Bernard Salt does not approve of your predilection for Bali holidays. Image: Splash

Just when you thought it was safe to hop on your skateboard, jam a beanie on your head and roll back to your favourite hipster cafe to order avocado on toast, Bernard Salt is back to question another aspect of your hedonistic lifestyle.

Not so fast, Vanessa Hudgens.Source:Supplied

Salt, a demographer and partner at KPMG, has written a new column for The Australian today, critiquing people’s tendency to favour holidays in Bali over saving for a home deposit.

It comes shortly after his divisive article that questioned millennials’ willingness to spend $22 on smashed avocado on toast for breakfast, in lieu of a savings plan.

That article wasn’t particularly well received.

It attracted an avalanche of critical rebuttals and mythbusting responses about the hard-to-crack property market, the disparity between millennials’ financial situations and those of their boomer parents, and how many plates of smashed avo you would need to forgo to save a deposit.

Throughout today’s piece he repeatedly addresses the readers as “boys and girls” — a sure-fire way to get the youth on board.

The stirring columnist takes the time to explain the concept of budgeting in a paragraph that is dripping with condescension.

“The idea of budgeting is this: you pay everything that has to be paid first, and then you make your lifestyle fit around whatever you have left. But that’s not all. Some money mortals do something else to ensure the survival of their species. Does anyone know what that is? Anyone? That’s right, they save.”

Salt conveniently leaves out that those “money mortals” are at home on Saturday night eating old falafels while everyone else is out partying like it’s 1999.

New saving technique: every time you’re about to make a purchase, picture Bernard Salt with his arms crossed, questioning whether you “really need that”. Picture: Richard Jupe.Source:News Corp Australia

The other group that Salt talks about is the “money magicians”:

“They are very exciting people who can do remarkable things with money: they can make it appear, they can make it stretch, and they are very good at making it disappear.

“Now, this tribe includes many who might otherwise be known as the well-to-do, but money magicians are less defined by their demography as they are by their adherence to a belief system centred on the spiritual truth of “I deserve it”, also known as IDI. It is this IDI factor that puts the magic into the money magician’s lifestyle”.

IDI. Money magicians. Money mortals. This article should come with a glossary.

“Now here’s the thing. When a money mortal meets a money magician, the latter will complain that they’re broke. And this makes the money mortal feel very sad for the money magician; some have even been known to help out money magicians in the forlorn belief that they might be converted by good deed into money moralism, however boring that might be.

But then do you know what happens, boys and girls? A week after money magicians complain about being broke, they post on social media photographs of themselves in a pool in Bali!

A cynic might think that Salt’s editors at The Australian thoroughly enjoyed the buzz his divisive smashed avocado column created and encouraged him to stir the pot again.

But we can’t afford to be cynical, because we blew it all on the smashed avocado column and didn’t budget for this.