In Defense Of The Guy Who Ripped Millenials For Buying ‘Avocado Toast’

So, it’s apparently terrible to tell Millenials to save their money these days.

On Monday, news broke worldwide that an Australian real estate developer, Tim Gurner, had explained that one of the secrets to financial success was saving rather than spending. “When I was buying my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for 19 bucks and four coffees at $4 each,” Gurner explained:

We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high. They want to eat out every day; they want to travel to Europe every year … I think until this generation realizes that the people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property ladder [they won’t get ahead]. You might have to buy an investment property first, you might have to share with mum and dad, you might have to buy with a friend, but you’ve got to get your foot in the door and you’ve got to slowly get up the ladder.

This was a terrible thing to say, apparently: never come between a Millenial and her avocado toast.

But obviously Gurner was talking about the choice by some young people to spend repeatedly on lifestyle rather than saving. He didn’t restrict his comments to the rather silly example of avocado toast — he talked about European vacations, too, which are significantly more expensive.

Naturally, to avoid the implications of Gurner’s correct statement, The New York Times fact-checked him:

The truth is, even if millennials assumed the eating-out habits of baby boomers, it would take around 113 years before they could afford a down payment on a home (assuming a 20 percent down payment on the median price for a home in the United States, $315,000 in March 2017, and a 1 percent yearly yield rate)…. The average price of a single avocado in March was $1.25, according to the Hass Avocado Board. One Twitter user, Nora Biette-Timmons, calculated that a serving of avocado toast cost her about $1.65 — or one-477,896th the average price of a home in Brooklyn.

But does The New York Times have any decent advice for Millenials other than snark about avocados? Of course not. Here’s the fact: everybody is spending more now, but Millenials can’t afford to do so. While The New York Times acknowledges that “all generations of Americans are eating out more now,” for example, it fails to evaluate whether younger people can afford to do so in the way older people can. When we were younger, my wife and I didn’t eat out nearly as much as we do now. We also had a lot less money.

Overall, young people are racking up debt much faster these days. Here’s ABC News from several years ago:

The percentage of students holding at least one credit card in 2001 rose 24 percent since 1998, according to the latest figures from student loan provider Nellie Mae. The median debt level among card-carrying undergraduates rose to $1,770 in 2001 from $1,236 in 2000, an indicator that more students are using their cards regularly and may not be paying off the balances each month.

And here’s CNBC from 2015: “more than half of millenials, people age 18 to 34, reported FICO scores below 670.” Millenials are even “turning to payday loans and pawn shops to put cash in the bank.” Millenials aren’t getting married or buying homes thanks to cost, and they’re not putting money in the stock market. But they are spending money on travel.

Some Millenial money trouble comes from the global financial downturn, of course. But to neglect personal decisionmaking in terms of investing is a mistake. Why wouldn’t investors tell kids to save up?

Because it might hurt their feelings, and suggest that they have agency in their own lives. When I told a group of students in a downtrodden public school that in a free country like America, permanent poverty is a function of making poor financial decisions, the high school principal actually dismissed the students, telling me that too many of their parents were impoverished and thus might feel insulted.

The problem here isn’t loose talk about avocado toast. It’s that people don’t want to hear the truth: their lives are in their hands, and if they don’t like their situations, perhaps they should start by examining their own decisions.