One thing I have noticed is how prevalent the hustle culture has become among Millennials. LinkedIn is a hotbed of narcissism, and Twitter has a ton of self-proclaimed business superstars who have made money by having companies entirely dependent on using foreign labor and providing shitty service for customers. It's quite appalling how often you hear fellow Millennials go on and on boasting about their own "successes" or try to sell themselves without an ounce of honesty.
The hustle of creating "passive income" means that we are going to see a lot of sociopaths becoming landlords and doing the bare-minimum for those who rent from them, and the quality of services will continue to decline across all companies as there is no value in providing a good service, merely making money. The decline of quality we have seen from the boomer generation onward (yes, that includes you, Generation X, you aren't exempt from being self-destructive narcissists like your parents and your children) is going to ramp up significantly.
Some people will say, "blame the system, not the person," but for god's sake, eventually someone has to stand up and refuse to operate as basically a scam artist. For as many supposed "leftists" there are among Millennials, they sure have no qualms about taking the worst aspects of human greed and using that as their core business model.
Am I over-exaggerating here?
And how many jews do you blame when you cry into your sheets at night?
No matter how much I despise you, I'll give you this lesson because improving your life will make you less retarded.
Rent typically isn't 50% of your income unless you are living alone and making very little money. For example: here's a shitty little corner of Pittsburg for $435 /mo. That's $5,220 a year. If that's 50% of your income, you're only making $10,440 a year, or around $5 /hr.
It's a little shit-pot, but it's workable. Get that, a reliable car, and grind out every hour of paid work that you can until you can create a pile of savings. That 20%-50% savings rate should be a goal of yours. That way, when the time comes to pay out for a real apartment, or a real car, or (much better yet) a real house, you can put that money down on it. Instead of feeding into a rental system. I don't like mortgage debt-based financial vehicles instead of savings, but that is one of the rackets you can get into and do well enough with if you don't blow your money out of your ass.
Middle class people are perpetually in debt, but it doesn't hurt them because they don't ever need to fully pay their debt off. The mortgage actually becomes a giant loan guarantee. So long as you keep working you can actually change your loan so that you can buy new houses with it. You could literally: get a mortgage on a broke-ass $50,000 house. (Okay, it's super weird I found one that isn't even that bad, actually) So long as you keep reliably paying it back, your debt becomes your savings. (Again, I don't like it, but this does work for the fiscally responsible) You don't have to pay that mortgage entirely off. You can both move into bigger or smaller houses and your loan company can adjust the mortgage for you, and take the sale price from the other house, and put it into your new loan. So long as you keep paying on time, you can even pull 'equity' out of your house. Meaning that they will give you some money up front from your mortgage as cash on hand.
If there's no way for you to save money, you can actually use this debt system to use the bank's capital as long as you are continuing to pay your debt reliably and get a good credit score.
"I have bad credit"
It's fixable. Start by getting secured credit cards. They literally won't let you spend past what you put in. Do that for a few months, and get a zero APR credit card. Something from Discover or the like. This way if you somehow manage to fuck it up, you can charge the credit card and pay your minimums. You SHOULD NOT be doing that, but if you end up having to do that (like, say, your car needs an new alternator); it won't kill you. Do this again for a few months, then get another credit card. Yes, you'll have several credit cards now, but that's fine because you'll ALWAYS TREAT THEM LIKE THEY WERE DEBIT CARDS. New credit cards that are being paid off well are given more emphasis than old bad debt. Multiple credit cards becomes multiple credit lines that are each weight more heavily than old bad debt. SO LONG AS YOU ARE PAYING EVERYTHING ON TIME, you'll actually build credit very rapidly. You could genuinely go from 300-800 in a year if you are diligent.
Again, I'm opposed to this debt system, but if you have zero capital, and you can budget correctly, you're good and you'll move up the socio-economic ladder very quickly. This is because the financial industry doesn't really want you to have capital anyway, but they'll love you if you just pay your damn bills.