Posted on 08/17/2015 9:28:41 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
While it’s not good for man to live alone, it’s even worse for him to live at home with his parents.
A recent Pew Research poll reveals that though employment is up, the number of millennials living on their own is down. This failure to launch reflects a widespread cultural regression. By returning home after graduation, this generation’s doing more than just perpetuating adolescence. We’re losing at life.
There might be more room for activities at your parent’s house but there’s little room for personal growth. And if being determines consciousness, then you’ll bring your future down with you when you move back into the basement. It’s time to grow up. It’s time to move out.
We Should Love Our Parents Enough Never To Move Back In With Them
Sure, student loans suck. More than our parents, we’ve had to grapple with unrealistic dreams built on unsteady mountains of student debt. But there’s a place you can go when you’re down on your luck and low on your dough. It’s called the YMCA.
If that sounds harsh, imagine asking your old man if you can live in your old room. By moving home, you could save some cash but only at the cost of your character.
Our parents might love us but they don’t like us that much. And they shouldn’t. In civil society, the family exists to foster maturity and prepare offspring for eventual adulthood not perpetual childhood. Taxing their generosity robs them of the investment of their lifetime. Every mother and father wants to provide their kid with a better and brighter future. After two decades of sacrifice—whether they’ll admit it or not—they want a son with a career, not an overgrown boy with a neckbeard. We ought to actualize the potential they’ve poured into us. We should become adults they’re proud of.
Yea Bro, Living at Home Isn’t Cool
Whatever you do though, don’t kid yourself. Living at home is anything but cool and everyone knows it. “Hey girl, want to come back to my parent’s place?” is a line that even Ryan Gosling couldn’t pull off. Winston Churchill once observed that the spaces we occupy end up shaping us. At 22, our mother’s house is turning us back into children. Like continence, literacy, and a job, a place of your own stands as a general benchmark of responsibility. Go find one.
Cutting a rent check is the first big step toward self-reliance. Millennials don’t have to blaze trails, brave the wilderness, or build cabins to make it in the real world. We just need to scout Craigslist for a place, set up direct deposit, and maybe lower our expectations. That first apartment won’t be ideal but it’ll be necessary. More than a roof, it represents an investment in the future.
Tough finances are a burden but they don’t have to be a permanent roadblock. If you’re drowning in student debt and rent breaks the budget, find a roommate, sublease, or couch surf. Do whatever it takes, because to make it in America, you have to make it out of your mom’s house first.
Get Ahead By Betting On Yourself
None of this should discount the difficulty of leaving home. Lord knows my living situation is hardly on fleek. The place exudes a kind of refugee camp chic with makeshift bookshelves made out of milk crates, scrounged furniture, and a few cheap Ikea pieces. Food and clothing present their own challenges. Since graduation a few months ago, I’ve bleached colors and burnt minute-rice; I’ve shrunk clothes and set grease fires. It’s been rough, unpleasant, and always worth it.
Coming and going each day reminds me that I’m on my own. It’s not a great feat. An apartment’s just the most approachable manifestation of day-in and day-out maturity. Stupid or smart decisions determine whether the rent gets paid or if the lease is lost. If disaster strikes, no one’s coming to the rescue. The world won’t pause for me to get back on. And those four walls remind me, that for better or worse, I’m an adult and that each day my mundane adventure is trying to live like one.
I wouldn’t have it any other way. A cheap apartment produces perseverance; soggy ramen noodles, character; and an on time rent check, hope—hope that I can build an adult life. The goal is simple. You want your dad to say, “That’s my boy. He’s got a place of his own.”
As a generation, we can live at home and languish or we can move out and make our on way. It’s time we take a risk. It’s time we bet on ourselves. If we don’t, no one else will.
You say you own four houses and don’t live in any of them, choosing to live in your family home instead. Yet you do not collect rent on any of the houses. Am I missing something or misreading what you posted?
If anything, parents should move in with their kids and mooch off of them.
Chump!!!!
Why, you could be living on AFDC, TANF, SSDI, and EITC, in Section 8 housing, talking on an 0bamaphone, yellin' "GIBSMEDAT!!!" and threatening to riot if anyone "disses" you ...
I lived with my parents for a year after I graduated college but I was working in my career field. They didn’t mind because they never knew me growing up. I was the phantom child. The other two, who were constantly in trouble, got all the attention.
I enjoyed getting to know them.
One I hang onto for my own enjoyment, the other three are investments that will get flipped. Last year, for example, it was three different properties. I could as well do this with ten but I’m not looking to make a full time career out of it. For the time I’m willing to put in, four is about my limit unless something irresistible comes along.
Neither a landlord nor a tenant be!
This isn’t rocket surgery, so I don’t see why people struggle to obtain conventional mortgages or pay rent. One month’s rent will buy a property at a tax sale. Foreclosures and fsbo’s are nearly as easy.
Not everybody knows how to buy and sell houses. As you mentioned, you were taught as you were growing up how to do this.
It took me a year to find a full-time, professional job after graduation. And, I needed to "lower my standards", as it were, to NOT work in engineering, but work in computers. (20-odd years later, here I am, still working in computers. but I digress....).
First "full-time, professional" job paid $20,000/year, with rudimentary benefits ("don't get sick") and no vacation. I worked 80+ hours a week. You can do the math, but that worked out to something pretty far south of "minimum wage" at the time. Lousy wages. Lousy hours. Abusive boss. Hard knocks indeed. But I had my own place (a dump, in a run-down apt complex, but it was MINE!). A used Honda that got me where I needed to go. And I knew that things would get better.
Of course, they did. Hard work and perseverance always pay off. But, I wonder how many of today's shrinking violets would work through issues like this, or just give up because things are "hard". OR, not bother at all because Mom and Dad are helicoptering around?
Well, I’m not seeing the difficulty. Someone could flip burgers for a few weeks and have enough cash to get over to the county seat and into the tax office, plunk it down, and when the deed comes in, multiply the cost x2 or so and put it on craigslist.
In most counties you can find the sale list online, and properties should be eyeballed before purchase but I don’t think that’s hard either.
I’ll admit I’ve been doing title searches since I was 12, but that just shows they’re not difficult. And sometimes I stop by a code office to make sure there are no serious issues.
All in all, 1,000x simpler than going hat in hand to a bank.
“Understand your point but some families are enablers.”
Exactly. You have to decide. Is this a reasonable healthy and functioning family, where the adults are treated like adults and everyone is generally prospering? Or are the younger adults still in Little Kid mode?
I just don’t like it assumed that every multi-gen family has adults in Little Kid mode, because they don’t.
When comparing then and now, remember, the money is worthless. $6/hsr in 1983 is the equivalent of $14.38/hr now.
The money has lost more than half its "value" since then.
A minimum-wage job today would have been $3.03/hr in 1983.
Yeah, it sucks.
Opportunity knocked after I completed the course I was taking and I took it for the experience even though I knew it was only a few months. I was a an air conditioning mechanic for the 1982 Worlds Fair. Pay was a straight $8 an hour no benefits and straight pay for all hours worked no time and a half for over 40 hours. We did OK and I thought I would be fine.
Anyone Freeper living in East Tennessee will understand & remember what happened next. Many local companies over extended themselves for the fair either directly or were effected indirectly by others losses. Worse than that two brothers who owned the two largest regional banks committed fraud triggering the two banks to fail. One was actually a non insured S&L and lots of businesses lost their butts and closed. The local economy tanked to a level unseen here since 1929. When you had to know someone to get a part time MickeyD job times were bad.
We moved in with my parents at their invitation. I decided to draw a GI Bill check and take another course and go back to work for the V.A. part time again. I also did a one year hitch in the national guards. The local economy was not looking up. So I made a career change and took a two week commercial driving course and was hired immediately driving OTR.
Since I was gone three out of four weekends usually 27 days a month and my home weekend was a drill one we stayed in my parents home. I went broke driving. Company paid $.18 a mile and many times I sat waiting without loads. My expenses ate up my earnings. I came home and took a job in a nursing home doing electrical and A/C maintenance. It was not top pay but steady and I wanted a job. A month after that my first wife died.
Afterward I took a transfer to another facility. That was where I would meet my second wife who was a CNA who's husband abandoned the family for another woman and I do mean he abandoned them. We had been dating a while and it became serious. Plans of marriage were talked about likely about a year away. That changed fast. While on a date she became a quadriplegic. I won't go into the why's and how comes but we married two months into her hospitalization and I brought her daughters to my parents until she would be released four months later.
When she was released from the hospital and spinal rehab I had to quit working for about a year. The girls were not ready in age or maturity to help out and I needed to get her stabilized, to therapies, etc. I then returned to work. We lived two years in her mobile home which I had moved to my parents land. After a that we moved back with my parents because of safety issues related to the trailer too costly to address.
I first worked as a night clerk while waiting on a better job. Then I hired on in a nursing home/retirement community in maintenance. I made starting out $5 an hour in 1989. In 1991 we bought a double-wide which many would say was a bad choice. No it was a wise one. We did it on a 10 year note. Five years into it I become disabled. In the 5 years I worked I did a lot of double shifts and could do so because the girls were old enough to help their mom and my parents were close by. I retired on disability in 1994 at age 37.
I do believe strongly in family doing for family. Dad became terminal in 2011 I split my time between my home with my wife and theirs a quarter mile a away helping Mom with Dad. A nursing home was never considered. He passed at home with family.
As of March this year again I became a widower. Because of that my income dropped by over 40% immediately. I'm in Chapter 13 but doing OK. I live alone as does my Mom. She's 84 now and reality is I will be likely living with her soon either in her home or mine likely mine because hers is way too big a two story house. She will need a caregiver and a nursing home as long as I am physically able is not an option. I promised dad I would take care of her.
My daughters have worked and have done better money wise than I did and I'm proud of them. Their kids will be going to college likely on scholarships either in sports or academics. My kids had a lot to overcome. Would I open my home if they needed it? Yes.
Times before FDR's New Deal and later LBJ's Great Society had families united for survival and best interest of all young and old. Sadly that part of family has disappeared. Many drive better cars, own their own homes, have expensive toys, etc. But are we really better off overall in issues related to family unity and morality than we were before FDR? I appreciate the help I was given. Dad and Mom raised me in a way that I could if needed live in a tent and care for myself. I did so for a couple of summers as a teen LOL. They also taught me what family means. My dad was the one in the family his siblings went too for advice, help, whatever. He filled his dads shoes when he had just turned 18 and was in the Navy in A-School when his dad passed. He came home and cared for his mom and two sisters still at home. Many at that time lived under one roof.
if young people knew they could live at home, paying bills etc, maybe they wouldn't be so quick to shack up with the stud or the tramp...
I think these very successful newer immigrants who buy hotels or gas stations or donut shops share living arrangements......that is the key......the extended family benefits by saving big bucks and can then buy more hotels, etc...
I’m glad my sons are at home. They can focus on school and stuff and we can all help each other in different ways. They are the best babysitters of their siblings and they run our electronics networks. They will leave soon enough.
I would have my parents in my home too but I wasn’t given the right to choose that. I’d love three generations in here.
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I ran across this quote somewhere and saved it. Thought you might like it:
The secret of success is the consistency to pursue.
— World War I Canadian Soldier, Harry Banks
Success is not held up as the ideal anymore
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Therein lies a big part of the problem. Kids seem to be preoccupied with too many other misplaced “priorities” such as an obsession with social media, hanging out with friends who are doing nothing but hanging out all the time, getting wrapped up in the liberal cause du jour, travelling about in search of nothing particular, and generally wasting time “finding oneself”. And you’re also right about time issue: Extended delays in life can be very costly.
Growing up seems to be on hold for many young people today. There’s no sense of obligation or urgency. That’s a bad sign that parents should be concerned about — if they’re even watching.
We know some parents who actually like the idea of their kids being dependent on them. It makes them feel like indispensable providers. That’s another problem altogether.
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