How much is too much to spend on food? In a story that was totally planted by your parents in Friday's New York Times, columnist / foodie scold Ginia Bellafante marvels at how a 23-year-old could blow half of her salary on eating well in New York City's best restaurants.
"Every generation of young New Yorker finds its own way to squander its meager earnings, and this one seems content to spend the money it makes on expensive, curated food with little sense that it is really squandering anything at all," Bellafante writes, immediately after she squanders 62 of her 913 words telling us, in a single sentence, that HBO's Girls doesn't touch on foodies and isn't that strange?
Bellafante hones is on 23-year-old Yaffa Frederick, a production assistant at MTV who makes $30K after taxes and is seen in this photo being spoon-fed (literally) Foodie Lies that are preventing her from becoming a Serious Adult.
Typically, she told me, she spends about $250 a week eating in good restaurants, which amounts to about $13,000 annually, and this does not include the additional $50 to $100 a week she spends on cooking classes, wine tastings and cheese pairings. Because about half of her salary is given over to food, she works an additional 10 to 15 hours a week tutoring and baby-sitting to supplement it.
At least she's paying and taking responsibility for her habits, which runs counter to the "Freeloading Parental Remoras" narrative that's so very popular. What should Frederick be spending her disposable income on?
It surely comforts modern parents who have spent fortunes educating their children to know that these children are spending money on pork belly and not, for instance, cocaine. But what solace can it offer to realize that $300 a week put into an S. & P. 500 Index fund over the past five years would have provided an annual rate of return of 10.34 percent and grown to $100,354 today? Even saving $300 a week at a 6 percent rate of return would have yielded about $91,000, Mark X. Chemtob, a financial adviser at Ameriprise, said, adding that in both cases, the sums would qualify for a down payment on a starter apartment in New York.
Everyone loves hanging out with the friend who says, "I can't, I haven't met my $300 minimum contribution to my money market fund this week." Handcuffing yourself to a "starter apartment," investing in the stock market, finding the mythical 6% Interest Bank, all of these things are better than blowing your money on food. Also: law school tuition.
