We are the smashed avocado generation. Hear us roar
I get it. Avocado toast is my life. Bu when my husband and I were saving for our house, any avocado toast we ate wasn’t being created by some bearded hipster chef in an overpriced artisan café every day; it was made by me, at home.
Sometimes you have to make sacrifices - whether those are big sacrifices or small ones is up to you. You must decide what is and isn’t important enough for you. If you want to own your own home, then the reality is that today (and yes we can sit around all day lamenting the ease with which our parents snaffled up their first house, but that’s not going to change the mortgage rates in 2016) it’s not easy - and it’s going to take hard work.
While I cringe at much of what Bernard Salt says (not to mention the way he said it), part of me can’t help but feel like there is a bigger picture message here.
The fact is, it's tough out there. I know. I’ve been through the saving, the house-hunting, the auction and then subsequent reality of ‘Sh*t, we got the house, not we actually have to pay it off’. And the saving doesn’t end when the auctioneer's hammer goes down; owning a house is a big responsibility, and one that you’re reminded of every month when the mortgage bill arrives.
But when I think about conversations I have with friends, often over said overpriced servings of avocado toast, about how they’ll never afford a home in a suburb in which they want to live.... as they sit there decked out in designer clothes that they got from the second overseas holiday they’ve been on this year… well, I can see where Salt is coming from.
I get it, I love avocado toast, designer clothes and travel as much as anyone – and I agree that there's more to life than owning your own home. So if you decide that home ownership is not for you, and a great lifestyle is, then all power to you. But it’s often said that the problem with Gen Y is that we want it all and we want it now. So maybe, just maybe, we need to make some choices.
Ask yourself, would you give up the avocado toast to own your own home? If the answer is a HELL NO, then that’s great, that’s your choice. But if the answer is yes, then maybe this is all a little bit of food for thought…
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