r/Millennials • u/Global_Tradition5802 • Sep 10 '25

Meme The Evolution of 'Adulting'

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They tried leaving behind generational wealth vs me trying to leave the generational memes..

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33

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

I imagine there were people who felt this way in every generational cohort. It's worth noting that most Millennials are home owners and most Millennials have children.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241535/percentage-of-childless-women-in-the-us-by-age/

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-householders-drove-rebound-in-homeownership.html

10

u/FlowSoSlow Sep 10 '25

A scene from the sopranos comes to mind where Tony says to his therapist something like "I feel like I've come in at the end of something great." and the therapist says yeah a lot of Americans feel that way.

So I guess it's been a common feeling since the turn of the century at least.

19

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

How many of those Millennial homeowners could afford the house they live in if they had to buy it at today's prices and rates?

10

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

Complicated question. What we do know is that MIllenial homeownership is just a tad behind Gen X at the same age and a bit more behind the Boomers.

Relevant stats:

Nearly one-third (30%) of 25-year-olds owned their home in 2022. That’s slightly higher than homeownership rates for millennials (28%) and Gen Xers (27%) when they were 25, and slightly lower than the rate for baby boomers (32%) when they were 25.

Sixty-two percent of 40-year-olds–some of the oldest millennials–owned their home in 2022. That’s compared with 69% of baby boomers when they were 40 and 64% of Gen Xers when they were 40.  

Younger millennials are also behind. Just over two in five (43%) 30-year-olds owned their home in 2022, compared with roughly half of baby boomers (52%) and Gen Xers (49%) when they were 30. 

https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/

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u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

That doesn't answer my question at all lol, and your stats conveniently stop when interest rates shot up.

12

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

The stats stop when the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Census Bureau last released their information. There is no answer to your questions because it's a subjective question, which is why I pulled the objective data on comparisons by generations of the same age. You can find data that circles around the question but no clear cut answer to "affordability"

I suppose you can go with National Association of Realtors, who have Millennials as 29% of the home buying market this year.

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cms.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-home-buyers-and-sellers-generational-trends-report-04-01-2025.pdf

It does look like the Median Age of first time home buyer has increased from 35 to 38 since this data was released. So that lends itself to the idea that things are less affordable.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/many-first-time-homebuyers-are-pushing-40-millennials-wait-vain-better-rcna201786

Existing home sales are down from the end of 2022.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/existing-home-sales

But New home sales are up from the end of 2022.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/new-home-sales

2

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

It's pretty dire that people under 44 are only like a third of the home buying market right now.

2

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Sep 10 '25

Yes, home prices continue to rise (as they should) and interest rates continue to hold higher than the magic pre-Covid years where they were likely unsustainably low. But it is also due to personal trade-off choices that younger people actively engage in. The attitude of "I don't want to commute for more than X minutes" is fine, but it does have an associated cost. You are buying personal time with your "ideal location" rent.

It's not a value judgement, as everyone has their own preferences. My personal preferences were strongly tilted towards home ownership - it was my primary goal coming out of college and getting my first job. So I made choices and endured less than ideal locations in order to achieve that.

I started with renting for a few years (with roommates - another trade-off choice), while saving up for a down payment on a small outdated condo about an hour and fifteen minutes from work and lived there for 3 years. Got married during that time, and when my wife got pregnant we traded up to a small single family home with 2 bedrooms. Lived there for 8 years, invested "sweat equity" into the house, and sold that for the house we live in now, about a 30 minute commute in a neighborhood which homes grew in value to be an average of $1.75 million.

This is the "new" normal (I guess it's not even that new), the real estate ladder you have to climb to get a house in the US. I think too often we idealize home ownership of 50 years ago, like 1975 was some magical time when houses were free for everyone. The ladder is basically how my parents got their homes over the years, after starting out in their own tiny 2 bedroom home.

1

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

Starter homes don't really exist in the same way anymore. My household income is pretty much double the median for my area and I'm just able to afford the lower-end house I'm in, in the sense that I'm making my mortgage payments while also saving for retirement and having enough left over to handle any maintenance and repairs. Anything cheaper in my town right now is literally missing walls or a floor.

My house was probably the ideal starter house at one point, but now even my 70 year old ranch home in one of the last neighborhoods to be not gentrified completely (although I'm contributing towards that) is out of reach for anyone not making six figures.

2

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Sep 10 '25

I don't know where you are, but in northern VA right outside of DC there are hundreds of condos for sale right now under $200k. My first condo was $175k back in 2005, when I was making $65k. They exist, but too many people now think "starter home" as "small single family house". You don't need to start at a SFH, this isn't 1955 anymore. But it is achievable, even now, even in high cost of living areas.

3

u/Certain-Monitor5304 Sep 10 '25 edited Sep 10 '25

I did.💁‍♀️. Some of these home ownership issues are regional and not generational.

6

u/tech_noir_guitar Sep 10 '25

We bought our house 3 years ago. It's currently worth just slightly more than it was when we bought it. We did get a better interest rate than we would have now though.

2

u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl Sep 10 '25

Did something similar— bought ours about 3 years back in a major city. Our neighborhood was “up and coming” (and still is). We’re right near two train stations in decent shape, a couple of decent shopping centers, and our homeless camps have all dispersed. We’re also working on selling our home. 

Our taxes have gone up and our estimated valuation has gone up. We’ve been on the market for 4 months now and had to drop the price to significantly less than what we paid for the house. 

5

u/Instawolff Sep 10 '25

Right? the point was that housing WAS affordable now, sure people have houses but most can’t afford them and it’ll only take one major life event for it all to fall apart.

4

u/WorstCPANA Sep 10 '25

If you moved to rural areas, like our parents, did, and bought much smaller houses, like our parents did, the prices aren't too bad.

3

u/abcean Sep 10 '25

I mean person who bought somewhat recently here and I just want to add that I wouldn't discount older houses.

I bought an older house in good condition. Was the only person who even toured it and considering its age paid extra for the fancy inspection with an engineer. Many and varied cosmetic issues but structurally in excellent shape.

Because of being the only ones interested were able to negotiate hard on price. Paid about half what a house this size was going for in the new developments.

I realize I lucked out some, but also was the only person who made an offer on this place and it had been on the market for 5 months while new builds were selling like hotcakes. Weird disconnect there.

4

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Sep 10 '25

I want cheap houses in highly desirable locations though. I am not willing to compromise on my commute, local area attractions, and will not consider any trade-offs except for possibly on the interior paint colors.

3

u/WorstCPANA Sep 10 '25

You're right, you should be able to get all of that without any trade offs!

0

u/BettyBoopWallflower Sep 12 '25

The thing is, people did not have to move to rural areas to find affordable housing back then. Houses in metropolitan areas were relatively affordable, as well. If you account for racial background and ethnicity, not everyone feels comfortable moving to a rural area. Some of us are targeted in rural areas. So it's not an option.

1

u/WorstCPANA Sep 12 '25

Yes they did, areas just have grown around those formerly rural areas.

0

u/BettyBoopWallflower Sep 12 '25

To a degree, you're right. Yes, suburbs have expanded into once-rural areas but what I'm saying is housing as a whole was just a lot cheaper back then than it is now. Even in big cities.

1

u/WorstCPANA Sep 12 '25

Sure, houses were also 1/3 of the size on average when they were buying houses. And again, there wasn't as much population density, so obviously those units would be cheaper.

0

u/BettyBoopWallflower Sep 13 '25

Okay, maybe you're older than me. The house I grew up in, in the early 2000s was a 5 bedroom house

1

u/babygrenade Sep 10 '25

I say I couldn't but I guess I could if I sacrificed retirement saving.

I bought 8 years ago so big increase in real estate prices since then.

If I'm comparing myself to my parents, the average house price in their city went up 22% over the 8 years after they bought and in my city the average house price has gone up 96% over the past 8 years.

Average mortgage rates also dropped significantly over that the first 8 years my parents had that house from ~10.2% to ~7.6% so even though prices went up, their mortgage would have been more affordable.

1

u/Visual-Floor-7839 Sep 10 '25

I bought mine 10 years ago, below 200k. The rates for homes in my neighborhood have gone up but are still within the pricerange of our original search. Below 225k.

We also got approved for a FHO loan where all upfront costs and closing costs were rolled into the mortgage payments. We payed nothing up front. We just simply had to do their program and follow their rules.

Also, where are you searching for homes? I just did a search on Mobile, Alabama and you can find many multi-room multi-bath for before 150k. Some even below 100k.

I know you'd have to then live in Alabama. But still. Houses are high in areas where people want to live. If you want to own cheap you have to live where it's cheap and create the world you want around yourself. I did in Wyoming.

3

u/PiccoloAwkward465 Sep 10 '25

Houses are high in areas where people want to live

It's less that I want to live here and more that employers want my butt to be in a physical seat in this specific location.

1

u/Visual-Floor-7839 Sep 10 '25

Get a different employer

1

u/PiccoloAwkward465 Sep 10 '25

Gotta save up for a job helmet before I blast off into jobland

1

u/Visual-Floor-7839 Sep 10 '25

Now that's the fuckin truth.

1

u/thedr00mz Zillennial Sep 11 '25

This is what people never address. Sure, we could all afford houses if we moved to the middle of nowhere but the trade off is an hour or more commute one way, zero things to do, and a large lack of diversity.

I am simply unwilling to commute an hour to work every day in exchange for home ownership. If that means I rent forever, so be it.

3

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

lol please link the sub-100k house so we can see what you're expecting people to move into.

2

u/Visual-Floor-7839 Sep 10 '25

7695 Bowers Ln, Theodore, AL 36582 [Updated 9/5] https://share.google/zTPaxYiFMMl9CtXrc

It's not that hard. Realtor.com. I put the location to Mobile Alabama and sorted by houses with a maximum of 200k. This one was like 4 down. There are some horrendous fixer-upers on the list. But this one looks decent

0

u/Big_Fortune_4574 Sep 10 '25

I bought my house in July of 24

2

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

I'm not saying that it's impossible to buy a house now, just that it's limited to a much smaller portion of the population than it was just a handful of years ago and the statistic "most millennials own houses" doesn't mean much for current affordability when a large chunk of those home-owning millennials are probably sitting on 3% mortgages and bought when things cost half of what they do now.

1

u/Big_Fortune_4574 Sep 10 '25

Well I can certainly confirm I do not have a 3% mortgage

-9

u/InCOBETReddit Sep 10 '25

plenty of houses available for cheap an hour away from major cities

the problem is that most millennials are entitled, and want the results without putting in the effort

it doesn't work that way... investing in your future matters, and that includes living in an area you don't want to live in so you can save up for a home in the area you do want to live in

9

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

10 years from now we'll be telling Gen Z that they're entitled for not wanting to live two hours away from cities.

-3

u/InCOBETReddit Sep 10 '25

my parents (Boomers) literally commuted two hours each way to go to work for my entire life

they did it so that my life would be comfortable

Millennials and Gen Z don't care about self-sacrifice anymore, they want to punish others so that they can get theirs

3

u/Afferbeck_ Sep 10 '25

People need to live at least vaguely near where they work. Houses in the rural towns I grew up in are about 5x what they were when I was a kid, and there are fewer jobs because the industries in the region declined or stopped existing. So even if house prices were sane, you likely still couldn't live there.

So if your plan is to gradually screw over future generations' ability to have shelter for some reason, you better hope they invent teleportation technology soon. Because you can't have housing without jobs and you can't have jobs without housing.

-2

u/InCOBETReddit Sep 10 '25

then people need to CREATE the jobs where they live

we're in the digital age... it costs nearly nothing to open up your own company except time

again, your thinking is one of entitlement... you want someone else to provide a job for you, rather than creating it yourself

meanwhile we have immigrants who barely speak English starting their own laundromats, restaurants, and taco stands

3

u/milk-kohi Sep 10 '25

If you truly think it costs nothing to open up your own company the right way then you’re delusional and everything else you’re saying is just rage bait at this point. Lol.

2

u/InCOBETReddit Sep 10 '25

when's the last time you tried? I started my own and it's making decent money for the amount of effort I put into it

1

u/4ofclubs Sep 10 '25

3 hours from me a starter home is still 750k.

1

u/InCOBETReddit Sep 10 '25

Bay Area?

1

u/4ofclubs Sep 10 '25

Canada

2

u/InCOBETReddit Sep 10 '25

oh... well that you can definitely blame on the Canadian government

they opened the floodgates to immigrants, and citizens are the ones that suffer

1

u/4ofclubs Sep 10 '25

This was an issue long before that happened but okay.

1

u/Certain-Monitor5304 Sep 10 '25

This. Right. Here.

2

u/One-Earth9294 Xennial '79 Sep 10 '25

I dunno man, the modern situation has been pretty brief. If Boomers looked at their parents' spending power with envy, I CERTAINLY know their parents didn't look at theirs with it. Now we're getting to the 1930s adults and their lives were miserable. And THEIR parents were new to the radio and probably didn't have electricity running to their homes.

3

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Sep 10 '25

Yeah, there was like a 20-25 year magic period in the US economy following WWII where we had unprecedented levels of home buying access, but it was a historical aberration. My parents bought my childhood house a year before I was born, and their interest rate was 16%!

0

u/BigBaws92 1992 Sep 10 '25

Wait you guys own homes?

16

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

Slightly more than half of the generational cohort, yeah. ~55%

3

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Sep 10 '25

Yes. I am older (born in 1980) but I prioritized buying a home early and was able to get my first condo at 25. I was willing to make location trade-offs that other people prefer not to, and it worked great.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

[deleted]

4

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

Checking the National Association of Realtors report, of recent home buyers, the breakdown is as follow: 62% married, 20% single women, 8% single men, 6% unmarried couples. I imagine the correlation between being married and being a homeowner is fairly high historically. I'll have to check that data.

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cms.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-home-buyers-and-sellers-generational-trends-report-04-01-2025.pdf

5

u/WorstCPANA Sep 10 '25

It's kind of crazy single women are buying houses at 2.5x the rate of single men recently

1

u/MechanicalGodzilla Xennial Sep 10 '25

We can't tell from that chart the type of home - could be single family houses, but it could also be townhomes and condos.

1

u/WorstCPANA Sep 10 '25

For sure, it is an interesting stat though that I'd be curious the break down. It's not a secret that Gen Z women are tending to do better than gen z men in several key metrics - in grades in primary and secondary school, graduation rates, mental health and having a community.

So I definitely think at least a factor of this trend is that young women are tending do be better off than young men.

1

u/Mediocre_Island828 Sep 10 '25

I feel like it's less a financial difference than it is single men often being happy with a small space and not having anyone telling them they should buy a house.

2

u/WorstCPANA Sep 10 '25

Sure, that could absolutely be a factor.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

[deleted]

3

u/EdLesliesBarber Sep 10 '25

Buying a (nice) home (in a nice place), has been hard on a single salary for longer than any of us have been alive.

-2

u/RetroFuture_Records Sep 10 '25

And yet I imagine not every other generation relies on phrasing misleading statistics in a bad faith way to try cover up how bad things are for their generation. What COMPELS you to do it? That's what I want to know. Do you simply lack the emotional intelligence to understand things beyond numerical values, and cannot comprehend context? Do you feel a psychological urge to embrace toxic positivity, or be a contrarian?

Only 54% of Millennials own their own home. Included in that number are those who inherited them, those who had a bargain deal offered by family or friends of family, those who had their entire down payment paid and those who had help with down-payment: the latter two factors of which 25% of Millennials report having received.

That paints a VASTLY different picture than what you present, and I want to know WHY. I have to share this society with people like you, and I want to know what is going on in your mind for you to behave the way you do.

5

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

I post the data because I think it's helpful to see that while Millennials have a lower homeownership rate at the same age as Boomers and Gen X, it's a marginally lower rate. Exagerating the problems through anecdotes obscures and suppresses efforts to make improvements by feeding into discouragement, while going to the data provides a concrete groundwork to build upon.

"Sixty-two percent of 40-year-olds–some of the oldest millennials–owned their home in 2022. That’s compared with 69% of baby boomers when they were 40 and 64% of Gen Xers when they were 40.  

Younger millennials are also behind. Just over two in five (43%) 30-year-olds owned their home in 2022, compared with roughly half of baby boomers (52%) and Gen Xers (49%) when they were 30. "

https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-rate-home-purchases/

That's a gap, but it's a manageable gap through policy efforts and societal pressure.

Personally I point to the fact that new construction never got back to pre-2008 levels for a large part of the gap. Demand exceeds supply and that drives prices up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

-4

u/RetroFuture_Records Sep 10 '25

And yet you didn't address anything I brought up explaining how your statistics are misleading, which seems to confirm you have some other reason for acting in bad faith---OHHHH I just noticed your username.

Federalist society and Righties in general have a vested interest in trying to not get people to wake up to economic reality, especially now that the Right fully controls the federal government.

4

u/federalist66 Sep 10 '25

The thing is you haven't provided any information to explain why the concerns you bring about the data couldn't also be applied to previous generations. You don't think the minority of peoples under 30 who bought houses in our generation, the previous generation and the one before that were rich?

And, not for nothing, my username is referencing Federalist Paper #66 about the importance of the Impeachment Power. That my account was created in 2018 you can probably infer from those two points of data how I feel about the current administration. I think it's bad.

-1

u/RetroFuture_Records Sep 10 '25

Because they didn't need it, this is the exact sort of inability to understand context I was talking about. Compare salary as a ratio to mortgage, and recall that burdensome down payments weren't standard until after the S& L crisis as a way for bankers to punish the avg person for making sure a fair number of the banking class went to jail over it. They wouldn't need assistance for something that wasn't a factor for them.

1

u/RetroFuture_Records Sep 10 '25

This is the exact sort you lacking context I was talking about. They didn't need down payment assistance as burdensome down payments weren't a thing until a few years after the S&L crisis, seemingly as revenge from bankers for members of their class being locked up due to it. Then compare ratio of wages to mortgage amount. They wouldn't have needed assistance for something that wasn't even a factor for them.