One thing it doens't do is account for cost of living for a given city. Sure it looks nice that NYC, SF is higher than everyone else but I'm sure there's a very large group living in LCL areas that have far less stress compared to the bigger cities when it comes to budgeting.
There is a small group of people who might benefit from being in a LCL area, its people with remote jobs and no kids. If you need to find work locally LCL doesn't help and is actually worse, and if you have kids the schools in these areas inevitably push you back to HCL sooner or later.
Growing up in a LCL area, there are few jobs, and young people tend to leave for opportunities. The ones doing ok are retired or working a government job.
I'm in Austin and money goes seriously far compared to the seven cities above it. There's a 2015-built home on Zillow for $199,000 1346 sq ft just 2 miles from the Tesla factory.
I find this to be an incredibly irritating way to present this data. Why the obsession with finding out where I fall in the distribution? Why prompt me to sign up for email? Do you have anything to say, or is this like a BuzzFeed quiz?
If the source is Fed SCF then I think it's _supposed_ to include student loans, retirement accounts, real estate, etc.
It might be worth just downloading the data from the Fed yourself and having the coding harness of your choice build whatever data visualization you want:
Households is an interesting metric to choose.
If fewer people get married, then average household would have fewer people.
But I don't see data for 2022 on the page?
I searched for "2022" and found nothing?
What makes it odd to me is that real median incomes for both individuals and households rose 6.2% over that period. That includes all people, but what I can find specifically on younger people is even more optimistic.
I suppose it’s almost exactly the right metric if you want to look at affordability of houses. Almost since a bigger household needs a bigger house/flat but only up to a point, a young couple needs barely more space than a young single person occupying their own flat.
This is a generic comment of course, but anyone else feeling immediate distrust when data is presented in an obvious vibe design (I have "built" sites with that exact font combo and general vibe ffs). Ideally one should distrust any data on random websites to begin with, but at least my human psychology deducted many extra points here.
Thanks for sharing the link. What I get from all that data is that the "households under age 35 from 2022-2025" was chosen specifically for a narrative, not because it is particularly interesting on it's own. There's lots of interesting moves in the data well beyond that one narrowly focused metric.
Yeah, personally I would be shocked if this wasn't like botted or something to make it onto the front-page. It's not much further from blogspam in how little effort has been put into presenting this particular page. Just head over to the home page and behold the default Claude design and ridiculous $150/yr plan haha.
And I'm not even sure where the part is on the site detailing this '23% fall' mentioned in the title is. Cause there certainly isn't any historical data provided on the page...
At least a blog post (potentially) contains original thought or analysis . This site on the other hand is basically rehashing the same content as the government source. It could have been replaced with a link and the only thing we would have lost was the italics and beige background
>Those "stock market lines" offer an excellent prediction of future inflation
And that prediction would have been dead wrong for much of the past 4 decades, except for the post pandemic inflation surge, but that's the exception that proves the rule. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The median is actually surprisingly high. How did someone who is in their early 30s and has been in the workforce for only about 10 years and presumably has university debt, manage to accumulate $68k?
That's $7k per year, which they have to save from the surplus after paying their rents, groceries, healthcare, university debts and everything else.
The median wage for an adult 24-35 who has a college degree is $84k-91k [1] and around 40% of 30 year old have college degrees. If your making 90k you can even save 7k a year in HCOL places like NYC and Boston if you live well below your means. I.e. lots of people would just use that disposable income on traveling/ eating out/ concerts etc but if your a homebody and live with an SO or don't mind commuting and cooking most of your food 90k goes quite far with no kids.
if you grind... live well below... not below, not without extravagancies... well below..., don't travel, don't eat, no avocado toasts, have two works, no wife, no kids... burn the eff out....
THEN it will go quite far
quite far to teach you you have been played out of your youth and now you are poor
I found sad, that someone on their early 30, on the pinacle of their capabilities and the pinacle of their "I'll grind until I get <insert capitalism goal here>" and then burnout have "only" $68k to know figure out what to do... in the usa... if you don't have a place to live but you have a car you can still do things, the other way around you can't, 95% of the time you need a car... and if you have a health issue you will start bleeding money really fast... there is no safety net...
And I say only because it's a lot of money, and it's not a lot of money... if you have to pay rent, or mortgage payments, or car payments... car will be reposesed, credit score will go south really fast, and everything is tied to the credit score, so they know how low they can drop the ball and you will still accept because you are in need.
I want you to remember, the american dream... one person working as a mail man can bring food to the table, pay the mortgage while the wife raise the kids and kids go to school, you retire 40 years later with social security giving you enough for the basics...
Then this is for someone with university debt... so this is the case for someone with a title... what's the situation for the other unlucky 95% of america?
It's not $7k per year, because that's not how investing works. Even given that, for young people who don't have a lot of fixed expenses besides student loans it's not hard at all for people with a professional salary to save that much per year.
The US Census Bureau says 49.2% of adults 30-34 are homeowners in the US, so clearly many people are figuring out how to save and invest.
I don't see the headline claim in the linked page. Also seems implausible that net worth would drop that much over a 3 year period when stock markets are rising.
the economy is essentially completely broken at this point and the youth are getting angrier and more checked-out. i think recent events in france are indicative of the future for most western nations in the next few years, especially as things continue to collapse and governments realise they cannot just keep kicking the debt-can down the road.
The interesting thing is how unanimous it is. The zoomers on the left and right disagree on just about everything, except they both agree that radical change needs to happen. Maybe the more moderate zoomers would disagree, but I wonder how many would even identify as such by now.
I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen in the future, but I'm sure that it's going to be wildly different from the current status quo in a number of countries.
If I think about why these differences show up across generations, in the end what matters seems to be whether or not you can be at the forefront of a new field in a new era's industry. In the case of today's younger generation, there simply isn't such a new industry.
But this site looks like GPT made it, doesn't it? I can see GPT's characteristic green button UI and beige color scheme. GPT 6.1 tends to use a green-toned UI.
I was going to say it was made by Claude, but only because the screenshot of the dashboard has the users name in unnecessary italics, which to me is 100% a giveaway that it's Claude.
What do you mean there’s no frontier industry? ML, infra, robotics, and even space all fall into this category. Not to mention medicine and biotech are starting to pick up.
To start with, I don't really know about AI, but I have worked in robotics, so I'll speak from that. There are cases where it's ambiguous to call something an emerging business. In fact, this technology is more than 20 years old, and existing companies have already staked out the market. So, apart from space, the industries you mentioned actually have quite a long history.(To be precise, it wasn't the robotics research field—I built my career specializing in installing robots and getting them running in factories)
What I mean by an emerging industry is one that requires little capital and has few entrenched players—in the end, an industry where new entrants can compete with small initial capital. That's how I'd redefine it.
Because in the IT boom era, there were many technological opportunities. The boss who hired me was one example. But in the case of industrial robot manufacturing, the existing hardware supply chain is, by and large, the one investing.
In the end, what I want to say comes down to this: there are fewer industries open to new entrants.
Because in the IT boom and the construction boom, there were markets that needed less capital than you'd think in the early days. In subcontracting, for instance, you could enter with relatively little capital. But in today's technologically advanced industries, initial capital requirements are far higher. So in the past, even within the same category of industry, there clearly existed sub-markets you could participate in with comparatively little initial capital.
For example, in the old IT industry, my seniors 20 years ago said it took surprisingly little capital. But today's market isn't like that. I think this is a problem that arises as industries become more advanced.
There's a paper I read some time ago arguing that as an industry becomes more advanced, the knowledge and resources required to make a product increase.[1]
[1]https://www.nber.org/papers/w27787
One thing it doens't do is account for cost of living for a given city. Sure it looks nice that NYC, SF is higher than everyone else but I'm sure there's a very large group living in LCL areas that have far less stress compared to the bigger cities when it comes to budgeting.
There is a small group of people who might benefit from being in a LCL area, its people with remote jobs and no kids. If you need to find work locally LCL doesn't help and is actually worse, and if you have kids the schools in these areas inevitably push you back to HCL sooner or later.
Growing up in a LCL area, there are few jobs, and young people tend to leave for opportunities. The ones doing ok are retired or working a government job.
I'm in Austin and money goes seriously far compared to the seven cities above it. There's a 2015-built home on Zillow for $199,000 1346 sq ft just 2 miles from the Tesla factory.
I find this to be an incredibly irritating way to present this data. Why the obsession with finding out where I fall in the distribution? Why prompt me to sign up for email? Do you have anything to say, or is this like a BuzzFeed quiz?
Are student loans excluded from this data? Can't imagine that the 10% line is only at -$10k in that scenario.
If the source is Fed SCF then I think it's _supposed_ to include student loans, retirement accounts, real estate, etc.
It might be worth just downloading the data from the Fed yourself and having the coding harness of your choice build whatever data visualization you want:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
it should be, net worth is assets minus debt
Households is an interesting metric to choose. If fewer people get married, then average household would have fewer people.
But I don't see data for 2022 on the page? I searched for "2022" and found nothing?
What makes it odd to me is that real median incomes for both individuals and households rose 6.2% over that period. That includes all people, but what I can find specifically on younger people is even more optimistic.
https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomer...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Edit: someone linked the data below. Seems like 2022 was an outlier. All numbers in 2025 dollars. 2019 17.8k 2022 42.7k 2025 32.8k
So from 2019 to 2025, median net wealth for people under 35 increased by 84%.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
I suppose it’s almost exactly the right metric if you want to look at affordability of houses. Almost since a bigger household needs a bigger house/flat but only up to a point, a young couple needs barely more space than a young single person occupying their own flat.
lol. With the WFH shit a young couple needs MORE space than a single person. You can’t both work out of the one bedroom.
This is a generic comment of course, but anyone else feeling immediate distrust when data is presented in an obvious vibe design (I have "built" sites with that exact font combo and general vibe ffs). Ideally one should distrust any data on random websites to begin with, but at least my human psychology deducted many extra points here.
Yep. The source data is here in case it's of interest to anyone
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
Thanks for sharing the link. What I get from all that data is that the "households under age 35 from 2022-2025" was chosen specifically for a narrative, not because it is particularly interesting on it's own. There's lots of interesting moves in the data well beyond that one narrowly focused metric.
Yeah, personally I would be shocked if this wasn't like botted or something to make it onto the front-page. It's not much further from blogspam in how little effort has been put into presenting this particular page. Just head over to the home page and behold the default Claude design and ridiculous $150/yr plan haha.
And I'm not even sure where the part is on the site detailing this '23% fall' mentioned in the title is. Cause there certainly isn't any historical data provided on the page...
I think data is fine, especially since the LLM will go to great lengths to site it's sources. Blog posts on the otherhand...
At least a blog post (potentially) contains original thought or analysis . This site on the other hand is basically rehashing the same content as the government source. It could have been replaced with a link and the only thing we would have lost was the italics and beige background
But the stock market lines keep going up...
Those "stock market lines" offer an excellent prediction of future inflation, not your net worth.
>Those "stock market lines" offer an excellent prediction of future inflation
And that prediction would have been dead wrong for much of the past 4 decades, except for the post pandemic inflation surge, but that's the exception that proves the rule. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
"the Dow is over 50K!"
More musically, featuring celebrity singer Pam Bondi and Autotune:
The Dow, the Dow right now
Is over fifty thou
I don't know why you're laughing
That's what we should be talking abou
The Dow, the Dow right now
S&P is almost seven thou
The American people need to know this,
Need to know, how is the Dow?
The median is actually surprisingly high. How did someone who is in their early 30s and has been in the workforce for only about 10 years and presumably has university debt, manage to accumulate $68k?
That's $7k per year, which they have to save from the surplus after paying their rents, groceries, healthcare, university debts and everything else.
The median wage for an adult 24-35 who has a college degree is $84k-91k [1] and around 40% of 30 year old have college degrees. If your making 90k you can even save 7k a year in HCOL places like NYC and Boston if you live well below your means. I.e. lots of people would just use that disposable income on traveling/ eating out/ concerts etc but if your a homebody and live with an SO or don't mind commuting and cooking most of your food 90k goes quite far with no kids.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-by-...
if you grind... live well below... not below, not without extravagancies... well below..., don't travel, don't eat, no avocado toasts, have two works, no wife, no kids... burn the eff out....
THEN it will go quite far
quite far to teach you you have been played out of your youth and now you are poor
I had a net worth of over $200k when I was 34 and making like ~$20/hr. Mostly from Bitcoin
I found sad, that someone on their early 30, on the pinacle of their capabilities and the pinacle of their "I'll grind until I get <insert capitalism goal here>" and then burnout have "only" $68k to know figure out what to do... in the usa... if you don't have a place to live but you have a car you can still do things, the other way around you can't, 95% of the time you need a car... and if you have a health issue you will start bleeding money really fast... there is no safety net...
And I say only because it's a lot of money, and it's not a lot of money... if you have to pay rent, or mortgage payments, or car payments... car will be reposesed, credit score will go south really fast, and everything is tied to the credit score, so they know how low they can drop the ball and you will still accept because you are in need.
I want you to remember, the american dream... one person working as a mail man can bring food to the table, pay the mortgage while the wife raise the kids and kids go to school, you retire 40 years later with social security giving you enough for the basics...
Then this is for someone with university debt... so this is the case for someone with a title... what's the situation for the other unlucky 95% of america?
I'm guessing car ownership counts for a lot considering how universal it is in the US
Most of that is likely retirement savings. That's 3.5k per year if you have employee match.
It's not $7k per year, because that's not how investing works. Even given that, for young people who don't have a lot of fixed expenses besides student loans it's not hard at all for people with a professional salary to save that much per year.
The US Census Bureau says 49.2% of adults 30-34 are homeowners in the US, so clearly many people are figuring out how to save and invest.
That seems a bit unbelievable to me, mind linking the source? I believe the trend in home ownership at this age is downward, in any case.
I don't see the headline claim in the linked page. Also seems implausible that net worth would drop that much over a 3 year period when stock markets are rising.
Most young people don't have much in the way of stocks, so, that's not relevant to them?
Some of us put money into Terra, Atom, and other blockchains that either failed spectacularly or just kind of faded into irrelevance.
Ugh. "This page is the cohort. An account puts you on it."
the economy is essentially completely broken at this point and the youth are getting angrier and more checked-out. i think recent events in france are indicative of the future for most western nations in the next few years, especially as things continue to collapse and governments realise they cannot just keep kicking the debt-can down the road.
The interesting thing is how unanimous it is. The zoomers on the left and right disagree on just about everything, except they both agree that radical change needs to happen. Maybe the more moderate zoomers would disagree, but I wonder how many would even identify as such by now.
I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen in the future, but I'm sure that it's going to be wildly different from the current status quo in a number of countries.
If I think about why these differences show up across generations, in the end what matters seems to be whether or not you can be at the forefront of a new field in a new era's industry. In the case of today's younger generation, there simply isn't such a new industry.
But this site looks like GPT made it, doesn't it? I can see GPT's characteristic green button UI and beige color scheme. GPT 6.1 tends to use a green-toned UI.
I was going to say it was made by Claude, but only because the screenshot of the dashboard has the users name in unnecessary italics, which to me is 100% a giveaway that it's Claude.
What do you mean there’s no frontier industry? ML, infra, robotics, and even space all fall into this category. Not to mention medicine and biotech are starting to pick up.
“ai and robotics are booming” is a weird answer to young people being broke. who owns the companies, and how many people actually get paid by them?
To start with, I don't really know about AI, but I have worked in robotics, so I'll speak from that. There are cases where it's ambiguous to call something an emerging business. In fact, this technology is more than 20 years old, and existing companies have already staked out the market. So, apart from space, the industries you mentioned actually have quite a long history.(To be precise, it wasn't the robotics research field—I built my career specializing in installing robots and getting them running in factories)
What I mean by an emerging industry is one that requires little capital and has few entrenched players—in the end, an industry where new entrants can compete with small initial capital. That's how I'd redefine it.
Because in the IT boom era, there were many technological opportunities. The boss who hired me was one example. But in the case of industrial robot manufacturing, the existing hardware supply chain is, by and large, the one investing.
In the end, what I want to say comes down to this: there are fewer industries open to new entrants.
Because in the IT boom and the construction boom, there were markets that needed less capital than you'd think in the early days. In subcontracting, for instance, you could enter with relatively little capital. But in today's technologically advanced industries, initial capital requirements are far higher. So in the past, even within the same category of industry, there clearly existed sub-markets you could participate in with comparatively little initial capital.
For example, in the old IT industry, my seniors 20 years ago said it took surprisingly little capital. But today's market isn't like that. I think this is a problem that arises as industries become more advanced.
There's a paper I read some time ago arguing that as an industry becomes more advanced, the knowledge and resources required to make a product increase.[1] [1]https://www.nber.org/papers/w27787
> Not to mention medicine and biotech are starting to pick up.
no, not really