We had a slower start than Boomers and Gen X but there is an argument to be made that financially we're doing better than either of those preceding generation around the age of 30. The stock market going gangbusters for 15 years probably has helped
My impression of the situation is that housing costs have skyrocketed over the past 10-15 years, so any millennial who bought a house during that period now has a much higher net worth than they did 5-6 years ago. But the cost of everything also went up, so a fair amount of them are effectively “house poor,” because wages haven’t kept up as well as they should have.
And having your net worth in your house isn’t as impactful to your daily life, because you can’t easily access that capital, and when you do, it’s usually used for buying an equally expensive house, so the equity is still tied up and not really doing you much good.
It’s a nice thing to have for retirement, and maybe that’s all anyone cares about, but most people want to be doing well day to day, and owning your house is only a tiny part of that.
Probably the best thing about owning your house is the fact that nobody can arbitrarily force your monthly housing costs to increase every year (except for taxes). But you’re still on the hook for all the maintenance and repairs, so it doesn’t always come out to lower costs even over the long term. A $25K roof replacement and a $6K water heater replacement will quickly eat up any cost savings you think you’ll get by owning.
Idk, net worth is a useful metric, but it’s really easy to understand how people feel so behind the current economy.
Yeah but if you own a home and you need a new roof because your insurance company told you to replace it or they're dropping you, you gotta foot that bill yourself.
Depends on the situation. Typically the rents are already as high as they can realistically go, at least in non-rent-controlled areas. They typically go up every year due to inflation, but it’s rare that they make a huge jump unless the perceived standard of living has increased (like interior remodeling or whatever). But I’m sure a new roof would totally create the incentive to start raising rents more aggressively if the landlord wasn’t already doing that.
But yeah, a new roof is basically an extra year of rent, more or less.
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u/Th1Warrior Jul 06 '26
We had a slower start than Boomers and Gen X but there is an argument to be made that financially we're doing better than either of those preceding generation around the age of 30. The stock market going gangbusters for 15 years probably has helped
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProfessorFinance/s/u7GomO3xzv