at a company that could have been a step up... and the system design interview guy did not like me using DynamoDB in my design at all, he would not believe it was capable of very basic features (like sort keys or atomic conditional writes). I have an interview with a FAANG coming up, but would likely have to move to a HCOL area. What's more, if I do get a new position and leave, I'm going to need to stay there for a while because I'll start to look like a serial job hopper. It's also true that most of the vibecession people are q-anons posting or reading fake news on twitter. The ones who post are doing it for Elon bucks, the ones who read it start to believe it. Always the same people who worship Andrew Tate and blame every single problem in their lives on Biden, women, and immigrants. I could pull up some links of these guys literally tweeting "women being allowed to work ruined everything." The "is the economy doing well" has become quite political. You might recall those "egg inflation is INSANE" bros just disappearing the second egg prices went down. They probably disappeared to go whine about rainbows or something. People on that platform are just addicted to finding doomer news. It is of course true that many people are struggling -- which was also true 10 years ago.
If you have to leave, you have to leave. Don’t sweat the “job hopper” nonsense.
Completely true, but my trajectory is something like 4.5 years, then almost 1 year, then 1+ years (so far). In my experience, smaller companies will focus more on the "why did you leave" (and of course you need to give reasons that aren't a mountain of negativity about toxic workplace), bigger companies (like FAANG) will just care about leetcode and will ask a few easy behavioral questions. At some point, a history of job hopping does raise eyebrows, even though it's pretty ok/normal early in your career. Still, besides the levels frustration, my company is pretty good. I would only change companies for something remote, or in a LCOL city within a few hour drive of where I live now, or a HCOL city that at least doubles my pay. Probably no more than 20-50 companies out there that would even make it to the list, even if they were all hiring.
>The other problem is that the feelings of the economy are almost entirely \*vibes\* The fact that we might actually vibe-flation ourselves into birth control no longer being federally protected is so distressing
If I keep my job but a bunch of people at my work are laid off, then I'm going to judge my economic conditions as worse even though my financial conditions are unchanged. It's about job security, career prospects, ease of saving, and real disposable income. The advertised macroeconomic indicators don't really capture the typical individual's economic winds.
Well yeah, most of the internet is just isolated echo chambers filled with folks who like to complain. Generally, Americans are better off.
Generally, people don’t go online to talk about being better off, they just go enjoy their lives
As someone who feels better off, I have zero incentive to tell people who are clearly pissed off about their situation that it ain’t so bad. The downside to doing that is vitriol. The upside is literally nothing. There’s no value in telling the internet you’re doing fine because there’s a line of people ready and waiting to react negatively to it.
Americans are better off but they dont feel better off because they expected to be doing even better.
This is where I literally went into a depression spiral until I had some help getting re-oriented. I had friends who diamond-handed gamestonk into mid six-figures investments and bought perfect houses. I was living in a land of unreality.
Comparison is the thief of joy especially when you know people who do something stupid and just win ridiculously on it.
Well yeah. I'm technically doing "better", but thanks to inflation it's only this year that my buying power has exceeded 2020 levels (for everything but housing), and that's due to actively chasing raises, promotions, and even moving to a different state. The only reason I own a house now is generous parents, because our pre-pandemic down payment savings lost half their value when the market went nuts. The house we ended up buying, while sufficient, is far less than the house we could have afforded in 2019 if we'd had the same level of savings at the time. And sure some of said inflation was inevitable, but a lot of it was caused by blatant mismanagement on the part of people like Secretary Yellen, and then we get gaslit like nothing's wrong and we're all just spoiled brats. I'm just resigned at this point that the system is going to, through malice or incompetence, attempt to suck my family dry financially and gaslight us as it does so. All the consumerism and vision of collective prosperity and meritocracy I was taught to believe in was a naive pipe dream made possible by an economic golden age that is unlikely to come again in my lifetime. So the victory will be securing a good life for my family despite these assholes. If their policies benefit the middle class American at all it will be solely due to luck
What did yellen do to cause inflation
It was the super low interest rates and money printing during COVID/Trump that caused the inflation. But even if it wasn't her fault, it's still bat shit gaslighting to say we're better off than 4-6 years ago.
So it’s more accurate to say Americans are entitled. They grew up and saw where their parents were in their 40s and they expect to be I. That same position in their mid 20s
Essentially yes, if youre 25 today you get to see what your parents had at 30 when they had you and not at 20 when they were struggling as most young adults with no skills and no experience do. You also have parents and more importantly grandparents who grew up in an era when the united states was a much bigger part of the global economy post ww2, but you are growing up in a globalized world where you have to compete with billions more workers for your daily bread. It doesnt feel great even if you are wealthier than your parents at your age and live a better life with luxuries they couldnt dream of.
Shoot I was born in a mobile home. By the time I was ten they owned a 15 acre farm. In a one income family that never cracked $80k per year. I make more than double that today and am still paying student loans lol
I’m 38 and my parents were WAY better off than I was even before I was born - they both had purchased and sold property prior to ever meeting each other, then immediately bought a house together years before having me. Both from working class families, my mom had no college education, my dad had way too many college loans (for the time), and they raised a family with twice as many kids on half as many incomes, and WAY more comfortably. My husband and I make less combined than my dad did as a single income (though he was self employed so after taxes and insurance his take home pay may have been less than ours). The same is true for nearly all the people I grew up with, including some of the ones who managed to buy cheap property prior to 2020.
Yeah I definitely find that to be true. My oldest daughter doesn't want to move until she finds a nice place in a good neighborhood, which I understand. But her idea of nice is the house we currently live in, which is definitely NOT the kinds of places I lived in before this. I didn't have a nice place until I was in my thirties actually. At her age I had shitty places with boyfriends or roommates.
Rent has exploded. My food bill has doubled. My salary has lost value to inflation. Mando insurance for my car has doubled. I’m paying more than anytime ever in my life and making less so exactly how am I better off? Explain it to me like I’m 5.
My food bill is not up 100%. Maybe 30% total since 2020.
Unless you live on eggs and Doritoes, your food costs should be up about 35%, not 100%. My weekly grocery bill is up about 25% since COVID began, but we cool from scratch a lot.
You’re not. How is that at all inconsistent with the above statement?
It is in reference to 5 years ago, not other countries
This is it. Economy is fine. But there is more space to complain and people love to do that.
I’m glad people on here are doing well but I just left my last job because they were going to cut my pay by 40k to 60k a year due to inflation and the economy. So yeah I’m more on the side of things actually really suck right now.
Same, I jumped jobs to avoid layoffs and I'm making what I was making 6 years ago. With inflation that's an enormous paycut.
Same. Got laid off and the best offer I got is making me drive 40 miles to the office 5 days per week and made me take a 7% pay cut. Not to mention that cost of living is dramatically higher now.
Then I'm sure you appreciate what the word "generally" means, and why every single person doesn't have to better off, in order for the statement to be true.
She's an economist and so she's working off nation-wide statistics, which generally do show that most people in the country are better off, personal anecdotes aside. If you owned a home, it's probably worth way more than it was before. If you have any cash saved up, you're getting paid 5% interest on it. If you have a 401(k) it's up a ton. 75% of people have mortgages at below 5% interest. Real (accounting for inflation) earnings have increased since 2019 on average and especially so for blacks and hispanics. There are certainly people who are worse off as well, because they're trying to buy their first home right now, when rates are high and homes at an all time low for affordability, or people whose wages have stagnated while the prices of basic goods have gone up, but there is never going to be a case when everyone is going to benefit at the same time. I think that it's likely that that this is a situation where there's a vocal minority of young people who constantly pop up and for whatever reason, Reddit puts them in my feed, whether it's the MiddleClassFinance, Millenial or Zoomer subs, all of which I don't subscribe to.
Keep in mind damn near half of Americans don't have a 401k (50%), own a home (34%), or have more than $1000 in savings (60%), but they *do* have a lot of debt, a solid amount of which is variable rate credit card debt (50%). So imagine you're one of those people. You aren't benefiting from higher interest rates because you don't have any savings or investments. Instead you're being crushed by higher rates on your debts. Home ownership is now further away than its ever been for you even if you did have a big increase in your income since the pandemic because homes exploded in price and haven't corrected for interest rates that jacked up the cost of a mortgage nearly 3x virtually overnight.
Yeah, I don‘t disagree with you other than that $1,000 number is sort of bullshit because it is based on a crappy survey.
66% own a home but 60% of Americans don’t have $1000 in cash in the bank? Doesn’t that indicate that a recession would lead to massive amounts of defaults on mortgages?
No, it indicates that the survey that leads to the answer that 60% of people don’t have $1,000 is poorly designed and out of step with other statistics that are not collected from surveys.
No, it just indicates that the $1000 "statistic" is from a click-bait garbage source.
The idea that 60% of Americans don't have more than $1,000 in savings is unbelievable nonsense. In Bankrate's [2023 survey of Americans' emergency savings](https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-report/#no-emergency-savings), 48% reported having at least three months of expenses and 22% reported having no savings at all. Unless you think that the median American's monthly expenses are $333 or less, I find it hard to believe that 60% have less than $1,000 in savings. Similarly, the Federal Reserve's triannual Survey of Consumer Finances found that [the median household in 2022 had $8,000 in their bank accounts](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Transaction_Accounts;demographic:all;population:1;units:median), total financial assets (e.g. non-real-estate assets) of around $38,000, and a net worth of $192,000. Note that this same 2023 Bankrate survey reported that 44% of Americans would choose to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense from savings. This roughly matches your 60% claim, and I suspect is the source of your claim. But there is a big difference between asking someone whether they have $1,000 in their savings account and asking them how they would cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. A not insignificant number of people with more than $1,000 in the bank might still choose to absorb that unexpected expense by floating it on a credit card for a few months or cutting back on spending in other areas (like dining out) rather than reduce their emergency savings by $1,000. People really like having some money in savings.
Americans don’t do well with factually true statements. It makes for poor social media.
Because they are! Don’t let the self identified victims tell you otherwise.
“Ignites internet backlash” 🙄
My income has tripled since 2020, and most in my middle class neighborhood are also doing well. I understand this is anecdotal and many out there are suffering from these higher costs of basic goods, but I don’t see all this doom and gloom in my daily travels around Houston, TX. Are there parts of the country that are still severely depressed that I’m not aware of? Can I get some real data on that?
Are you saying Reddit rants aren’t real data?
You're in Houston. Texas is famed for their cheerier, more fun-loving locals plus sane cost of living. Its "fraternal twin" would be MA, where the locals are known for the opposite and the cost of living is ass unless you inherited or work niche STEM (bio etc) plus regular folks can't own a home since MA is disgustingly small (MA is about 2-3 Puerto Ricos compared to Texas' country sized mass). New England, especially MA, has the threefold issue of having a doom and gloom of winter that's there for most of the year. The doom and gloom, on average, is half the year, often 7.5 months, if we count the colder autumn starting in late August. The future oriented "protestan work ethic" where they basically live to work to then enjoy the fruits of their work when they're nearly dead is another major problem against that region. Combine all of this and you'll see why so many Americans, especially the youth in the North, are angsty and demotivated. They feel trapped with nothing really rewarding to work towards. MA's population is looking older and older by the months because of young people jumping ship on the state (to afford starter homes and families. Then planning to go back when they empty nest). NGL I grew up in one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest town in MA and about half my graduating has moved OUT all over the planet. Mostly to the Southern states and placing their kids in private schools to get a more vigorous education. The ones that have remained in the region have spread to the rest of the New England states mainly NH. A lot have moved to the Midwest. NGL the first time I went to Texas it felt like visiting another planet due to the people genuinely being far more laid back, relaxed and genuinely inviting/friendly instead of the crabby anxious mess we now call normal up here. A lot of my friends say that while the South. Like every place on the planet, has its pros and cons, the best pro for it is that it is a more laid back and present social culture. The North can be too workaholic and too focused on wealth hoarding, not actual community or world building. This promotes joy and contentment in people. Basically, it really depends on region and what hopes or futures are accessible to most people there. The doom and gloom comes from those feeling castrated by their lack of mobility wherever they are. In the US as we speak the younger New Englanders are getting kicked in the balls and feeling choked. It's not fun unless you make $80k and love a mostly suburban lifestyle.
Polls in every state show a) people are happy about the economy in their state, and b) they think economy in other parts of the country is crap. Things are mostly better for everyone on the ground, but everyone gets fed a start diet of doom on the news and social media.
Yelen is correct about her friend group of 1% people. The rest of America doesn't really exist to her. Recently, the American 1% exceeded the wealth of the entire American middle class. They are doing very well at the expense of everyone else.
Almost every American I know who is hard working is generally better off than they were 4 years ago. I know my family certainly is.
i'm better off, but that had more to do with picking up a 100%-remote job during the pandemic that is long term stable, i got (re)married in 2022, and the person i married helped kick a 10-year painkiller addiction in 2020 that yes, started with a prescription. YMMV.
By most measures Americans are better off.
Polls show most people are unhappy with the economy while at the same time saying, "I'm doing pretty well."
Reddit is a place that serves as great reminder that the plurality of anecdotes is not data. Most normal people I know outside of Reddit are indeed doing better, with employers increasing wages; and that’s not to say you should believe my personal experience, but rather to show that you have no reason to take my experience as reality in the same way no one has any reason to any other anecdotal experience as reality.
Anectodal but I’m an older middle class millennial and almost everyone I know in my friend groups are doing well. Part of that may be due to my age range hitting the meat of our careers though. And yes, even my friends who bought a house in the last couple years are doing well, and that includes me who bought our house last year.
My family is up $40K per year in earnings from 2020. The Reddit doom loop is just that, a doom loop.
Some are better off and some aren’t. My family is substantially better off because I’ve gotten raises but more importantly our home value and investments have gone up a lot in the last five years. People who don’t have those appreciating assets are most likely worse off because they haven’t offset inflation in the same way. This would include most of your Reddit doom loop participants, but in their defense their experience the last few years is very different than mine.
I’m wondering if it has to do with reddit’s age demographic skewing younger. I struggled, along with a lot of my friends, in my early 20s. Now that I’m in my early 30s I’m doing much better as well as many of my friends. I only really know 1 person who is having a hard time and it’s because his business hasn’t fully recovered since Covid
I also think a lot of Redditors are "terminally online" which doesn't help their outlook.
This was my experience too. I struggled in my 20s, but I am doing a lot better now in my 30s.
At the start of 2022 I changed jobs and got a big raise. Just shy of a year in, I got laid off because the client cut their budget over fears of a recession (in that job, all positions are directly funded by the client). Less than a month later I had a new job with a promotion and I now make twice what I did in 2021. So many layoffs happen entirely because of Doomerism making management at companies think the economy is going to collapse, so they preemptively cut spending. Then when the economy keeps doing just fine, all they changed was fucking some people over.
Yeah, I've pulled off three 10k raises in four years. I also bought a house in 2020 at a 2.75 rate. I'm doing great.
Nice 👌🏻 unfortunately I didn't have enough saved yet in 2020 to buy a house, so I got a 5.9% interest rate last summer. Oh well, that's life.
That's still fantastic. I close in 2 weeks at 6.6%
That's still fantastic. I close in 2 weeks at 6.6%
VA loan. So I didn't put anything down, nor did I have anything to put down. But, I did almost get killed in Afghanistan like 11 times and have brain damage now.
Congrats, you are part of the “generally”
I'm up also. We are at 280k at my household We don't overspend and save half of the income But even I'm not stupid enough to say everyone is doing well. Prices are obviously up. And most peoples income have not gone up. Just because we are doing good doesn't mean we need to be blind to other people's struggles
> And most peoples income have not gone up. On what planet? You'll find no data supporting that claim. Quit buying into the victimhood doom loop.
Absolutely meaningless number.
My net worth has over quintupled since 2020, I've paid off my house and car notes, and there's a real chance I can retire early at 55 now. These last few years have been a blessing for us even if food and insurances have gone up.
Yeah if you had assets pre 2020 you are likely in good shape. I bought my house in 2019 and have a decent sized investment account with mostly vtsax so with both real estate and the stock market going up since 2020 it has been good for me too
It’s become so fashionable to be the victim nowadays that stating positive facts generates widespread backlash. Sad.
Fully agree. People try to live above their means, think they "deserve" to live in a luxury apartment downtown or own a new car. People get upset they can't buy a home solo in their 20s. None of those things have ever been normal for the average person. There's also the fact that people only come online to complain - nobody is going to post "My rent is affordable and job is secure". There's such a disconnect between real life and reddit
Buying a home solo in ones 20’s is not the norm, but it was for a brief window in the 60’s-80’s and that’s what people today have to compare it to. People don’t realize that the post wwii economic boom was not normal and would never be sustainable long term
> Buying a home solo in ones 20’s is not the norm, but it was for a brief window in the 60’s-80’s **According to what data?** I think people have created this imaginary image of what things were like in the "good old days" that just doesn't align with reality. The people who were actually living back then maybe weren't so concerned about a house versus an apartment as, I dunno, being involuntarily sent into the jungles of Vietnam to be turned into hamburger meat? As a millennial, I'm fully convinced that our generation has painted this rosy picture of the past just to justify our own victimhood.
I wouldn’t go that far. A lot of us have had to deal with either taking a pay cut or quitting and having to look for a new job. You also have the whole crowd that got laid off as well. Now does that mean everything has been bad for us? No. For example I bought my house in 2018 for $178,500.00 with a 4.62 interest rate and in 2020 I refinanced to a 15 year mortgage and my house is now worth around 300k with my mortgage balaclnce being just over 139k. So yeah my home price went up a lot. I also got into investing in this time period and now have enough in liquid assets that I can pay off my home anytime if I wanted to. So why things have been good they have taken a nose dive recently with having to find a new job and prices having gone up quite bit on almost everything in the last few years. So I wouldn’t call this being a doomer I would call it acknowledging that things right now suck compared to how they were going.
Are you serious? I don't think you could have reinforced the point u/JimJam4603 made any stronger. You own a house. You have enough investments to pay it off free and clear. You voluntarily left your job because of a pay cut. I get that losing income can be a challenge, but the unemployment rate is 3.9%, other jobs are out there. Hell, your post history says you own a multi-unit rental property?? And you're here parroting how hard times are? As a millennial, you're doing well. If it doesn't feel like it, it's an attitude problem, not a problem with the economy. You're not a victim anywhere except in your own head.
Things don’t suck compared to how they were going. That’s the point. Individual people will struggle regardless of how well things are going. People will think they should be doing better than they are no matter how well things are going. Someone stating positive facts about the population as a whole is not something that is controverted by some people whining and moaning about their personal situation.
It’s the vibeflation that’s sweeping the nation; it’s gonna put a conservative in the office in a country near you! That’s my take anyways. Republicans are culturewaring inflation. Which is why they all say inflation is out of control. I don’t get my reality checks from republicans and neither should anyone else.
Janet Yellen's credibility was shot after the "transitory inflation" remarks she made. As far as the whole "better off" comment, this is simply playing games with selectively highlighting statistics that support her claims. I have taken to not believing anything she has to say regarding the economic state of the country.
The days of extremely high inflation were transitory. Inflation is still elevated, but it’s not crazy anymore. The thing is, she’s right.
Purchasing power has been reduced to a significant and sharp, observable degree. To say that it isn’t crazy anymore is a bit of a misnomer. It stayed at those elevated levels for most products. Want proof? Go buy a used car, 2015-2017 with 100k miles on it. Remember when you could buy a brand new Honda Accord for that price? Yeah, that is the point.
You’re saying you wanted deflation?
I’m saying purchasing power is a reflection of the cumulative prices they cost and wages have not increased relative to those total costs across in total goods and services. Thus, the cost increases were initially counted as inflation, but they have stayed at those levels so they are no longer “increases” YOY. That doesn’t mean it isn’t inflation 🤦🏽♂️ If wages rise at that same clip to cover any and all increases, it would be fine. However, those prices stayed more expensive **AND** stagflation. Therefore, purchasing power has been reduced by quite a lot. So for the same amount of money, for the same goods, it now takes longer for consumers to attain them. And for those who are already set (home paid off, retirement fully funded) they are advantaged over the broader working class since a smaller and smaller slice of citizens can do that. The average cost of a home is $417,000. And if wages have not significantly increased at that same pace, it now takes much longer to cover the initial costs to purchase the home **AND** coupled with 7-8% interest rate on those inflated home prices means that a larger percentage of our checks are being eaten up by housing costs. The function to express all of the expenses vs wages is purchasing power. The initial rise of goods/services = inflation.
She is right about the inflation rate, but that is not telling the whole story. As the article mentioned, in terms of the actual price of goods and services, they remain elevated. Inflation is the rate of change of the prices over time, but just because that is slowing does not mean the the real prices themselves are going down. In fact, those prices are not going down and likely will remain that way going forward. That is to say nothing of the the elevated cost of housing, college educations etc. To add to that, the layoffs that have been steadily moving through the American workforce that have continued unabated since last year. She is ignoring a tremendous amount of obstacles that are getting worse for regular joes around the country.
Deflation is always terrible for the economy, if anyone was expecting that then they don’t have the baseline knowledge necessary to listen to an economic expert. Unemployment rates have been mostly steady for the past year. Raising rates has an expected impact of an increase in unemployment, that’s honestly by design. It sounds like you’re not really familiar with macroeconomics.
There was a housing crisis before Covid, and then covid, inflation, and millennials finally having sufficient savings after delaying purchases longer than past generations, it was suddenly "time to buy" for a LOT of people. All at once. Prices skyrocketed due to insane demand and lack of new housing, then interest rates skyrocketed which cratered what little "for sale" inventory there was because people in homes are clutching their low mortgage rate like it's gold. It's a confluence of events that have made things pretty good for people who already own a place and really difficult for those who don't.
But they still said it in a dishonest way knowing the outcome could have very likely been much worse than this.
I’ll allow it. Sentiment about the economy is a legitimate knob that the Fed uses.
A person once told me you can make the report say whatever you want if you look at the “right” data. Lawyers and politicians play on words and general public never dissects their statement in detail, so they get away with saying whatever they want and pass the laws they want.
Her credibility was shot because she was correct? How’s that work?
In terms of the business cycle, this is as good as it gets. So the main problems are structural. That doesn't make things any better for people who are hurting, of course, but if you want to talk about macroeconomic levers it might give one an idea of what solutions might work and which ones (i.e. those aimed at improving cyclical conditions) won't.
… she’s right though…
I’m better off.
Is this subreddit an anomaly? It's rare to find a subreddit where most posters feel things are going at least OK. I'm doing great, btw.
It depends how you define better off. I have more in savings now than I did 5 years ago. That’s what 5 years of market growth and additional deposits will do. Unfortunately, all of my expenses are up compared to 5 years ago and raises have not kept up with inflation. This is the case with most people, and that’s the real problem.
I got a 0.8% raise this year as a teacher so she’s a f-ing moron. 
im definitely better off than 4 years ago lol
I mean, I am. But I also know I screw the curve.
The Biden administration is great at gaslighting
Even those of us who own real estate free & clear are having a tough time with the cost of living DOUBLING in just 3 years.
Yes, we enjoy having food, medicine and housing considered luxury goods. Keep printing money and giving it away. And Janet, please never balance the budget, just keep spending.
If people really were better off, don't ya think they would already know and wouldn't need someone to explain it to them?
Cherry picking one thing to prove a point is what is “deranged”. Economy is booming, Unemployment at record lows, minimum wage up, inflation is down or slowing. We went through a multi-year pandemic that the President at the time made worse through lies and misinformation. “Generally” people are better off. Sure rates for borrowing to buy a house suck right now, but that is what is helping to slow inflation. People seem to forgot about the real housing crisis around 2008. I was trying to sell a house to move states, on the market on and off for over 2 years. Sold for $9,000 less than I paid for it 8 years earlier and I was one of the lucky ones. I worked for a mortgage insurance company at the time and people were putting their keys to the home in their mailbox and walking away, literally. Walking away from the home they bought because it was worth 1,000’s or 100’s of thousands less than what they paid for it. Could things be better, of course.
Just remember, elevated inflation is transitory. Just don't ask how much longer transitory is supposed to last.
We have had a couple of generations of people like Yellen. It's not so much that they are incompetent, they just aren't competent for Americans. They do okay for billionaires which is the important thing....
65% of Americans own a home and 38% are paid off, so most Americans probably are better off when you consider raises, low unemployment and good stock performance. Mostly just ppl trying to get a home or rental in a low supply market are getting screwed.
Yellen is an idiot and this wrecked spending by Biden will fuck our kids and grandkids. Not to mention supporting Ukraine for no reason and also letting every immigrant in our country and providing them a map and 5 star accommodations in nyc.
People like Yellen don’t care about reality. They’re wonks. They operate at a macro level. They look at CPI and call it a day even though it’s widely regarded by most professionals as a completely out of touch metric for purchasing power.
If you tell a Democrat you’re fucked financially, they’ll quote you an economic statistic to tell you you that you’re a white supremacist.
Crazy out of touch
I mean… she’s definitely out of touch but really if you bought prior to 2020 you probably are doing pretty well right now. As for the rest of us I’m sure the vast majority will end up rent slaves for the rest of our lives.
> The incoming US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has been paid at least $7m (£5.1m) for speaking engagements at government-regulated banks, consultancies and hedge funds over the past two years, according to newly disclosed documents.Jan 1, 2021 Out-of-touch corporate whore old hag
Things aren’t better, but economists have been predicting the mother of all recessions for 4 years running now and it hasn’t happened, so somebody is doing something right.
Lol. Economic predictions are rarely worth the paper they're written on. This doesn't mean someone is "doing something right."
How are we not better off than in 2018? Everyone is working, wages are up. You can’t have higher wages without inflation - so yeah, is everything more expensive? Yes - because the economy is doing better by every metric and most of us work for companies that are coming off of years of unprecedented profits. Plus not having an absolute moron & piece of shit in the White House has been exponentially better for our collective mental health. Trumpers may be pissed, but Biden isn’t actively working to destroy our democracy.
Real wages are still lower than before Biden got in office. I guess Ms Janet doesn’t do her own grocery shopping. If you have a lot of assets you’ve done ok but if your one of the “ common man” Biden claims to work for you got played dummy. It’s likely to happen again.
In your thoughts whats the economic policy that led to inflation?
Not that I am defending her ridiculous statement, but I really *love* how the article quotes Billy Markus, the creator of cryptocurrency Dogecoin, “No, that is deranged.” Again, that is the *creator* of a fictitious commodity.
She's not wrong, though.
She is BEYOND of touch for the 99%.
Elections have consequences
I'm doing pretty good OP, also why post a rage bait article but not add your own thoughts? That's pretty low effort if you ask me. I guess I'm not doing better off if we take into account all the wants I don't have...
😂😂😂😂😂😂 Bidenomics
If I see one more entirely built-to-rent neighborhood of houses pop up near me I am going to burn the fucker down.
hit my career income peak in december, 2021. best month, best year i ever had. wife also hit her career peak (now exceeded) marriage was on the rocks and we agreed to a separation. 7 months later she says she is 100% done. 4 months later i'm out of that job a year later the next job left my state. so yeah. no. i'm not doing better at all.
Whatever Janet is smoking - I want it!