I did it by myself on a single income, these young folks have it hard now due to

[theking]

..inflation and high interest rates...

The main factor was home prices and salaries gap was closer when I was in my 20s..from what I've seen.

Are Millennials Frozen Out of the Housing Market? Reality May Be More Interesting
Members of the cohort born from 1981 to 1996 are now 29 to 44 years old — meaning they’ve all reached the age where their parents and grandparents were probably homeowners. But because the typical millennial has met with economic upheaval for much of their working life, they’ve been on a slower timeline.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) made headlines this month when its annual survey of home buyers revealed an eye-popping statistic: The average first-time home buyer is now 40 years old.

For years, the real estate agents’ annual survey of home buyers showed a very gradual uptick in first-time buyers’ ages, from a median of 28 in 1991 to 33 in 2019. But it’s accelerated since the pandemic, the survey showed, jumping to 36 in 2022, 38 in 2024 and now 40.

But those findings don’t match up with other data on first-time home buyers.

Connor O’Brien, an economic policy researcher, analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey, which asks a huge representative sample of Americans about their housing. By his findings, the median age of a first-time home buyer has held at 33 for nearly a decade, from 2014 to 2023, the most recent year data is available.

When more data comes out, O’Brien still isn’t expecting a huge uptick in buyers’ ages. Housing costs are higher now than before the pandemic, but not much higher than 2023. “The volume of sales hasn’t changed that much. Interest rates on new mortgages haven’t changed that much. Given that all these big market indicators have basically remained [flat], it would be strange to think the median age of buyers suddenly shot up,” he said.

So what’s going on? Are millennials delaying homeownership or are first-time home buyers just as young as they ever were?

The answer is yes on both counts: For buyers, the median age at which they purchase their first home is about the same, based on the American Housing Survey data that looks at a huge swath of households. But millennials are a big generation. There are more Americans born in 1990 and 1991 than any other years — people who are now 34 and 35 years old. And because fewer homes are being sold, fewer of those millennials are becoming home buyers at all.

It’s probably not true that the average first-time home buyer is that much older than before, despite the NAR’s questionnaire results. But it is true that millennials have found homeownership harder to attain than earlier generations.

Jessica Lautz, an NAR economist, stood by her organization’s survey. She said her group sends an annual survey to people who bought houses in the past year. This year, the group mailed the questionnaire to more than 173,000 buyers, and 6,103 responded.

She speculated that perhaps young adults, who can’t afford homes in the cities they want to live in, are instead buying rental properties in cheaper markets as investments — which would show up as young purchasers in some other studies of first-time home buyers, but not in her survey, which only looks at buyers of primary residences.

Federal Reserve economists largely attributed the declining number of first-time home buyers to shrinking transactions overall. In 2003, more than 7 million people bought homes with mortgages. In 2023, it was just over 3 million, a reflection of fewer houses being built. Meanwhile, many homeowners were able to secure mortgage rates below 3 percent by buying or refinancing in 2020 and 2021; today, with rates in the 6 percent range, they are reluctant to sell, and home sales in recent months have been lower than any time since the Great Recession.

[theking]

Millennials are richer than their boomer parents. Here's why they love to complain anyway.
The stereotypical millennial plight goes something like this: A guy or gal staring down 40 is trapped in a perpetual struggle to launch. They've finally moved out of their parents' homes, but later than their judgmental relatives expected. They're getting around to marriage and kids, but they're forever screwed on housing, still trying to shake the ghosts of the post-Great Recession job market, and drowning in student debt. They've developed a strange animosity toward their baby boomer parents, who seemingly had it all and won't let go.

Much of this stereotype, however, is more feeling than fact, especially when it's repeated by frustrated millennials themselves. Despite their gripes, the generation born between 1981 and 1996 is doing quite a bit better financially than their parents. It's just that they're not outpacing them as much as they expected, especially millennials on the wealthier end of the scale, who are accustomed to everything being extra great. That's a marked shift, since it was wealthier baby boomers who were the biggest winners of their generation. Poorer millennials are actually doing better than Americans at the lower end of the income scale in previous generations, but poor in America is still pretty bad, and for the rich, the narrowing of the income gap can be uncomfortable.

That's one of the takeaways from a recent paper out of the Federal Reserve Board comparing how Gen X and millennials are faring on their economic journeys. The findings: When Gen Xers and millennials hit their late 30s they had a median household real (aka inflation-adjusted) income 16% and 18% higher, respectively, compared to the generation before them at the same age, whereas the Silent Generation and baby boomers had increases of 34% and 27%, respectively.