Five Years of Saving, and We’re Still Nowhere Near a House

By Bracha Cohen

My husband and I have been renting since we got married, saving up to buy a house the way everyone tells you to. Five years in, we sat down and counted what we have. $50,000. The house we’re looking at, a normal house, nothing fancy, is $600,000.

$50,000 sounds like a lot until you try to use it. It’s not even a real down payment on a $600,000 house. And the mortgage on what’s left would cost more every month than our rent, and our rent is already more than we’re comfortable paying.

So somebody explain that gap to me, because I did everything I was told and I still feel like I’m missing a step.

No vacations. No eating out, not even a slice on Kingston that we pretend counts as going out. Same car for six years, the one with the door that only opens from the outside if you know the trick. We did all of it, and we still landed on $50,000. I was almost proud for a second. Until I looked up what houses cost.

Last week, at a wedding, someone who’s owned his house about two years came over by the smorgasbord and told me I should really try to buy before prices go up more. He said it like he was telling me to take the highway instead of local streets. A little tip. On the house.

With what money?

Nobody who says that line ever explains the next part. They say it, feel like they’ve done their good deed for the day, and go back to the smorgasbord.

The Rebbe was clear that a family should buy, not rent, and that going into a normal amount of debt for a home is nothing to be ashamed of. Fine. I believe that. I will never argue with what the Rebbe said.

But what did “a normal amount of debt” mean back when five years of saving got you a down payment? Because $50,000 against $600,000 is not a normal amount of debt. That’s a mortgage broker calling it “a great start” with a straight face.

A great start toward what? Another decade of saving, while tuition goes up every year, rent goes up every year, and everything else goes up every year, a little faster than our raises do.

Nobody sat the community down and said, listen, home prices are about to double and salaries aren’t, so maybe we should update the save-and-buy speech we give every couple under the chuppah. It just happened, quietly, over about fifteen years, while we kept handing the next couple the exact same script like nothing had changed.

We tell people this is a discipline problem. Save more. Cut more. Wait longer. As if the thing standing between us and a $600,000 house is one less iced coffee run.

I’m not asking anyone to feel bad for me. I’m asking a real question, not another wedding tip: we’re still telling young families to save for a house the way people saved a generation ago. Their five years got a down payment. Ours got $50,000 and a house that costs twelve times that.

So what exactly are we expecting young families to do?