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Heck mine quintupled in 6 months at the last place i rented
I’m so lucky to live with my parents at 21 because if this were me I would genuinely choose to be homeless. I’ll rent a PO box to use as my address for work and just bum homeless shelters.
I count my blessings every day i am here because i have been homeless and it is no joke. You have to be very strong willed to survive it even with help. I respect your choice but could not go through it again
I literally had avocado toast today. You know what made me start? I did the math, and avocado toast costs about as much as a bowl of cereal. They’ve been gradually hiking the price of all the essential items like cereal and milk, but the luxury goods haven’t gone up as much. There’s no such thing as “cutting corners and saving up” anymore.
I noticed healthier food getting cheaper than manufactured “food” products years ago. Everyone talks about McDonald’s in 2024, but nobody remembers the discomfort around a $6 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in 2014.
…well there’s always rice-and-beans but with the way finance, insurance, and real estate are going these days you’ll need rice-and-beans just to survive, not to save up…
Avocados are $3 each here and half the time they’re bad. Must be nice living somewhere with affordable avocados.
Even with avocados at $1 each it’s still way more expensive than a bowl of cereal. Unless you buy brand name cereal at MSRP or something.
The price of cereal shot up in the last year, heh.
Do you use an entire avocado for your toast?
Where I live it’s $5 a gallon for milk (let’s assume 1/10 gallon for breakfast cereal so $0.50 per bowl)
Then it’s like $1.00 /100g of cereal, so you’re probably looking at $1.50 for a bowl of cheerios.
Where I live I can get avocados for $1.20 each and a loaf of bread for $4.50 (14 slices?) so if I use half an avocado for my slice of toast that’s less than $1.
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What a rich guy mindset, have you tried skipping meals and save up for rent? Tip your landlords.
If you make the bread at home it’ll taste even better.
I switched from cereal to oatmeal to Red Mills hot cereal. The hot cereal is great, I add honey and it’s very nice.
The bit about avocado toast is not making one for yourself at home for $2. It’s about going out to eat for every meal and ordering an overpriced item at a hipster brunch bar in a liberal city. It has nothing to do with the fact that a piece of bread and an avocado are fairly cheap on their own.
Not defending the out of touch piece of shit that said it, just trying to give context.
So it’s okay to do in a conservative city?
Costs and nutrition estimates
- milk - $3-3.50/gallon
- avocado - $1-1.50/ea
- cereal - $0.10-0.20/oz @ Costco - so I guess $0.35-0.70/100g?
- bread - $2.50/loaf, 22 slices per loaf
The internet tells me that 125ml milk to 30g cereal is the proper ratio. In freedom units, that’s ~30 servings per gallon or $0.10 of milk per bowl, and 30g is a little over an ounce, so $0.10-0.20 cereal per serving, leading to about $0.20-0.30 per serving. For avocado toast, a slice is about $0.11-0.12, so avocado toast is about $0.61-0.87.
Looking at nutrition (taken from MyFitnessPal and Walmart websites):
- 125ml whole milk - 81 calories, 5g fat, 5g protein
- 30g honey nut cheerios - 113 calories, 2g fat, 3g protein, 2g fiber
- 1 slice whole wheat bread - 60 calories, 1g fat, 3g protein, 1g fiber
- 1/2 avocado - 117 calories, 11g fat, 1g protein, 5g fiber
In total for my area, for an average serving:
- cereal - 194 calories; 7g fat, 8g protein, 2g fiber
- avocado toast - 177 calories, 12g fat, 4g protein, 6g fiber
Normalizing for cost per calorie in my area, I get:
- cereal (whole milk, honey nut cheerios) - $0.10-0.15/100 calories
- avocado toast (whole wheat bread, medium sized avocado) - $0.34-0.49/100 calories
In other words, avocado toast is something like 2-5x more expensive than cereal, depending on where in that range your meal falls. If you’re buying regularly priced cereal (more like $0.20-0.25) and if milk is more expensive in your area, then it’s a lot more competitive, but still cheaper than avocado toast (something like half the price).
That said, neither is a particularly expensive meal, and you’re not poor because you’re eating avocado toast. However, if everything you do is 2-5x more expensive than alternatives, then we have an issue.
You’re also forgetting that cereals contain almost no vitamins or fiber, but avocado does. So, to make up for it, you should eat a salad to your cereals. Then calculate the price again. You will find (I guess) that avocado can compete with cereals+salad.
Well, a multivitamin costs a few cents…
But yes, cereal is certainly less healthy than avocado toast, but it doesn’t really need to be if the rest of your diet makes up for it. Also, there are also breakfast cereals with higher fiber and vitamin content (e.g. most granolas), and oatmeal has 4g fiber in a 140 calorie serving and is cheaper still than most breakfast cereals.
My point here isn’t to decide which is the best option for your breakfast, but to challenge the idea that avocado toast is somehow about the same price as breakfast cereal. There are a lot of options for breakfast that can fit into a balanced diet. The important thing is to find something you like that supports a healthy lifestyle and fits into your budget, and there are a lot of options to get there.
…in `98 i was paying $500 to rent a 650sf one-bedroom apartment at $30k salary; in 2008 i was paying $750 to rent a 650sf one-bedroom apartment at $45k salary; in 2018 i was paying $1250 mortgage on a 1500sf house at $85k salary: today i pay that same $1250 mortage at $105k salary and thank god i managed to save that down payment within twenty years, before the real estate speculators completely overran my local market…
…not sure what that illustrates other than 2024 is brutally expensive relative to pay: we bought three nectarines last night for six dollars at the local discount grocer, which would have cost less than a dollar thirty years ago…
Where I live I’m looking at a possible $1600 mortgage for a 750sq ft. apartment if I live in a shitty part of town where I may need to replace a window due to stray bullets at some point.
Where I live 2K is at the low end for a 400sf studio (I am in a big city where rent is particularly high though).
…i don’t doubt it: when i left the bay area for cheaper lands twenty years ago, 650sf apartments were going for $1600 and i’m sure prices have only inflated since…my data points are all the cheap minima on my housing curve over the past
threefour decades…edit: …f*ck, i forgot how old i am; it happens on the north end of the century mark…
Where I am $1300 gets you the luxury of living in someone’s garage which is what I’m currently doing, not even remotely close to a city… Utilities not included of course.
In my area:
- 2014 - 2 br apartment, 500 sq ft for $650/month
- 2015 - bought 2400 sq ft, 4br house; mortgage ~$1200
- 2024 - checked Zillow, and a comparable apartment is $1.2-1.3k
- 2024 - if I bought my house today at my same rate, my mortgage would be ~$2700
So, my mortgage is currently cheaper than the apartment I used to rent that was 1/4 the size with 1/2 the bedrooms, and my house would cost more than twice what it would if I bought with today’s valuations. So over 10 years, both have approximately doubled. Regular inflation would put that instead at $860 rent and $1560 mortgage.
And we’re far from the hardest hit area in the country, housing these days is just nuts.
Even being homeless got more expensive.
They won’t be homeless for long. They’ll be living in a for-profit prison soon. 'Murica.
4x in 10 years where I live. I feel like Mr. Krabs in that blurry meme
Been living with my parents for almost two years again. Thought about renovating a connex as a living space for breakfast just yesterday. Might snack on my last marbles tonight.
I don’t believe average rent was $500 in 1990. In 1995 I was paying $450 per month to sleep on a couch in someone’s house. I eventually saved enough for all of the moving expenses and managed to get a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in a terrible part of town for $485. When I found a roommate I moved to a better part of town and our two bedroom apartment was $700 per month. That was like 1996. This was all in a fairly affordable city. So pardon my suspicion, but I think this post is creating a rosier past than the one we lived through. Also, minimum wage was $4.25 an hour everywhere. Now it’s $15-$20 per hour in most major cities. Overall I think the poor are making more comparatively, but the middle class are worse off, and it’s a shrinking economic status group.
Quick Google for the Census Bureau only turns up median rather than mean:
Median is probably a better value here since it’s going to reduce outlier effects.
Looks to me that median rent in most states in 1990 was closer to $300-400 per month than $500.
$620 for California, which is where I was. I guess some parts of the country are way cheaper, even though I was in a city that was considered affordable in California.
My 2007 apartment was $475. It is now $1,485.
Rents were fairlyish stable until the housing market crash.
That apartment was $790 in 2010. The rent hike was a long time ago, and since then it has just more or less been following inflation/gouging patterns seen elsewhere.
I will acknowledge that shit went crazy after covid too. My rent went up 22% in two years, and house prices were going up hundreds of thousands of dollars within a year.
Yeah that’s true. I was lucky enough to have gotten a mortgage right before covid so I haven’t personal experience on rent hikes as a result, I recognize.
It finally pushed us to get serious about buying, and we bought a home at the end of last year. We were feeling like we’d never be able to afford a house, but we made it happen! We had to move an hour outside of the city, but we still made it happen.
Let’s do the math. At a nice brunch place, avocado toast costs $14.
To make up for the $1,500 increase in rent, you would need to eat 3-4 fancy avocado toasts per day, for an average of 107 avocado toasts per month.
Given these numbers we can assume that you exclusively eat avocado toasts at restaurants for all sustenance. This would negate the need for a grocery budget, which usually trends at about $300/month, giving you the budget for an additional 21 avocado toasts per month, for a guaranteed minimum of 4 toasts per day (128 per month).
So as long as you’re consuming avocado toast below this level, it’s probably not the cause of your financial issues.
You forgot to account for lattes, which are a critical part of the equation.
Median income for a single worker in the USA in 2024 is so far $59,228 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In large cities it’s significantly higher. Rent and property values are definitely out control though. There wasn’t nearly enough housing built after '08. I feel even worse for our neighbors to the north.
My rent has doubled since the last time we met
I mean… yeah? Kinda late to the party though - this has been true for a minute now…
This is hard to read after decades of useful idiots telling me it’s just a blip and everything is OK.
Ah, but Real Income is up 0.6% over the last fiscal cycle, so why are you complaining?
Judging by the massive price hikes right next to being told that Inflation is much lower percentage-wise than the price increases most people are experiencing, that Official Real Income growth number is based on doing the Maths with an Official Inflation that hugelly underreports real inflation.
Do the Maths with an Inflation figure that’s not as bullshit as the current Official one and you get negative Real Income Growth.
Similarly for GDP Growth, by the way: Official Inflation numbers which understate the real inflation mathematically yield higher Official GDP Growth numbers.
There are very big political reasons to fiddle with the Inflation reporting to make it seem lower because it boosts up several important Economic figures without fiddling with those directly, and the pressure from politicians to do so is probably manyfold the normal in an election year.
We need the Rent Is Too Damn High guy to be in high political office to get this shit under control.
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Pitchforks and bottles with rags in the top.
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At this point we need somebody who will just come out and say it: it’s everyone else versus landlords.
Fuck them. You cant outsource an apartment building to China. Make their lives hell and if they decide being a landlord isn’t worth it and sell their property at a loss then everyone is better off for it
What we need is more housing, and that means looser zoning, which means fighting the NIMBYs. I would love to see mixed zoning become a more common thing in the US (and everywhere TBH).
Eh, McMillan is a republican who endorsed Trump. We don’t need him.
We want the legend, rather than the man, it would seem
And when Bill Shorten proposed to change the tax system to slow down speculative capital gains that are driving house prices, the people voted for Robodebt Scotty Morrison.
My rent has gone up 3.4x in the last 14 years. 2010 I was paying roughly $800/mo for a three bedroom house, now I’m paying roughly $2700 for a smaller 3 bedroom apartment.
