{"id":4678,"date":"2009-02-05T12:08:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-05T12:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/forget-2006-lets-go-back-to-96\/"},"modified":"2009-02-05T12:08:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-05T12:08:00","slug":"forget-2006-lets-go-back-to-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/forget-2006-lets-go-back-to-96\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget 2006, let’s go back to ’96"},"content":{"rendered":"
Like many of you, I have been waking up in the middle of the night wondering what's going on with the global economies and how the world will look in a few months when we adjust to the new economic reality. I started thinking about about the world when people lived within their means, took a job for a job's sake, and could plan for the future. It then hit me hard – things have simply fallen out of proportion.<\/span><\/em> <\/p>\n When I graduated in '94 there weren't a lot of high-powered careers available to graduates – you took what you could get and worked at it until something better came along. I actually started off in customer relations for a burglar alarm firm… doesn't make my LinkedIn profile, but it actually started me off on a track that somehow got me here (and I did have some hilarious conversations with London celebs with their alarms wailing in the background).<\/p>\n Let's talk about proportion and focus on the two staples in life - food and shelter. By 1996, I was flying high as an analyst earning a whopping $30K a year (about the same as an Oracle developer in Bangalore today). I also purchased an apartment for $100K. In those days you could borrow 3 times your annual salary – that was it. The cost of groceries was about $40 a week, and a good restaurant meal was never more than $35 a head. I'll stop there. While my salary seems terrible by today's standards, I didn't build any debt and I had a mortgage that was manageable for a property that was fairly valued. Life was good, and I slept well at night.<\/p>\n Take 2008. The equivalent salary for a graduate-level analyst is about $50K. The cost of that equivalent apartment is $300K (6 times the salary), weekly groceries $75 and a good meal $60 (if you're lucky and the wine's cheap). There's no feasible way you can enjoy the same quality of life without mortgaging yourself way beyond your means and delving deep into credit-card debt. What's worse is that debt has become part of life for so many people. And that's precisely what happened, and now everyone's paying the price.<\/p>\n The optimum way out of this crisis is for these proportions to be redressed, however painful it may be. <\/p>\n