If you're young you shouldn't eat smashed avocado on toast at "hipster cafes", you should be saving for a house, says Australian demographer Bernard Salt. Photo / Jason Oxenham
An Australian demographer penned a column in the weekend edition of The Australian that has really upset some millennials across the ditch.
The KPMG partner said that young Australians should spend less on going out for brunch and instead save the money for a home deposit.
In the column Salt bemoans the "evils of the hipster cafe".
"I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more," he writes.
"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".
A lot of young Australians took umbrage at these comments, and Twitter was set alight with responses to Salt column.
Salt responded by telling The Australian: "I clearly touched the avocado zeitgeist in Australia."
"You can say a lot of things about Generation Y - they are remarkably tolerant - but you don't mess with their breakfast."
Sydney comedian, renter and millennial James Colley told the ABC his generation felt a sense of futility about saving for home, and if they could not afford a deposit, they might as well enjoy life's smaller pleasures.
"The numbers don't add up, so I feel like people get smaller indulgences almost to break free of that," he said.
According to Salt, the smashed avocado on toast the "young hipsters" are gobbling up for breakfast every day costs A$22 ($23.42).
This is a $589,000 apartment for sale on Fort St, in central Auckland. It's 61 sqm with two bedrooms, one bathroom and no carpark.
A 20 per cent deposit on the house would be $100,000.
You'd have to sacrifice 4,269 serves of the $23.42 smashed avocado on toast to save the deposit for the apartment. If we assume you're dining out at these hipster cafes every day, that'd take you 11 years. Most people would assume house prices will have gone up by then.
In April, John Bolton, chief executive and founder of Squirrel Home Loans, came under fire for saying young people needed to ditch Sky TV subscriptions and flashy possessions to save for a house.
"You've got to be disciplined. You don't need the $17,000 car ... There's nothing wrong with a $3000 car," Bolton told the Herald.
Bolton said many people seemed to regard items such as Sky TV as necessities, instead of luxuries.
"I do tell people to do without Sky when it's appropriate. When you go through people's expenditure it's amazing where the money goes.
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