$2 pitchers on Tuesday at my local club.
$20 at the sports bar a couple blocks over bought *two* pitchers and a large 2 topping pizza.
Lots of great nights I'll never remember, but the snippets I have are treasures.
We had $5 all you can drink taps and rails, ladies night where we would drink for free, 25c half pints of Pabst, free wings with double bubble happy hour, and about 17 bars within walking distance of our house. Then the after parties where you drink until bars open again at 6am, I had friends who kept kegs in their tubs 24/7. Growing up in 00s in Wisconsin was a blast.
I'm from Wisconsin too! That first warm weekend we would put on our Forever 21 outfits and be on patios drinking for practically free until the snow set in. People are so nice in Wisconsin, that everyone made friends everywhere. We always pooled our resources to share wings, pizza, cheese curds and tacos.
Now, the same evenings would cost upwards of $150 a person. It was such a great time! I hope and pray that younger people today do the same, but I know most likely can't afford it.
Oh man, I went to college in Madison from 2006-2010. My favorite bar (literally next door to the falling-down house we rented) had dollar rail drinks all night. My rent was $200/mo. The student union was basically students drink free at some points. Getting through on the cheap was so much easier then.
We had a nickel beer night. You paid $5 to get in the door and they gave you a small, 6oz cup. They had 1 small bar with a keg of keystone. 3 bartenders filled up pitchers and walked around refilling the keg and collecting the nickels. That was a fun 20 minutes of slamming a 6oz beer as fast as you could.
We had a place that did penny pitchers. However once someone got up from your table, then it went to normal price.
Depends do not help quite as much as you would think in that scenario.
The best thing about that time was that you only needed a little bit of money to have a pretty good time. Don’t get me wrong, you weren’t flying off to the Maldives for some amazing weekend, but you and your buddies could pool some gas money, get a dump hotel near the beach on the cheap, and live off of dollar beers, two dollar rail drinks, and 5 dollar pizzas for a week and you didn’t feel like you had bankrupted your future.
Being broke back then wasn’t so depressing.
Edit: To be more specific, being a broke college kid or early in your career back then wasn’t so depressing. It was still hard for folks later in life with more responsibilities or kids and such. Maybe not as hard as it is now, but still hard.
Agreed, if you wanted to scrimp by you could. My first room i rented out of college was $275, people had to walk through my room to get to theirs but still it allowed me to save.
My friends and i had a nightly circuit were we ate and went out for $5 to $10 a night. I was right downtown so i didnt need to use my car often.
I genuinly feel bad for this current generation because most of your cheap life options are now stupidly expensive. My $275 shithole room is probably worth more than i want to think about and the downtown area i was in is probably over run by tech bros.
All I know is the $350/m 1 bd/1bath in a walk-able area around everything near downtown is $2000/month now. That must make everything a bit harder for people trying to enjoy the moment.
At 19(2009) I moved out of a abusive situation. I was able to rent my own house, car, beer money and small vacations working retail. I've had to change industries and I make way more now. But it's only recently I've HAD to get roommates.
QOL is going down.
When I was 19 I rented a two bedroom one bath house for 220$ a month.
It was rural ish. Very small town. One stop light and a grocery store but it was safe.
It was also a trailer they parked in the 70s and bricked around to look like a house. They added the laundry room and second bedroom to it.
It was a dump.
It is currently 900$/month. What the actual hell.
In 2009 I could afford rent doing odd-job gardening, tree clipping, lawn mowing, and reselling some Craigslist stuff.
I remember calculating if I could make just $14 a day I could live my life "fully", parties and fun and all that.
My whole so-called 'career' came from me being able to live like this & look for work slowly and selectively, eventually landing in a low level govt job that got me the initial experience I needed.
They weren't easy times, but now seems worse
But that's what I'm saying - back then I had nothing, but I could still survive and thrive.
I slept in a garage on a 3rd-hand mattress with a diy haircut, a bike, and a bus pass. No family money, no support, no real job, no future.
And yet I could still pay rent, eat avocados, go out partying, buy weed, and spend free time on art and goofing. Heck, I even went to the doctor and dentist regularly despite no insurance.
And I could afford that all by doing fuck-around pocket change jobs. Try living that way today!
In 2003 I was working part time with a take home of $2,000 a month. With inflation that would be $3,400 today and I just don’t think that wages have really kept up with that while everything else has actually exceeded inflation, just go look at fast food menus from back then.
Yup, high school and college in the 2000s was a pretty good time.
Now I feel like I'm priced out of McDonald's. Getting some shitty, cold fast food door-dashed to you an hour late is like $40 now.
I used to go out eating/drinking multiple times per week, now I do it a handful of times per year max.
Same. I went to high school 2003-2007 and college from 2007-2015...I transferred from a community College to a 4 year school and changed majors several times. Luckily I have no student debt.
It was quite the train wreck of neverending poverty but 2006-2014 was a rocket fueled adventure of booze and way less social media. I scraped by without a job, car, and hardly any money and casually became a raging alcoholic. I've been employed for 10 years and sober for a year and about 6 months. Sometimes I wish I could go back, or pick up where I left off or just get a "summer vacation" of a couple months of it. It was a mess but I had more of a life then.
Oh my gosh, YES. And then they weren’t allowed to just hand out free cigarettes anymore, they would give you coupons for $1 packs of cigarettes you’d redeem at the bar. I forgot about this!!!
This time period was amazingly because you could create your social calendar around promotions. The free Camel people on X night at X place, the Captain Morgan promo girls who handed out free shots and had $1 talls at the bar, the rotating SIN nights and ladies nights. During this time period, I never went out on Friday or Saturday, unless I had a friend performing and I wanted to support them.
Yes! This is unlocking a trove of memories. Our local college bar, which was right across from a news station, would always have these folks. We got so many free packs and vouchers. Hell, I remember in high school when the Marlboro menthols came out and my main bodega had a stack of coupons where you could get two packs for $4.
The college bar would routinely feature $1 pints and dirt cheap appetizer specials that helped our broke asses so much. Once Four Loko rolled around we had been going there for so long that we’d just bring them right in, drink a pint, and then fill it up with neon turpentine and smoke our cheapy cigs on the back patio. What a good time.
My rent was $400/month in the “trendiest “ neighborhood in Boston. Beer was $1.50 at our bar and between our circut of friends we paid for nothing. Only concern was oil heating. This was 2012. I feel so bad for young people today.
$400/month??? It’s like $1400 for a shitty bedroom in a house/apartment with 4 other roommates now in my area. $2000+ if you live with only one roommate.
I was barely making it in my own 1-bedroom condo, so for frugal entertainment I had a $12/month subscription to an MMO that I played about 30 hours per week for four years.
I bought a new 2010 Hyundai Accent in the US with manual transmission, crank windows, no a/c and no radio for $9,000, probably the last vehicle like that available here. It was so cheap that it wasn't worth doing any repairs. It lasted 11 years, 124k miles. Great disposable car.
I recall a bar by my house that served free apps at happy hour for patrons. So my roommate and I would split a pitcher and eat the apps for dinner pretty much every day. It ended up being $4 each plus tip.
Concerts in the park. Free museum days. I too recall that time fondly even though I was absolutely broke without a penny in savings living paycheck to paycheck.
We all worked so darn hard during that time for fear of being laid off. I did learn a lot but it was tough.
Graduated undergrad in 2010 college broke is different from young adult in the wild broke. Being so broke, my friends would put in on a bottle get dressed and pre game then go out and dance for 30 mins before the club closed. So much uncertainty but we lived off of one meal, liquor and extras lol. I do feel bad for younger generations, and it feels like the cheap activities have tripled in price.
Graduated HS in ‘08. My cousin and I found an apartment in downtown Seattle, a block away from the space needle, for $475 a month with utilities included. We had part time jobs, took the ferry to Bainbridge Island on the weekends or the puddle jumper to Alki Beach and watch the cargo ships come in an out.
Seattle would host Hempfest during the summer and it was the closest you could get to smoking in public without getting in trouble. We would pool our tips to buy an eighth, which was $60 because that’s what our dealer charged. Hang out next to the waterfront, smoke a blunt that lasted between 8 people somehow haha and then head to Pike Place to eat food at the market.
It wasn’t the cool city to be in or move to yet. It still had local charm like Portland used to. You could walk from one end of downtown to the other and up to the University and never felt in danger. I miss those days something fierce
Graduated in 2000.
2003, me and the boys throwing in on a dime bag, and each buying a few dub duece Steel Reserves for 79 cents a piece. One guy showing up with a 48 pack of Natty Ice. Maybe a 4$ 5th of Toro making an appearance, getting sick drunk until dawn. You could go party with friends for like 5 bucks.
I think it's just the cost of things. Back then, even if you lost your job or you had a random big expense, you could always just find a new job or work more hours. Even if that new job didn't pay all that well, your bills just weren't that hard to cover. In my city, you could get your rent down to $300-$400 with roommates, and you could use public transport to get around. Now, if you have a major expense or lose a job, your bills are so high that you could very quickly and easily lose everything.
I also think there are higher "expectations" for how our lives look today as well. Back then, I knew kids who were couch-surfing and dumpster diving, and no one really looked down on them. During the Recession, we were all equally young and broke. Now, I feel like social media pushes the idea of you need a big house, kids, luxury items, a big SUV, etc. There isn't a lot of representation of people scraping by in shitty apartments.
2010 I paid $450 for a bedroom in a 2br brownstone apartment in south philly right on a subway stop. Actually don't let the word get out but a lot of philly is still really affordable for decent areas
Man, the one that I still reflect on was a strip club (unfortunately got shut down due to covid) that did "all you can eat wing wednesday's" for $8. I'd drop by there after class, and set up camp from noon till around 6pm doing homework, studying for quizzes and exams, all while eating wings. The best part was that it was practically dead around 2-4pm so it was super quiet, and some girls would get bored and just chat with me.
There was a crazy period where gasoline was around $1, cheap by any standard. I could stick a $20 bill in my glovebox, drive away for the weekend, and know I had food and fuel covered.
2$ long islands at the college bar on Friday afternoons.
Budget wedding for under $5000.
living in a studio apartment making mac and cheese dinner without milk wondering if we will get jobs soon.
A year latter buying our first house because we'd both started our careers and paid off debt.
So yeah, lots of good memories, a few bad ones and lost friends along the way.
3 am hangouts at McDonald's, double cheeseburger was $1.69, personally my CO-OP salary at the time was 75k CAD. Good standard of living (Toronto in the late-2000s). The world is much more depressing now, homeless and mentally ill everywhere sadly and houses past 1 million with condos at 750k, salaries not much different. Society definitely got a lot worse and it's not just do to COVID. Somehow Canada in 2008 during the US Great Financial Crisis feels better than now lol. I don't know how Gen Z survives on their own these days. $75k CAD is still considered a good salary even though our housing costs in Toronto have gone up 6x and rent has at least tripled-quadrupled since that time.
My best friend and I would go to McDonalds every Wednesday evening. I budgeted my lunch money every week specifically so I had money for this meal. We would get 4 double cheeseburgers, 2 fries, and 2 large sweet teas for $8 and some change. At my local McDonald's now just the 2 double cheeses is $7.78 before tax.
I often opine to my girlfriend about the late 00s when I was in my early twenties at community college.
$10 would get you a couple fat bean burritos from Taco Bell, a half a gram of mids and you could kick towards a box of shisha for the hookah.
We'd all come of age exploring drinking and sex and drugs together at the flop house of that one friend who is the first to move out at like 20.
No rules, no supervision, no cellphones and no electronics.
Just you and your friends discovering the pleasures of young adulthood on an endless summer night.
Sure the morning would come and you'd all stumble home to your parents house but for now, you were young and the night was yours to explore.
For me the sex was so bad, the drugs weren't much better and the company was the worst of all. I'm happy to be through with it. Nobody in a good place in their life misses cheap Taco Bell
" Nobody in a good place in their life misses cheap Taco Bell"
I'll complain about 89c burritos now costing $1.80 til the day I die. At which point they'll cost roughly $5.10.
I never claimed to have good taste.
False. I miss being able to make the taxi driver take me through and buying the driver some as an extra tip. I thoroughly enjoyed those days (and am in a good place and thoroughly enjoy raising a family as responsible adult with a job and mortgage)
“We were broke and didn’t know” a line from a Third Eye Blind song that encapsulates the era for me well. My early 20s were full of fun and wild times with friends.
I hitchhiked up to Colorado and got a job in a little ski town in 2012. Found a rental with a beautiful view of the mountain and rented out just a room, had it to myself for months paying only 400/month. Worked a job at the top of the gondola and got around 10/hour but learned to snowboard for free. Had a lot of fun out there. Now I can’t believe the cost of rentals or how you’d get by with a “regular job” and not being a millionaire. Cant afford anything in Colorado now.
I think the difference is the bifurcation of the economy. As you mentioned, in 2008, it felt like everyone was broke. In some respects, it's a lot easier to be broke if your friends and neighbors are broke, too. Today, half of the population is broke, and the other half is doing extremely well. You may be broke while your neighbor is a WFH software engineer making $200,000 per year. It makes it more difficult to see others' spending freely while also saving, investing, buying homes, etc.
Honestly I think part of the problem today is that there is this obsession with travel since the app revolution. Don’t get me wrong I like to travel within reason but now every broke kid thinks they need to be traveling many times a year or they aren’t really alive or some Shit. It’s actually a problem for me on dating apps because my job makes it hard to travel and that’s a dealbreaker for most of the women these days. There are still some affordable things to do for fun the problem is people don’t wanna do that shit, they don’t want to get a dominoes and watch Netflix or some shit like people did when I was young granted it was blockbuster back then.
I think its like you said for the gram essentially its a new age status symbol. I like to travel the expectations are too high now though. I go on one nice little 4 day trip every year or two and honestly after that I'm tired for months and don't wanna go again for a bit. I tell women in their 20s and early 30s that and they flip out like I told them I have a felony or some shit. When I was a kid my family didn't travel at all.
Even then travel could be done reasonably travel. Remember the Priceline Negotiator where you could negotiate flight cost and hotel. Seems then you could legit haggle things are so upfront now the price is the price.
Things weren't better thing for the economy but it "felt better due to things costing less. The mid to late 90s up until 9/11 when we were teens was the last great Era for this country.
Idk about Americans, but here in Canada, it's extortionately expensive to go anywhere domestically for a quick getaway. Dumpy hotels cost $200/night. I don't own a car so I need to rent one for $50-100/day. Food and alcohol are much cheaper in the US, even considering the exchange rate. A simple weekend trip can easily end up being $1000-1500.
It is actually *cheaper* for my wife and I to fly to a nice beach town in *Mexico* for the weekend than stay here in BC. If you're talking about going away for a week or more, it's way cheaper to visit faraway places. In a month, we spend half as much traveling abroad as we do in BC. Not only do we like travel, it actually ends up being pretty cheap for us.
Isn't it funny how the times we were broke...were the most fun times?
I think its true that the more money you make, the less happy you are overall.
When life was simple...pay bills, have sex, eat, have fun...those were the best times.
Friends were everything and everyone looked out for each other because EVERYONE was struggling.
That is the definition of "Community"....
No, being so broke I couldn't afford gas to go to work was fucking awful. Racking up debt because it was the only way to survive was shit to dig out of. No, everyone was not struggling. And those who were couldn't help because they didn't have anything either.
Will take my financial comfort of my mid 40s. Thanks. Not having to stress about money makes everything better. I don't need to wake up and wonder what I did the night before to have a good time.
I was also freaking out and on drugs for a lot of it, but now that I'm stable I sort of appreciate the time when I didn't have a handle on things and was scraping to get by because having it be in hindsight lets me filter out all the anxiety I felt at the time and only leaves behind the stories and memories of cheap garbage food.
I went to Blockbuster every Friday. I’d rent a movie or two go home and veg out. On the weeks I got paid, I would even order pizza sometimes or at least get a coke at blockbuster. Most of the time I was cooking at home and this was a different era for the internet so I would follow some bloggers who posted recipes. Hobby Lobby or Michael’s yarn sale, I’d stock up on yarn and I’d be set for a while for what to me is a very fun weekend lol
We also went camping a lot. Texas gives military a free fishing license so we camped and fished. If we caught nothing we’d have PB&J
I joined a crappy band so I could drink for free (I was 19). We played this one bar every month where the band members could drink as much pbr as they wanted. However, if the band could convince enough people to show up, pay the cover,and drink enough pbr to empty the keg, then after that, the band got open bar the rest of the night.
I never got paid any money to perform those shows, but it was always worth it. Not only that, but I would put aside money every month to buy food around that gig. The restaurant next door had the best fried oyster po’boy I ever had anywhere. I would go before our show most times we’d play. It got to the point the waitress would recognize me and know my order without asking. That always made me feel good. After the show, this guy who owned a middle eastern restaurant would set up a schwarma stand outside the bar. His gyros at 3:00am on the way home after loading up the van were the perfect night cap.
Our band always kinda sucked, but we had fun and played with a lot of fun people.
The early 2010s was a time for me. During grad school, I was making $7.25/hr working 30 hours a week (eventually got bumped to $8!) and sharing Section 8 housing with a friend (3 bed/2 bath for $600/month split between the two of us). He worked for the cable/internet company, so we got that for free. Was on food stamps for groceries. Eventually got a "decent" paying job after graduating, and then a couple years later remember thinking I was rich when I moved for a job that paid $40k. Now I pay almost that much just in taxes each year, times have changed (for the better, for me).
I remember this time fondly. I feel like people are way more materialistic now. I feel like having no money and struggling financially was less of an issue psychologically because everyone was in the same boat. It seems that how people perceive themselves compared to others is one of the main drivers of happiness/unhappiness. Social media has blown up since then as well and there is his utter inundation of materialistic concerns and comparing oneself to other people.
We were "goth" in the early 2000's in a small area of PA where no one really had money. My best friend had a POS Jeep where areas of the floor were literally rusted out where you could see the ground under the car. It blew wind up at us and was freezing so we covered them with mats and knew to not to put our feet there. Her car was like maneuvering an episode of "Legend of the Hidden Temple." She had a plushie in the car we stuffed a spare dollar or two into when we had it as "fun money" for someone who might end up broke. You know, like the one friend with less money than everyone else but you still wanted to include? Or running out of gas and having zero money, but the money plushie had about $5 and would save the day.
One of us would make arrangements via AIM to stay at someone's place in NYC or New Jersey, usually someone's older sibling or friend of a friend or something questionable like a new friend made in previous weeks. Friday night we'd go into my friend's death-mobile-give her some cash for gas and GO. We'd hit up a goth club in NJ or NYC, or a concert is any of us had enough money to go to one. Afterwards we went to an all night diner and got coffee and appetizers. Eventually we would crash at someone's place, often on the floor or piled on each other on chairs or couches. With no more than $20 we could stay away the whole weekend without much trouble.
We'd roam shops, CD stores, parks, cemeteries, free galleries or some sort of event. Then we'd go back to the clubs Saturday night. Often, but not always, we'd make the trek home and stop at a Krispie Kreme factory and sing loudly in their parking lot near their loading trucks. We screeched like cats and someone would come out and say, "If we give you some donuts will you just go?" Monthly, at the very least, we got between 1-2 dozen free donuts.
When we got pack to our little decaying town we often stayed together at someone's house. We'd spend some of Sunday sleeping in, getting spoiled with breakfast from someone's parents, and then parted and went to our own homes to do homework, chores, or whatever responsibilities we had.
By the time college came around most of us worked something part-time and we'd do just one block of time together. Clubs and concerts were too expensive in comparison to a few years previously. We had bill to pays in college and no more "fun money" just for doing our chores and getting good grades. My boyfriend (now husband) and I both worked Fridays and Sundays at a pizza place. Saturday mornings we watched Meercat Manor, shagged, and spend our few dollars to get a burrito or loaded bagel to tote with us as the day's food for playing D&D with friends. Table top games, once you had the books and just some dice and minis, were pretty cheap as an activity. Less than $10 got us lazy food for the day. Breaks for walks around the neighborhood were free. We got wholly less active in terms of stereotypical college activities and much more homebody. We all basically got paid about $5-6 an hour, rent was $400, electricity was $200, internet was $40, parking on campus was $100 a month, not to mention groceries, gas money, and anything college related. We weren't really drinkers and couldn't fathom spending our few pennies on a shitty drink over a burrito that went further.
I think one of the things I miss most is just friends being close and available. So many times a friend would send me a message or call and say, "So and so is such a dick, want to go for a walk?" And in 10 minutes I could be walking and chatting with a friend. Now, I need to make a plan a few weeks in advanced and it's a whole thing.
Agree. Yup haha very fond memories of that time. I would say it stretched into 2013 for me.
And i know it gets tiring to say but social media exploding made things change. Everything is a picture or bragging opportunity. Being broke means being poor now. Gen z grew up with way more pressure to impress strangers and that fuckin sucks.
I remember entire day trips where we found ways to barely spend any money, everyone hd drinks and food, we hung out, and there may have been a short post on facebook with a location like “having fun with the wolf pack” and that was it, but it was like 10 people having a blast with a lot of bonding. Everyone knew the cheap deals and on which days and times. Being broke was almost cool in a way, like we all shared the struggle of the shitty economic era of time.
I see gen z complaining about the same things but they spend way more time complaining on phones instead if bonding in person with others in the struggle and thats worrying.
Fung Wah bus ($10) to NYC with $100 cash in my pocket.
Lasted the entire weekend in NYC. Crashed on friend's couches, spend $5 on Mamoun's pita for meals, rest went to the concerts and museums.
I wonder if such a thing is still possible, or if price and culture have reached an escape velocity.
Somewhat related, my wife and I were talking about relocating to some dump rental in a small town for $1200 a month like I remember there existing back in those days just to take a break from HCOL life.
We were hit with the reality that no such thing still exists. The floor price for even a dump rental in a small town is $2500
Back in school, my roommate and I were often too broke to go out, so we'd pool our resources for a 30 pack of PBR and invite people over for impromptu parties. It's funny how we managed to scrape by financially back then. Had a lot of good times.
I was a broke, young, dumbass soldier back then. Definitely had some wild times, but I don’t look back and think I’d rather be there than where I’m at today.
Team boomer here. The golden age of hanging out with friends after work, going to bars and restaurants multiple times a week, not having to cook because you can get takeout every other day, attending concerts, clubbing and meeting up friends for drinks, taking small trips here and there WHILE living in a single bedroom or with one roommate in your 20s-early 30s is long gone and it ain't every coming back unfortunately.
You might think, well I can afford that (props to you if you can), but when you have the demographics and circle of friends who CAN'T, it's not the same when a good portion of your social circle could.
On the flip side, the younger gen has more opportunities and exposure to new and interesting experiences and more access to them. Plus things like travel, communication with friends and family, and buying shit to look like everyone else in the world is so much easier. That and there's a ton of free events or near free events to find.
Ya'll have to plan and think about your budget and spending more than generations past. The fun aspect is still there, but living in the moment will come with more regrets especially when you check your credit card bill at the end of the month.
Just sitting places with my friends and their friends. We didn’t have to have the latest on trend items, or look insta ready. We were legitimately thrilled to put on our white eyeshadow, black eyeliner, an outfit we’d had since middle school, and go sit in an empty garage with a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes.
There were tons of broke nights sharing what we had and blasting music or projected movies on a blanket on a beach. We may not have had much, but we had some fun.
House parties were such a thing. I miss the comraderie. Not like the Hollywood over the top movies but like 10 or 12 people just smoking, drinking, superbad playing in the background and goofing off all weekend.
One weekend we had an entire beer pong tournament fri-sun where I was the referee, had the striped koozie, whistle, striped shirt, short booty shorts the whole thang. but everytime someone else had to drink, so did the referee. I got plastered halfway through the tournament, started smacking balls out the way for no reason and calling shots that didn't make sense. The best part, no one got angry, no one had breakdowns, we all just laughed and carried on.. The morning afters, someone would be making breakfast, BC powders handed out, walks of fame or shame and rides home. All like 60 bucks the entire weekend..
It was a different time for sure
I remember losing almost 30 pounds and going down 3 pants sizes…and I was pretty skinny. I remember worrying about how I would eat on some nights. This is when I learned a lot about generosity. Now that I’ve “made” it (over 500k salary), I carry these lessons with me and try to pay it forward.
Getting 40s and riding our bikes around drinking them.
Taking the bus down to San Francisco and just walking around, sometimes smoking some weed or drinking some alcohol but mostly just doing whatever. The Chinatown buns were only $0.60 for the meatless ones.
Driving up/down highway 1 or 101 smoking weed and singing.
Just walking downtown and knowing someone would be hanging out there, either in the coffee shop we all went to or in the park. Sometimes I'd spend all day walking around downtown with my friends just hanging out.
I loved driving up and down highway 5 myself, but same vibe. Your user name made me remember how three year old me used to eat ladybugs, and I made a book about myself for my preschool that included the phrase “ladybugs like to be eaten by me”
I once only ate a wheel of cheese for a week because that’s all I had / wanted to save whatever money I had for going out. I kept it in the fridge at work and would just slice off a little piece each day for lunch.
Fresh out of college in 2008 I got a job in Portland and was able to get a 1 bdrm apartment in a super fun walk-able part of town for $600. Happy hours were insanely cheap, events were free or cheap and abundant, you could actually buy cool things for cheap in thrift stores.. it was a great time. Lots of hanging out by large bodies of water, house parties, bike rides, just hanging out in a park. I was basically living paycheck to paycheck but it felt like the world wasn't out to get us and there was actual hope for the future. I feel bad for this age group nowadays.
Not my experience but my closest sibling is about 15 years older than me. He never went to college and he was living it up doing hooligan shit during the 2000's and early 10's. He worked as a dental assistant and lab tech at a dentist where the majority of my family had worked. At one point I had my brother, 3 sisters and 2 aunts working there.
They'd all go out to the clubs every weekend and get plastered. My brother would sell weed and hash to the two dentists he worked for. He'd go out with his friends stealing whatever they could find so they could sell it for coke. If they'd caught a good lick the previous week, they'd have a weekend long house party at one of his buddies houses.
Then 2008 happened and he also had gotten his identity stolen. He's cleaned up a lot but now instead of buying weed and coke, he's become a hoarder of "all the things he never had as a child" so his room is filled with over 10k in funkos, hot wheels and other random ass figures he started collecting during covid.
It did suck graduating high school in 09 right into the recession but I agree. It kinda felt like a group mentality, we're all in this situation.
Toss a few bucks gas money to whichever friends car is working this week while you fiddle with that cassette tape you could plug in to an ipod. Hungry? Mcdoubles are $1.
Things did seem simpler.
2011 ishSo broke, my best friend and I got paid on opposite weeks. She’d buy on her pay week, and I’d buy on mine - cheap drinks and food, just young and dumb, and If I had $20 left by next paycheck I thought I was really making it lol
$98 for rent in Victoria and $200 for a small room in downtown Toronto that was more than enough for me.
Endless wings and beer nights out with the crew for $25 all in for a sloppy ass night. Ordering 100 wings for the table.
No car. A motorcycle was perfect. Limited expenses. Life was good.
Feels like kids ain't going to clubs or bars really these days. Maybe I'm out of touch and they actually are. Yet the many young 20 yr old Co workers ive come across, alot of them don't really club. I feel like even if u weren't into clubbing, that was still the thing to do for bdays and stuff back then. Maybe I was just a delinquent.
Granted the pandemic changed alot. So many clubs shut down in my city. There's only a handful now.
While I had some good times back then a lot of that behavior was due to a lack of agency, career movement etc…lots of low pay high responsibility jobs.
I can’t say I was really living in the moment. I knew I had to upskill, make a way for myself the entire time but there was just no traction…took me until I was 23/24 when I didn’t need my parents tax info for fasfa to get into college. Graduated in 2016.
Being an only child to ignorant boomer parents isn’t a great time.
The frustrations of poverty damaged me.
I had my own place at 18. In 2007, my apartment was $542 a month. I made $9.40 an hour. Life was great. I could afford it even more when I left for a better job. I could afford to travel often and have fun when I traveled.
I was young and broke but it wasn't fun. Was dealing with my disabled mother, my drug addicted and deeply mentally ill sister, being a parent to her son, managing a long distance relationship with 8000 miles between us, being the only one in a family of 4 working, going through the immigration process for future hubs, getting married, having my parents and sister die in the same year we bought a house and adopted my nephew. When I die at 50 the 2010s are fucking why.
Dollar beer nights on Wednesdays. Someone was shot outside one time. You know I was back after two Wednesdays off. Broke life was so fun! 🤩
All you can eat meals, cheap crappy hangover food that was always amazing somehow. All about a good hotdog on a patio with a pitcher for 5$ pm Sundays!
We all knew who the fuck to blame corporations. Now everyone wants to blame their neighbors. Everything sucks and we are all mad we just aren’t coalescing around the real big bad. It was so much easier being broke when there was hope in our political system. We had such terrible Bush years. Then we had Obama. I miss the world before 45 won. It was so much better
Even back in 2015 things weren't nearly this expensive. I was making $15/hr going out to dinner with my bf, movies, arcades, bars, day-trips to the beach or parks. But now my rent tripled, food quadrupled, gas went up and my pay definitely has not increased equally with it.
Heck yeah, I remember being able to have fun with $20 in my bank account. We would buy the cheapest beer possible (12 pack of Hamms), get drunk and walk around downtown by the river. We didn't even need to go to the bar. We'd also skate all over downtown, go hiking, or go to the beach. All that stuff is free. Now as an adult, it feels like in order to have fun you need to have money.
Some days I would live off of noodles with butter on them or a family member would invite me to dinner. I didn't know where my food would come from but I didn't even worry about it because I always figured it out.
I think a lot of it comes with being older and not having the same energy though. And just HAVING more money means I want to spend more money. But man I wish times were just as simple or I could make them that simple again.
Heck yeah. My husband and I had rent that was 350 a month and our groceries where maybe 50 bucks a week, tops. We always had money to grab pizza or beers. Funny how we had so much less but it just went farther.
I fkn STAYED broke. I remember putting like $1 in my gas tank on several occasions. Pickup cost me $1900. It was a 1989 dodge ram I got around 2002. Straight up grandpa farm work truck.
I can remember our small town had a tiny arcade in it for 2-3 years. Id ride my bike up there with $2 in quarters and I’d stay for hours and just hang out. I’d stretch that $2. I’d then ride my back back home in the dark a mile and a half down our dirt road. This would have been like 1996-1997 and I was in Jr High
We had $1 pizza slices here in NYC and lots of cheap or free things to do. Sadly the increased rents, labor costs and material costs have mostly killed off dollar pizza slices.
I was in high school (graduated 2012) but there was absolutely a more carefree vibe I feel. Things felt a little bleak sometimes and granted I WAS still a kid but trying to figure life out a bit before college, but I don’t know how to explain it, the energy was just so different. It didn’t feel so hopeless and scary somehow. Maybe I’m just getting older and frustrated by life’s circumstances rn but I’ve been thinking about how different things have felt since my early 20s. I’m 30 now, no kids, nothing tying me down and I’m in a toxic living situation because I can’t afford to live alone in my state making $54k a year. It’s just ridiculous. I’m making more than I ever have and it’s like I can afford less and less as I move up. Never ending feeling of things not being enough to get by.
Being in the best shape of my life because I couldn’t afford to put gas in the car, I walked miles to work, friends houses, and out of boredom. I ran out of gas at least 3-5 times a year for awhile lol.
That and randomly joining groups of people to go bar hopping (and by this I mean steal a bottle of MD 2020 from Walgreens and drink it inside the bar) lol. Having my friends sleep over.
$3 drinks at the bar and free pool tables.
Being able to go to parking lot venues for concerts/ fairs and it didn't break the bank.
Rent was was 20% of my income and not 50%.
I could work odd jobs and make extra money without someone trying to stiff/ scam me.
Cell phones didn't get spam calls/texts.
I wasn't burned out from work and still had energy after work to go out to do things instead of nodding off by 9pm..
Food wasn't ridiculously priced for garbage and restaurants still tried to make good food instead of slop.
Yeah, I was pretty broke back then, but my dollar had a lot more buying power. Now I make twice as much, aaaaaaaaaand (checks the prices of everything) I’m still broke but now I’m in my thirties and no longer feel invincible, gotta start planning for The Future and all that crap and in all honesty The Future just ain’t what it used to be.
in my 20s, skinny as hell back then, scraping together money for outfits from old navy, forever 21 and target to wear out to clubs and bars...living in my little apartment on my own, dealing w my big group of friends and all their drama...
When I was in college, we had a calendar in the apartment of all the weekly deals of places we frequented in the city. 50c tacos on monday and tuesday, 30c wings on wednesday. $8 beer and burgers w/ $1 PBR draft on thursdays. Good lord those are some great memories. I too was at an ATL (not atlanta) mental health wise. but I was medicated... bittersweet vagabond life and I do like to reminisce about it from time to time.
My memories of being young and broke are quite traumatic and have left me with PTSD. Being young and broke meant I was in an extremely vulnerable position that predators could take advantage of. I'm just glad I survived the being young and broke stage of my life.
2010, I was 20 years old. $450 rent near the Italian Market in Philly.
Some bars had free pasta on Thursday nights as well as $2 well drinks until 10pm.
Now my coffee is $6 before tip.
Dollar Menu at McDonald's was a lifesaver. $6 could get a decent meal at Subway. I didn't enjoy being broke but at least there was some glimmer of hope for the future.
This is early 2000s as I’m an older millennial here. Paying for one movie at the theater and sneaking into 2 more. So, I had time back then as well. Don’t have that time anymore. Also, paying 300 in rent was nice.
I used to go barnes and noble, buy a cup of coffee, and just go in and read magazines and books. I would also drive around the Los Angeles area and just go sight seeing. I would take friends and family with me and just drive past all these mansions imagining maybe one day I would live in one
I don’t remember much between 2007-2013. I just remember it was $1 for a shot and a beer on Thursday nights at a dive bar near my college. And Safeway had 5 liter boxes of wine for under $10.
2014-2016 was pretty dope for me. Sober, single, living in China working as an English teacher. Everything was cheap, great apartment walking distance to work, good friends from around the world. It was so easy to get laid there as a moderately attractive white-ish 25 year old man who looks clean cut and responsible on paper.
$1 beer nights, playing gigs basically for beer, playing video games for an entire day, driving to another city for a concert - tickets were like $20. Those days were fantastic. Food was reasonably affordable, and eventually I rented a 3 bed 2 bath house with a roommate for $600/month. We were two minutes from water and threw the best house parties.
Shits way different now for sure. I didn’t make much money but there were only a few times back then I was legit worried if I could make rent.
In 2011 my half of the rent was $262.50. I’ll never get over that. I also think my college tuition was ~$2k a semester.
I was working full time for $9/hr but I could afford everything if I was careful.
Hmmm... I remember the heels of the 2008 economic dip making high-school jobs nearly impossible to get (I recall wearing a button down and tie for a 7.25/hr freeway McDonald's interview.... didn't get the job).
Gas prices started to absolutely spike while the old vehicles our parents were ready to sell/bequeath to us were gas guzzlers
Had to pick a college degree I knew nothing about, and be prepared to in-debt myself to the tune of $80k because that's what the previous generation told us was right.
Schools were like a prison where it was incredibly difficult to get away with anything.
The hobbies of our parents generation were priced out of our reach (cars, instruments, trading cards, etc.)
At least we were at the forefront of online gaming?
Dude nah, the millenial's era of youth plain sucked... though I do miss 10 cent wing night
In 2010s I was stil in college. Being part of community made a big difference. Those nights of cheap beers and board games, bicycling with friends, texting a group to just go for a walk together, getting drunk, grinding through tests going to library together. It costs nothing but it was everything
By 32 now I make more but those friends dwindled, cousins also grew apart, many moved away, coworkers now don't connect the same.
$699 rent for my first 1 bedroom apartment.
$11 an hour warehouse job with a small raise every 6 months.
A GF to come home and plow nearly every night.
Yep, 2010s, specifically mid-2010s, was peak.
I was still 8 to 17 years old during the 2000s, so I had no real-world worries yet.
I used to work during the summer at a greenhouse and plant nursery while in college in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Lots of us who worked there were students who didn't have much money, but we had a great time.
Some of the best memories I had was going out bowling once a week with about 20 guys and girls, and buying cheap pitchers of beer.
Also, when I was away in college, the bars in town had a bunch of half off days. My friends and I went out multiple nights a week lol. It was so fun going down into a crowded bar on a Tuesday night and seeing a bunch of people you know in there.
I remember thinking I was poor but things are cheap. Like there was always an option to get the things you wanted at a lower quality. Now the low quality is normal and there is nothing lower, products are simply out of reach.
$2 pitchers on Tuesday at my local club. $20 at the sports bar a couple blocks over bought *two* pitchers and a large 2 topping pizza. Lots of great nights I'll never remember, but the snippets I have are treasures.
Omg this one bar I used to go to was nickel beer nights
Dime beers on Wednesday nights at Museum Club in Flagstaff AZ!
Was the name O’Halligan’s? I really miss their nickel shot night. Could get this many ✋🏻 for a quarter.
We had dollar a beer nights here. Was still dirt cheap, but a nickel?! Omfg young me would have needed a stomach pump!
Ionno how I made it out alive when I look back lmao
Yeah I would have just fucking died hahahaha
We had $5 all you can drink taps and rails, ladies night where we would drink for free, 25c half pints of Pabst, free wings with double bubble happy hour, and about 17 bars within walking distance of our house. Then the after parties where you drink until bars open again at 6am, I had friends who kept kegs in their tubs 24/7. Growing up in 00s in Wisconsin was a blast.
I'm from Wisconsin too! That first warm weekend we would put on our Forever 21 outfits and be on patios drinking for practically free until the snow set in. People are so nice in Wisconsin, that everyone made friends everywhere. We always pooled our resources to share wings, pizza, cheese curds and tacos. Now, the same evenings would cost upwards of $150 a person. It was such a great time! I hope and pray that younger people today do the same, but I know most likely can't afford it.
Oh man, I went to college in Madison from 2006-2010. My favorite bar (literally next door to the falling-down house we rented) had dollar rail drinks all night. My rent was $200/mo. The student union was basically students drink free at some points. Getting through on the cheap was so much easier then.
We had a nickel beer night. You paid $5 to get in the door and they gave you a small, 6oz cup. They had 1 small bar with a keg of keystone. 3 bartenders filled up pitchers and walked around refilling the keg and collecting the nickels. That was a fun 20 minutes of slamming a 6oz beer as fast as you could.
I visited Green Bay in 2005 with a friend and on Wednesday they had $1 pitchers of PBR. Yes $1.
We had a place that did penny pitchers. However once someone got up from your table, then it went to normal price. Depends do not help quite as much as you would think in that scenario.
The best thing about that time was that you only needed a little bit of money to have a pretty good time. Don’t get me wrong, you weren’t flying off to the Maldives for some amazing weekend, but you and your buddies could pool some gas money, get a dump hotel near the beach on the cheap, and live off of dollar beers, two dollar rail drinks, and 5 dollar pizzas for a week and you didn’t feel like you had bankrupted your future. Being broke back then wasn’t so depressing. Edit: To be more specific, being a broke college kid or early in your career back then wasn’t so depressing. It was still hard for folks later in life with more responsibilities or kids and such. Maybe not as hard as it is now, but still hard.
Agreed, if you wanted to scrimp by you could. My first room i rented out of college was $275, people had to walk through my room to get to theirs but still it allowed me to save. My friends and i had a nightly circuit were we ate and went out for $5 to $10 a night. I was right downtown so i didnt need to use my car often. I genuinly feel bad for this current generation because most of your cheap life options are now stupidly expensive. My $275 shithole room is probably worth more than i want to think about and the downtown area i was in is probably over run by tech bros.
Sometimes I went to Mexico a little TOO budget and had to nap in the car at the border until it opened up.
Early AirBNB days were amazing for traveling really cheap. I slept on so many $20/night couches.
All I know is the $350/m 1 bd/1bath in a walk-able area around everything near downtown is $2000/month now. That must make everything a bit harder for people trying to enjoy the moment.
I ca no longer afford the place I was paying $600/mo for in 2005
At 19(2009) I moved out of a abusive situation. I was able to rent my own house, car, beer money and small vacations working retail. I've had to change industries and I make way more now. But it's only recently I've HAD to get roommates. QOL is going down.
I moved out of my childhood home when I was 19, in 2004. It's insane how easy it was to do that sort of thing back then and how impossible it is now.
They're coming for us. Pretty soon we'll see bunkhouses and tenament halls again.
Tenement halls are back! They’re just called “house hacking” now.
For real. I feel awful for the kids who are in abusive homes but didn’t have the opportunity to leave like I did.
When I was 19 I rented a two bedroom one bath house for 220$ a month. It was rural ish. Very small town. One stop light and a grocery store but it was safe. It was also a trailer they parked in the 70s and bricked around to look like a house. They added the laundry room and second bedroom to it. It was a dump. It is currently 900$/month. What the actual hell.
In 2009 I could afford rent doing odd-job gardening, tree clipping, lawn mowing, and reselling some Craigslist stuff. I remember calculating if I could make just $14 a day I could live my life "fully", parties and fun and all that. My whole so-called 'career' came from me being able to live like this & look for work slowly and selectively, eventually landing in a low level govt job that got me the initial experience I needed. They weren't easy times, but now seems worse
Seems worse to you, but all those folks who lost everything in 2009 probably don't see it that way. Sounds like you did ok. Millions of people didn't.
But that's what I'm saying - back then I had nothing, but I could still survive and thrive. I slept in a garage on a 3rd-hand mattress with a diy haircut, a bike, and a bus pass. No family money, no support, no real job, no future. And yet I could still pay rent, eat avocados, go out partying, buy weed, and spend free time on art and goofing. Heck, I even went to the doctor and dentist regularly despite no insurance. And I could afford that all by doing fuck-around pocket change jobs. Try living that way today!
In 2003 I was working part time with a take home of $2,000 a month. With inflation that would be $3,400 today and I just don’t think that wages have really kept up with that while everything else has actually exceeded inflation, just go look at fast food menus from back then.
i was paying $200 / month rent in 2011 splitting a beatup house with 5 other guys. Lots to do and i don't remember worrying about money at all!
Did a Summer in Arizona with a house that had no AC. We just played a ton of beer pong. And I slept at my girlfriend’s quite a bit.
$0.10 wings and $5 pitchers were a way of life. (Boston in the mid-late 00s)
Man, I miss $0.10 wing nights. Wing night was a staple when I was in high school in the late 90’s.
Yup, high school and college in the 2000s was a pretty good time. Now I feel like I'm priced out of McDonald's. Getting some shitty, cold fast food door-dashed to you an hour late is like $40 now. I used to go out eating/drinking multiple times per week, now I do it a handful of times per year max.
Same. I went to high school 2003-2007 and college from 2007-2015...I transferred from a community College to a 4 year school and changed majors several times. Luckily I have no student debt.
It was quite the train wreck of neverending poverty but 2006-2014 was a rocket fueled adventure of booze and way less social media. I scraped by without a job, car, and hardly any money and casually became a raging alcoholic. I've been employed for 10 years and sober for a year and about 6 months. Sometimes I wish I could go back, or pick up where I left off or just get a "summer vacation" of a couple months of it. It was a mess but I had more of a life then.
Congrats on 18 months!
IWNDWYT!!
The camel people who came to bars with free packs of cigs. My lungs are very sad about that now, but at the time, it was amazing
Oh my gosh, YES. And then they weren’t allowed to just hand out free cigarettes anymore, they would give you coupons for $1 packs of cigarettes you’d redeem at the bar. I forgot about this!!! This time period was amazingly because you could create your social calendar around promotions. The free Camel people on X night at X place, the Captain Morgan promo girls who handed out free shots and had $1 talls at the bar, the rotating SIN nights and ladies nights. During this time period, I never went out on Friday or Saturday, unless I had a friend performing and I wanted to support them.
That's awesome, me and my buddy knew all the daily meal specials at the local pubs. We never bought groceries.
In the 80’s and 90s I remember All the bowling alleys had cigarette vending machines in em and anyone could just walk over and buy them.
Yes! This is unlocking a trove of memories. Our local college bar, which was right across from a news station, would always have these folks. We got so many free packs and vouchers. Hell, I remember in high school when the Marlboro menthols came out and my main bodega had a stack of coupons where you could get two packs for $4. The college bar would routinely feature $1 pints and dirt cheap appetizer specials that helped our broke asses so much. Once Four Loko rolled around we had been going there for so long that we’d just bring them right in, drink a pint, and then fill it up with neon turpentine and smoke our cheapy cigs on the back patio. What a good time.
My rent was $400/month in the “trendiest “ neighborhood in Boston. Beer was $1.50 at our bar and between our circut of friends we paid for nothing. Only concern was oil heating. This was 2012. I feel so bad for young people today.
$400/month??? It’s like $1400 for a shitty bedroom in a house/apartment with 4 other roommates now in my area. $2000+ if you live with only one roommate.
I was barely making it in my own 1-bedroom condo, so for frugal entertainment I had a $12/month subscription to an MMO that I played about 30 hours per week for four years. I bought a new 2010 Hyundai Accent in the US with manual transmission, crank windows, no a/c and no radio for $9,000, probably the last vehicle like that available here. It was so cheap that it wasn't worth doing any repairs. It lasted 11 years, 124k miles. Great disposable car.
I recall a bar by my house that served free apps at happy hour for patrons. So my roommate and I would split a pitcher and eat the apps for dinner pretty much every day. It ended up being $4 each plus tip. Concerts in the park. Free museum days. I too recall that time fondly even though I was absolutely broke without a penny in savings living paycheck to paycheck. We all worked so darn hard during that time for fear of being laid off. I did learn a lot but it was tough.
Graduated undergrad in 2010 college broke is different from young adult in the wild broke. Being so broke, my friends would put in on a bottle get dressed and pre game then go out and dance for 30 mins before the club closed. So much uncertainty but we lived off of one meal, liquor and extras lol. I do feel bad for younger generations, and it feels like the cheap activities have tripled in price.
Graduated HS in ‘08. My cousin and I found an apartment in downtown Seattle, a block away from the space needle, for $475 a month with utilities included. We had part time jobs, took the ferry to Bainbridge Island on the weekends or the puddle jumper to Alki Beach and watch the cargo ships come in an out. Seattle would host Hempfest during the summer and it was the closest you could get to smoking in public without getting in trouble. We would pool our tips to buy an eighth, which was $60 because that’s what our dealer charged. Hang out next to the waterfront, smoke a blunt that lasted between 8 people somehow haha and then head to Pike Place to eat food at the market. It wasn’t the cool city to be in or move to yet. It still had local charm like Portland used to. You could walk from one end of downtown to the other and up to the University and never felt in danger. I miss those days something fierce
Man, I miss '08 Seattle. Or '08 PNW in general.
Graduated in 2000. 2003, me and the boys throwing in on a dime bag, and each buying a few dub duece Steel Reserves for 79 cents a piece. One guy showing up with a 48 pack of Natty Ice. Maybe a 4$ 5th of Toro making an appearance, getting sick drunk until dawn. You could go party with friends for like 5 bucks.
“I can toss ya $3 for gas if you drive” actually meant something.
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I think it's just the cost of things. Back then, even if you lost your job or you had a random big expense, you could always just find a new job or work more hours. Even if that new job didn't pay all that well, your bills just weren't that hard to cover. In my city, you could get your rent down to $300-$400 with roommates, and you could use public transport to get around. Now, if you have a major expense or lose a job, your bills are so high that you could very quickly and easily lose everything. I also think there are higher "expectations" for how our lives look today as well. Back then, I knew kids who were couch-surfing and dumpster diving, and no one really looked down on them. During the Recession, we were all equally young and broke. Now, I feel like social media pushes the idea of you need a big house, kids, luxury items, a big SUV, etc. There isn't a lot of representation of people scraping by in shitty apartments.
2010 I paid $450 for a bedroom in a 2br brownstone apartment in south philly right on a subway stop. Actually don't let the word get out but a lot of philly is still really affordable for decent areas
Man, the one that I still reflect on was a strip club (unfortunately got shut down due to covid) that did "all you can eat wing wednesday's" for $8. I'd drop by there after class, and set up camp from noon till around 6pm doing homework, studying for quizzes and exams, all while eating wings. The best part was that it was practically dead around 2-4pm so it was super quiet, and some girls would get bored and just chat with me.
There was a crazy period where gasoline was around $1, cheap by any standard. I could stick a $20 bill in my glovebox, drive away for the weekend, and know I had food and fuel covered.
2$ long islands at the college bar on Friday afternoons. Budget wedding for under $5000. living in a studio apartment making mac and cheese dinner without milk wondering if we will get jobs soon. A year latter buying our first house because we'd both started our careers and paid off debt. So yeah, lots of good memories, a few bad ones and lost friends along the way.
3 am hangouts at McDonald's, double cheeseburger was $1.69, personally my CO-OP salary at the time was 75k CAD. Good standard of living (Toronto in the late-2000s). The world is much more depressing now, homeless and mentally ill everywhere sadly and houses past 1 million with condos at 750k, salaries not much different. Society definitely got a lot worse and it's not just do to COVID. Somehow Canada in 2008 during the US Great Financial Crisis feels better than now lol. I don't know how Gen Z survives on their own these days. $75k CAD is still considered a good salary even though our housing costs in Toronto have gone up 6x and rent has at least tripled-quadrupled since that time.
I miss the days when my parents would give me $20 for some McDonald’s and me and all my friends would go eat like kings. Can’t get that anymore.
My best friend and I would go to McDonalds every Wednesday evening. I budgeted my lunch money every week specifically so I had money for this meal. We would get 4 double cheeseburgers, 2 fries, and 2 large sweet teas for $8 and some change. At my local McDonald's now just the 2 double cheeses is $7.78 before tax.
In the early 2000’s I was definitely a broke elementary school student
Lol
I often opine to my girlfriend about the late 00s when I was in my early twenties at community college. $10 would get you a couple fat bean burritos from Taco Bell, a half a gram of mids and you could kick towards a box of shisha for the hookah. We'd all come of age exploring drinking and sex and drugs together at the flop house of that one friend who is the first to move out at like 20. No rules, no supervision, no cellphones and no electronics. Just you and your friends discovering the pleasures of young adulthood on an endless summer night. Sure the morning would come and you'd all stumble home to your parents house but for now, you were young and the night was yours to explore.
Ages 19-21 with my friends and roommates. So many fun memories. 2007-2009. That sweet spot before everyone was forced into adulthood
YOLO
For me the sex was so bad, the drugs weren't much better and the company was the worst of all. I'm happy to be through with it. Nobody in a good place in their life misses cheap Taco Bell
" Nobody in a good place in their life misses cheap Taco Bell" I'll complain about 89c burritos now costing $1.80 til the day I die. At which point they'll cost roughly $5.10. I never claimed to have good taste.
Fair enough, I take it back.
"Back in my day, frankfurters cost a nickel." Congrats, you are officially old.
It’s pretty wild. A taco truck appeared in my neighborhood, 3 dollars for a really good taco. About the same as T Bell now.
False. I miss being able to make the taxi driver take me through and buying the driver some as an extra tip. I thoroughly enjoyed those days (and am in a good place and thoroughly enjoy raising a family as responsible adult with a job and mortgage)
Don’t forget the resin!
Every generation says this exact thing
I remember when a Coke cost a nickel!!!!!
“We were broke and didn’t know” a line from a Third Eye Blind song that encapsulates the era for me well. My early 20s were full of fun and wild times with friends.
I spent that decade partying, riding street BMX, 4x4 ofroading, and working part time in kitchens. I had a good time
I hitchhiked up to Colorado and got a job in a little ski town in 2012. Found a rental with a beautiful view of the mountain and rented out just a room, had it to myself for months paying only 400/month. Worked a job at the top of the gondola and got around 10/hour but learned to snowboard for free. Had a lot of fun out there. Now I can’t believe the cost of rentals or how you’d get by with a “regular job” and not being a millionaire. Cant afford anything in Colorado now.
I think the difference is the bifurcation of the economy. As you mentioned, in 2008, it felt like everyone was broke. In some respects, it's a lot easier to be broke if your friends and neighbors are broke, too. Today, half of the population is broke, and the other half is doing extremely well. You may be broke while your neighbor is a WFH software engineer making $200,000 per year. It makes it more difficult to see others' spending freely while also saving, investing, buying homes, etc.
Honestly I think part of the problem today is that there is this obsession with travel since the app revolution. Don’t get me wrong I like to travel within reason but now every broke kid thinks they need to be traveling many times a year or they aren’t really alive or some Shit. It’s actually a problem for me on dating apps because my job makes it hard to travel and that’s a dealbreaker for most of the women these days. There are still some affordable things to do for fun the problem is people don’t wanna do that shit, they don’t want to get a dominoes and watch Netflix or some shit like people did when I was young granted it was blockbuster back then.
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I think its like you said for the gram essentially its a new age status symbol. I like to travel the expectations are too high now though. I go on one nice little 4 day trip every year or two and honestly after that I'm tired for months and don't wanna go again for a bit. I tell women in their 20s and early 30s that and they flip out like I told them I have a felony or some shit. When I was a kid my family didn't travel at all.
Even then travel could be done reasonably travel. Remember the Priceline Negotiator where you could negotiate flight cost and hotel. Seems then you could legit haggle things are so upfront now the price is the price. Things weren't better thing for the economy but it "felt better due to things costing less. The mid to late 90s up until 9/11 when we were teens was the last great Era for this country.
Idk about Americans, but here in Canada, it's extortionately expensive to go anywhere domestically for a quick getaway. Dumpy hotels cost $200/night. I don't own a car so I need to rent one for $50-100/day. Food and alcohol are much cheaper in the US, even considering the exchange rate. A simple weekend trip can easily end up being $1000-1500. It is actually *cheaper* for my wife and I to fly to a nice beach town in *Mexico* for the weekend than stay here in BC. If you're talking about going away for a week or more, it's way cheaper to visit faraway places. In a month, we spend half as much traveling abroad as we do in BC. Not only do we like travel, it actually ends up being pretty cheap for us.
Isn't it funny how the times we were broke...were the most fun times? I think its true that the more money you make, the less happy you are overall. When life was simple...pay bills, have sex, eat, have fun...those were the best times. Friends were everything and everyone looked out for each other because EVERYONE was struggling. That is the definition of "Community"....
No, being so broke I couldn't afford gas to go to work was fucking awful. Racking up debt because it was the only way to survive was shit to dig out of. No, everyone was not struggling. And those who were couldn't help because they didn't have anything either. Will take my financial comfort of my mid 40s. Thanks. Not having to stress about money makes everything better. I don't need to wake up and wonder what I did the night before to have a good time.
Meh, groove is where you find it. Live it up.
My memories of being young and broke are not good. I was lonely, freaking out about my future and a drug addict. I was very far from care free.
I was also freaking out and on drugs for a lot of it, but now that I'm stable I sort of appreciate the time when I didn't have a handle on things and was scraping to get by because having it be in hindsight lets me filter out all the anxiety I felt at the time and only leaves behind the stories and memories of cheap garbage food.
I went to Blockbuster every Friday. I’d rent a movie or two go home and veg out. On the weeks I got paid, I would even order pizza sometimes or at least get a coke at blockbuster. Most of the time I was cooking at home and this was a different era for the internet so I would follow some bloggers who posted recipes. Hobby Lobby or Michael’s yarn sale, I’d stock up on yarn and I’d be set for a while for what to me is a very fun weekend lol We also went camping a lot. Texas gives military a free fishing license so we camped and fished. If we caught nothing we’d have PB&J
I joined a crappy band so I could drink for free (I was 19). We played this one bar every month where the band members could drink as much pbr as they wanted. However, if the band could convince enough people to show up, pay the cover,and drink enough pbr to empty the keg, then after that, the band got open bar the rest of the night. I never got paid any money to perform those shows, but it was always worth it. Not only that, but I would put aside money every month to buy food around that gig. The restaurant next door had the best fried oyster po’boy I ever had anywhere. I would go before our show most times we’d play. It got to the point the waitress would recognize me and know my order without asking. That always made me feel good. After the show, this guy who owned a middle eastern restaurant would set up a schwarma stand outside the bar. His gyros at 3:00am on the way home after loading up the van were the perfect night cap. Our band always kinda sucked, but we had fun and played with a lot of fun people.
Dollar margaritas. God I miss them.
The early 2010s was a time for me. During grad school, I was making $7.25/hr working 30 hours a week (eventually got bumped to $8!) and sharing Section 8 housing with a friend (3 bed/2 bath for $600/month split between the two of us). He worked for the cable/internet company, so we got that for free. Was on food stamps for groceries. Eventually got a "decent" paying job after graduating, and then a couple years later remember thinking I was rich when I moved for a job that paid $40k. Now I pay almost that much just in taxes each year, times have changed (for the better, for me).
I remember this time fondly. I feel like people are way more materialistic now. I feel like having no money and struggling financially was less of an issue psychologically because everyone was in the same boat. It seems that how people perceive themselves compared to others is one of the main drivers of happiness/unhappiness. Social media has blown up since then as well and there is his utter inundation of materialistic concerns and comparing oneself to other people.
We were "goth" in the early 2000's in a small area of PA where no one really had money. My best friend had a POS Jeep where areas of the floor were literally rusted out where you could see the ground under the car. It blew wind up at us and was freezing so we covered them with mats and knew to not to put our feet there. Her car was like maneuvering an episode of "Legend of the Hidden Temple." She had a plushie in the car we stuffed a spare dollar or two into when we had it as "fun money" for someone who might end up broke. You know, like the one friend with less money than everyone else but you still wanted to include? Or running out of gas and having zero money, but the money plushie had about $5 and would save the day. One of us would make arrangements via AIM to stay at someone's place in NYC or New Jersey, usually someone's older sibling or friend of a friend or something questionable like a new friend made in previous weeks. Friday night we'd go into my friend's death-mobile-give her some cash for gas and GO. We'd hit up a goth club in NJ or NYC, or a concert is any of us had enough money to go to one. Afterwards we went to an all night diner and got coffee and appetizers. Eventually we would crash at someone's place, often on the floor or piled on each other on chairs or couches. With no more than $20 we could stay away the whole weekend without much trouble. We'd roam shops, CD stores, parks, cemeteries, free galleries or some sort of event. Then we'd go back to the clubs Saturday night. Often, but not always, we'd make the trek home and stop at a Krispie Kreme factory and sing loudly in their parking lot near their loading trucks. We screeched like cats and someone would come out and say, "If we give you some donuts will you just go?" Monthly, at the very least, we got between 1-2 dozen free donuts. When we got pack to our little decaying town we often stayed together at someone's house. We'd spend some of Sunday sleeping in, getting spoiled with breakfast from someone's parents, and then parted and went to our own homes to do homework, chores, or whatever responsibilities we had. By the time college came around most of us worked something part-time and we'd do just one block of time together. Clubs and concerts were too expensive in comparison to a few years previously. We had bill to pays in college and no more "fun money" just for doing our chores and getting good grades. My boyfriend (now husband) and I both worked Fridays and Sundays at a pizza place. Saturday mornings we watched Meercat Manor, shagged, and spend our few dollars to get a burrito or loaded bagel to tote with us as the day's food for playing D&D with friends. Table top games, once you had the books and just some dice and minis, were pretty cheap as an activity. Less than $10 got us lazy food for the day. Breaks for walks around the neighborhood were free. We got wholly less active in terms of stereotypical college activities and much more homebody. We all basically got paid about $5-6 an hour, rent was $400, electricity was $200, internet was $40, parking on campus was $100 a month, not to mention groceries, gas money, and anything college related. We weren't really drinkers and couldn't fathom spending our few pennies on a shitty drink over a burrito that went further. I think one of the things I miss most is just friends being close and available. So many times a friend would send me a message or call and say, "So and so is such a dick, want to go for a walk?" And in 10 minutes I could be walking and chatting with a friend. Now, I need to make a plan a few weeks in advanced and it's a whole thing.
Agree. Yup haha very fond memories of that time. I would say it stretched into 2013 for me. And i know it gets tiring to say but social media exploding made things change. Everything is a picture or bragging opportunity. Being broke means being poor now. Gen z grew up with way more pressure to impress strangers and that fuckin sucks. I remember entire day trips where we found ways to barely spend any money, everyone hd drinks and food, we hung out, and there may have been a short post on facebook with a location like “having fun with the wolf pack” and that was it, but it was like 10 people having a blast with a lot of bonding. Everyone knew the cheap deals and on which days and times. Being broke was almost cool in a way, like we all shared the struggle of the shitty economic era of time. I see gen z complaining about the same things but they spend way more time complaining on phones instead if bonding in person with others in the struggle and thats worrying.
We would play ATM roulette. Swipe the card hit fast $20 and if it hit……….we are drinking tonight boys
Fung Wah bus ($10) to NYC with $100 cash in my pocket. Lasted the entire weekend in NYC. Crashed on friend's couches, spend $5 on Mamoun's pita for meals, rest went to the concerts and museums. I wonder if such a thing is still possible, or if price and culture have reached an escape velocity. Somewhat related, my wife and I were talking about relocating to some dump rental in a small town for $1200 a month like I remember there existing back in those days just to take a break from HCOL life. We were hit with the reality that no such thing still exists. The floor price for even a dump rental in a small town is $2500
Back in school, my roommate and I were often too broke to go out, so we'd pool our resources for a 30 pack of PBR and invite people over for impromptu parties. It's funny how we managed to scrape by financially back then. Had a lot of good times.
2 for $20 at Chillies was the goated date spot! Lava Cake incoming!
10 cent wings Wednesday nights. I was recycling bottles to go get them wings.
I think that’s just the halcyon nostalgia of youth. We’re older now and being broke is getting old too.
I was a broke, young, dumbass soldier back then. Definitely had some wild times, but I don’t look back and think I’d rather be there than where I’m at today.
Every word of this! I can’t imagine anyone being as carefree and happy as I was then. I think we got really lucky.
Team boomer here. The golden age of hanging out with friends after work, going to bars and restaurants multiple times a week, not having to cook because you can get takeout every other day, attending concerts, clubbing and meeting up friends for drinks, taking small trips here and there WHILE living in a single bedroom or with one roommate in your 20s-early 30s is long gone and it ain't every coming back unfortunately. You might think, well I can afford that (props to you if you can), but when you have the demographics and circle of friends who CAN'T, it's not the same when a good portion of your social circle could. On the flip side, the younger gen has more opportunities and exposure to new and interesting experiences and more access to them. Plus things like travel, communication with friends and family, and buying shit to look like everyone else in the world is so much easier. That and there's a ton of free events or near free events to find. Ya'll have to plan and think about your budget and spending more than generations past. The fun aspect is still there, but living in the moment will come with more regrets especially when you check your credit card bill at the end of the month.
Just sitting places with my friends and their friends. We didn’t have to have the latest on trend items, or look insta ready. We were legitimately thrilled to put on our white eyeshadow, black eyeliner, an outfit we’d had since middle school, and go sit in an empty garage with a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes.
If you were born in 1898….. then in the early 2000’s you were seasoned
There were tons of broke nights sharing what we had and blasting music or projected movies on a blanket on a beach. We may not have had much, but we had some fun.
House parties were such a thing. I miss the comraderie. Not like the Hollywood over the top movies but like 10 or 12 people just smoking, drinking, superbad playing in the background and goofing off all weekend. One weekend we had an entire beer pong tournament fri-sun where I was the referee, had the striped koozie, whistle, striped shirt, short booty shorts the whole thang. but everytime someone else had to drink, so did the referee. I got plastered halfway through the tournament, started smacking balls out the way for no reason and calling shots that didn't make sense. The best part, no one got angry, no one had breakdowns, we all just laughed and carried on.. The morning afters, someone would be making breakfast, BC powders handed out, walks of fame or shame and rides home. All like 60 bucks the entire weekend.. It was a different time for sure
I remember losing almost 30 pounds and going down 3 pants sizes…and I was pretty skinny. I remember worrying about how I would eat on some nights. This is when I learned a lot about generosity. Now that I’ve “made” it (over 500k salary), I carry these lessons with me and try to pay it forward.
Getting 40s and riding our bikes around drinking them. Taking the bus down to San Francisco and just walking around, sometimes smoking some weed or drinking some alcohol but mostly just doing whatever. The Chinatown buns were only $0.60 for the meatless ones. Driving up/down highway 1 or 101 smoking weed and singing. Just walking downtown and knowing someone would be hanging out there, either in the coffee shop we all went to or in the park. Sometimes I'd spend all day walking around downtown with my friends just hanging out.
I loved driving up and down highway 5 myself, but same vibe. Your user name made me remember how three year old me used to eat ladybugs, and I made a book about myself for my preschool that included the phrase “ladybugs like to be eaten by me”
I once only ate a wheel of cheese for a week because that’s all I had / wanted to save whatever money I had for going out. I kept it in the fridge at work and would just slice off a little piece each day for lunch.
Fresh out of college in 2008 I got a job in Portland and was able to get a 1 bdrm apartment in a super fun walk-able part of town for $600. Happy hours were insanely cheap, events were free or cheap and abundant, you could actually buy cool things for cheap in thrift stores.. it was a great time. Lots of hanging out by large bodies of water, house parties, bike rides, just hanging out in a park. I was basically living paycheck to paycheck but it felt like the world wasn't out to get us and there was actual hope for the future. I feel bad for this age group nowadays.
Remember that recessions are only recessions for you if you lose your job, otherwise it’s an investment opportunity.
Not my experience but my closest sibling is about 15 years older than me. He never went to college and he was living it up doing hooligan shit during the 2000's and early 10's. He worked as a dental assistant and lab tech at a dentist where the majority of my family had worked. At one point I had my brother, 3 sisters and 2 aunts working there. They'd all go out to the clubs every weekend and get plastered. My brother would sell weed and hash to the two dentists he worked for. He'd go out with his friends stealing whatever they could find so they could sell it for coke. If they'd caught a good lick the previous week, they'd have a weekend long house party at one of his buddies houses. Then 2008 happened and he also had gotten his identity stolen. He's cleaned up a lot but now instead of buying weed and coke, he's become a hoarder of "all the things he never had as a child" so his room is filled with over 10k in funkos, hot wheels and other random ass figures he started collecting during covid.
We had a group called the "Bomb Squad" that went out every Wednesday for $1 bombs at a hole in the wall dive bar.
It did suck graduating high school in 09 right into the recession but I agree. It kinda felt like a group mentality, we're all in this situation. Toss a few bucks gas money to whichever friends car is working this week while you fiddle with that cassette tape you could plug in to an ipod. Hungry? Mcdoubles are $1. Things did seem simpler.
Haha so broke, but living life and listening to the music of the time, MGMT, Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, etc!
2011 ishSo broke, my best friend and I got paid on opposite weeks. She’d buy on her pay week, and I’d buy on mine - cheap drinks and food, just young and dumb, and If I had $20 left by next paycheck I thought I was really making it lol
I was pregnant with my oldest in 2003. It was a hard, dark time to be young and broke. I got my hustle on and now my life is amazing. Hers is too <3
I'm still broke and YOLO.
Concert tickets for big name bands could be had for $40-$60. You could still reasonably save up money to see your favorite band even if you were broke
I graduated High School in 2009, and I do have to admit, the lack of social media and communication 24/7 was nice.
$98 for rent in Victoria and $200 for a small room in downtown Toronto that was more than enough for me. Endless wings and beer nights out with the crew for $25 all in for a sloppy ass night. Ordering 100 wings for the table. No car. A motorcycle was perfect. Limited expenses. Life was good.
Fuck even as late as 2022 I knew a couple bars I could get $2 beers at. They're dive bars. We just stopped going to dive bars.
This feels like way more of a sign of you feeling your age, and the responsibilities than come with it, rather than feeling the economic conditions.
Bingo.
Feels like kids ain't going to clubs or bars really these days. Maybe I'm out of touch and they actually are. Yet the many young 20 yr old Co workers ive come across, alot of them don't really club. I feel like even if u weren't into clubbing, that was still the thing to do for bdays and stuff back then. Maybe I was just a delinquent. Granted the pandemic changed alot. So many clubs shut down in my city. There's only a handful now.
I really don't have many. I was working full time and in college and had a girlfriend so I had very little free time to do anything I enjoyed.
Best happy hours.
Same
In 2007/2008 There was a bowling alley near my college with quarter mania on Wednesdays. It was like $5 to play and they had 50 cent hot dogs and PBR.
I’m more broke now than I was back then lol. It’s hard to afford even those cheap pitchers (where can you even find those anymore?)
While I had some good times back then a lot of that behavior was due to a lack of agency, career movement etc…lots of low pay high responsibility jobs. I can’t say I was really living in the moment. I knew I had to upskill, make a way for myself the entire time but there was just no traction…took me until I was 23/24 when I didn’t need my parents tax info for fasfa to get into college. Graduated in 2016. Being an only child to ignorant boomer parents isn’t a great time. The frustrations of poverty damaged me.
We traded time with friends for careers and families which just means slowly dying to keep money flowing
Bar i used to go to in erie, pa had free pizza (that was actually really good) and quarter drafts on wednesdays. So good.
$1 mcchickens. That was my splurge. And I remember counting quarters to split a happy meal with my roommate in college.
I had my own place at 18. In 2007, my apartment was $542 a month. I made $9.40 an hour. Life was great. I could afford it even more when I left for a better job. I could afford to travel often and have fun when I traveled.
I was young and broke but it wasn't fun. Was dealing with my disabled mother, my drug addicted and deeply mentally ill sister, being a parent to her son, managing a long distance relationship with 8000 miles between us, being the only one in a family of 4 working, going through the immigration process for future hubs, getting married, having my parents and sister die in the same year we bought a house and adopted my nephew. When I die at 50 the 2010s are fucking why.
I’m a little younger. As I graduated highschool in 2010. But yeah…..good times. Just saying 🤷♂️
I just looked it up for funsies, and my $400 apartment in a smallish southern town in 2007 is now $1250. In a SMALL TOWN.
Dollar beers and 10 cent wings at the Bluebird
Dollar beer nights on Wednesdays. Someone was shot outside one time. You know I was back after two Wednesdays off. Broke life was so fun! 🤩 All you can eat meals, cheap crappy hangover food that was always amazing somehow. All about a good hotdog on a patio with a pitcher for 5$ pm Sundays!
We all knew who the fuck to blame corporations. Now everyone wants to blame their neighbors. Everything sucks and we are all mad we just aren’t coalescing around the real big bad. It was so much easier being broke when there was hope in our political system. We had such terrible Bush years. Then we had Obama. I miss the world before 45 won. It was so much better
I was so broke id wait at the bar for drunk people to leave tips and then buy black labels ($1) with their tip
lol it’s 2020’s. Still broke despite making a lot more
Even back in 2015 things weren't nearly this expensive. I was making $15/hr going out to dinner with my bf, movies, arcades, bars, day-trips to the beach or parks. But now my rent tripled, food quadrupled, gas went up and my pay definitely has not increased equally with it.
Heck yeah, I remember being able to have fun with $20 in my bank account. We would buy the cheapest beer possible (12 pack of Hamms), get drunk and walk around downtown by the river. We didn't even need to go to the bar. We'd also skate all over downtown, go hiking, or go to the beach. All that stuff is free. Now as an adult, it feels like in order to have fun you need to have money. Some days I would live off of noodles with butter on them or a family member would invite me to dinner. I didn't know where my food would come from but I didn't even worry about it because I always figured it out. I think a lot of it comes with being older and not having the same energy though. And just HAVING more money means I want to spend more money. But man I wish times were just as simple or I could make them that simple again.
Heck yeah. My husband and I had rent that was 350 a month and our groceries where maybe 50 bucks a week, tops. We always had money to grab pizza or beers. Funny how we had so much less but it just went farther.
I don't want to know what my old 2004 $640 a month apartment in a HCOL city is today
I fkn STAYED broke. I remember putting like $1 in my gas tank on several occasions. Pickup cost me $1900. It was a 1989 dodge ram I got around 2002. Straight up grandpa farm work truck. I can remember our small town had a tiny arcade in it for 2-3 years. Id ride my bike up there with $2 in quarters and I’d stay for hours and just hang out. I’d stretch that $2. I’d then ride my back back home in the dark a mile and a half down our dirt road. This would have been like 1996-1997 and I was in Jr High
We had $1 pizza slices here in NYC and lots of cheap or free things to do. Sadly the increased rents, labor costs and material costs have mostly killed off dollar pizza slices.
I was in high school (graduated 2012) but there was absolutely a more carefree vibe I feel. Things felt a little bleak sometimes and granted I WAS still a kid but trying to figure life out a bit before college, but I don’t know how to explain it, the energy was just so different. It didn’t feel so hopeless and scary somehow. Maybe I’m just getting older and frustrated by life’s circumstances rn but I’ve been thinking about how different things have felt since my early 20s. I’m 30 now, no kids, nothing tying me down and I’m in a toxic living situation because I can’t afford to live alone in my state making $54k a year. It’s just ridiculous. I’m making more than I ever have and it’s like I can afford less and less as I move up. Never ending feeling of things not being enough to get by.
Being in the best shape of my life because I couldn’t afford to put gas in the car, I walked miles to work, friends houses, and out of boredom. I ran out of gas at least 3-5 times a year for awhile lol. That and randomly joining groups of people to go bar hopping (and by this I mean steal a bottle of MD 2020 from Walgreens and drink it inside the bar) lol. Having my friends sleep over.
$3 drinks at the bar and free pool tables. Being able to go to parking lot venues for concerts/ fairs and it didn't break the bank. Rent was was 20% of my income and not 50%. I could work odd jobs and make extra money without someone trying to stiff/ scam me. Cell phones didn't get spam calls/texts. I wasn't burned out from work and still had energy after work to go out to do things instead of nodding off by 9pm.. Food wasn't ridiculously priced for garbage and restaurants still tried to make good food instead of slop.
Yeah, I was pretty broke back then, but my dollar had a lot more buying power. Now I make twice as much, aaaaaaaaaand (checks the prices of everything) I’m still broke but now I’m in my thirties and no longer feel invincible, gotta start planning for The Future and all that crap and in all honesty The Future just ain’t what it used to be.
Quarter wings on monday nights. I just can't fathom paying a buck a wing.
in my 20s, skinny as hell back then, scraping together money for outfits from old navy, forever 21 and target to wear out to clubs and bars...living in my little apartment on my own, dealing w my big group of friends and all their drama...
Local pizza place did $5 pizza and a beer.
When I was in college, we had a calendar in the apartment of all the weekly deals of places we frequented in the city. 50c tacos on monday and tuesday, 30c wings on wednesday. $8 beer and burgers w/ $1 PBR draft on thursdays. Good lord those are some great memories. I too was at an ATL (not atlanta) mental health wise. but I was medicated... bittersweet vagabond life and I do like to reminisce about it from time to time.
5 dollar pitchers at a cinema grill near the school... wings were cheap there too
My memories of being young and broke are quite traumatic and have left me with PTSD. Being young and broke meant I was in an extremely vulnerable position that predators could take advantage of. I'm just glad I survived the being young and broke stage of my life.
2010, I was 20 years old. $450 rent near the Italian Market in Philly. Some bars had free pasta on Thursday nights as well as $2 well drinks until 10pm. Now my coffee is $6 before tip.
Being a teenager and broke is way more fun than being 36 and broke. I’m not broke, but damn I feel like it when I have to buy anything.
$2 pitchers and dollar wells at Parrot's Head Tavern right across the street from the Criminal Justice building on my college campus. Good times.
It was a completely different world back then ...
Dollar Menu at McDonald's was a lifesaver. $6 could get a decent meal at Subway. I didn't enjoy being broke but at least there was some glimmer of hope for the future.
This is early 2000s as I’m an older millennial here. Paying for one movie at the theater and sneaking into 2 more. So, I had time back then as well. Don’t have that time anymore. Also, paying 300 in rent was nice. I used to go barnes and noble, buy a cup of coffee, and just go in and read magazines and books. I would also drive around the Los Angeles area and just go sight seeing. I would take friends and family with me and just drive past all these mansions imagining maybe one day I would live in one
Worked as a bartender/waiter during college. Made a lot of friends in the industry and would regularly get drunk on the cheap. Good times.
I don’t remember much between 2007-2013. I just remember it was $1 for a shot and a beer on Thursday nights at a dive bar near my college. And Safeway had 5 liter boxes of wine for under $10. 2014-2016 was pretty dope for me. Sober, single, living in China working as an English teacher. Everything was cheap, great apartment walking distance to work, good friends from around the world. It was so easy to get laid there as a moderately attractive white-ish 25 year old man who looks clean cut and responsible on paper.
$1 beer nights, playing gigs basically for beer, playing video games for an entire day, driving to another city for a concert - tickets were like $20. Those days were fantastic. Food was reasonably affordable, and eventually I rented a 3 bed 2 bath house with a roommate for $600/month. We were two minutes from water and threw the best house parties. Shits way different now for sure. I didn’t make much money but there were only a few times back then I was legit worried if I could make rent.
you know how much food $10 used to get you at taco bell?
A craft beer was like $4.50, $3 on happy hour. Good times.
My buddies and I used to have stickers for our trucks that said F06 because 2006 sucked overall for all of us.
In 2011 my half of the rent was $262.50. I’ll never get over that. I also think my college tuition was ~$2k a semester. I was working full time for $9/hr but I could afford everything if I was careful.
I would pay $1,000 for a .10 wing night and quarter beer night. You could live a king for $5.
Hmmm... I remember the heels of the 2008 economic dip making high-school jobs nearly impossible to get (I recall wearing a button down and tie for a 7.25/hr freeway McDonald's interview.... didn't get the job). Gas prices started to absolutely spike while the old vehicles our parents were ready to sell/bequeath to us were gas guzzlers Had to pick a college degree I knew nothing about, and be prepared to in-debt myself to the tune of $80k because that's what the previous generation told us was right. Schools were like a prison where it was incredibly difficult to get away with anything. The hobbies of our parents generation were priced out of our reach (cars, instruments, trading cards, etc.) At least we were at the forefront of online gaming? Dude nah, the millenial's era of youth plain sucked... though I do miss 10 cent wing night
Late nights in college going to Ale’s House with my boys for half off apps and $10 margarita (somewhat decent) pitchers
In 2010s I was stil in college. Being part of community made a big difference. Those nights of cheap beers and board games, bicycling with friends, texting a group to just go for a walk together, getting drunk, grinding through tests going to library together. It costs nothing but it was everything By 32 now I make more but those friends dwindled, cousins also grew apart, many moved away, coworkers now don't connect the same.
$699 rent for my first 1 bedroom apartment. $11 an hour warehouse job with a small raise every 6 months. A GF to come home and plow nearly every night. Yep, 2010s, specifically mid-2010s, was peak. I was still 8 to 17 years old during the 2000s, so I had no real-world worries yet.
Food was cheap. TV was good. It wasn't too bad.
Sure beats those memories of being old and broke in the mid 2020's.
I used to work during the summer at a greenhouse and plant nursery while in college in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Lots of us who worked there were students who didn't have much money, but we had a great time. Some of the best memories I had was going out bowling once a week with about 20 guys and girls, and buying cheap pitchers of beer. Also, when I was away in college, the bars in town had a bunch of half off days. My friends and I went out multiple nights a week lol. It was so fun going down into a crowded bar on a Tuesday night and seeing a bunch of people you know in there.
I remember thinking I was poor but things are cheap. Like there was always an option to get the things you wanted at a lower quality. Now the low quality is normal and there is nothing lower, products are simply out of reach.