A house, two cars, a healthy relationship ,a career, livable wage, 2.5 kids, a dog. ya know, the expectation many children were told in school.
Everything I hear on social media says this is a myth.
I have this, and to be honest, it’s exhausting to maintain.
I think that’s why you see social media push back about it being a myth.
The idea of “normal” that we pretend is true started after WW2. The US was highly unionized, highly industrialized, and most other countries were either former colonies that had been gutted economically, or were European powers that were decimated by the war.
We stepped into the manufacturing void, and suddenly one income was adequate to provide for a family. That’s not the case anymore. If your family happens to have resources now, you can maintain the semblance of that lifestyle, but you will probably need two incomes and will always be at risk of losing it.
We absolutely must, as a society, change our conception of “normal” and stop penalizing people for trying something new. Going back to some old ways may have benefit as well.
For example, multigenerational housing would solve a huge number of my problems. I want a kid, but I don’t want to pay a second mortgage for daycare. I can keep myself clothed and fed, but cleaning the house suffers. If you have more people under one roof, then you have opportunities for economies of scale that just don’t work when we all live in our own cloistered enclosures. There’s more resilience in that sort of system, and we need to be engaging with ideas like this to land gracefully as the world continues to fall apart.
My brother and I live together. A lot of people think it’s weird but it’s been great for both of us. I worked part time while going to college while he footed most of the bills. Now he’s a full time student and I’m paying for everything. We get all the household benefits of a married couple (shared chores, lower food bill, cheaper housing per person, mixed finances, etc) without the risks.
Success in early adulthood heavily depends on having familial support, especially from your parents. We don’t have that, but together we can still pool resources and do better than if we were alone.
Seems like a nice situation indeed.
Exactly. I don’t think I’ve ever lived alone - I’ve always either had a roommate or lived with a romantic partner since leaving my parents’ house. I’d like an additional roommate or two, honestly, to cut down even further on costs.
Yeah but minus the kids. It makes a difference but it depends on how much that matters to you. For us, we figured we could do without and are happy where we are.
It’s good that you figured it out!
I was always interested in the childfree lifestyle, let’s hope the [email protected] gets a bit more active
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Doing fine so far! No kids yet though.
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Agreed on 2 out of 3.
Im just happy that I wake up another day without health problems.
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The things I appreciate the most about my life, are the ones that took me off plan and by surprise. The unscripted unexpected shit, that’s my real happiness.
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I moved out at 20, but I was privileged enough to get help from my dad until my spouse and I got our shit together. I’m always amazed by people who seemingly did it themselves.
Roommates. Lots of roommates.
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Definitely did 4 in a 2 bedroom and 5 in a 3. Not counting couch surfers.
That’s what I did, but it was the late 1990s so things were a bit different. Married with a kid, single-income household on the salary of a high school dropout. Fortunately for me the software industry was easy to get into back then and housing was cheaper. Funds were tight for a decade or so, but it’s gone well.
My kids all moved out in the past 5 years, skipped college and are living on their own with livable wages from jobs they like, more or less, and homes they own; one with kids, one renting their own place with a life-partner. Not having student loans helps, as does living in the forsaken US midwest where housing costs aren’t terrible (the tradeoff being that entertainment options can be more limited than closer to the coasts. A decent one bedroom apartment in a safe area is like $900, mortgage on a somewhat crappy medium-sized house like $1200, provided you got in on those sweet 3% mortgages).
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Norwegian govt gave me enough money to pay rent at a boarding school when I was 17. I earned enough in my apprenticeship to rent an apartment and have a crappy car, in a small town, for two years when I was 20. Unemployment benefit (and eggs, rice, and tomato-beans) supported me for 3 months when renting in Oslo in a shared rundown apartment with 5 other people while I was looking for work, when I was 23. The job I found, 1&2 line tech support for a small software company, wasn’t well-paying but good enough to pay my share of the rent and eat a bit better, and eventually buy a car again. And my dad has occasionally helped me with a bit of money when I made a mistake. Only what he could afford, and I paid back most of it.
So thats how I did it. I’ve been lucky. With country, with parents, and with friends.
I don’t see how people in any country can do it without some kind of govt support if they don’t start out with rich parents.
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- A house
-- Just purchased, closing is closing in soon. - two cars
-- completely mandatory. We couldn’t possibly bus, we have two used cars approaching two decades old and we’re dreading the day they croak. - a healthy relationship
-- married in July - a career
-- For me, finally started the career I wanted two years ago, after a decade of trying to become a programmer I finally am. Wife might be in a career now, she’s not quite sure. She’s happier where she is than Target, but that’s a low bar. - livable wage
-- livable with the ability to go on vacations (mostly anime and comic conventions) 2.5 kids
-- don’t want them at the moment.- a dog
-- … two cats
I do NOT in any way feel like I’ve earned this. I have been saving to buy a house EVER SINCE I paid off my student loans. I dumped all my money for YEARS to get that debt off of my books and after I did, I immediately started saving. Didn’t even change my living habits because they were habits at that point. I didn’t even have a GF at the time. I just knew that I wanted to be ahead, because I knew that it was going to be a slog when I was finally ready to buy a home. Just like it was a slog to get into my career, just like it was a slog. I wanted to be AHEAD I wanted a good home. And after all that effort I got…
half a duplex for $305,000… Cheapest we could find if you don’t count badrealestate suggestions on lemmy.
All that effort and I barely have a home. barely. We could’ve taken a larger loan but, shit happens. We could’ve been laid off, One of our cars could’ve needed to be replaced, We could’ve been disabled, We could’ve had our identity stolen, We could’ve been scammed, We could’ve been robbed, We could’ve come across a cop who didn’t like our faces, We could’ve missed payments because Wells Fargo SUCKS and have our credit killed.
All of these things DIDN’T happen to us, so we got to purchase a house. Because if any of those things happened to us, we would’ve dipped into savings and we wouldn’t be purchasing a house in our 30s. All of those things that could’ve happened were completely out of our control. (except for Wells Fargo, you can choose to not be fucked by Wells Fargo by LEAVING Wells Fargo)
So… there is no plan, only a lottery.
- A house
47 here… I suppose im at the tail end of the people who still had a chance. We have a house that is half paid off but that needs a new roof, windows, and flooring that we cannot afford to take care of due to inflation screwing everything up. We have 2 cars but they are both 30+ years old and keeping them on the road is taking up most of what free time I have. When we got the mortgage it felt like we had finally ‘made it’ and that future pay increades would allow us to remodel and modernize our ‘fixer upper’ but the intervening 15 years has been an escalating shitshow that has us barely able to maintain what we have in its current state. It is starting to look tempting to liquidate the house and extraneous posessions and buy an old RV and become modern day nomads for our remaining years. The only thing really preventing this is that our 2 adult children are living with us still because there are no jobs that pay enough for them to move out on their own and we are not going to just dump them on the curb and say ‘figure it out’ like my parents did to me…
I’m 5 years younger, give or take. Husband and I have been toying with that idea more and more. Liquidate it all, and buy an RV to travel in, and be happy checked out nomads.
We don’t own a house, the absolute lowest rent we can find (within a 20 mile radius of our business) is $2600 a month (1 bed/1 bath), and every year Greystar and their cronies raise the rent significantly. The apartment we are in now is currently listed for right around $3k. It was up around $3200 about a month ago. It’s a fucking 1 bedroom.
Food gets more and more expensive. Insurance for everything is easily $1k a month. All the “utilities” just keep going up and up, and being in San Diego, SDGE just keeps bending us over further and further. We pay more for electricity than anyone else in the country, last I heard. Fucking why?! Car payments, and petrol is hovering right around $5.50-$6 per gallon now. We never eat out because it’s inevitably over $50, and sucks.
When I graduated high school, a house was somewhere in the $250k to $300k range, in an ok area, but far from most stuff (yay urban sprawl) with interest rates being over 7%. Ok. cool, in todays money that would be solid, but back then, I made less than $9 an hour. Then we had how many “once in a lifetime” financial crisis in the span of what 10 years, right after I got out of school.
Owning a business gets harder and harder each year, and more and more expensive. City and county both keep making up new shit to charge a $300 fee here, a $400 fee there, another $250 fee there. Plus, hacking, banks, and the rest of the shit going wrong, we just had $4k stolen from our payment account, and Intuit (the fucking devil, only behind nestle) just shrug their shoulders, say they aren’t a bank, and to get fucked. I just don’t want to do any of it anymore.
I also don’t have family to help me, so I’ve always been on my own. Your kids are VERY, unbelievably lucky. I have asked my mother for help once in my adult lifetime, and I was told I didn’t deserve it, and I got myself in the position, so I needed to figure it out myself.
I didn’t mean for this to turn into a whine fest. But to answer the original question, no, I don’t. I did the right things, I started a business to better my life, and while I’d say we are squarely middle class, but what I was promised as a kid absolutely does NOT line up with reality.
Sort of in a backwards kinda way. Made a plan 2 years ago to start something and it almost coming to completion.
But damn if I know if going work out or not.
What’s the plan if you don’t mind me asking?
Sorry telling it could divulge who I am. Maybe after it done I can advertise.
I’m 28. I have a good career, a good dog, and an affordable apartment in a great neighborhood. The cars thing is obviously very subjective; for me personally I’m thrilled that I live somewhere that I can get away with not needing to own a car.
The only thing that isn’t going my way is the relationship thing. Feels like that’s never going to happen for me. I’ve been single my whole life and often doubt that I’ll ever find someone. I have ASD so the skills that most people develop naturally which are necessary to develop and maintain a romantic relationship never developed for me.
Doing pretty good.
No cars because I don’t need it, still saving for a flat (also, met my gf a year ago so we still have some time). Kids in a few years probably, I don’t like dogs.
I wish I did dogs after kids, I just don’t have the bandwidth to take care of them to the standard I did before.
Glad to hear you are doing well, do you ever feel survivors guilt when you read about people struggling to get by?
I live in Europe, so I already had survivor’s guilt during university when I learned about college debts in the US.
I am well aware that I’m doing good, and I try to feel grateful for that everyday.
I am a cat person, so, never.
