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I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.
If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.
I understand that YC is questioning the results of the survey. The YC community is very privileged; and i bet, if we do the same survey in this community, 20% or less of adults rely on their parents.
Like: I built a $50 billion business with my own hands. Okay, I got the first $2 billion from my parents. Okay, I got the first $2 billion for every business from my parents until I was successful.
- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff.
Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.
Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids?
> Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income.
They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.
Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.
I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever.
I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.
> Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth
Looks like about 1/5 are in the trust fund kid category.
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters.
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2018/01/26/how-different...
However, I never _asked_ my parents for money. I had a good education and a well-paying job, and was able to turn IPO money into a house down payment. In the end, we struggled to close the deal, and my wife and I both asked to borrow money from our parents. Of course they were happy to do so, but I still remember it as feeling so hard to do -- just something that I "shouldn't" have to do. And, of course, it also made me reflect on those who didn't have family support to fall back on, let alone jobs that paid well.
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."
e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.
That's quite different to your claim.
I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live alone that are losing.
When I grew up, that was seen as pampering kids. They'd never "learn" how to be financially responsible, etc. if they always received help.
But, let's be honest, in many places the housing market is now so expensive that people could be saving for 5-10 years just to afford the down payment. And by the time they have enough, the market will have appreciated even more, so they have to save for even longer. I have peers that got into the housing market 20 years ago with help from parents, and their properties are now worth 5x - 8x of what they paid.
I know other fathers that charge their adult children rent, keep the money, and then gift it to them at the wedding or to help them buy a house.
I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.
We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"
Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.
"How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)"
1: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...
I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.
Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.
Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.
As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.
> $1500/month [ 2026 ]
CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692. So if it really costs $1500 to cover the things you've mentioned (noticeabley absent: student loans, health insurance, car payments) then either our society is deeply fucked or your list has changed or your estimates are wrong or your memory is wrong or all of the above.
Rent alone will probably blow that. I live in a burnt out rust belt shithole city and I’m struggling to understand how rent is this high. I pay a good bit more than $692 to live in a slum just outside the ghetto right now and I have to feel gracious for that. It’s closer to what I paid in a decent middle class neighborhood in Florida. That was only 5-6 years ago.
This is in a city where the best people can say about it is: “well it’s cheaper”.
Hell when I lived in South Carolina from 2017-2019. My apartment there was closer to the stated inflation figure, but this was for a place that regularly flooded the downstairs neighbors and left me for weeks without AC in the peak of summer because of careless management.
Still not as bad as business rents. I’ve seen downtown business close because they’re being made to be $7000 for a shitty 100 year old property surrounded by condemned properties.
OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.
My kids are in their 20s and I still support them.
But, I want the government to STOP
- spending my taxes on wars and military - spending my taxes on supporting immigration programs - immigration programs altogether
May be then financial and work situation can finally improve for kids of the people who built out the western civilization.
I've heard enough "this country doesn't have enough talent!!! We need millions more immigrants to cover the gap!" While almost every recent cybersecurity graduate I know is quite literally UNABLE to find a relevant job, with most resigning to hitting up the employers of jobs they had in HS with low-skill work like wiping down decommissioned K-12 Chromebooks for resale on ebay.
What an absolute waste of their talents.
We obviously have the talent in this country, we're literally the forefront of the field. Employers just prefer a 'subclass' of laborers with less rights (e.g. H1Bs/illegal immigrants that the employer can hold over their head) and lower minimum livable salary compared to regular citizens.
We had an article a few days ago on the Zuckerbergs of the world trying to find their way into the Chinese party. We’ll see how that goes for them.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com has been linked on HN many times before.
Is it related to that?
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBEapf3OFw asks the below:
> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country was handed the same three reasons...(It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe.) Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
Most people are just trying to survive for tomorrow.
Most of these people that are getting help aren't saving for retirement either so its just a long game of desperation. Easy to say get a better job but not everyone has the skills or mental acuity to do that. With that said there are aboslutely a lot of people that have no concept of budgeting and are their own worst enemy
Whatever is happening to 42% of Americans is happening to 97% (figures drawn from my ass) of black Americans. $5000 is pretty good. I'm from Chicago, where the median black wealth is $0.
https://colorofwealth.org/