About the stepson who still lives with us and complains about housing prices, I will say he's not spending extravagantly, that I know of. I know he binges every now and then on our Amazon account and I'll see it and shake my head, but really, it hasn't been a regular thing. Granted, I have no way of knowing what all he really spends money on. But he certainly isn't going out to spend, and he's certainly not spending a bunch of money on his gf (he should). All he does is go to work and come home and go visit his gf, or she comes over to our house.
At the same time, he doesn't earn as much as he should. (There are a lot of reasons for that I won't go into here.) So it's like, yeah, things are tough for your generation, but you were given tremendous advantages in getting a sought-after degree but with no debt, but you didn't make the most of them. You could've parlayed what you were given into a higher paying job, even right now. And when he talks about house shopping, I can tell he's completely averse to anything older or with any kind of condition--such as small square footage--that might make it more affordable. In his mind, it's got to be a house similar to ours or nothing. Granted, our house is not that big, but it is on the newer side, and I wouldn't consider it a starter place, exactly, either now or back when I was younger. Really, what I considered "starting out" residence was an apartment, which is all I could do back in the day.
So what he's really complaining is that he can't afford the house he currently lives in, which my wife and I pay for.
I hear him that it's expensive out there. But I also know I can make a living situation work on his salary, because I know how much he makes, I keep on top of the local housing market, and I've done the math. But you can't tell him that.
It also bugs me when he pays us every month and calls it "rent."
I don't charge rent. I told my wife I wasn't interested in that when he went to work, that I wanted him to be able to save as much as he could to start out, that my parents did what they could to help me when I still lived at home, and that's what we should do for him. When she expressed her thoughts that he should contribute, I agreed and said I'd figure out his car insurance since he's still on with us, and a rough estimate for how much he adds to the utility, electricity, and grocery bills....and then really low-balled it. We don't charge him for anything we have that wouldn't change even if he weren't here.....Netflix, say, or things like that which would cost us the same, even if he benefits from them. We explained all this to him, and I totaled it up and he's paid us like clockwork on the first of the month. But he calls it rent, and I've heard him talk to his peer group about paying rent. And I wanna be like "You don't pay rent. If you did, you'd be paying us WAY more. WAY." And also, it irks me because I'm deliberately trying to give him an advantage, and when he says stuff like that, it makes me wonder if he's really conflating what he pays with rent, i.e, the privilege to live in our space. Because that would mean he's either got a really screwed up idea of what renting a room in a house here would cost, or that he's unaware/forgotten that we're actively trying to help him. It ain't rent, bruh.
/rant
