Smashed Avocado Is Not Keeping Us From Home Ownership

Photo credit: Katherine Lim, CC BY 2.0.

When I wrote, yesterday, about attending a Woman2Woman webinar on joy-based spending, Billfolder Emily Friedel reminded me of a story that I would be remiss not to share with the whole group.

Here’s what happened: a columnist named Bernard Salt wrote a piece for The Australian titled “Moralisers, we need you!”

I belong to a secret society and I am looking for new recruits. It’s a sect known as the Middle-Aged Moralisers.

[…]

I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn’t they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.

There. I’ve said it. I have said what every secret middle-aged moraliser has thought but has never had the courage to verbalise.

I already want to smash avocado into my screen, and I can’t because I need this screen for my job. So I’ll let the rest of the internet get salty with Bernard instead.

Columnist causes outrage over smashed avocado on five-grain toast

Additionally, according to a recent study, in 1988 people only needed to save 32 per cent of their disposable income to buy a home.

Today, young people today need to put away 134 per cent of theirs if they have any hope of getting a foot in the door of the property market.

One $22 smashed avocado toast a week adds up to $1,114, a far cry from how much is really needed to buy a home.

I Stopped Eating Smashed Avocado And Now I Own A Castle

One doesn’t have to be a financial wizard to calculate that $22 a week put aside into a Dollarmites bank account would quickly amount to a deposit for a house. And that is exactly what I did.

As soon as I stopped eating avocado on toast, my life changed — I had so much extra money for rent, bills, travel costs and health insurance!

If you want even more salt on your avocado, Mashable has a series of tweets from Millennials who understand that saving $22 a week will make them eligible for home ownership in 175 years.

No, baby boomers, millennials aren’t poor because they eat smashed avocado


Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.

Comments