My visit to my daughter's apartment did concern me in that I saw not one but two Scrabble sets on her shelf.

And she doesn't have means to make coffee. That part will get immediately remedied.

But seriously, she and I are quite close. I was telling her that my biggest concern going forward is living alone and going full blown dementia as I failed in securing long term care.

I also told her to never, under any circumstances, sign anything remotely related to my healthcare because the fine print will make her assume financial responsibility. Fuck that. Dump my withering winkled ass in a storm drain before I let that happen.

Upkeep can be a PITA, mentally as well as financially.

I found out that local housing co-ops offer 3 bedroom 2 baths for rent at like 800, honestly I'd prefer that over owning a home.

I don't get how you don't get it. I mean that with no animosity of any kind. I'm genuinely curious when people talk about buying a house like it's a common sense option.

As a millennial in my early 30's, the only people I know my age that own a house are people with parents that essentially handed them a fully built life when they came of age. As in, paid for college, bought their first (or first few) cars, floated them after college, paid for their weddings, then paid half or the full deposit on their "starter" home. And that's not a specific person I have in mind. That's every friend I have who owns a house. Their parents had that kind of money. Every other person I know that doesn't have rich parents (I'm in this camp) is working themselves to the bone just to scrape by. After 16 years in the workforce, 14 of those years being in a highly niche (but terribly paid) tech role, I can barely afford to keep a car running doing all of the work myself, let alone scrape together an extra $200 to get a secured card so I can finally start building credit. My pay checks are already consumed by the time they hit my account, and there's a seemingly endless backlog of debt from decades of poverty. My parents are finally at a point were they can help their kids at times, but it's in small amounts and they can only help one or two of us at a time. But, they're boomers who might never retire, so even taking small loans from them feels bad. It's an incredibly disparaging state of existence. I'm leaving out a lot of details for the sake of not writing a novel, but, I'm not financially illiterate, and I'm not giving up. I've just accepted the bleakness of my reality while I slowly grind myself (hopefully) out of it over the next 2 to 3 decades.

I'm not trying to whine, or point out your privilege. What I'm saying is; this is my reality. One in which the concept of "extra money" you can put aside for smart investments is a nice delusion to entertain. The fact that people like you are out there wondering why someone our age wouldn't buy a house boggles my mind, but also shows a very stark contrast in the lives of working/povery-class people and middle class and up. That is a huge problem.

But that's just my perspective. As I said, I'm genuinely curious to hear yours. How are you in a position where buying a house is the obvious option when statistics show that is very much not the case for most people under 40?

Edit: spelling.

I'd love to own. Problem is, I did the math recently. Mortgage payments on a house in my area start at more than double what I'm paying for rent. And that's only the mortgage, not PMI or or tax or home maintenance costs.

To be fair, I live in a relatively HCoL area (just outside Boston). But owning is still wildly more expensive than renting.

It might work if I was married and we had two nice incomes. But I've also priced it out with a multi-bedroom house and renting out the other rooms. I'd have to charge rent above market rate just to break even. It doesn't make any sense to me.

It was a shitty 900 square foot 2 bedroom for 40k. My mortgage was $109 a month.

How long ago was this? I wanted to do something like that in 2009, but banks refused to write a loan that small because (with laws limiting origination fees to a percentage of principal etc.) there wasn't any profit in it. (I ended up buying a 3-bedroom house for ~$100k instead, and the super-cheap house I wanted sold for cash to a flipper, who put an addition on it and sold it again a year later for ~$300k).

Dude took the full term to pay me off even though I suggested that he take a loan in an attempt to rebuild their credit. Nope. Just gave me money each month.

As the landlord/creditor, you could've reported the on-time payments to the credit bureaus yourself, I think.