I'm a little upset. I just found out that my generation is responsible for more than the gratuitous wearing of flannel, the death of Kurt Cobain, the rise of Courtney Love, Winona Ryder in general, and the tech boom and subsequent crash. According to Generation X Finance, Gen X'ers may also have caused the current mortgage & housing crisis. How, you ask?
1. We were too darn optimistic.
Generation X Finance:
If we look at the position of Generation X in the economy, a noticeable trendemerges. The majority of those in this generation that attended collegegraduated in the mid- to late-90s. What was the economy doing then? We wereinthe midst rapid technology growth, and the sky was the limit. The economy wason fire, high-paying jobs were almost being handed out upon graduation, and lifecouldn’t have been better for this generation....
..But without being able to experience or understand the effect of inflation rates in the double-digits and what a bear market feels like, this generation had unbridledoptimism as they set out on their own.
Unbridled optimism? Really? Didn't this guy see Reality Bites?
2. We were childless, overeducated, and rolling in the dough.
Gen X Finance:
Without a family or children to support, the booming economy presented opportunities that most young adults could only dream of. Unlike their boomer parents who typically worked blue-collar jobs and didn’t venture far from their roots, many Gen Xers saw an opportunity to take dream jobs almost anywhere in the country.
And lose them one or two years later in the tech crash, causing them to go home and cry to their mamas. I know - it happened to me.
3. We were overly mobile and buying more house than we could afford.
Gen X Finance:
Since people were not often bound to their hometown by a spouse or young child, this allowednew graduates to pick up and move to the hottest areas in the country. Of course, with the salaries being offered and few financial obligations, this meant many could buy the house of their dreams at a very young age.
Ok, maybe I just didn't have the right friends. I had lots of friends that moved to New York, Chicago and San Francisco during this time and none of them bought homes. They either a) couldn't afford to, b) didn't have the credit to, or c) were scared to, knowing their new "dream jobs" could go up in smoke at any minute.
The people I knew who stayed in Knoxville and bought homes, bought small homes that actually had lower mortgage payments than they were paying in rent.
4. We lost our shirts in the tech crash because we didn't see it coming.
Gen X Finance:
Suddenly, those living the high-life are faced with increased expenses and potential income loss. This is a bad situation to be in if you were dedicating 30-50% of your income to housing. Now, the generation that has experienced nothing but good times is completely lost.
I worked for a software company/internet start-up from 1998 to 2001. Trust me, the only people who didn't see the writing on the wall were the 40 and 50 something CEOS with dollar signs in their eyes. The rest of us rode it out, hoping for a decent severance package.
In summary, the Gen X Finance article states:
When you combine a generation of people who were possibly biting off more than they could chew and leaving themselves unable to cope with economic changes, you find the effect on housing, real estate, and credit to be very significant across the board.
Whatever. Maybe I'm prejudiced, but my experience with my generation has been that we are extremely resillient. I would be interested to know how many of the
"4 million foreclosures" that McCain talked about today belong to Gen X'ers. And while I'm sure some of us played a part in what is playing out in the US economy right now, I seriously doubt if we, as a generation, caused it. This situation comes down to a lot of
bad personal decisions by many different individuals, all of whom didn't want to admit to themselves that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
But you can still totally blame Winona Ryder if you want to.
