Boomers laugh at millennials for eating avocado on toast.
It’s not that funny. I mean avocado is bloody healthy. And actually, most millennials like me don’t go to cafes and eat bottomless plates of avocado on toast. Cafes don’t have all-you-can-eat buffet options like Sizzler did, you know.
Millennials don’t really worship the whole get-rich-quick idea. When we think of rich, what we mean is free. Free from the shackles of a cubicle. Free to say and do whatever we want. Free to spend our time how we please.
Millennials get drunk on the idea of free time, not $100 bills.
I’ve spent a lot of this year talking to my parent’s boomer generation about money. I wanted to understand whether they think the world has changed, since 2020 turned our financial system upside down and enabled trillions of dollars to be created out of thin air to fund one of the most difficult times in human history.
Stay away from the bricks of infatuation
Millennials are tired of real estate. It’s literally the last thing in the world we want to own. It requires a great big deposit to get the loan, and a lifetime of debt that keeps us awake at night.
The digital nomad movement has nothing to do with selfies on the beach. Digital nomads are quietly protesting against stupidly high real estate. So they travel around the world to the cheap places my parent’s generation hasn’t been able to hype up and cause people to over-invest in. Makes sense.
My parent’s generation gets all warm and moist when they think about real estate. The thought of a floor plan complete with open-plan living just gets their blood pumping. They’re romantic about real estate. Their love affair has made housing affordability screwed for us millennial normies.
Combine the real estate lovefest with traditional banking that doesn’t understand freelancing, side hustles, the gig economy, contracting and consulting, and you’ll see why millennials hate real estate even more.
I spent a lifetime in banking. If I walk up to their marble foyer right now and ask for a loan as a writer, they’ll literally laugh at me. Writing online isn’t a job to them. Selling NFTs isn’t an income to them. Online courses are a fad to them. Crypto is a joke that will blow up to them.
Everything I currently do in my life to earn a living will likely be ignored. They won’t trust me to pay back a real estate loan, even though I probably could if I wanted their dirty cocaine-stained money.
Now you can see why we millennials hate real estate. Prices are artificially too high compared to the typical paycheck, and the dinosaur banks treat us like bums because we make money on the internet.
We know how to get rich: don’t fall in love with real estate. Don’t own hundreds of investment properties that take homes away from people that need them. Don’t pile up huge amounts of debt for no good reason.
We know how to get rich: live.
Stay away from leather recliners on wheels
My parent’s generation talks about people by introducing what car they drive.
“Ohhh, Marty is the guy down the street. You know the one darling. The one with the bright red C-Class Mercedes.”
A luxury car is an overpriced leather reclining couch on four rubber wheels. You can’t get rich enough to own your time when you buy an expensive piece of junk that drops enormously in value the minute the car salesman gets his huge commission and allows you to drive it out the glass doors with your free bottle of champaign, giant red ribbon on the bonnet, and the Mercedes Benz umbrella for suckers.
Millennials don’t care about cars because they make us poor. We used Uber before we learned about Travis. Then we used a more respectable Lyft. Now we’re in love with blockchain and are considering moving to user-owned rideshare companies like Arcade City and Drife, so we can cut out the middle man.
What brand of metal we get into to get to our destination doesn’t really matter. Most of the journey is spent on our phone anyway, not waving out the window to strangers like the Queen of England.
Stay away from fashion status
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t exactly the guy from the tv show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He’ll take a peek at your data, and joke about privacy. His employees may look up your dating history to qualify their chances of a good time. But Zuckerberg did one thing right.
This:
Zucks set the trend for millennials to stop playing fashion status games. All the changing of outfits for no good reason costs a lot of money. Us millennials have become the grey shirt army.
Stay away from instagram food unicorns
Fine dining in my parent’s generation is huge. They don’t understand that the grilled filet mignon is just beef with sauce. It’s enhanced with lots of salt. Oil is often added to speak to our inner caveman/cavewoman. And those naughty sauces that taste so good are just injected with tonnes of sugar. Voila.
Our parents love fine dining restaurants. They want to tell the neighbors where they went on a Saturday night to eat a dead carcass. The food is assembled nicely on the plate, not for eating pleasure, but so it can be photographed by an army of dumbphones and be plastered up on Instagram for the whole world to see.
Hands up who has ever gone back through their photo library and re-looked at photos of food? Not me. Ever.
Fancy plating, oil, and salt cost a fortune. Millennials have figured out fine dining is window dressing on food they can get anywhere or make at home.
Rethink the rotten deal of a savings account
My parent’s generation preached the need to have a savings account. Yeahhh, right. That was when interest on a savings account was 6%. Now I get 0.3% on my savings account if I’m lucky.
Us millennials are not falling for one of the greatest scams in history. The bank gets rich. We get the scraps that inflation eats while we sleep. Companies like BlockFi, Coinbase, and Celsius tried to save us from our savings accounts.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tried to defend millennials. The SEC in America seeks to prevent his company from taking crypto savings from millennials and lending them out to borrowers in return for a respectable rate of interest. The dinosaurs that run the SEC are deeming this type of product as a security to protect the legacy banks.
You can’t fool us millennials anymore. We know savings accounts make us poor by design. 0.3% doesn’t cut it anymore. We will find a way to use crypto to replace this badly designed product, just you wait.
Stay away from a workplace you’re forced to live next to
The micromanaging culture our parents come from wants us to live next to an office. This is so we can return to work and be under their watchful eye.
No thank you amigo. A workplace tied to a postcode means one thing: high housing costs. An office you have to live next to, that doesn’t require a 3-4 hour commute every day, wastes money.
We know we can get richer when we choose a job that doesn’t care where we do Zoom calls from.
The pandemic did one favor for millennials: Remote work forever.
Takeaway
Getting rich isn’t about making bucketloads of money. It’s about living differently and changing the rules of society.
Cars, fashion, offices, real estate, instagram food, and savings accounts have eaten away at the foundations of freedom. Millennials are not falling for these lies any longer. We get richer by challenging all the things we supposedly need money for in the first place.
The truth is, we don’t need that much. That’s why we’re not following what our boomer parents did anymore.
Lots of love, millennials.
This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
