My Mum says this, my Dad says this, every boomer I come across says this. I'm fucking sick of it. My Mum stopped working at 28 to be a stay at home parent, their “hard work” including the horrible concept of “mowing peoples lawns every Saturday until 1pm to save up for the deposit”. Their idea of doing it tough was “One time we had to sell our camera”.
I'm a professional business man earning a decent salary. My wife also is in a professional career earning a decent salary. Combined we CANNOT afford a fucking deposit. We save and save and save but even if my entire wage was put aside, it still can't keep up with the rising house prices in my country (Australia). I would need to be earning over $200,000 p.a before tax to beat rising house prices. No amount of fucking Saturday morning mowing will fix this. No amount of $4.60 coffees I've skipped or Netflix subscriptions can add that amount of money to my bank account.
My parents bought their house for $43,000 in 1983. That's $145,269 in today's value. Do you know what their house was recently valued it? $1,300,000. Add in the stamp duty tax and the insanity at auctions going on and that would easily be $1.5mil out of pocket by the end. We would need nearly $300,000 of hard cash in the bank to put a deposit down on that.
“Oh but wages have risen too! I earned only blah blah blah when I was your age”. Yeah, wages have risen. You know what else has risen? FUCKING EVERYTHING. A house back then cost 7 times the yearly wage average. Now it's over 16 times the yearly wage average.
If house prices were even remotely close to when my parents bought a house, we'd be living somewhere really fucking nice. Not looking at shithole units and cheaply built townhouses with low grade insulation but large, beautiful homes in prominent suburbs with big back yards for a dog and kids and a great schooling zone.
We tick every box to live a comfortable live in a nice house and still can't even get close to buying one. It's fucking broken, it's fucking bullshit and it's fucking depressing.