The kid sounded like he had a plan of his own and was working towards it, so it might just be as simple as mom has a car and he doesn't, or it's his first apartment and she knows what to look out for when moving into a new one, which he's never had experience doing. The article doesn't make it sound like he's some totally dependent man-child, but it also doesn't elaborate enough to really say why she went along.
This is why I hate how media tries to stir up ‘this generation vs that’, and I refuse to fall prey to it. I’m 40 and I have so much respect for younger generations trying to make it now. It’s still hard enough for me and I can’t imagine how much harder it is for them.
Also, even if I don’t get the stuff they’re into, that’s ok because the generations before me don’t get the stuff I’m into. People seem to get older and forget they were at one time considered the ‘lazy’ ones who liked ‘dumb’ stuff.
Literally every single generation we have records of. Hell, there were ancient Romans (and I mean ANCIENT) who wrote about how their 'cultural values' were in decline compared to the older generations. And this was BEFORE Rome was even an empire, this was back in the B.C.E.s
As a Gen-X'er, I had the same conversation with my grandparents 35 years ago.
"Why don't you just buy a house?"
"Do you know how much houses cost now?"
"Well, we bought our first house for $40,000."
"$40,000 isn't even a down payment now. Tell you what, here's how much I make, let's sit down with the real estate listings and you tell me what I can afford."
". . . Oh."
"Yeah, right, 'Oh'."
I did finally buy a house... 33 years later, a decade after they both died.
I've bought two homes with a price tag under 80k - most recently about 15 years ago (and it was a fixer upper to be sure) and sold it for about that 12 years ago. My first house I bought when I was 23. 27 years ago. I don't recall what I put down, but it was under $5k.
Which isn't to argue so much as just demonstrate that this varies wildly with location.
In both those cases you still have to pay one thousand dollars in rent every month to the actual property owner, so I don't know if I would call that home ownership except only in the most generous sense.
Oh yeah, it absolutely varies wildly. My first place is back on the market for little more than I sold it for over a decade ago. My current home is worth far more than I paid for it just a few years ago. They're 4 hours apart.
What are you talking about? I was responding to someone who said they couldn't afford a house 35 years ago with 40k down. It's only been in the last few years 40k wouldn't be enough and even that is only if you go conventional mortgage instead of one of the other programs.
3% down FHA $40k will purchase you a $1.2 million house.
That's not what he said. He said in a conversation that 40k wouldn't hypothetically be a down payment 35 years ago. I didn't say housing is cool today, I said that the conversation he had 35 years ago was very atypical and housing wasn't impossible to afford until relatively recently. No, the experience of Gen X 20-30 years ago shouldn't be compared to the experience of today as if they were the same.
You bought busted ass houses during the multinational housing market crash. At the time banks were struggling to offload massive inventory repossessed from people who could no longer pay whist they themselves were worrying about going bankrupt. There was very little in the way of credit available so you presumably bought them for cash which means that while everyone else was losing their ass you had more liquid wealth than most everyone. The last time this happened previously was the great depression.
To describe this as situations vary with location is to be completely full of shit.
Houses ARE cheaper in the boondocks where there are no jobs but this isn't a viable strategy for most folks.
Yep, you could still probably find that in the town I grew up in - which the major employer left decades ago, everyone of working age moved out, and has been getting more rundown and greyer every year. Sometimes a cheap house is not worth it.
And her son wasn't the only one struggling. Jess received a call from her eldest daughter, who was complaining that her husband was going to have to quit his job to take care of their kids because of how expensive childcare was. They were spending more on daycare than what he was earning.
It's called 'having a person in your life who worries too much'. I'm a millennial and I'm getting close to this point, with how often my parent keeps asking me about finding a better place to live when I'm scrounging to find places that won't cost an arm and a leg
No that's bullshit. I had the same type of parents and as a result I never had any privacy to myself, ever.
Spend more than an hour in my room? They're knocking on the door, wondering what I'm "up to". "Why are you on the computer all day?" "You better not be looking at porn!" "Why are you reading that Wikipedia article?" "You can't play StarCraft; it has the word 'craft' in it, which means witchcraft". One time my dad even printed out my browser history and read it during family dinner.
To this day I still have a mild anxiety attack every time I hear someone say something that sounds even remotely like my name in public, and I'm 34.
Trust me, you don't want to be raised by helicopter parents. It traumatizes you for life. I know I'm not explaining this adequately enough for someone who didn't grow up this way to understand just how bad it is to never have any privacy or time to yourself, especially when you're an introvert like me. I don't think I ever can explain it, so you'll have to just trust me when I say I'm still fucked up over being raised by parents who care too much.
I'd guess that it was to prove a point to someone who wouldn't accept the world wasn't how they declared it to be, despite being wrong.
I mean, not all of them but some boomers are beyond impossible with this stuff. I think there's a real denial in many of them because so many saw their wealth expload simply for buying a dirt cheap house or having a job you now need a degree for and all the real chances of slary progression have been taken away.
I think it makes people start wondering where its coming from and, rather than think about that, they decide that things are fine or else they'd have to start thinking about one particular generations insatiable greed.
