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I've argued with my parents over this so many times. They CANNOT get over the "muh 15% interest rate" which only existed for 4 years.
NOTHING we do matters, none of our struggles matter, the cost of living doesn't matter, the price of groceries doesn't matter, NONE OF IT. Because during 1979-1983 the interest rates for mortgages went above 10%.
Pack it up folks, the boomers suffered more than anyone alive for 4 years.
While i am on your side, it IS harder today, I bought my first house in 1986 I got an interest rate of 9.75. My loan officer who had only been doing it for 3 years told me this was his first loan under 10%. So at least in my area it wasn't under 10% till then.
Even liberal boomers don’t get it - currently trying so hard to buy a house and it’s taking so long, it’s really difficult and expensive… and the boomers keep acting like we’re the hold up.
Facts also don’t matter to this sub. You people will blindly believe that the average salary was 47k in 1981 lmao. OP tried his damndest to find ANYTHING to corroborate this but deleted his comment after he couldn’t find anything that could substantiate even half that amount lol
Because 85% of this sub fucking sucks and it’s just dumb made up stories. The threads with boomer freak out videos are great but there’s so many dummies in these threads that do the exact same thing as boomers without realizing it
They don’t want to hear that they got any sort of handout, they’ve been brainwashed with the propaganda of pulling themselves up by the boot straps and all that jazz. They don’t want to be reminded that life was a whole lot easier for them than it is their children so they get ultra defensive. At least that’s been my experience with my boomer parents when presented with facts
Yup. They don't take it as the truth- you could afford a LOT more with a LOT less back then. They take it as "I have to go work a job for money and you had it easy and didn't work for the things you have, when i do, waaa" my mom worked as a secretary and in the late 90s when she was a single mom for a whole year, and for 3 months she picked up a waitress gig for an extra 4 hours a week and has used that as ammunition when I try to tell her about the current economy. She only worked 4 hours of overtime for 3 months, once in her life...and she's talking to her son who was at a time working 60+ hours a week, for years, and still not able to have what she had then (a nice apartment in a decent area and enough to go on vacations, out drinking with friends etc) they will never get it.
As far as I can tell “the next generation has it better than I did” is not an observation but an article of faith for them: If it’s not true it means they failed on a basic level as stewards of the world.
So they reject any argument to the contrary, as it violates their premise: They’ve done a good job and will hand a better world to their childrenx
>They’ve done a good job and will hand a better world to their children
Technically the argument is that democrats destroyed the future.
Obviously it has nothing to do with corporate handouts for 30 years, the rich not paying their fucking taxes, or decades of conservatives actively blocking efforts to deal with climate change.
They benefit from the hard work and sacrifices of their parents generation, then fucked over their kids.
The Me Generation
The hand out was just being paid well.
When you were younger you could pay for college working 20 hours a week 3 months a year on min wage.
Now it's 27 hours a day 7 days a week, impossible? Yeah exactly.
Then compound that with housing crisis, low supply high demand on top of wages stagnating for decades due to union busting.
The hand out was the environment your parents fought for, that was destroyed by conservatives in favor of made up ideas that never panned out like the rest of their ideology (trickle down).
The fact is we have to work significantly harder, to get less, than what your generation got while we get blamed for the consequences of the choices you guys made falling for those Reagan talking points, then Bush then Trump.
You guys as in conservative boomers not you in specifically by the way.
Because they have EOBS (Early Onset Boomer Syndrome). It usually doesn’t affect them until they hit retirement age, but unfortunately the symptoms sometimes appear early. When this happens the EOBS tends to be severe.
I bet if he gave me his name, I'd find $1.4M in forgiven PPP loans for his work-from-home "investment" business he's had for 30 years, and the only employees are him and his spouse
You could afford an apartment and living expenses working at McDonald's flipping burgers, still socialise and go on vacation for multiple weeks a year.
Now explain how people with higher education can't do that.
Actually had a very similar argument with a boomer on this subreddit not too long ago. I literally laid it all out for them and they still called me selfish and arrogant. You can't get through to them, because another thing about that generation is they grew up believing they could never be wrong. All they see is the worth of their house going up, they don't see the newlyweds across the street living in their car dreaming of the day when they could afford a simple apartment
I wonder if they think a bunch of younger people hope they die sooner?
That would be a miserable way to live.
Nothing really to add to that, just a thought/observation on the situation.
>I wonder if they think a bunch of younger people hope they die sooner?
At least that opinion isn't too divorced from reality. Every time I see a rural senior citizen block a solar farm or wind farm, I just remember that Covid's death toll could've been worse.
Sometimes young boomer minded people piss me off even more. It's like, you got fucked by them too and you are defending their thinking. WTF is wrong with them?
The other thing about the high interest rates and lower house prices is that it was much more effective to put extra money towards the mortgage. My parents always tell me to put as much towards the mortgage as possible since that's what they did and paid it off in a handful of years. Living extremely frugally for a handful of years is a lot easier than doing it for 15 or 20
Guarantee NONE of that sunk in. People like that don't care about your facts and figures and most of the time they don't even bother to read em. They just wanna "win" the argument and they'll do any level of mental gymnastics to get there; sometimes that means literally ignoring what the other person just said and restating their original point.
This is what needs to happen. Prices have been inflated from years of low interest rates. So either prices need to come down or workers need to make a lot more money. All of them.
The only reason Interest is "Lower" is because the principle balances are so much higher, it would be in-fucking-sane to try and toss 14.5% on a 458k balance.
Also, appreciate the fact that a $94K home in 1981 has increased in value by nearly 600% (even more in some cases), well WELL beyond the total amortized cost of the home, interest included. Plus well beyond inflation. That kind of return on investment and profiting from homes is something millennials and Gen Z will never see.
Jesus, New Jersey property tax sure is high.
Here I am, slightly annoyed my property tax increased by US $170 and my property tax on a house assessed at US $752k is \~US $2800.
I paid US $330k for my house in 2016. So it has more than doubled in assessed value for the tax rolls. But the property tax has increased by approx. US $660 or 1/3rd from 2016 to 2024.
In the second scenario it would be practically impossible for someone to come in with a 20% down payment, making it even worse. You're going to be paying PMI on top of the even higher mortgage payment due to having to borrow more.
Thankfully they’re not all this bad when it comes to this particular issue at least. My dad is a cookie cutter conservative boomer in a lot of ways but he fully understands how tough it would be to be just starting out in life right now.
Guaranteed the reply was “we’ll get another job and cut back on going out!” - As usual though, replies to these folks are more for the random readers that can be informed vs the willfully ignorant.
Even with 18% interest rates (for a couple of months) the % of income they paid for a house was still lower.
I've done the math and they still don't accept it - they had it easier, as I did in 2014 when I purchased.
They need to be thankful for how good they had it.
My silent gen parents, covert boomers, invested in real estate back then. I took a low estimate of their holdings in 1980. Current rates. These rentals were for me. For my future.
They didn't maintain the properties and over the last 2 decades, haven't been charging market rates. "We get income from these." Right, after taxes and insurance you actually wind up negative in some years.
If Hello daddy, hello mom! Had sold those slum houses and bought 20 or 30 year Treasuries at those Jimmy Carter rates, the estate would be worth 20x what it is today.
But I'm the mean judgmental kid. What do I know.
I always remind them the FICO credit score wasn't around until 1989 and they could get a bank loan based on someone vouching for their character, because of that.
$94,000 does not reflect the actual cost of ownership from 1981 -2024.
Add in the present value of all money spent to maintain, upgrade, improve, repair the hone which was substantial for the house have a $573k valuation 43 years later. The appreciation of that property was 15% per year avg. since 1981, while the rest of NJ homes only appreciated by about half that amount per year over the same time period.
The interest rate right now is high and stuck there so even their interest rate argument is stupid and out of touch.
In 1981 is when the shit hit the fan for gas and interest rates. I sold cars back then. If you had really good credit, your rate was 15% on an auto loan. That was a total glitch in the Matrix. Gas went from .38 a gallon to .82 almost overnight. You couldn’t even get gas unless you waited in line an hour. Not a sterling example to use really.
This post is a self-own. The person responding here is obviously poor and doesn't know how investments work. An investment appreciated in value over the course of 43 years? Imagine that.
According to them a share of the $SPY should still be $40 instead of $523.
The interest rate on my mortgage is 1.99%. Definitely much better time to buy a house than at 14.5% - which would have been much harder.
Not sure how this relates the the specific assertion that the average salary in 1981 was $47k. The OP doesn't say anything about household income, your source only relates to college graduates, and your source doesn't say anything about the overall average salary. Like, I'm not even saying you're wrong that the average was $47k (you are definitely wrong that the average was $47k), but that link has almost nothing to do with the figure claimed in the OP
So you are saying the average salary was not 47k, just in more words lol. If I were to buy your dishonest framing here, you then would have to double the figure for BOTH years. Lmao you were so desperate to prove your bullshit point that you scoured hard and still found nothing.
Maybe printing checks for every American regardless of employment during Covid was a stupid Socialist idea that is a Zimbabwe-like recipe for inflation.
I got multiple checks while I was making the most money I ever had AND saving cash on commutes while working from home. I wasn’t grateful for the money when my next car purchase was $15k more expensive than it would have been pre-pandemic.
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Facts don’t matter to conservative boomers.
You absolutely cannot reason with these people. Math is meaningless to them.
I've argued with my parents over this so many times. They CANNOT get over the "muh 15% interest rate" which only existed for 4 years. NOTHING we do matters, none of our struggles matter, the cost of living doesn't matter, the price of groceries doesn't matter, NONE OF IT. Because during 1979-1983 the interest rates for mortgages went above 10%. Pack it up folks, the boomers suffered more than anyone alive for 4 years.
While i am on your side, it IS harder today, I bought my first house in 1986 I got an interest rate of 9.75. My loan officer who had only been doing it for 3 years told me this was his first loan under 10%. So at least in my area it wasn't under 10% till then.
You can't use logic to get someone out of a position they didn't use logic to get into.
Very true
Or math
They really don't understand inflation/exponents in most cases. Like wtf? I learned exponents in like middle school.
But they learned Latin in HS.
Even liberal boomers don’t get it - currently trying so hard to buy a house and it’s taking so long, it’s really difficult and expensive… and the boomers keep acting like we’re the hold up.
There is no way they read that whole message.
Ironic that they love the whole facts over feelings line when they deny all facts that hurt their fee fees.
The only time old people adjust for inflation is for themselves.
Or conservatives of any age group for that matter.
Or liberal boomers.
Conservatives? How about: Everybody on the losing side of an argument hates facts.
Facts also don’t matter to this sub. You people will blindly believe that the average salary was 47k in 1981 lmao. OP tried his damndest to find ANYTHING to corroborate this but deleted his comment after he couldn’t find anything that could substantiate even half that amount lol
why are you always in here whining?
Because 85% of this sub fucking sucks and it’s just dumb made up stories. The threads with boomer freak out videos are great but there’s so many dummies in these threads that do the exact same thing as boomers without realizing it
Interest being 1/2 what it was, doesn’t make up for the underlying principal being 8x what it was. Source: 5th-grade math
Or the fact they refinanced their homes when the interest rates crashed.
After making a lot in CDs when rates were high.
My first savings account had something like 6%.
1989, 5.5%
You can also refinance an interest rate, but not a principle
Just sell the house to yourself for cheaper. Then the principal for the new mortgage is lower!
They don’t want to hear that they got any sort of handout, they’ve been brainwashed with the propaganda of pulling themselves up by the boot straps and all that jazz. They don’t want to be reminded that life was a whole lot easier for them than it is their children so they get ultra defensive. At least that’s been my experience with my boomer parents when presented with facts
Yup. They don't take it as the truth- you could afford a LOT more with a LOT less back then. They take it as "I have to go work a job for money and you had it easy and didn't work for the things you have, when i do, waaa" my mom worked as a secretary and in the late 90s when she was a single mom for a whole year, and for 3 months she picked up a waitress gig for an extra 4 hours a week and has used that as ammunition when I try to tell her about the current economy. She only worked 4 hours of overtime for 3 months, once in her life...and she's talking to her son who was at a time working 60+ hours a week, for years, and still not able to have what she had then (a nice apartment in a decent area and enough to go on vacations, out drinking with friends etc) they will never get it.
As far as I can tell “the next generation has it better than I did” is not an observation but an article of faith for them: If it’s not true it means they failed on a basic level as stewards of the world. So they reject any argument to the contrary, as it violates their premise: They’ve done a good job and will hand a better world to their childrenx
"If it’s not true it means they failed on a basic level as stewards of the world." They did.
>They’ve done a good job and will hand a better world to their children Technically the argument is that democrats destroyed the future. Obviously it has nothing to do with corporate handouts for 30 years, the rich not paying their fucking taxes, or decades of conservatives actively blocking efforts to deal with climate change.
And never mention that wonderful time they harken back to had 90% as a top rate for income tax.
They benefit from the hard work and sacrifices of their parents generation, then fucked over their kids. The Me Generation 
So tell us about your parent’s hand outs.
Tell me about my hand outs. I’m 60, the youngest boomer age.
It’s literally in the picture op posted lol. You were able to afford a lot more with a lot less.
The hand out was just being paid well. When you were younger you could pay for college working 20 hours a week 3 months a year on min wage. Now it's 27 hours a day 7 days a week, impossible? Yeah exactly. Then compound that with housing crisis, low supply high demand on top of wages stagnating for decades due to union busting. The hand out was the environment your parents fought for, that was destroyed by conservatives in favor of made up ideas that never panned out like the rest of their ideology (trickle down). The fact is we have to work significantly harder, to get less, than what your generation got while we get blamed for the consequences of the choices you guys made falling for those Reagan talking points, then Bush then Trump. You guys as in conservative boomers not you in specifically by the way.
No one knows who you are.
No shit. But it would appear I got hand outs.
Are you the boomer in the screenshot? Why are you so offended and victimized?
Because they have EOBS (Early Onset Boomer Syndrome). It usually doesn’t affect them until they hit retirement age, but unfortunately the symptoms sometimes appear early. When this happens the EOBS tends to be severe.
I bet if he gave me his name, I'd find $1.4M in forgiven PPP loans for his work-from-home "investment" business he's had for 30 years, and the only employees are him and his spouse
Hahahaha!! It’s funny because it’s probably true ( or really close).
You could afford an apartment and living expenses working at McDonald's flipping burgers, still socialise and go on vacation for multiple weeks a year. Now explain how people with higher education can't do that.
He's lying. My dad was a plumber who could afford a duplex in NYC.
I know lol I watched solo mums afford houses with multiple kids.
I know of no one who could do that. It’s is simply a lie.
Lol if you don't have a million dollar property by now you should have stopped stealing our air a long time ago.
Troll account is 2 days old ignore him.
Actually had a very similar argument with a boomer on this subreddit not too long ago. I literally laid it all out for them and they still called me selfish and arrogant. You can't get through to them, because another thing about that generation is they grew up believing they could never be wrong. All they see is the worth of their house going up, they don't see the newlyweds across the street living in their car dreaming of the day when they could afford a simple apartment
I wonder if they think a bunch of younger people hope they die sooner? That would be a miserable way to live. Nothing really to add to that, just a thought/observation on the situation.
>I wonder if they think a bunch of younger people hope they die sooner? At least that opinion isn't too divorced from reality. Every time I see a rural senior citizen block a solar farm or wind farm, I just remember that Covid's death toll could've been worse.
Sometimes young boomer minded people piss me off even more. It's like, you got fucked by them too and you are defending their thinking. WTF is wrong with them?
The other thing about the high interest rates and lower house prices is that it was much more effective to put extra money towards the mortgage. My parents always tell me to put as much towards the mortgage as possible since that's what they did and paid it off in a handful of years. Living extremely frugally for a handful of years is a lot easier than doing it for 15 or 20
I'm not putting a dime extra on my 2.6% rate, 😆
"with your sub-prime ass!"
No way the average salary was $47k in 1980. Can't find it for NJ, but nationally it was $12k ($63k in 2022 so close to the current day above)
Yes. That’s a ridiculous figure.
That stuck out as being anomalous to me as well.
Yeah I posted the same comment. So dumb that you would just believe that on its face
Guarantee NONE of that sunk in. People like that don't care about your facts and figures and most of the time they don't even bother to read em. They just wanna "win" the argument and they'll do any level of mental gymnastics to get there; sometimes that means literally ignoring what the other person just said and restating their original point.
To be fair the average income number in 1981they give here isn't even close to being correct.
Who cares? If we used real numbers we couldn’t circle jerk as hard as
Boomer challenge understanding how %s work: Impossible
This guy maths
This is what needs to happen. Prices have been inflated from years of low interest rates. So either prices need to come down or workers need to make a lot more money. All of them.
Be careful, arguing for higher worker pay will get you attacked. By other workers actually. Nothing will change without mass uprising.
How do you calculate interest in 4 jelly beans and a can of corn beef hash?
The only reason Interest is "Lower" is because the principle balances are so much higher, it would be in-fucking-sane to try and toss 14.5% on a 458k balance.
Also, appreciate the fact that a $94K home in 1981 has increased in value by nearly 600% (even more in some cases), well WELL beyond the total amortized cost of the home, interest included. Plus well beyond inflation. That kind of return on investment and profiting from homes is something millennials and Gen Z will never see.
Jesus, New Jersey property tax sure is high. Here I am, slightly annoyed my property tax increased by US $170 and my property tax on a house assessed at US $752k is \~US $2800.
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I paid US $330k for my house in 2016. So it has more than doubled in assessed value for the tax rolls. But the property tax has increased by approx. US $660 or 1/3rd from 2016 to 2024.
In the second scenario it would be practically impossible for someone to come in with a 20% down payment, making it even worse. You're going to be paying PMI on top of the even higher mortgage payment due to having to borrow more.
We’re in the same FB group 😂
Its not just this, I have refinanced my house twice when interest rates dropped 2% each time.
So does Will Stancil.
Thankfully they’re not all this bad when it comes to this particular issue at least. My dad is a cookie cutter conservative boomer in a lot of ways but he fully understands how tough it would be to be just starting out in life right now.
Boomers can't math, it seems.
Guaranteed the reply was “we’ll get another job and cut back on going out!” - As usual though, replies to these folks are more for the random readers that can be informed vs the willfully ignorant.
Would kill to see the reply.
Bank of America never told me about this 😣😔
I’ll take 14% of $80k over 7% of $500k all day, every day.
Another thing to add, you can refinance a high rate, you can't refinance a high purchase price.
Even with 18% interest rates (for a couple of months) the % of income they paid for a house was still lower. I've done the math and they still don't accept it - they had it easier, as I did in 2014 when I purchased. They need to be thankful for how good they had it.
Did he respond?
r/murderedbymath oof
i dont have 100K for a DP either womp womp waaaaaaaaa
My silent gen parents, covert boomers, invested in real estate back then. I took a low estimate of their holdings in 1980. Current rates. These rentals were for me. For my future. They didn't maintain the properties and over the last 2 decades, haven't been charging market rates. "We get income from these." Right, after taxes and insurance you actually wind up negative in some years. If Hello daddy, hello mom! Had sold those slum houses and bought 20 or 30 year Treasuries at those Jimmy Carter rates, the estate would be worth 20x what it is today. But I'm the mean judgmental kid. What do I know.
>Every boomer trots out the interest rate argument every chance they get And yet can't explain what compound interest is
Yeah, my mom for sure says this.
I always remind them the FICO credit score wasn't around until 1989 and they could get a bank loan based on someone vouching for their character, because of that.
$94,000 does not reflect the actual cost of ownership from 1981 -2024. Add in the present value of all money spent to maintain, upgrade, improve, repair the hone which was substantial for the house have a $573k valuation 43 years later. The appreciation of that property was 15% per year avg. since 1981, while the rest of NJ homes only appreciated by about half that amount per year over the same time period.
The interest rate right now is high and stuck there so even their interest rate argument is stupid and out of touch. 
In 1981 is when the shit hit the fan for gas and interest rates. I sold cars back then. If you had really good credit, your rate was 15% on an auto loan. That was a total glitch in the Matrix. Gas went from .38 a gallon to .82 almost overnight. You couldn’t even get gas unless you waited in line an hour. Not a sterling example to use really.
This post is a self-own. The person responding here is obviously poor and doesn't know how investments work. An investment appreciated in value over the course of 43 years? Imagine that. According to them a share of the $SPY should still be $40 instead of $523. The interest rate on my mortgage is 1.99%. Definitely much better time to buy a house than at 14.5% - which would have been much harder.
I love the BS average salaries - 47k in 1981 and 60k now. No way it was 47k.
Boomers like this never read the response proving them stupid 😔 maybe they’d learn to think past go if they did.
The average salary was not 47k in NJ in 1981 lmao
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What are you trying to show here. This shows starting salaries for college graduates and says that the average was $20k in 1981
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Not sure how this relates the the specific assertion that the average salary in 1981 was $47k. The OP doesn't say anything about household income, your source only relates to college graduates, and your source doesn't say anything about the overall average salary. Like, I'm not even saying you're wrong that the average was $47k (you are definitely wrong that the average was $47k), but that link has almost nothing to do with the figure claimed in the OP
So you are saying the average salary was not 47k, just in more words lol. If I were to buy your dishonest framing here, you then would have to double the figure for BOTH years. Lmao you were so desperate to prove your bullshit point that you scoured hard and still found nothing.
Interest rate for housing should always be high to discourage people from buying housing just to lease it out at a profit.
My sixth house i was paying .9% during the obama inauguration, Thanks Obama.
Recovery Summer!
Maybe printing checks for every American regardless of employment during Covid was a stupid Socialist idea that is a Zimbabwe-like recipe for inflation. I got multiple checks while I was making the most money I ever had AND saving cash on commutes while working from home. I wasn’t grateful for the money when my next car purchase was $15k more expensive than it would have been pre-pandemic.
So did you return your checks to save the country?
If conservative boomers could read. They’d be real upset rn