this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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Every single millennial homeowner I know managed to get their house one of two ways: get married in 2008 to a Gen-X doctor who can afford to buy a foreclosure when the market tanked, or get massive financial help from their parents.
That's it. Those are the options. And unless you've got a time machine, I think the first one is off the table by now.
Basically, yeah. If you don't already have money saved up, and you don't have someone who can cover the down payment for you, you need some method of living rent free for enough time to get $15-20k, at least in Minneapolis, where I live. The starter home I got for $200k in 2020 is now worth $250k, so the $10k down payment I saved up would now need to be $12.5k for first-time homebuyers.
Crazy that such a piece of crap house is worth so much more when the neighborhood has only gotten worse, but it shows that even just sitting on the house for a few years doing nothing to it like I did will net you some hefty capital. I sold my house after only 4 years, and after paying off the rest of the mortgage and the realtor fees, I had a nearly $50k check to show for it, thanks to what little of the mortgage I'd managed to actually pay down combined with the $30k increase in the price of the house in that time.
Gen Z here, bought a small home with 3% down first homeowners loan.
Honestly the only thing going for me was being married. Dual income was a big step up, but other than that it was just me and my wife. We don't even make all that much, I have a degree in anthropology lol. No money from either of our parents.
We did rent the cheapest place we could find, and that neighborhood was rough. I will say if we tried to buy our house again today I'm not sure we could. Interest rates and home values have shot up like crazy. It only taken about 4 years for things to get that crazy.
I got curious to see what it would be like if I refinanced my house.
My current mortgage that I'm paying $2850 on would be over $4,000 with today's interest rates.
I literally could not afford to live where I'm living if I hadn't moved when I did.
Yeah I got lucky my parents were able to rent me and my wife the garage for about 4 years at a discount. Then since my in-laws were renting a house we decided to team up and go half on a house. This way we both got out of renting and we can all pitch in to cover the mortgage, we converted the garage to be our living room/kitchen and put a wall in the hallway so essentially the house is cut in half. Our commutes increased a ton to go to work, but its so much nicer on the weekends being away from a major city