The answer is qualifying for a mortgage is not as simple as you might think. Even if you do, good luck squaring that with prices that will almost certainly leave you "holding the bag" because none of it is sustainable ore makes sense. Wrap that into the best choice when you might get laid off at any second is not always a mortgage...

That last point seems like it's a great point for what rentals but I'll save you some time: for the vast majority of jobs thats strictly because of people enforcing office mandates unnecessarily because something like 1/3rd of assets in the USA are in commercial realestate.

My point being: the deck is stacked. There is not an actual housing shortage, there's just a housing shortage for human beings. An entire generation has gotten boxed out of the most classic way to build wealth.

Sorry, I didn't have a chance to get back on Lemmy until now. Bit of a now-or-never situation. The housing market is absolutely bonkers where I live (maybe where you live too, from your username). We had both made big leaps in salary recently that put the monthly payment in the barely-doable range, and her parents had some fixed funds available to help with the down payment.

Both the gift money and our salaries were going to be outpaced by the housing market if we waited, and interest rates were already on the post-COVID rise. I don't think it was a terrible financial decision in the long run, because at least now we're building equity and the house value will rise with the market. But until we sell (which we won't be able to afford to for a long time), those assets aren't liquid, so our month-to-month finances are a lot tighter than when we were renting. Which makes the repair work from the dipshit former owners hurt a lot more since it's gonna take a long time to recover from big financial hits.