Older workers are flabbergasted by co-workers rents because their mortgages are lower.

Buying a house today is much more complicated than 20-30 years ago. Wages have not raised with the prices of a home, interest rates are intense, and unlike your parents, you can't use a tray of homemade cookies as a down payment on a home.

On a popular Reddit thread, one person tells their coworkers how much they pay to rent, and they don't believe them.

They write:

I was talking to one of my older coworkers, and he asked why I work two jobs; I told him my rent is $1800. He was like well damn, you must live in a mansion. I said, no, just an 800 sq ft apartment.

He didn't believe me, so I showed him on my phone what all the apartments are going for in our town, and he was like, what the f*ck? My mortgage is half that on a four bedroom house.

He showed me pics of his house, which was huge and pretty decent; I looked it up on Zillow, and it's worth $400 000. He bought it decades ago when it was around $100k.

All my coworkers and I talk about the housing crisis a lot, and all the older guys who have been working there for 20-30 years said they bought houses in their early 20s thanks to this job.

The internet finds this deeply relatable.

elmuchocapitano says:

I have the same job they did, the same position, and I will never be able to afford even a starter home. The American dream is dead.

At least they were willing to listen and be curious. I have mostly older coworkers, and we all work in finance, so it isn't that they don't understand. It's that they don't want to understand.

Content_Cooker says:

Yep. My husband and I bought our first house when we were in our mid-20s. He made about $18/hour, which was a pretty decent wage in 2001-02, and I stayed home with our toddler and was pregnant with our second child.

The house was $130,000. We sold it a couple years later for a little over $200,000. It's worth about $400K now. But my now-adult children have skilled jobs (both in the trades, one is a few years into their apprenticeship and the other is a year in) and neither of them makes $18/hour... in 2023 dollars.

They're nowhere near able to purchase a house and they still live at home (with no real prospects for moving out, as rents in our area are around $1,800 for a one-bedroom or $2,400 for a two-bedroom apartment).

It's troubling and makes me feel bad for them very hard for regular middle-class young people to get ahead. They're fortunate in that we, their parents, do well and can house them and help them without any problem.

If we were having trouble paying our bills or didn't have a large-enough house for four adults, I really don't know how they could manage to save their money and get ahead at all.

DNBeauty420 says:

And people wonder why we are depressed and not having kids. It really is depressing. I highly doubt I'll ever own a home myself.

OP, I am literally in your shoes.