The shouting match broke down along the expected lines. Boomers – including spiritual boomers – loudly agreed with O’Leary’s remarks. If you only spend $2 a day on lunch, they insisted, the resulting $26 a day that you save adds up to $9490 a year; after 5 years, you’ve got the down payment for a $250,000 house. Checkmate, you financially illiterate layabouts!
Zoomers, millennials, and Gen-X replied that $250,000 will get you a leaky shack in rural Arkansas with black mold in the unfinished basement; that by the time you save up the money for the down-payment, that shack will be going for $500,000; that recent immigrants receive government assistance to get onto the property ladder (along with preferential employment) and so do not have to spend years of their lives saving up at all. Disaffected youth (and these days, that is just ‘the youth’) generally heaped scorn on the idea that it’s even possible to save in this economy, or that there’s anything worth saving. “If you live on instant noodles and margarine sandwiches for twenty years, you too, my son, can one day afford a van down by the river.”
