Will I Ever Afford a House?

I'd like to speak to the person at the kitchen table again with the deposit calculator open and the savings on one side and house prices on the other. Absolutely certain that you're falling behind. This is for you. And this is not just any will I ever afford a house podcast episode. Before we get anywhere near whether you'll even afford it, I'd like to ask you the question that sits so far under the panic. You've probably never had a reason to dig down to it.

Do you actually want the house? Now I'm not asking you whether it would be nice. I'm asking whether you've ever once examined the belief that you're supposed to buy a house. Because it's highly likely like many other people, you were handed that belief and you didn't arrive at it on your own. Somewhere behind you, there's a voice and it's a parent's voice usually. And behind there's the whole world that they grew up inside that filled in the answer before you could form a question and told you exactly what a good life is meant to look like and what kind of person rents instead of owns.

You took it in the way you took in your accent long before you had the chance to turn around and ask whether it was true. So at the kitchen table, you're not really grieving a house. You're failing to reach something you were told to want by people who never asked you whether you even wanted it. And this is measured against a finish line that you never agreed to run toward. Now you already know the noise around this. There's the lecture, the coffees, the takeaways as though discipline were the only thing standing between you and a deposit.

You know in your gut the maths don't work. And there's a cleverer voice and that's the one that's everywhere now. Supply and rates and zoning or its financial cousin which has become its own gospel that owning was never even the smart move that the maths favours the disciplined renter that the interest on a mortgage is every bit as dead as the rent they told you to be ashamed of. Now all of it is true as far as it goes.

But here what every one of those voices has in common, they're all still arguing the same question by or rent which one wins and not one of them stops on the question sitting underneath all of it. So stop there with me because the words you were handed don't survive being looked at directly. You were told renting is dead money and owning is what a grown up does and you believed it before you were old enough to question it.

So I'm asking you to question it now. Get ahead of what toward what? Security is that indeed that you owe 90% off to a bank that you can't walk away from and can't move out of for 30 years without severe financial penalty or is it money you can actually reach a cost of living low enough that you're hard to frighten. The freedom to go where your life needs and wants you to go. Dead money getting ahead a foot on the ladder none of these were ever facts.

They were one generation's words for one generation's world handed down to you as though they described yours. And don't assume you slipped the trap by being the clever one who runs the numbers. Getting smart with money doesn't get you out it just changes the shape of the cell. The person grinding five years for a deposit and the person who rents and invests the difference chasing the numbers that lets them retire early are doing the identical thing.

Both have handed their actual life to a figure on a screen that promises that one day when it's finally high enough that they will be allowed to begin. One of them calls it a house the other calls it freedom both are spending the only years they will ever get sitting in a waiting room waiting on permission that a number was never able to give. Now none of this was a lie when your parents first believed it. In their world a house was cheap enough to reach on one income.

A job was a thing you held for 40 years you stayed in one town one city and inflation quietly ate your fixed debt while your wages climbed underneath it. Inside those conditions by and hold was simply the rational move. Those conditions are largely gone but the belief has stayed and it reached you stripped of the world that once made it make sense so that you strain toward it now as a kind of duty in a reality where following it may quietly be the less free choice of the two.

Now I'm not trying to talk you out of owning your own home your own home might be exactly right for the life you want. Roots a garage a garden somewhere your kids can come back to but the point was never rent good and buy is bad the point is that you were never handed the one thing that would let you decide which is a clear side of what you actually want before the wanting was filled in for you. And the unassuming cost in all of this the one that shows up on no calculator is the life you put on hold in storage while you wait the years you spend not quite starting deferring the partner the children the move the work that matters to you until this fictional number finally arrives.

The number is in no hurry and the years don't wait for it. Being locked out of a house has done something brutal to you and if you let it something useful as well it's forced you to ask the question most people go a whole life without asking because the old path worked for them and so it never came up what do I actually want and how much is actually enough your parents never had to examine the belief that owning was the point it paid out so it stayed invisible to them the way water is invisible to a fish you've heard that analogy before but we don't get that luxury and that's the gift buried inside the feeling of theft the virtuous thing was never buying a house it's building real ground under yourself first knowing what you want knowing what enough is knowing what security actually means to you and then choosing that life on purpose instead of running someone else's race toward a line you never agreed to and that keeps on moving so if you need to be angry about the market be angry about the market you've earned that because the injustice is real but don't let the anger nail you to the one bricked up door as though it were the only door there is paying for a script you never read holding your whole life back for a key and a mortgage the lockout pushed open a question that stays shut for most people until they're far too old to do anything with the answer that's the one thing in all of this that's actually yours don't hand it back the years you keep promising yourself once the number lets you start those years are the life there's not another one coming along behind it that you can make different decisions within if anything in this episode may you want to explore what you just heard i've made it very easy for you to do so in the show notes there's a link to access a book called before approaching the threshold which is the gateway to this work and alongside this you'll also receive free 14 day access to the atlas an intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes this was michael laurier and you're listening to the architect speaks