The thing that angers me the most is that I said to my mom “I’m never going to have a retirement…”

I’m 42, no house, no retirement savings, no 401k, and no way to save for those things. Some weeks I don’t have enough money to buy food.

My moms response was “Oh you’ll be fine! I struggled when I was in my 20s, with both of your sisters, and I turned out ok!”

Yes, it’s true that for about 5 years my mom had it as hard, maybe harder than I do. The difference is, then she met my dad, moved in with him, her money problems disappeared. She then got a better job, with retirement options, and a 401k, and benefits.

Then she bought her own house in the 90s. The seller wasn’t sure if he wanted to sell to her as a single woman. So she said “you can either sell to me, or sell to someone else. The price is the same either way. You may as well just sell now, rather than waiting for the next buyer.”

THATS the speech that got her the house.

Today, you’d get laughed at.

My biggest problem with boomers isn’t their selfish nature, or the fact that they’ve had an easy life. My biggest problem is that they refuse to admit that times have changed. I CAN’T live life the way boomers did. I’d LOVE to wear a suit, walk into a business, demand to see the manager before I even fill out an application and talk myself into a job. I’d LOVE to do that…but thats not how it works anymore! Now you fill an application out online, submit it to an AI crawler that steals your data, be in competition with 500 other applicants, and most of the time never hear back.

I asked my brother in law 10 years ago if he could get me a job at his fortune 500 company. He works there, he’s not the owner, but I was asking him to put in a good word, get my application even looked at.

He’s my age, and this was said right in front of my mom. He said “I couldn’t do that. That would be nepotism”. I said “Yeah. I’m fine with nepotism if it means I canpay my bills.”

And my mom asked if I wanted her to storm the corporate offices of Progressive Insurance, and hunt down the CEO for an interview.

So I just said yes. Not because I think it would work, but because I knew she’d fail spectacularly. Maybe even get arrested on a light charge. Then maybe she’d realize how times change.

But she just said “I can’t always fight your battles for you. This is something YOU need to do.”

God dammit.

Hell, the house my dad got when he was a train driver with a wife that didn’t work and with 2 kids is a house I can’t buy as a senior software developer with 3 cats.

My dad bought a house when he was mid 30s and the solo bread winner for the house a couple of years after I was born. I loved that neighbourhood. It wasn’t anything too special. The houses there are 50s-90s builds, 2-3 bedrooms, maybe 2 bathrooms (our second bathroom in that house was almost an outhouse in the basement – concrete floor, exposed pipes, door that looked like it belonged on a shed, etc. My dad and a friend built a back deck which was really nice. There is a park nearby. There’s access to a nice bike path. It’s not on a through-route at all, so the only cars entering the neighbourhood are residents or guests. It’s not near shopping, not near public transit, not really near any schools. It was just a quiet, modest, neighbourhood.

I’m significantly older, don’t have any kids to support, have been saving for ages, had better, and higher paying jobs (inflation adjusted) than him. I can’t really afford any house in that neighbourhood. The only people buying there now are multi-millionaires, but they’re moving in next to families who have been there for 30ish years and know enough not to give up a good thing.

It just seems to me that a rule of thumb with housing is that in general you should be able to afford to buy in the neighbourhood where you grew up. I know sometimes that isn’t possible. Cities get denser, areas become highly sought after, etc. But, if the neighbourhood really is basically the same, and you earn what your parents did (or better), you should be able to stay nearby.