That was my thought on this topic too. Eighteen years is a long time. I’m guessing a lot of Dopers were working then and are now retired. Younger GenX and Millennials are in wildly different spots in their lives.
For me, I was 29 and 3 years in to home ownership. In fact I was one of those people who got a home loan in 2005 who probably shouldn’t have, but I actually made it work and didn’t default. I had no investments, no savings, no debt aside from my mortgage. I just hunkered down and living life. The only scrambling I had to do was to re-finance before my ARM kicked in, and I did it with 5 years to spare at a very good rate.
This time everything is different about my life status (well, I still am single with no kids). Everything about the economy is just more…all-encompassing now.
In 2008 I was working in New York City for a nonprofit consumer credit counseling agency. It was absolute mayhem. The Bankruptcy department staff tripled, and we saw a high volume of housing counseling calls. A lot of them came from immigrants who had no idea what they were getting into and couldn’t even read the letters from the mortgage company.
I guess it forced some perspective on how the economy was personally affecting me. I wasn’t really aware of the future consequences, say, of the high interest rates on our exorbitant student loans. I had been planning to go to grad school and when the economy went to shit I figured this was the best time to go, because I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job for those two years, and maybe it would be better by the time I graduated.
Where I personally saw the biggest difference though was from the time I entered undergrad in 2001 to the time I graduated in 2007. I entered college with a set of assumptions about what a college education could get me, and by the time I graduated it was a completely different reality. That was the rug-pull moment for me.