Life

Messed-up Numbers

From an MSNBC story on the “economic crisis”, comes the story of a young man, forced to live with his parents:

Jesse landed a new job six months later — but it was near San Diego in Escondido, Calif., about 110 miles from his parents’ house in the Los Angeles suburb of Norwalk. With apartment rentals at a premium near his office, he hasn’t been able to find a place he can afford. So instead, he’s spending hours on the road each day, and occasionally even sleeps in his car instead of making the long trek.

Jesse estimates he pays $215 a week for gas, and he also pitches in some rent to help his parents with the rising cost of their adjustable-rate mortgage. But so far he hasn’t found a housing solution that would make better financial sense.

Doing the math, that comes out to nearly $900 a month in gas. Let’s assume he’s paying his parents around $100. So he has $1000 available to rent an apartment somewhere around Escondido. Rent.com found 94 apartment listings in Escondido under $1000 per month. Maybe he’s holding out for 2-bedrooms?

He could be one of the people Newsweek just wrote about who continue to get subsidized by their parents to live a lifestyle beyond what they could afford on their own.

One 25-year-old friend—whose parents pay for more than half her rent and all her utilities, as well as giving her spending money—snubbed the idea of compromising her lifestyle for financial independence. Another, a 22-year-old who gets a portion of her rent paid by Mom and Dad, admitted she would be willing to cut back on “superfluous spending,” but was reluctant to move out of Manhattan and into a more affordable borough like Brooklyn or Queens.

Living the American Dream…