There are signs of hope that our kiddos will not repeat the mistakes of their parents’ generation:
As soon as my kids had earned income, I gifted them money for IRAs. First day they start their first career job they will have something in retirement savings.
Roth IRA’s - important distinction.
I agree with that and I set up Roth IRAs for my kids. Though a traditional IRA would still be better than nothing.
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A qote from the article referenced in BB’s past #12620: “While it [archetype of millennial as saver] seems to provide a more encouraging picture of millennials than the scrounging off their parents archetype, there’s a lot to unpack here.”
Who’s to say you can’t be both at the same time?
Our S has much more (several times as much) in tax advantaged accounts than I did at his age. He’s also been holding down a full-time AND a part-time job. I was fine with just a full-time job that had very long hours. We also gift him and D much more than our folks ever gifted us.
Big reason why my son in college has a lot in savings is because I am still paying for pretty much everything. If someone else was covering my expenses, I could save a ton more. 
D1 graduated in 2016 and currently has a minimum wage job (by choice — long story). She has north of $40K in a Roth — we have not contributed— and $100K in investments stemming primarily from the monetary gifts she got from relatives at birth and for bat mitzvah — my H did a great job of investing. She contributes the max to her roth 401(k) and replaces the contributions with money from investments, since she can’t exactly afford to give up the salary. We pay her cell phone and car insurance… and helped her with car purchase and major expenses like furniture. When she quits her job, she plans to travel using money she put aside from a side job (at a much higher pay rate) last year.
I’m wondering when you stop contributing to retirement funds. We are weary of it, but feel like we have to keep doing it because they are Roth 401K’s and backdoor Roths, so they aren’t ever going to be taxed (supposedly). It’s frustrating, because we think we probably have all we need and now that we’ve finally paid off our rental condo debt, we’d like to put money in accounts for us to actually spend on unnecessary items. It’s impossible to pass on tax free investing, but we’re getting really tired of still prioritizing that.
We stopped contributing, except to the extent required to get the employer match, which is free money. We had saved enough for retirement and asset appreciation dwarfs anything we can contribute. We would have continued to save the maximum if it wasn’t cutting into what we want to do now — but it was. Since then we have been traveling more and started to do some much-needed updating in our house (still have the original carpet upstairs from 1992, lol).
I think we have the original carpet from when our house was built, 1989. But that’s low on my list of priorities. Fun stuff, first.
Hmmm… has the market slide began?
Yes unless it hasn’t.
We have the wooden floors we had installed just before we moved in 26 years ago. They still look fine so we aren’t going to touch them. On the other hand, we need to re-do the wooden window screens and repaint the entire exterior. We also want to have bathrooms redone. Somehow we can’t get a quote to get bathrooms redone.
Oh well, we are enjoying traveling more and dining out more. We can’t do much tax advantaged savings at this point, so we are spending and enjoying life before we can’t, while helping our kids.
We pay cell for all 4 of us plus all of D’s expenses. We gift S enough to contribute toward his Backdoor Roth IRA.
Are HI contractors too busy to even bother to give you quotes?
So it would seem or our job is just too small to be of interest. I guess they rather just stick with the big jobs that can give bigger chunks of $$$ to their workers.
My area is that way. You call 10 people in the hopes that 7 will call you back in the hopes that 5 will come out to take a look for a quote in the hope you’ll actually get 2-3 quotes.
And many of the snowplow guys have abandoned their residential customers completely to focus solely on commercial accounts.
I’m happy that we aren’t in a rush and nothing we are thinking of is pressing. When things cool down in construction folks may be more interested in providing quotes and actually doing the smaller jobs, like ours. In the meantime…
Yeah. I think we are paying for both kids on our cell phone and NetFlix plans. I think the incremental cost is not that high, but I haven’t looked in a while.
I think our son is on our Costco account. Will have to separate that. Our D is already separate. Both have acquired my love of Costco. My son’s GF, who immigrated to the US when she was 7 retains an intense level of frugality and is also a Costco fan.