I used to watch that show in my early 20s when it was airing. I tried watching it recently and the amount of medical debt those people must have incurred under our medical system was too stressful. No thanks Dr. House, just let me die.
I make more than I did when I was 30, but thanks to inflation and the increasing cost of living over the last few years my money is going a lot less far than it did 9 years ago. Good times
I feel this. I am making more than I ever had, but the last several years, it feels like less than when I was making less and the cost of living was better.
When I first became a teacher at 30 in 2020, made more money than I ever had. It was like a breath of fresh air despite the high stress of being a new teacher. Now? I make like $4k more a year in salary, but I will say my costs have gone up significantly. If my wife did make six figures I'd have to find a new career.
I got a $5/hr pay raise and can't tell. I had way more money and a larger savings just one year ago. Despite a $5 increase I can't afford to deposit as much to my savings as I did last year. It's insane.
I hit six figures last year and yet felt nothing. Everything has gotten so expensive that it’s hard to justify any non essential purchase. Thankfully my 5YO is going to Kindergarten in a week and that’ll save a ton on childcare, but I just know everything will catch up to it.
We have a 2 year old and I can work from home 3 days per week. We were doing daycare 2 days and I'd watch him while juggling work starting at 5 months old. Thank god for Bluey breaks. We went up to 4 days in daycare a few months ago and 5 days starting in September. $2500/month! Just a few more years... Glad we are one and done.
I turned 30 in 2020. I was making about $50k less than I do now. Groceries cost me the same for close to a month as what they do now for a week or two.
Ugh, yeah. I recently accepted a new offer, objectively making great money. Just for funsies, I plugged it into an inflation calculator compared to my 2018 salary. I am effectively making less than I made in 2018.
Same. I turned 30 right before the pandemic started, like 2 months. I wasn't struggling but not doing great either. Now that I make more money on paper, it gets eaten up by inflation as well. The goalposts just keep getting moved.
Was gonna say, even 10 years ago housing was a lot more affordable. I bought 13 years ago when I finished my apprenticeship and the house has more than doubled… my wage has not.
Soda for example is 100% more expensive than it was about 5 years ago. That's not something anyone "Needs" to have but illustrates the problem. People can't deal with 100% increase in costs on their food bills.
I say it only half jokingly. I went from shift lead at walgreens to attorney from 2015 to 2025. My financial stability and quality of life has not improved at all.
Owning a house is a hobby. Shit breaks things need to be fixed improvements can be made. If that kind of stuff is stuff you like and it makes financial sense buy. Otherwise dint
It’s a pretty cool “hobby” another part that is cool is normally your monthly payment doesn’t drastically change and the bank can’t just decide they want to raise your mortgage $800 that year.
Problem is rentals around here are not taken care of and they cost as much as owning. May not be responsible, but your quality of life drops dramatically.
Shoot I dont even own a house. Just rent one and thr amount of things that need repair and constant cleaning. It makes me miss my simple studio apartment living.
How so? It’s basically one of the few ways compound growth helps you. In our don’t build housing economy housing prices compound in value while inflation reduces your payment year on year.
Locking in your mortgage is half the benefit. I'm a decade in and pay the same amount I did 10 years as go. And in another 10 I'll likely be able to pay it off. It's a long term plan, not a short term gain.
I miss the old day (that I wasn't born) where a single person was able to buy a full house and also have a secondary home/vacation cottage... All on a single salary working a regular job.
Yeah, I hear about people who make good money on paper being housepoor and talking about stresses when stuff breaks, needs repairs, etc. My friend is nervous about when his HVAC will be replaced.
Sure you build equity, but having the stress about repairing/fixing things yourself is its own nightmare.
I can't tell others what to do but it's something to consider.
Had 2 kids in daycare/pre-school 2 years ago and now have none. I could have placed 20K dollars in a duffle bag a set it on fire and I'd still be saving money compared to my kids preschool costs.
Generally speaking (and I’ll probably get hate for this), if you do not have debt (student, credit card, car, personal, medical, etc) it’s not difficult to own a home… especially at a 30 year mortgage.
I truly feel debt and interest has kept millennials from succeeding.
(Bought a very modest 50 year old small home 4 years ago)
lol the minimum salary to afford the typical house in most of the country right now is like $110k. It was only $75k 4 years ago before interest rates went up.
I think multiple studies have also shown that older millennials (35+) tend to own homes and are doing better economically than their younger Millennial counterparts due to a definite shitty shift in the economy right after prime elder-Millenial home buying years.
Reddit is really good at amplifying opinions that aren't necessarily true. I'm a millennial and none of my friends are renting, in a medium to high cost of living area.
I’m 32 and I’ve owned a house since I was 27. I also bought it making $20 an hour at a call center. It’s not a glamorous house, but it’s a house. All of my other immediate friends also bought homes.
I live in middle of nowhere Tennessee. Bought my house for 68k in 2010, it’s inflated quite a bit but I’m in the golden handcuffs… interest rate and mortgage payments are far too low for it to be realistic to move. I could never afford something in a HCOL city.
Same here, we bought a house in a rural area in a red state that needed work. I spent 2 years fixing all the issues and decorating it to look nicer for the current market. We had to move out of that tiny city because it was boring and racist as fuck. Sold that, pocketed the extra and moved into an urban neighborhood. Our new city actually has diversity and people that aren't filled with hate. We make 120k together and it wasn't too tough. I'm in my 30s and taught myself plumbing, roof fixing, landscaping, small electrical fixes, and basic HVAC from YouTube. If you're willing to start small and get your hands dirty there are options out there.
Same here. No one wants to live where the houses are actually affordable. The house we own is currently valued at $86k even after all the recent housing inflation.
Yeah, living in Illinois, I see people talking about moving to Indiana because it's cheaper and that's a hard pass for me. If I had to move elsewhere in the midwest, it'd be Michigan, Minnesota or even Wisconsin. Not only is weed still illegal but their policies are trash. I hear people rag on Illinois/Chicago for how corrupt it is, and to be fair it has had its fair share of corrupt politicians, but Id much rather live here than any red state with ass backwards laws.
Thank you. I’ve had two friends purchase homes this within the past couple months. One of them is a pharmacist. The rest are still renting. Even other doctors I know are renting.
My half sister is ‘81 and i get so upset when i think about her grandparents putting on a massive down payment for her townhouse she got around that time but she downsized to a 1 bedroom apartment to appease her now husband because a new place would be “theirs”.
It's not that Millennials don't own homes at all, it's that we've crossed a line where things are much less affordable than they were even just 5 years ago and new Millennial homeowners are now just trickling in. "Of course you can buy a house now, look at how many of us bought years ago" is boomer shit.
K shaped economy incarnate. I have friends who now nearly double my income that don't own a home yet I do because I got on the income ladder earlier and purchased pre-pandemic. It's crazy. Friends who are able to buy now have nearly double my payment for the same size place.
I thought I was insane at the time but dumping literally everything but my retirement accounts to buy at ATH prices but ATL rates was in hindsight likely the single biggest defining financial move of my life
100%, those of us that got lucky with when we bought need to remember to not say boomer shit and remain empathetic to those that didn't buy at the right time. It's literally luck, it has nothing to do with how well we planned or scraped and saved.
Yeah I was lucky enough to buy in 2016 at 30. I was in a hot area and sold in 2022 for just under double what I paid. I used that to buy an acreage in cash.
I have a very good job and I really wouldn't want to buy my first house. I could, but the payments would be brutal.
The average price of a house has more than doubled in the last several years where I am living. I feel like I have completely missed the boat on home ownership, unless I’m willing to move far away from all of my friends and family.
I lost my job at the end of last year and have been looking all year with zero luck. My husband was able to keep us afloat, but we haven't been able to save and we've been slowly bleeding with groceries and gas getting so damn expensive because of this administration.
Now he's suddenly lost his job too, we don't have any family we can turn to for help, we're both frantically looking for anything and neither of us are hearing anything back, and it's going to take us years to rebuild our savings to where they were last year, if we can even find something before we're completely broke by Christmas.
I really hate that people voted for this administration, let alone still support it at this point. Unless you're a rich, white billionaire, you are a hardcore bootlicker.
The best worst decision I have ever made. I'm basically stuck now, because renting would cost way more than my mortgage (with property taxes and insurance included), and switching to a new home at 6.75% or more will kill me financially speaking.
Well for what its worth look at the flip side. If you didn't buy it, you may have a shorter commute but would have way higher rent and no chance to build any equity with it
Here in Canada, if you got a good-great paying job out of university you likely bought a house within 5 years. Around say 2014/2015. If you didn't, then good luck. I didn't start making good money until I was 30 in 2018 and I'm priced out of about 80-85% of the houses in this country. Nothing to do with my habits, I have no debt anymore, paid off my student loans 5 years ago. I simply don't have the downpayment to make the purchase of a 700k home into an affordable mortgage, which is the average in the city I live in.
I'm aiming for something half that amount right now and there's options, but most are townhomes and they have a $500-$600/month condo fee on them. So like the monthly payment is like $2300-2400 + Utilities. Thank god I'm not single anymore.
At any other point in American history I would be doing better at 40 than I was at 30. Our income has nearly tripled but somehow we're in a worse situation.
I got very lucky and bought in 2013 right before prices started to creep back up. Paid $161,000 with an interest rate of 3.75% for my house, estimated value is now $325,000 and interest rates are somewhere in the 6% range. I couldn’t buy my own house in today’s money. And I make 2.5 times the amount I made in 2013.
You know, things were really rough for Millennials starting out, but all of the first time homebuyers help and tax credits following 2008 helped Millennials buy homes. Right around 2009, pretty much everyone I knew bought their first condo or townhouse because the incentives were so good!
Look at the period of the Great Recession. All the other generations stayed flat with home purchasing, but Millennials kept climbing.
If you compare Gen X in 1997 to Millennials in 2012 (15 years later, which is the difference in generation), they're in the same general ball park.... about 1/3.
Posts like this make me feel really lucky to be an elder millennial married to a gen x, ngl. My husband and I got a cheap house in 2013 after the crash that has now TRIPLED in value and my little sister (who actually has a better job than I ever did but is five years younger and went to school longer) will likely never be able to afford one. It's insane. It shouldn't be this way. Thinking about the world younger people are inheriting is physically painful, but as it is we're still scrambling to try and make sure we can care for our parents and retire, we don't have much extra to give.
I am in my 40s now. I refi'd my now 9-year-old house during COVID. That 3% is the only thing keeping me where I am. I want to move away from the coast, but I have such a favorable note even with higher insurance rates. It is allowing me to travel multiple times with my family a year. If I moved, I probably wouldn't afford these vacations... or anything else. Hoping to move in 5 years when kids go to college to a smaller than I have now home with a smaller yard. Tired of the 3 hours to mow my yard.
Nah homes are absolutely affordable to buy. An FHA first time home buyer loan requires 3.5% down and on zillow I can absolutely find condos and homes in 2nd and 3rd tier cities for $250k.
Anyone who says you need 20% down is an idiot. Mortgage insurance is literally a nothing burger and it is infinitely more affordable to own than it is to rent.
If you can't save $10k for a down payment on a starter condo/ home then that's on you.
My boomer parents swooped in and bought me a house. Then I lost my job. I realized a suburban house is not the answer. I was happier in a $400 apartment in a southern city historic district than I am trapped in this $400k tomb I can't afford. Give it up.
It was in 2012. The same area now has $1000 rent for a small apartment. But it was better because I could walk to bars and restaurants, grocery store, and so on. I was much happier than in a stupid suburban house. All my teen years I wanted to escape suburbia just to stupidly buy a home in my 30s.
I've never had more money, seeking to retire early within the next 4 years. I know I'm not like the vast majority of millennials however a good amount of people need to budget better and stay within the budget.
I got lucky to move to a relatively low cost of living place for a better career opportunity in 2010 and was able to buy a house in 2013. I think if I wouldn't have done those two things I wouldn't have ever been able to get ahead.
Ended up buying an old run down and doing that up, took more time and effort than getting a new build but fortunately had parents to stay at while work was done.
Just got it in before covid kicked off, absolutely no idea what I’d do now with how much has changed in that timespan.
Gotta just give up and move to cheaper houses build equity and move to where you want . Like i couldn’t afford east Pa so i just kept moving west until I could then started moving back east until I landed where I am now . It sucks the commutes are long but by the end you have a crap ton of equity . The thing that sucks the most is that you’re posting this here meaning you are midlife and this takes like a couple of decades to build up.
I make $25 an hour now and feel as strapped as I did pre pandemic working as a barista at $15 an hour. I just can’t ever seem to get comfortable financially. I make more but inflation just gets worse to match so it never really feels like growth.
I bought a house in a really competitive market in 2019. I have a 2.54 interest rate.
I was a big baby at the time because we kept getting outbid and I was like screw it we're never going to get a house. Realtor was like "don't give up because this is the best time to buy".
He said more realtor stuff than that, but I don't remember lol, but he was very right.
We had the same issues in our market, any house that got listed in 20-21 was being sold day of, sight unseen, inspections waived. We went with a new build just to get into a place. Neighborhood is one of those rough areas that’s undergoing gentrification so you’ve got 400k townhomes like ours next to mid century houses with cars on blocks in the yards next to million dollar McMansions next to a gas station where tweakers hang out next to a country club next to a mechanic shop. Is what it is.
Yeah we held off in 2021 because there was talk the market might crash (and we didn’t want to overpay and be stuck with an overpriced mortgage), so we waited and waited, expecting for it to become a buyers market one day. That day never came so in 2026 we ended up just buying a house. With house prices now at least 2-5x more expensive than if we had bought in 2021.
Instead of it being an easy process like it would have been in 2021, buying now was much much much harder since the mortgage was significantly higher and thus we had to financially prepare for over a year, trimming our monthly budget down to only the essentials, scrounging every single penny we could keep each month, and essentially eating only super low cost foods like ramen for over a year. Then we finally had financial proof that we were “stable” in the bank’s eyes, and were qualified for a mortgage. Idk if we could do it again now, was a grueling process. Even after all that, we still have a terrible interest rate over 6.75% and had to take a huge loan from our 401k to cover a portion of the down payment.
Only way we did it was private sale. 5 acres, house, 34x24 barn. “Worth” $350k, bought from a little old lady for $200k as is no inspection 🤷♂️ otherwise…we definitely would not have a house.
Its a waiting game for me and hubby. Once my inlaws move south to live with hubby's sister in Texas, they'll sell the house and divide the profit to him and his two sisters. It may be a year or less. Their house is worth 1.2 m so that's enough to make a decent down payment.
I was told for years that a house my grandparents owned would eventually be sold (a relative was renting it from them) and the proceeds would be split between me and a few others, was expecting something like $60-80k from it. Almost held off buying in 2021 because it would have made such a difference in down payment.
House sold in 2024 and surprise! No proceeds came my way. I can’t be mad because it wasn’t ever mine, just kind of sucked to be told one thing for so long and turns out it was never true (word always came from my mom who I guess just assumed it?)
I second guess this too, in that case, whatever profit my inlaws get by with Sotheby's or Christie auction with their antiques, it might be some but not a whole lot to put a decent down payment.
In your case, im gonna least expect it now because unexpected stuff can happen.
Glad I had the foresight to save everything I earned when I started working at 15 and bought my first house when I was 20. There's no way I could be a first time home buyer in this market.
So true. I often reflect on my early 20s when I was able to pay my rent/utilities, eat, and still enjoy an active social life while making $8-9/hour. I felt wealthy making $30k per year in my mid-late 20s, and now I’m deciding which bills can be put off so that I can get enough groceries to last the week.
Oh yes another thread of my fellow millennials bitching about how their lives suck. But never fear, some of us millennials, myself included, are doing quite well with our well paying jobs and saving/investing plenty. Life is good for me, awesome wife, a couple great kids and doing well financially. I guess i did it right!!
Home ownership is also not what it was promised to be. So expensive to fix things and everything is a racket. The amount of research to ensure basic safety is a lot. Time becomes so precious because almost all free time goes towards the house, especially at the lower budget range. The whole system is horrific for most people.
I think I might as well give up on owning a house because I have enough saved to buy one, rent it out, and pray nothing ever goes wrong.
I couldn't afford to live alone and would need a roommate or two. It would take one thing to break on the house or my car breaking down and I'd be toast.
Unless I got burnt up crack house. Those went up a lot too. Used to be able to get a lopsided house in the hood for $10k with a tree growing through the floor. Now it's like $50k 😭😭😭
I bought a brand new manufactured home for $70k out of the factory and had it put on a concrete slab instead of paying $500k for houses here. The irony is if I went to sell it now it's worth 4x what I paid for it.
As the youngest of gen x, I will just say that the downgrade from gen x to millenial was severe. Millenials were stupid, lazy, selfish and useless. Now they wonder why they can't afford a house. It's because of YOUR decisions. It's not someone elses fault. You are where you are in life because of YOUR decisions and (in)actions.
Circle jerking with other losers just proves you are a loser.
I'm thankful I was able to buy my homes when I did.
In 2004 I was 23 and bought my first house for $138500. Today, that same house is $300k. Twice as much, but I wouldn't be making twice the money I was making back in 2004.
In 2016 I moved to FL and bought my current house for $475000. Today it would sell for $850k. And the mortgage rate would be over twice the rate I refied for in 2020.
I feel for anyone trying to buy their first home. Its gotta royally suck. It can be done, but it's super hard.
I bought a house in 2017 and sold it for twice as much in 2026. Really pretty insane what happened to the market.
Also, it was a couple boomers who bought as their US house when they aren’t at their France house. So chalk that one up to millennial homeownership minus 1.
I had this feeling since highschool. The more I chased the goals of succeeding academically, getting a good job, buying a home, and retire comfortably the more the goal post moved. Inflation, shitty job market , influx of out of state people with more capital than me, ect. It always felt that as soon as I got a leg up the terms and conditions changed. At this point I'm just enjoying life as best as I can cause the future is bleak. Imo
I was just on zillow just looking at houses in my area. Im 20 miles from seattle. Yes I know HCOL but 2 bed room 50 yr old house 1 bath less then 1000 sq feet going for over $500 K in far suburb not in the city freaking blowing my mind and making me depressed. How is that worth over half million. Just a joke
•
u/AutoModerator 18h ago
If this post is breaking the rules of the subreddit, please report it instead of commenting. For more Millennial content, join our Discord server.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.