I have never really said anything like this publicly however, coming across this reddit I thought what better place to get something off my chest that has been eating at me for a long time. I am a 29M Australian and living in Australia. When I was a young man from say 12 until maybe like 20 / 21? I basically shunned and felt shunned from society in a way. My area I grew up in had a lot of gangs / drugs / violence etc and of course, like many of the young men around me I got sucked into all this. When I was 15, I was (very briefly) incarcerated in a youth prison (Juvie for Americans)? and again when I was 18, I was arrested, and this time incarcerated in proper adult prison. At this point I pretty much had an epiphany that I didn't really like Jail. When I got released on parole when I was 19, I started working as a apprentice cabinet maker (I never finished school and when I got expelled from year 10, I worked as a full-time concreter and had worked my whole life). I quickly got fired from my apprentership for having a sick day and bounced around basically every trade / laboring job you could think of getting hired and fired accordingly. I learned a lot about what I didn't want to do and decided I had aspirations of a cooperate office job. It was hard with a criminal record and no education but after literally years of countless interviews I landed an Office job and quite enjoyed it. Since then, until now at 29 I have stayed in the cooperate world and just recently got a new job where (if I make it through probation and everything goes well) I can earn up to 90K a year (10K more than I am currently making) which is considered very slightly above the median wage in my country. I do however, still feel like I am completely drowning in stress and fears of the future. Me and my Fiance currently pay $600 a week in rent and it seems like all of our pay each fortnight just goes on that and bills. In February 2023 we have to move out again and fear of our living arrangements / homelessness / being fired / etc is haunting me 24/7. We have been saving for a house deposit and we have 40K in savings (mostly mine) and after speaking to a mortgage broker, with our combined salary of 160K per year. We can borrow around 550 thousand dollars. This isn't enough to get us anything in or around the city we work and live in and also the mortgage repayments will be crippling. I always had a dream of owning a home / safe space where I knew if all else failed, I would have a home and I am realizing now it's never going to happen. My life to get to this point has been marked by blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice and I basically have realized my reward is renting a noise polluted shit hole for as long as I can hold down a job praying I don't get sick or injured which would ultimately lead me to being homeless and forgotten in a very short amount of time. Again, apologies for the rant. I have woken up in my feels and needed to vent to someone today.