I literally had avocado toast today. You know what made me start? I did the math, and avocado toast costs about as much as a bowl of cereal. They’ve been gradually hiking the price of all the essential items like cereal and milk, but the luxury goods haven’t gone up as much. There’s no such thing as “cutting corners and saving up” anymore.
…well there’s always rice-and-beans but with the way finance, insurance, and real estate are going these days you’ll need rice-and-beans just to survive, not to save up…
What a rich guy mindset, have you tried skipping meals and save up for rent? Tip your landlords.
Costs and nutrition estimates
- milk - $3-3.50/gallon
- avocado - $1-1.50/ea
- cereal - $0.10-0.20/oz @ Costco - so I guess $0.35-0.70/100g?
- bread - $2.50/loaf, 22 slices per loaf
The internet tells me that 125ml milk to 30g cereal is the proper ratio. In freedom units, that’s ~30 servings per gallon or $0.10 of milk per bowl, and 30g is a little over an ounce, so $0.10-0.20 cereal per serving, leading to about $0.20-0.30 per serving. For avocado toast, a slice is about $0.11-0.12, so avocado toast is about $0.61-0.87.
Looking at nutrition (taken from MyFitnessPal and Walmart websites):
- 125ml whole milk - 81 calories, 5g fat, 5g protein
- 30g honey nut cheerios - 113 calories, 2g fat, 3g protein, 2g fiber
- 1 slice whole wheat bread - 60 calories, 1g fat, 3g protein, 1g fiber
- 1/2 avocado - 117 calories, 11g fat, 1g protein, 5g fiber
In total for my area, for an average serving:
- cereal - 194 calories; 7g fat, 8g protein, 2g fiber
- avocado toast - 177 calories, 12g fat, 4g protein, 6g fiber
Normalizing for cost per calorie in my area, I get:
- cereal (whole milk, honey nut cheerios) - $0.10-0.15/100 calories
- avocado toast (whole wheat bread, medium sized avocado) - $0.34-0.49/100 calories
In other words, avocado toast is something like 2-5x more expensive than cereal, depending on where in that range your meal falls. If you’re buying regularly priced cereal (more like $0.20-0.25) and if milk is more expensive in your area, then it’s a lot more competitive, but still cheaper than avocado toast (something like half the price).
That said, neither is a particularly expensive meal, and you’re not poor because you’re eating avocado toast. However, if everything you do is 2-5x more expensive than alternatives, then we have an issue.
You’re also forgetting that cereals contain almost no vitamins or fiber, but avocado does. So, to make up for it, you should eat a salad to your cereals. Then calculate the price again. You will find (I guess) that avocado can compete with cereals+salad.
Well, a multivitamin costs a few cents…
But yes, cereal is certainly less healthy than avocado toast, but it doesn’t really need to be if the rest of your diet makes up for it. Also, there are also breakfast cereals with higher fiber and vitamin content (e.g. most granolas), and oatmeal has 4g fiber in a 140 calorie serving and is cheaper still than most breakfast cereals.
My point here isn’t to decide which is the best option for your breakfast, but to challenge the idea that avocado toast is somehow about the same price as breakfast cereal. There are a lot of options for breakfast that can fit into a balanced diet. The important thing is to find something you like that supports a healthy lifestyle and fits into your budget, and there are a lot of options to get there.
Avocados are $3 each here and half the time they’re bad. Must be nice living somewhere with affordable avocados.
Do you use an entire avocado for your toast?
Where I live it’s $5 a gallon for milk (let’s assume 1/10 gallon for breakfast cereal so $0.50 per bowl)
Then it’s like $1.00 /100g of cereal, so you’re probably looking at $1.50 for a bowl of cheerios.
Where I live I can get avocados for $1.20 each and a loaf of bread for $4.50 (14 slices?) so if I use half an avocado for my slice of toast that’s less than $1.
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Even with avocados at $1 each it’s still way more expensive than a bowl of cereal. Unless you buy brand name cereal at MSRP or something.
The price of cereal shot up in the last year, heh.
The bit about avocado toast is not making one for yourself at home for $2. It’s about going out to eat for every meal and ordering an overpriced item at a hipster brunch bar in a liberal city. It has nothing to do with the fact that a piece of bread and an avocado are fairly cheap on their own.
Not defending the out of touch piece of shit that said it, just trying to give context.
So it’s okay to do in a conservative city?
I noticed healthier food getting cheaper than manufactured “food” products years ago. Everyone talks about McDonald’s in 2024, but nobody remembers the discomfort around a $6 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in 2014.
We need the Rent Is Too Damn High guy to be in high political office to get this shit under control.
Eh, McMillan is a republican who endorsed Trump. We don’t need him.
We want the legend, rather than the man, it would seem
good luck angering the rich real estate-owning people without a backup plan
Fuck them. You cant outsource an apartment building to China. Make their lives hell and if they decide being a landlord isn’t worth it and sell their property at a loss then everyone is better off for it
At this point we need somebody who will just come out and say it: it’s everyone else versus landlords.
What we need is more housing, and that means looser zoning, which means fighting the NIMBYs. I would love to see mixed zoning become a more common thing in the US (and everywhere TBH).
It’s funny, my father-in-law repeats all the lazy and spoiled talking points about this weak younger generation. The one thing I’ve never heard him complain about?
Avocado toast.
Bro eats that shit every morning.
Ha, my boss gives me this one. “But I’m different,” he says when I tell him about side project stuff like working on my house. I try to tell him… everyone my age I know is like that. They fix their own car/house/electronics and also do some kind of side work. You know how much a contractor costs? Between friends and family, I could be a contractor tomorrow, but not because I want to be. It’s out of necessity. I would love to pay someone else to install floors or do plumbing.
But yeah… all the evidence in front of his face doesn’t hold a candle to whatever Fox News tells him.
650$ to replace a 20$ shower handle cartridge. 500$ to spray down your AC 400$ to replace a 30$ capacitor in your AC 150$ to turn off your sprinkler system valve and blow air through it for a few minutes.
Yeah… I basically do 100% of our home maintenance myself. It’s literally cents on the dollar compared to hiring it out.
And the flip side of that; paying a craftsman to do the job is 1000% better for everyone involved!
Better for the craftsman. I’m helping someone else stay employed.
Better for my house/car. Let’s be honest, I learn by trial and error.
Better for me. Outside of more basic maintenance, I don’t want to buy all those specialty tools… like that thing you use to pull a shower handle cartridge out.
It’s better for the economy. Putting money in the craftsman’s pocket contributes to the general churn of the economy, and he is more inclined to buy local where I am more likely to end up at a franchise. It’s a little thing I call Trickle Up Economics™.
I’m happy to do the straightforward jobs that if I mess up I’m just inconvenienced. Changing the kitchen faucet? If that gets stalled halfway, I’m doing dishes in the bathroom sink for a bit. (TBH I wish I was 3 inches narrower because my undersink area has a divider between the doors and it was an uncomfortably close fit, including moving 1 boob through the space at a time, not fun).
Electrical? I’ll swap out GFCI outlets but if that doesn’t fix the problem I’m calling a professional.
Painting? Sure, good excuse to get a nice step ladder.
Anything I get stumped on or which takes more equipment than I can fit in my closet (chimney sweep, carpet replacement) gets hired out.
Am considering doing the flooring in my laundry closet, will probably hire it out because I don’t want to deal with moving big stuff.
Am very glad we can afford to do these things instead of deferring maintenance. Am also very glad we were lucky enough to be able to buy a condo when we did. Our mortgage+hoa fee today is 2/3 what rent on our old place is today, and we build equity. And this is a 15-year mortgage, which makes the rent comparison even worse.
Oh, and I should mention I’m still reprogramming myself from growing up in a house where we did everything ourselves. Wallpaper? Us. Siding? Us. Roofing? Us. Drywall? Us. Ducting the dryer through the crawlspace? Us. Well, Mom. No way I was going under the house
The only thing I remember being hired out growing up was installing new dormers in the attic and framing the attic into bedrooms.
Partner is the other end, his dad hired everything out growing up.
Those prices sound… inflated. In our area, service is something like $100/hour for all of that, plus the cost of parts. So I’d expect it to be:
- shower handle - $150-200
- AC clean service - $150 - in my area, there’s a promo $75 AC clean service
- AC repair - $200-300 - extra cost for diagnosis and whatnot; probably done in 2 visits
- sprinkler system - $150 - though why would you pay for it? It takes like 30s to shut off the valve, and you don’t need to blow air through it (I never do)
That said, I still do most of that myself. I hire out the dangerous work (gas lines, electrical breaker box, safety components on car, etc), but I’ll do most of the rest myself, such as:
- oil changes - costs me like $35-40 each time ($25-30 for synthetic motor oil, $5 for OEM oil filters bought in bulk, $10 for air filter from auto parts store); that’s about half the price of oil change places for synthetic
- fixed combination meter in car (Prius) - $100 eBay service and 2-3 hours of work (remove whole dashboard; would’ve cost $1k+ at the shop)
- replace sprinkler heads - $5-10 per head, and about 10 min of work (dig around it, unscrew head, screw new head on, re-pack)
And so on. It’s usually faster for me to DIY since I don’t need to call, change my schedule, etc, I just order the parts and do it when I have time, with a YouTube video showing me what to do. It probably takes me about 2-3x as long as a pro, but generally speaking, that time would be spent with me setting up the appointment, talking with the contractor, etc.
Laughs in upcoming brake job and then cries in current bathroom reno diy costs
Ah, but Real Income is up 0.6% over the last fiscal cycle, so why are you complaining?
Judging by the massive price hikes right next to being told that Inflation is much lower percentage-wise than the price increases most people are experiencing, that Official Real Income growth number is based on doing the Maths with an Official Inflation that hugelly underreports real inflation.
Do the Maths with an Inflation figure that’s not as bullshit as the current Official one and you get negative Real Income Growth.
Similarly for GDP Growth, by the way: Official Inflation numbers which understate the real inflation mathematically yield higher Official GDP Growth numbers.
There are very big political reasons to fiddle with the Inflation reporting to make it seem lower because it boosts up several important Economic figures without fiddling with those directly, and the pressure from politicians to do so is probably manyfold the normal in an election year.
the same people bribing the supreme court are behind this very bullshit.
Say it with me: Line. Must. Go. Up! - millionaires who don’t give a fuck.
When do we eat ^the rich^?
We really don’t give a single flying fuck but always nice to be eaten
My rent has gone up 3.4x in the last 14 years. 2010 I was paying roughly $800/mo for a three bedroom house, now I’m paying roughly $2700 for a smaller 3 bedroom apartment.
Let’s do the math. At a nice brunch place, avocado toast costs $14.
To make up for the $1,500 increase in rent, you would need to eat 3-4 fancy avocado toasts per day, for an average of 107 avocado toasts per month.
Given these numbers we can assume that you exclusively eat avocado toasts at restaurants for all sustenance. This would negate the need for a grocery budget, which usually trends at about $300/month, giving you the budget for an additional 21 avocado toasts per month, for a guaranteed minimum of 4 toasts per day (128 per month).
So as long as you’re consuming avocado toast below this level, it’s probably not the cause of your financial issues.
You forgot to account for lattes, which are a critical part of the equation.
Have you seen the price of a decent piece of avocado toast though?
1990: “We don’t do that, do that yourself at home. GTFO”
I can get 4 avocados for $5, a loaf of good sourdough for $5, and a dozen aggs for $8. $18/week ($3/day) and I can eat a healthy breakfast of avocado toast with 2 eggs every day.
That $72/month is what’s breaking the bank, not my $2500/month rent.
Avocados are $3 each here and man is it a gamble.
Yeah they can be finicky. I live in the mountains in CA and they’re definitely fresh, but you can tell they’ve travelled and the altitude here turns them shitty real quick so it’s a delicate balance of getting just the right ones that’ll be ripe at the right time in sequence to eat before they go to hell the next day.
Avocado toast on this is $11.99. You’re saying I can have a slice or day for only $360 a month? Not a bad deal!
…in `98 i was paying $500 to rent a 650sf one-bedroom apartment at $30k salary; in 2008 i was paying $750 to rent a 650sf one-bedroom apartment at $45k salary; in 2018 i was paying $1250 mortgage on a 1500sf house at $85k salary: today i pay that same $1250 mortage at $105k salary and thank god i managed to save that down payment within twenty years, before the real estate speculators completely overran my local market…
…not sure what that illustrates other than 2024 is brutally expensive relative to pay: we bought three nectarines last night for six dollars at the local discount grocer, which would have cost less than a dollar thirty years ago…
Where I live 2K is at the low end for a 400sf studio (I am in a big city where rent is particularly high though).
…i don’t doubt it: when i left the bay area for cheaper lands twenty years ago, 650sf apartments were going for $1600 and i’m sure prices have only inflated since…my data points are all the cheap minima on my housing curve over the past
threefour decades…edit: …f*ck, i forgot how old i am; it happens on the north end of the century mark…
In my area:
- 2014 - 2 br apartment, 500 sq ft for $650/month
- 2015 - bought 2400 sq ft, 4br house; mortgage ~$1200
- 2024 - checked Zillow, and a comparable apartment is $1.2-1.3k
- 2024 - if I bought my house today at my same rate, my mortgage would be ~$2700
So, my mortgage is currently cheaper than the apartment I used to rent that was 1/4 the size with 1/2 the bedrooms, and my house would cost more than twice what it would if I bought with today’s valuations. So over 10 years, both have approximately doubled. Regular inflation would put that instead at $860 rent and $1560 mortgage.
And we’re far from the hardest hit area in the country, housing these days is just nuts.
Where I live I’m looking at a possible $1600 mortgage for a 750sq ft. apartment if I live in a shitty part of town where I may need to replace a window due to stray bullets at some point.
First moved out in the early 00s, rent was anywhere 75-150/w depending. Friends had 2 room units in complex for 95/w. Not even 2 or 3 years later rents were at 200-250/w. Now those same units wont be under 400.
I know airbnb and such arent the sole reason, but when they can rent out their house where nightly prices 350+ where rents are at least 400/w they can rent the place for not even 2 months a year and get the same as if they were renting it out the traditional way. So, naturually there are less longer term rentals available, pushing prices up. We have whole towns which are tourist areas where people cant get a house to live in because of airbnb shit. I’ll liikely never own my own home because im paying at least 65% of my income on rent, how the fuck can i save. Fuel, food, energy. Everything going up except wages.
The answer is simple, but not easy. We need to get rid of the greedy capitalist fuckers who are ruining it for the whole world. By ANY means necessary.
Where I live, rent has almost quadrupled since 2010 while wages for many jobs have stayed pretty much the same.
Median income for a single worker in the USA in 2024 is so far $59,228 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In large cities it’s significantly higher. Rent and property values are definitely out control though. There wasn’t nearly enough housing built after '08. I feel even worse for our neighbors to the north.
Then you have these financially obese oligarchs skirting their social responsibilities to fund the system however they legally can. Who’s the freeloader now?
I mean… yeah? Kinda late to the party though - this has been true for a minute now…
This is hard to read after decades of useful idiots telling me it’s just a blip and everything is OK.
