In Defence of Living With Your Parents
November 15, 2014
In 2012, 36% of the nation's young adults ages 18 to 31
were living in their parents' home.
EP, 32, defends the practice:
"I'd feel like an idiot handing over more than
fifty percent of my paycheck every month
just to live in someone else's basement."
I'll be the first to admit that I'm too comfortable living at home. I'm an only child, I have a great relationship with my parents and I live in their basement apartment which has its my own entrance, kitchen and workspace not to mention a queen size bed. I show my parents my appreciation for letting me stay with them by buying groceries, cooking and taking them out to dinner every so often.
What makes this arrangement somewhat okay is that I live in an Italian area in the suburbs of New York City where there are many other guys and girls just like me. I'm half Nicaraguan and half Portuguese, so our cultural practice is children stay home until they're married.
This is all well and good, except in America, if you're not out of the house by 25, you're automatically a loser and a mooch. I definitely feel the pressure to move out of the house, but I'd feel like an idiot handing over more than fifty percent of my monthly paycheck just to live in someone else's basement. It would be like paying a 'no-ridicule tax' just so friends and colleagues can't make fun of me. If that's what this is all about, then bring on the jokes.
RENTS TOO HIGH. YOUNG PEOPLE LEAVING
A couple years ago, I priced a few places. I was willing to pay five hundred a month, but I couldn't find a decent place for that price. Now, years later, the rents in my area are still astronomically high. For a bare bones studio, you're looking at a minimum of 1,000 dollars a month. If you actually want to live in a nice place, you're easily paying 1,500 a month and up.
A year ago, when I used to work as a personal trainer, that would have been my whole paycheck, but these days, as a part-time teacher at a private school, it's a little more than half my paycheck.
Sometimes I wonder what I'm still doing here. I know a lot of married couples from my generation who've left New York because of the taxes and high cost of living years ago. They now reside in red states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, places like that. I should mention that I live in Westchester County, which is about thirty minutes north of New York City.
And the really disturbing trend is that as marriage and fertility rates go down across the nation, the median age of New Yorkers has gone up by startling numbers. According to census data from 1990 - 2010, the median age in New York City grew by roughly 2 years, by 5.2 years in the suburbs and 6.6 years upstate. At this rate, New York is going to be one big nursing home in a couple years.
All of this makes me very wary of investing any more time or money here in New York. If all I have to look forward to are higher taxes and an even higher cost of living, then I might as well move now.
As I wait to see if the corruption and liberalism here in New York is going to spread across the country, I might as well stay right where I am - in my parent's basement. As long as New York and America continue to fail miserably at tackling our spending and debt problem, as long as food prices continue to go up, and our moral fabric continues to disintegrate, I'll thank God, and my parents for this safe, comfortable and cheap haven.
Thomas said (November 17, 2014):
This man Rob would seem to have his priorities straight. We’re all working for the
banksters. That he has found a way of keeping more of what he earns is to be lauded.
If we think back to earlier, simpler times his story was the trend not the exception.
Extended families lived together. Not merely parents and children but grandparents,
aunts, uncles and anyone on their own. It was smart, it was correct and it was a means
of the whole family remaining “whole†and autonomous. The socialist, world elite would
prefer us separate and spread out across the globe. Much easier to control individuals
than groups of like thinkers.
Look at every modern problem confronted by families. They are all compounded by
separation and the desire for more and more material goods. I’m not big on the Bible
as you know but there are historical insights contained there that are always relevant.
Matthew 16:26 - For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?