6 ms·

Well, all this macro economics discussion is nice. But on a micro level, you can't get around the fact that if you spend $50 on lattes a month, and then you st

Well, all this macro economics discussion is nice. But on a micro level, you can't get around the fact that if you spend $50 on lattes a month, and then you stop doing that, you will have $50 more per month. And if you spend $50 on buying a luxury brand shirt rather than a $10 shirt, you have $40 less. If you DON'T spend $50 on lattes, then obviously you can't save that money. Anything else is self flaggelating excuses about why you need to buy lattes, and why capitalism is bad, and an excuse for your status games or your consumer desires. Fact is, if you buy lattes, you can save that money instead.

kaybe 4y ago
So you'll have $600 per year. Good luck buying housing on that budget.
- sifar 4y ago
  An alternative way to look at it is you would need a 12K investment @5% to generate those $600. Now how many such $600 are lurking in your habits. May be that would change your perspective.
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  It's an example ffs. If that's your criticism of what I wrote, it doesn't really make sense, everyone can personally decide how much they want to spend on avoidable luxuries. But btw, $50 a month means $50 extra you can spend on mortgage payments, which can actually add a couple of thousand dollars to your budget potentially.
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
    Everyone can personally decide how much they want to spend on avoidable luxuries, of course. It just so happens that the "avoidable luxuries" that the overwhelming majority of the population can afford—the clichéd old lattes and avocado toast—are mere rounding errors when compared to the cost of housing that is keeping them from being able to own a home.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    Having been in that situation, with a good salary (3 times the average of the UK) and spending close to 0 in leisure, I can tell you that it’s still impossible to buy a decent house in London even if you give up on all avoidable luxuries, because you need a 160-200K£ deposit, that would require 20-30 years of savings. The average salary in London is 35K£, the average house cost 500K£ and if it doesn’t fall apart and if it’s not in the middle of nowhere, a 2-bed flat cost 600K£. I find extremely dishonest and patronising to suggest that people can’t buy houses because they spend too much on avocados or Netflix. Even if one spent 5000£ a year on these, which is an order of magnitude too high for the average earner, it’s still going to take them 40 years of monastic life to save 200K£. I’m out of that infernal loop only because a few years ago my salary jumped above 250K£ and I’ve made 200-300K£, after tax, in a single year when my employer did its IPO. Let’s not pretend that the average person can buy a half decent family home in a decent part of the UK just by working hard and giving up lattes.
    - cloutchaser 4y ago
      > If you DON'T spend $50 on lattes, then obviously you can't save that money. I did acknowledge that if this doesn't apply to you, then it doesn't apply to you. Yes somewhere like London I imagine this might be true, although looking at the amount of people in lines in coffee shops and lunch places spending £15-20 on lunch, a lot of people it DOES apply to. If you find it impossible, and the math doesn't work, fine. But I think a lot of people use articles like this as an excuse to never be frugal in any way.
      - mmarq 4y ago
        People line up for 15-20£ lunches because they have to, because they have been forced to go back to the office to make their daily sacrifice to Micronus, the petty god of middle management, and to Parasitus, the evil god of real estate. They may live more frugal lives, and feed themselves with close to expiration Tesco sandwiches that cost 0.01£ (why, it’s left as an exercise), but it won’t help them getting out of poverty and renting (which in itself is a form of poverty in a country where tenants can and are routinely evicted for asking repairs). So it’s not impossible to live a more frugal life and save 5£ a day, which is less than 2000£ a year, it’s pointless if the price of the average house increases by 7-8% a year. What is one doing this for? To please the editor of the Daily Telegraph who complains about millennials? The only way out for the individual is to earn more or to enjoy a lottery-like event, such as my company going public. The collective way out will probably require political action, of what kind I don’t know nor I care. But we can’t pretend that the better educated generation in the entire history of mankind can’t buy houses because they can’t budget and spend too much on avocados and takeaways.
dougmwne 4y ago
I think you missed the point. Yes, forgoing discretionary spending will lower your expenses. But for most people, trimming a bit of fat out of their budgets is not going to come close to allowing them to afford a house in their city or plan for retirement. Increasing your income is much more powerful and once you increase it enough, you no longer have to go through life living like a monk. The central economic problem is that wages have been flat and housing, healthcare, and education (expenses that together dwarf discretionary) have been increasing.
cs137 4y ago
Great job of completely missing the fucking point. Also, while lattes may be a luxury from your standpoint--personally, I prefer black coffee--expensive purchases, for white collar workers, are not. You have to play those "status games" or your infinitesimal chances of getting promotions will go straight to zero. It's not always lattes. It could be something else: eating lunch with the popular kids, drinking with the bosses, etc. But you have to do it if you want any chance at all of having a career. Furthermore, you need to take a course in remedial math. To be able to afford a starter house in the U.S. where there are decent jobs, you need to skip about (wait for it) a hundred thousand lattes. That's about 5,000 months (416 years!) of forgone coffee. The life expectancy from age 20 is about 58 years. Wrong; play again. It's funny how Boomers and cappies love to talk about our need to take "personal responsibility" for surviving in the shit-ass world they've left us, but never consider that they should take responsibility (or be held responsible, because that's Bolshevism!) for having made the world the way it is.
- zpeti 4y ago
  If everyone took this advice, then the status games would change, because everyone would be more frugal and it wouldn't be about eating lunch with the popular kids. But because society as a collective has decided on these games, and decided that you need credit cards, and need lattes that cost about $0.10 in raw materials at home, then everyone has to play these games. Most importantly, if everyone refused getting mortgages, house prices would crash. But because mortgages (and low interested by the fed) have made housing more affordable to everyone, they've pushed up prices to where you're back to square one, except you have to pay interest as well as the house's price, rather than waiting until you've saved up the price. This goes back 50-100 years though. Here's an another option: start your own business, so you don't have to play these career games. There are a million options, it's just that they are harder, especially on a personal discipline level, which is not very popular these days.
- sifar 4y ago
  It is not just the $50 latte but what it signifies. That expensive phone plan, car lease, gym membership, subscriptions etc. Together they would represent a few months rent which you would save otherwise. Invest that and in a decade it would matter.

kaybe 4y ago

So you'll have $600 per year. Good luck buying housing on that budget.

sifar 4y ago
An alternative way to look at it is you would need a 12K investment @5% to generate those $600. Now how many such $600 are lurking in your habits. May be that would change your perspective.
cloutchaser 4y ago
It's an example ffs. If that's your criticism of what I wrote, it doesn't really make sense, everyone can personally decide how much they want to spend on avoidable luxuries. But btw, $50 a month means $50 extra you can spend on mortgage payments, which can actually add a couple of thousand dollars to your budget potentially.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  Everyone can personally decide how much they want to spend on avoidable luxuries, of course. It just so happens that the "avoidable luxuries" that the overwhelming majority of the population can afford—the clichéd old lattes and avocado toast—are mere rounding errors when compared to the cost of housing that is keeping them from being able to own a home.
- mmarq 4y ago
  Having been in that situation, with a good salary (3 times the average of the UK) and spending close to 0 in leisure, I can tell you that it’s still impossible to buy a decent house in London even if you give up on all avoidable luxuries, because you need a 160-200K£ deposit, that would require 20-30 years of savings. The average salary in London is 35K£, the average house cost 500K£ and if it doesn’t fall apart and if it’s not in the middle of nowhere, a 2-bed flat cost 600K£. I find extremely dishonest and patronising to suggest that people can’t buy houses because they spend too much on avocados or Netflix. Even if one spent 5000£ a year on these, which is an order of magnitude too high for the average earner, it’s still going to take them 40 years of monastic life to save 200K£. I’m out of that infernal loop only because a few years ago my salary jumped above 250K£ and I’ve made 200-300K£, after tax, in a single year when my employer did its IPO. Let’s not pretend that the average person can buy a half decent family home in a decent part of the UK just by working hard and giving up lattes.
  - cloutchaser 4y ago
    > If you DON'T spend $50 on lattes, then obviously you can't save that money. I did acknowledge that if this doesn't apply to you, then it doesn't apply to you. Yes somewhere like London I imagine this might be true, although looking at the amount of people in lines in coffee shops and lunch places spending £15-20 on lunch, a lot of people it DOES apply to. If you find it impossible, and the math doesn't work, fine. But I think a lot of people use articles like this as an excuse to never be frugal in any way.
    - mmarq 4y ago
      People line up for 15-20£ lunches because they have to, because they have been forced to go back to the office to make their daily sacrifice to Micronus, the petty god of middle management, and to Parasitus, the evil god of real estate. They may live more frugal lives, and feed themselves with close to expiration Tesco sandwiches that cost 0.01£ (why, it’s left as an exercise), but it won’t help them getting out of poverty and renting (which in itself is a form of poverty in a country where tenants can and are routinely evicted for asking repairs). So it’s not impossible to live a more frugal life and save 5£ a day, which is less than 2000£ a year, it’s pointless if the price of the average house increases by 7-8% a year. What is one doing this for? To please the editor of the Daily Telegraph who complains about millennials? The only way out for the individual is to earn more or to enjoy a lottery-like event, such as my company going public. The collective way out will probably require political action, of what kind I don’t know nor I care. But we can’t pretend that the better educated generation in the entire history of mankind can’t buy houses because they can’t budget and spend too much on avocados and takeaways.

dougmwne 4y ago

I think you missed the point. Yes, forgoing discretionary spending will lower your expenses. But for most people, trimming a bit of fat out of their budgets is not going to come close to allowing them to afford a house in their city or plan for retirement. Increasing your income is much more powerful and once you increase it enough, you no longer have to go through life living like a monk. The central economic problem is that wages have been flat and housing, healthcare, and education (expenses that together dwarf discretionary) have been increasing.

cs137 4y ago

Great job of completely missing the fucking point. Also, while lattes may be a luxury from your standpoint--personally, I prefer black coffee--expensive purchases, for white collar workers, are not. You have to play those "status games" or your infinitesimal chances of getting promotions will go straight to zero. It's not always lattes. It could be something else: eating lunch with the popular kids, drinking with the bosses, etc. But you have to do it if you want any chance at all of having a career. Furthermore, you need to take a course in remedial math. To be able to afford a starter house in the U.S. where there are decent jobs, you need to skip about (wait for it) a hundred thousand lattes. That's about 5,000 months (416 years!) of forgone coffee. The life expectancy from age 20 is about 58 years. Wrong; play again. It's funny how Boomers and cappies love to talk about our need to take "personal responsibility" for surviving in the shit-ass world they've left us, but never consider that they should take responsibility (or be held responsible, because that's Bolshevism!) for having made the world the way it is.

zpeti 4y ago
If everyone took this advice, then the status games would change, because everyone would be more frugal and it wouldn't be about eating lunch with the popular kids. But because society as a collective has decided on these games, and decided that you need credit cards, and need lattes that cost about $0.10 in raw materials at home, then everyone has to play these games. Most importantly, if everyone refused getting mortgages, house prices would crash. But because mortgages (and low interested by the fed) have made housing more affordable to everyone, they've pushed up prices to where you're back to square one, except you have to pay interest as well as the house's price, rather than waiting until you've saved up the price. This goes back 50-100 years though. Here's an another option: start your own business, so you don't have to play these career games. There are a million options, it's just that they are harder, especially on a personal discipline level, which is not very popular these days.
sifar 4y ago
It is not just the $50 latte but what it signifies. That expensive phone plan, car lease, gym membership, subscriptions etc. Together they would represent a few months rent which you would save otherwise. Invest that and in a decade it would matter.