Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
Extra time in college is hugely expensive like you said. This is a cost people don’t realize and don’t like to admit. Each extra year “costs” around 100k between tuition costs and lost earning potential. The people I graduated with that took 7-8 years to get a bachelor’s were so much further behind financially they won’t ever catch up with those taking 4 years.
And those that spent 1 year getting a specialized certificate or two and entering into specialized markers that have low supply are even farther ahead.
Mind you, this isn’t an option for many industries… but it is an option for some and extremely lucrative. (Welding, machining, tonnes of “confined space” jobs, anything in waste management…)
Spending 7 years on a degree to get a high supply low demand job though was and is a scam…
I feel really bad for folks who fell for it though, they trusted people who told them it was a good choice and ot sucks watching so many people suffer for it.
Literally all I did at 19 was crunch the numbers. “Average salary for that field is this, at min wage I would lose this much a year not working and going to school. After paying off my debt it’d cost this, I’d make this much more per year if I get the job asap… so it’d take… thirty years for the investment to pay out? Wat?”
After comparing some costs vs others and contacting people in the fields, it became apparant that my dream field was actually a huge money sink, and my second best wasn’t much better… but my third option was actually very low barrier of entry, growing demand, and paid less but cost almost nothing to get into.
So I went with that.