Millennial compares how far her income goes to her parents’ and is floored

In August 2022, inflation rates were skyrocketing as a report estimated that the average cost of raising a kid through high school was more than $300,000. This past August saw those numbers increase even more (if that’s even possible) as the Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that U.S. consumer prices grew by 3.7% since a year ago.

It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around just how impactful that number is, but a millennial recently went viral for painting a picture of her life experience, and the story is pretty jarring.

“My parents are retired public school teachers…and have been teachers their whole lives,” she explained in a video while sitting on a porch swing. “I want you to think about what life looks like for a household of two public school teachers with two kids today. What does their house look like? What’s their finances look like?”

She has two parents, both public school teachers, and points out what they were able to afford in the 1990s.

Compared to what the typical incomes are today and the cost of housing, there is just no comparison. The massive inflation of the real estate market (hard assets)… pic.twitter.com/0dNYi53WnR

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) October 3, 2023

Chances are, your mind probably goes to a modest suburban house in a middle-class neighborhood. Well, that’s not where she grew up. “This was my parents’ situation as two public school teachers,” she continued, panning the camera to reveal a lakeside view. “This is where I grew up, on a lake, with a boat. Not a super fancy house, but a three-bedroom house. There are currently two houses for sale on this lake. One is $530,000 and the other is $1.2 million on the lake my parents moved on to in the ’90s as two public school teachers with two children. They never had side hustles, they never had summer jobs.”

She then spoke about how far her income goes compared to her parents’, and it’s even more eye-opening. “My fiancé and I now make combined what my parents made when I was in high school, decades into their teaching careers,” she explained. “Our apartment, when it rains on the outside, it rains on the inside. It’s enraging and unfathomable thinking about the world that people older than us got to live in because no one ever gets to live like this with normal jobs ever again.”

This is pretty gut-wrenching for any middle-class parent of two, but also probably not all too surprising. Are we actually getting poorer? That’s hard to say, but it’s crystal clear that the dollar went a lot further 30 years ago than it does today.