vaspider:

andinthemeantimeconsultabook:

Personally, I’m still trying to figure out how $12/hr is considered “competitive pay”???? ????

I’m going to take you all back in time to 1996, when I had my first apartment with @mistresskabooms‘s dad.

Here were our bills. Ready?

• $425 rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Lancaster, walking distance from basically everything.
• $22 for phone
• $15 for internet
• $20-100 for heat and electric depending on what month it was.
• $40 for cable, if we decided to have it. Usually we didn’t bother because we didn’t watch a lot of TV.

We didn’t have a car so we had no car insurance. I paid $40 for a monthly bus pass to get to and from work.

I made $9 an hour. 

After taxes, I brought home around $1100 a month. All by myself. I could have paid all our bills and bought our food on just my income alone. And I did. And we fucked around a lot and didn’t save much and were always broke because we went out a lot and drank and other stuff and bought shit we didn’t need. But… we didn’t go hungry, and our rent got paid.

I genuinely feel sorry for anyone trying to start out today, because it’s really, really different from when I was 19 and working my shit job, schlubbing along. Quitting my shit job whenever I got to hate it too much and finding another one, because there was always another shit job that I could work, and I didn’t have to worry too much about it. Someone would hire me. 

Oh, and I didn’t have a degree or anything. 

This isn’t me bragging or trying to rub it in. I’m not. I’m saying this is the reality of when most of Gen X was starting out. That’s how it was for us. Some of us did have student loans, but … man. It was different. And those of us who are older than Millenials need to realize that.