An Australian millionaire told millennials to stop buying avocado toast if they want to afford a home. It got us wondering, how much avocado toast would you have to give up to purchase a home? The median value of a U.S. home is $196,500, which comes out to $39,300 for a 20 percent down payment (the amount people often put down before taking out a mortgage). If avocado toast costs around $8 a serving, you’d have to skip approximately 4,900 of those beloved toasts to afford that new home (and of course avocado prices are volatile these days).
For those on the coasts, prime avocado toast country, it gets even steeper. If you’re brunching in New York City or San Francisco, you could be looking at skipping roughly 10,000 and 21,000 avocado toast servings for a down payment, respectively.
Want to have your toast and to eat it too? You could follow millennials to popular suburbs for lower down payment costs, where avocado toast is likely already on the menu. To see how much it would cost where you live, use the calculator below, based on Zillow median home values for 575 metropolitan areas.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Introducing the 2024 TIME100 Next
- The Reinvention of J.D. Vance
- How to Survive Election Season Without Losing Your Mind
- Welcome to the Golden Age of Scams
- Did the Pandemic Break Our Brains?
- The Many Lives of Jack Antonoff
- 33 True Crime Documentaries That Shaped the Genre
- Why Gut Health Issues Are More Common in Women
Contact us at letters@time.com