I’m 23 and fully aware I will never own my own home. My boyfriend and I have been renting a place for 2 years, casually mentioning “once we have our own house” in our conversations. The prices just keep getting higher and with our, above average paychecks we are still living paycheck to paycheck and have to cut out on food in order to save up for a vacation where we already have free accommodation (family). My pay is around 740$ and his is around 700. The minimum wage where we live is 300$. And we can’t even save up for interest to get a loan from a bank which we wouldn’t be able to pay off before we die. A decent house where we live would be at least 100k$. I don’t want us to have to work two jobs, 80+ hours a week and miss out on our time together and youth just to be able to afford a home. I already work a job I don’t like (support) and he is too. It would kill our will to live if we went into something like programming, or sales (tried sales once, didn’t survive the training as it’s too aggressive for me) it’s something we’ve never had interest in. I know it takes a huge drive and passion to put in so much work and study so much to have a good paying job. I’m getting more depressed day by day just trying to think of a way to make a decent life for us and talking about it got my boyfriend depressed as well.. it shouldn’t be this hard. We want to have a family and while it was so different for my boyfriend, my own childhood was very difficult, with a very messy family and always moving. I didn’t have a place i could call my childhood home cause there’s at least 8 of them, 4 of which had bars on the windows and mold everywhere. I don’t want our future children to have the same experience. I want them to have a childhood more similar to my boyfriends. Calm, happy, and all in one place. Hell, forget about the house, we wouldn’t even be able to afford a decent small wedding if we decided we want that anytime soon.. if we had at least 400$ extra each per month MAYBE it would be possible to make a life. What we’re doing right now is not a nice life if we have to cut out on some food in order to be able to get a coffee with friends. We considered working on a cruise for 6 months but after the 6 months (away from friends and family) we’d still need to go a couple more times to afford a house. It’s killing me. I know this may be messy but i just wanted to get this out of my system, the depression keeps coming in waves and I don’t want to pull my boyfriend into it as well…