How much avocado toast to pay rent on a Brooklyn studio?

If only we could stop eating you all our financial problems would be gone faster than you go bad. Photo by T.Tseng / Flickr

As the opioid crisis ravages America, one Melbourne millionaire was able to divert national attention to the real crux of America’s problems with addiction: avocado toast. It’s not the very real drug crisis that consumes lives and breaks families on a daily basis, no no no, says Tim Gurner, the real problem we should be addressing, the real problem preventing the Millennial generation from investing in real estate is our inability to overcome our love of trendy breakfast fare, namely avocado toast.

In a viral interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes last week, Gurner said, “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.” But wait, there’s more: In Gurner’s selfless attempt to continue giving Millennials helpful tips so we can finally buy ourselves a home, he gave an interview to Time’s Money.com today where he further advised, “sacrifice a lot of social and sporting events.” Gurner continued:

“If you add up what people are spending today on things generations before them were not — things like online shopping, $25 movie tickets, overseas holidays, the latest iPhone or iPad the day it comes out — then it does add up and this extra money would certainly assist people getting into the market sooner.”

Baby Boomers didn’t spend as much money on online shopping when they were our age largely because online shopping didn’t exist. Buying an iPhone or iPad in the early 90s would have in fact been an incredible investment, hardly a frivolity, and also impossible without access to time travel or military-grade technologic resources. Seeing an evening movie at Alamo Drafthouse, one of BK’s bougier if not bougiest cinemas, will run you $15 – $10 short of Gunner’s quoted ticket price.

SO, will sacrificing all these apparent frivolities really leave us with enough cash to buy a house? According to a mortgage calculator created by Howler Magazine editor David Rudin in the wake of Gurner’s avocado toast comment, you would need to sacrifice 20,440 avocado toasts to save enough for a downpayment on an NYC house. This is assuming you are eating avocado toast daily, meaning you’ll have that cash saved up by May 11, 2073.

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Forget buying a house, though, most of us can barely make rent. The average monthly rent for a Bushwick studio is $1,888, according to MNS’s April market report. Some quick math ($1,888 / $19, or the price of avocado toast according to Gurner) gives us 99.36 avocado toasts. If you have a three & change a day avocado toast habit, and you give up all three avocado toasts a day, that saved cash will be your month’s rent.

Now, once Trump’s wall is complete and California and Florida have broken off into the sea thus skyrocketing the price of avocado imports to $100 per, then Gurner may have a point. Even then, though, any Millennial who can afford $100 + tax avocado toast also probably has the necessary trust fund to cover the price of a home.

Below, Tim Gurner (center) displaying the lifestyle of those of us with enough self-control to resist the sinful joys of avocado toast.

Signing off from team GURNER™ on another challenging but incredibly rewarding year. We have achieved more than we ever thought possible this year, thanks to the support from our many collaborators, partners and friends. Thank you to everyone who is on this journey with us, have a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

A post shared by GURNER_TM (@gurner_tm) on Dec 20, 2016 at 2:59pm PST