In some ways I agree with you. In others, well...
My parents formative years were the 1940s. By the 1950s my dad had returned home from the war, was working, and seeing his salary grow.
There was inflation in prices, but there was inflation in salaries too. Today we see inflation in many things, but not in salaries. Those remain static.
My dad stuck his neck way out to purchase a home. Within a decade the home had gone up in value by 50 to 100%. Equity was an almost instant reality. By the time that decade was up, his salary had also gone up by 25 to 50%.
Generally speaking, it’s tough for those who grew up during the 1940s and 1950 to understand what the youth of today face.
Yes, a kid today can scrape and save and get themselves into a home. And five years later that home may be worth 50 to 80% of what he financed on it. His salary, if he has the same job, will be a little more than what he was being paid five years earlier, but not all that much. And if he’s already been there seven years or so, the yearly increases may have ceased.
While it may look like a kid is blowing a lot of money, buying a home at $500k will keep that kid’s nose barely above water for decades today. It won’t be like it was in the last century, where you stuck out your nose, and were handsomely rewarded a decade or so later.
In the last century you could expect to hold your same job for ten twenty, perhaps 40 years. Today you’re lucky if it last six.
In some ways I agree with your take, but this generation faces some problems we haven’t seen in 100 years.
We have 22.8% of our workforce out of work. We have another 25% working for far less than they are qualified to be making.
We have a flood of foreign nationals being brought into the nation. We also have regions across this nation being turned into foreign soil, they have been so saturated with people who do not speak English.
We have areas where only Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Armenian, Tolog, and other languages are spoken.
I wish any kid luck trying to start out today.
In the 1970s, I would have agreed with your post a lot more. Today, not so much.
I was married and had two children by the time I was 28. My wife was a good bit younger than that. Standard Operating Procedure in my grandparents’ day. But our peers, for whom it was still Party Time, thought it quite weird.
I know failure to launch “kids” (mostly late 20s now), and none of what you said applies to them. Because they don’t care. They have no desire to enter into the adult world, they don’t have jobs, they don’t want jobs, the don’t care about the challenges of paying their own bills because they don’t have them. Yeah those actually entering the adult world have some extra challenges, but they will handle them because they’re becoming adults. The rest are just lazy losers who are going to get a rude awakening when their parent die and they find themselves pushing 50 with no employment history and nobody around that cares if they live or die.
Really? No way should a young person’s first home be $500k.