I'm way too old to be a Millennial, so I obviously can't directly sympathize, but the ridiculous prices today really trigger the introvert side of me. I have this strong desire to move somewhere that land is still very cheap and become a crazy hermit who lives in a shed or something.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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I have this strong desire to move somewhere that land is still very cheap and become a crazy hermit who lives in a shed or something.
Any time I have a piece of this feeling I'm reminded of the most underappreciated technological and society development: the flush toilet.
Its freakin' magic that usually requires a functioning municipality to run dependably and cheaply. I just don't think I can live a life long term without it.
You make a great point for a sane person, but it's unconvincing to a crazy hermit.
You can of have flushing toilets with a septic tank. It doesn't have to be an outhouse.
Yep. Grew up in a village. We had flushing toilets that flushed into a septic tank.
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A septic system isn't that expensive nor hard to maintain. If you have access to well water you can run it near independently. Assuming electricity of course, which is often available even in places without sewer or water.
All you need is to occasionally pay someone to come and pump the tank
A septic system isn’t that expensive nor hard to maintain.
OPs scenario is paraphrased as "shack out in the woods removed from civilization". Getting the equipment and workers out to such a place would present the first challenge.
If you have access to well water you can run it near independently. Assuming electricity of course, which is often available even in places without sewer or water.
See, now we've raised the bar to not only requiring a sewage solution, but also dependable electricity and water source. This is why a functioning society is so valuable. It can provide easy and cheap access to dependable water, sewage, electricity, and skilled workers to build, install, and maintain the systems that let the toilet function without a second though.
All you need is to occasionally pay someone to come and pump the tank
See point #1.
I've seen people way out there be able to run septic systems. We're talking miles of dirt road through the mountains
Also have you even traveled the rural US? You can usually get electricity in the middle of absolutely no where. Thank FDR for that one.
Basically it's perfectly possible to meet the shack in the woods definition in either of our models. You can find a place without access to these things in a rural setting, but you also can.
toilets just require a water supply and somewhere to flush to
no need for municipal water supply and wastewater, though that does make it easy, but you can simply use stream water that gravity fills your well located water tanks, then flush into a septic container suitable for the location. or hell even hand pump the water up from a well - bicycles make great transmissions to drive pumps
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Give me a compost toilet any day! A peaceful poo, often with a view. No mixing water with shit and then needing to separate them again. Why make more work out of nothing!? A well kept compost toilet is heavenly. Plus zero splashback - can't fault that. Keep water free of sewage!
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So long as there's gigabit internet and a hospital not too far away....
Have home in the boonies, have gigabit fiber, have hospital <40min away if you're not flooring it.
Am also millennial... I guess we're the lucky ones, closing on a home like 6months before covid closed everything down, and politicians made some irresponsible decisions that made the housing market skyrocket.
Well it's telling that all of the rich investment banker types always eventually quit and start a hobby farm in the country.
The general feeling seems to be that agriculture was a good idea, but we took things too far with this whole civilisation thing.
You remind me of this Hitchhiker's quote:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Nah screw that. The issue is not enough cities, and the solution is certainly not further unsustainable sprawl
Moving onto abandoned agricultural land doesn’t count as sprawl if you don’t subdivide it and start growing food.
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A bit inland in Dalmatia (Croatia) seems very cheap and you could have at least have your own wine and olives. Land directly at the coast is super expensive.
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One in my area that had me raging was 65k in 2016, 295k now... It was a glorified shed that looked like it burned down twice in a shit neighborhood.
...so I'm stuck renting a garage "apartment" instead...
The house I own now has sold six times between 2000 and now. Mostly because it's been in a possession of elderly people who've lived in the house for 2 or 3 years after downsizing from their original house and then either dying or have to enter care.
As a result the house has basically had no work done on it for 20 odd years and it shows, the person I bought the house off of was one of the first non-elderly people to live in the property and she did do quite a number of important maintenance, but not a lot because she only lived in the house a year and then got married and moved in with her husband, so between me and her we've probably added untold value to the property. However had we done none of that and just held on to the house as an investment, we did probably been able to triple our investment in about 5 years.
Not that it'll do me any good when I finally sell it.
There was a literal burnt out shell in my old area that was listed for $400k.
Yeah but your income adjusted for it, so stop complaining /s
Luckily I was earning 40k in 1999, and I'm now earning 400k!
Which is about the average income these days, right?! Something something avocado.
Just be born to wealthier parents bro. It's not hard...
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yep, if you're not working 6000 hours a year, you don't deserve to own a home because you're just lazy
B-b-but wages have gone up and interest rates have been higher decades ago! /s
I can't find it now because I'm on phone and not a computer and I can't really search for it l, but I'm sure that there was a post a while back where someone worked out that if minimum wage had actually kept up with inflation it would be around $80 USD an hour now. Which seems ludicrously high for minimum wage job, but apparently the math works out.
Obviously American employment protection laws are probably the worst in the western world, so probably not a great baseline, but it still demonstrates how badly off people are in general, compared to their parents and grandparents.
Geriatric millennial here: it's missing the purchase at the top of the bubble in 2007, listing for sale at a loss 3 times in 2008-2009, list for rent in 2014 and 2015 at less than the mortgage, sell in 2017 at slightly more than when you purchased it when you finally got it off your back (but you paid it all in taxes because it was a rental), then see it sold in 2022 for 2.5x what you sold it for in 2017.
At least that's how my first home purchase went when everyone told me real estate was a guarantee in my 20s on a non-profit salary. The only thing you wouldn't see is the 0% mortgage offer they made on the first 150k when we started walking away in 2009. And the medical bills for idiopathic neuropathy from the stress.
I'm sorry about the stress but to be fair one of the reasons that house prices got so insane was people like you who were buying to rent. That puts pressure on the housing market because if you buy to rent you can own multiple properties, so more and more housing stock gets taken out of rotation so it gets to the point where even if people could theoretically afford to buy a house, there are none available.
Renting brakes the supply and demand system. If there were more houses than there was demand, the value would go down and would open up home ownership for more people, this would increase demand and stabilise the market. If there was insufficient supply, housing prices would go up which would incentivise companies to construct more properties, thus increasing availability and stabilising the market. But the want to be landlords come in and buy up all the available homes and now there is high demand but low supply, so construction companies build houses and sell directly to landlords (because landlords have no chain), demand has increased but supply has remained the same, despite construction having happened. Repeat that for 50 years and you get our current housing market.
We absolutely did not buy to rent.
If you see the timeline, we lived there 7 years and were landlords for 2.5. We moved across the country for a major income jump (and cost of living increase) and literally couldn't afford to pay into the bank to sell the house for a $50k loss at the time. We were going to walk away again, but some friends convinced us to rent it out.
What a fucking nightmare that turned out to be.
We didn't live in a great part of town, so rent was cheap and literally less than the cost of owning. We effectively subsidized the rent. A smarter person would have realized that taking a loan to sell was the better plan here.
The first property management company we hired found some people quickly and got them in. 4 months later the person managing our house left and the new person asked us why we hadn't evicted because they had never paid rent, ever (we had been getting rent minus the fee, so we were shocked). So we had to evict and fucking hell I spent 3k cleaning and fixing and hauling out all their trash, flying across the country to do it. They stole the washer and dryer on the way out, ruined the dishwasher and destroyed several doors and walls.
We fired that company and got a new one. The next tenants actually paid rent for 2 years, but had constant issues with rodents and bugs and the appliances. When the market finally brought us above water we didn't renew their lease and Jesus fuck me they had destroyed everything. The 160lb Cane Corsa they kept in the basement had literally pissed and shit so much the walls were destroyed and the cement floor had to be painted and sealed after heavy industrial cleaners. There was food everywhere in the house and rodents and bugs were prevalent, so we had to hire exterminators. Also they left several yards of trash in shitty furniture and garbage we had to haul out.
We lost so much money renting we would have been better off taking a loan to sell in the first place. We listed for 40k over what we originally paid, but took just 15k because, let's face it, the house was still a shambles (and the basement still stank). We got a tax bill for 14k when we sold because of some financing fuckery that screwed us more.
I regret ever having been a "landlord".
Don't forget how much Airbnb fucked shit up. Pulling houses off the market that then don't even have anyone living in them just to earn a profit.
I'm also a 'geriatric millennial', but I wasn't in a position to buy until 2009 so my experience was vastly different. I do have some same-age friends who bought in 2007 with stories more similar to yours, though.
Ironically, my mom tried to warn me against buying back then. I would've been absolutely screwed if I'd listened to her.
Yeah, it's the worst financial mistake we ever made. If we had waited just a few months, we would have at least qualified for the bailout money.
We had so many friends that bought in 2009 and 2010 at the bottom and watched them flourish.
It took us 12 years to recover, but we're homeowners again and ultimate leaving for higher pay finally worked out in our favor. We bought again in 2020 and our down payment was the entire cost of the first house (we went from medium cost of living to very high with incomes to match). We emptied just about everything, but had also been saving hard since selling the shit heap. 5 years later, we're finally comfortable.
This is me!! I bought a house in 2014 for $140k probably spent $30k in upgrading it, sold it in 2019 when I had to move for $160k... It just sold for $350k.
For some reason I feel like this should be adjusted for inflation. Now this isn't any better but $162,000 adjusted for inflation would have been roughly $296,288 and some change in 2023. That's still well over a 470% increase, if my bad math is not bad today. I was lucky enough to buy one as a Millennial back in 2019 before houses started to skyrocket but this is just absolutely asinine.
This is inflation
OP's post has a sell date in 2023, your graph includes gold's meteoric 2-year doubling after that, in 2023-2025.
The price of gold (like so many assets) is so far removed from any realistic measure of value as to be meaningless.
No it isn't. You gotta compare against 2023 not 2025.
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That house earned like $50k a year, just being a stupid fucking box
Being that I am now middle aged... have a full time job\career, single, and I still can't afford to buy a home.. isn't that great?
The only reason my partner and i could is we lucked out and bought our house at the bottom of the housing market during COVID. Interest rates hit the lowest point just as we began financing but people hadn't quite started buying yet so prices had bottomed out. It "appreciated" by over 50% within two years, like fucking magic.
If we had waited until now, we could not afford to buy our two bedroom, one bath, <1000 square foot, old-as-fuck, not fancy house. The monthly payment would be almost 2.5x higher and the FHA minimum down payment nearly killed us already at the lower price.
My partner and I both have advanced degrees and now make over $200k a year (disclaimer: we live in one of the top 5 highest cost of living areas in the US). We still don't make enough to adopt kids. The market, economy, and country in general are just super fucked.
Am millenial, am homeowner, am still rooting for a marketcrash. Solidarity! ~Also our home hasn't appreciated noticeably in the last 10years so we don't stand to lose much~
It's really really really easy to have this outlook, if you consider a house to be more a thing you live in, and less an investment opportunity.
Average wage index in 1999: $30,469.84
Average wage index in 2023: $66,621.80
So wages roughly doubled, while the house now costs 8x as much. Yep, sounds about right.
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