alt.hn

7/5/2026 at 5:34:49 PM

Moving back home used to be a sign of failure. Now it shows financial savvy

 https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/living-with-parents-finances-0c35530c

by apparent

7/5/2026 at 5:55:14 PM

I agree with some of the commenters who note that the author tries hard to portray this as "financial savvy" but without a whole lot of evidence.

Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?

by apparent

7/5/2026 at 6:47:10 PM

> > Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?

Most people in my circle who bought a home in California before the age of 30 did exactly this.

by Mr-Frog

7/5/2026 at 6:32:24 PM

Yes, I absolutely know some. At the same time, many weren’t out of financial necessity but maybe financial convenience. I know a few who had a remote job or worked in their hometown even though they had savings and weren’t spending a lot.

They then would move out to a bigger more expensive city and feel more financially comfortable than they would have. This was in first generation immigrant families, which as the article notes, is where this practice is more common.

by typs

7/5/2026 at 6:16:09 PM

You assume the goal is to move out, but it might not be. Extended families have lived together in many parts of the world throughout history. Expectations of living alone are relatively new.

by bwhiting2356

7/5/2026 at 6:19:10 PM

That's true, but there were also no stories of adult children getting married and living with their spouse/children with their elderly parents. There weren't even any mentions of adult children (or their parents) who sought such an arrangement.

by apparent

7/5/2026 at 7:10:10 PM

> there were also no stories of adult children getting married and living with their spouse/children with their elderly parents

That used to be common arrangement.

Like, fun fact, Rosa Parks has such arrangement. On darker side, John Brown sons with families lived with him, were totally ruled by him.

by watwut

7/5/2026 at 7:43:26 PM

We also didn't have today's medicine throughout history, nor today's food security. "Return to monke" is not an argument.

by throw-the-towel

7/5/2026 at 6:47:07 PM

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife

by FergusArgyll

7/5/2026 at 6:59:48 PM

Yes. Or they stayed put. I had a friend who lived at home and drove a Jaguar. He helped his mom occasionally, but it was a financially great deal that allowed him to live large.

by xhkkffbf

7/5/2026 at 8:10:04 PM

Driving a Jaaaaag but not being able to bring women/men home seems like a special kind of hell.

by tomasphan

7/5/2026 at 6:45:57 PM

> Have any of these adult children successfully moved out after saving up money while living with their parents?

Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents.

This is just the WSJ-reading "haves" justifying the increasing stratification of society by reframing a clear regression[0] as a "responsible individual choice" which that crowd LOVES.

(EDIT: it's also cope for the parents of those kids for the not-quite-THAT-elite WSJ reader crowd who doesn't want to believe either their kids are failing or their economy is faltering.)

[0] Even if you see the everyone-moves-out vs multigenerational-housing trend as a negative overall, the broadening loss of the ability to make that choice is a clear symptom of overall economic weakening.

by majormajor

7/5/2026 at 7:14:11 PM

> Even if they do, it still means they failed to save up that money without having to live with their parents.

So? This practice of moving out for no particular reason is very US-centric.

To me the "normal" obverved in most peer households of my youth is that people live with their parents until they get married, often late 20s.

by jjav

7/5/2026 at 7:16:42 PM

You are correct.

The US is coming to resemble economically stagnant Europe more and more.

by jimbokun

7/5/2026 at 7:37:43 PM

No particular reason? Says who?

by throw-the-towel

7/5/2026 at 7:34:52 PM

[dead]

by anonreeeeplor

7/5/2026 at 7:37:29 PM

Moving back home wasn’t an option for me or my wife (she spent some time living in her car) but if my kids, in high school now, wanted to move back home after college I’d be ok with it as long as they had a plan to get on their own two feet. If they just wanted three hots and a cot all bills paid then not so much.

by chasd00

7/5/2026 at 7:08:22 PM

Sometimes you just hit impossible life scenarios like a pretax clawback in a hostile workplace which drains your liquid savings and leaves you broke, or breakup with a partner which forces you out the home, or learning that the landlord you split your duplex with is a charged criminal of some pretty awful crimes.

You can’t fail sometimes, even if you thought it were failure

by glouwbug

7/5/2026 at 7:14:44 PM

Sure but the point is that these scenarios must be far more common now than in past decades, if they are to account with the big increase in adult children living with parents.

So what changed?

by jimbokun

7/5/2026 at 7:13:41 PM

well, it's a sign of societal failure to provide more + better wages / housing, etc.

by erelong

7/5/2026 at 7:14:57 PM

Mainly housing.

by jimbokun

7/5/2026 at 7:22:23 PM

our wages are frankly astronomical compared to my parents’, and we’re DINKs and only one of my parents even worked. Guess which one of us owns a house.

by laweijfmvo

7/5/2026 at 8:26:25 PM

And this, is the damn harsh truth.

by Fire-Dragon-DoL

7/5/2026 at 6:46:57 PM

archive.is is caching error messages for this page. Is WSJ now immune to paywall bypasses? As fun as it is to have discussions entirely based on headlines, it threatens to turn HN into yet another low information high emotion discussion forum.

by qwerpy

7/5/2026 at 7:18:19 PM

Yes I see people accusing the article of sanitizing the reality of capitalistic excesses, but can’t access the article text to evaluate for myself.

by jimbokun

7/5/2026 at 6:54:46 PM

If this is being published in the Wall Street Journal, you can rewrite the headline in your head this way:

“To extract increasing returns from real estate, property prices and rent must be priced out of reach for people whose parents read the Wall Street Journal. Here’s an article you can quote to your friends at cocktail parties to feel good about yourself when your kid moves home.”

by mbgerring

7/5/2026 at 7:36:34 PM

Here are two quotes by Karl Marx on landlords:

> Landlords do not create value. They merely charge others to use natural resources (like land) that were already there

and

> Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed

Plot twist: these are actually Adam Smith quotes. Karl Marx quoted the second in particular.

There is a contemporary economist and former wealth manager by the name of Henry Fudge who describes the housing markets in Western countries as a "rentier asset black hole" [1] and has written a paper called "The Housing Theory of Everything" [2]. The idea is fairly straightforward: capital moves to housing instead of and at the expense of productive output (eg factories) because of tax advantages, inelastic demand, artificial constraints on supply and it being a political goal to make sure that housing prices always go up.

China had made this same mistake as well. Real estate was one of the few ways people could build wealth prior to Xi Jinping who came in and quietly popped a trillion dollar real estate bubble, famously saying in 2016 [3] "Houses are for living, not for speculation".

My personal view is that ever-increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation, a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. It has so many negative effects on society too because it makes everything more expensive. It's an input to every cost (through commercial real estate, which either has to hafve a similar return to residential real estate or it gets replaced with such).

I say all this because the WSJ is defending this generational theft by arguing that people are being "financially savvy" when people seek independence ultimately and this is simply a product of the affordability crisis and declining real wages. It's asinine.

[1]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-rentier-asset-...

[2]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6571818

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

by jmyeet

7/5/2026 at 7:49:44 PM

> I say all this because the WSJ is defending this generational theft by arguing that people are being "financially savvy" when people seek independence ultimately and this is simply a product of the affordability crisis and declining real wages. It's asinine.

Indeed. There's this common trope in modern journalim of pretending that these financial moves are pure results of personal choices and nothing else. So, tweens going back to their parents is them "being financially savvy". Americans spending more on groceries and rent rather than other goods and services is them "adopting new consumer preferences".

It's always chosen, never suffered. Once you start seeing it, you notice it everywhere.

by thrance

7/5/2026 at 6:36:15 PM

shame "home" for me is manhattan, and moving there would be financial ruin

by csmiller