Want to be an adult? Live with your parents
Staying in your childhood house after graduation can help you save money to be financially secure when you’re 30
“Get out as fast as you can.” This is what everyone I knew advised me to do when I graduated from university in 2011 and moved back into my parents’ house in Richmond Hill, a suburb outside Toronto. This directive had very little to do with my parents, who are lovely, but rather with the idea of what it means to be an adult.
Adults, we are often told (in North America at least), do not live with their parents longer than they absolutely have to. So I didn’t.
I was lucky enough to find paid work in journalism shortly after graduation and within a few months, I saved up enough money to rent a cheap, sunny apartment on the corner of a major downtown intersection where a streetcar shortturned regularly right outside my bedroom window, making a screeching sound that my poetic roommate called “whales on a chalkboard.”
But screeching whales be damned, I was out of my childhood home and settled into my first adult one — a new reality that made me very proud. But it also made me very naive. It’s only now, six years later, that I’ve come to realize a surprising and sobering truth about the city of Toronto: If I really wanted to fasttrack my way to adulthood, I shouldn’t have taken the advice of my peers and left home as fast as I could.
I should have stayed put, in Richmond Hill, with mom and dad. I should have stayed put because, if I had, I might now have enough money saved up to put a down payment on a house.
This truth — that staying home may be more adult than moving out, was lost on me at 22 — but it’s well known to the nearly 50 per cent of young adults in the GTA currently living with their parents.
According to a survey called Gen Y at Home, commissioned by the University of Waterloo and released last week, “In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), almost half of young adults live with parents (47.4 per cent), much higher than the Canadian average of just over a third (34.7 per cent).”
What’s more, almost 80 per cent of the survey’s millennial respondents said they lived with their parents not because they had nothing better to do, but because they wanted to save money.
“In the face of precarious work and widespread economic insecurity,” the survey reads, “familial interdependence provides young adults with a way to plan for their futures while coping with economic challenges. Economic constraints such as low income, a high cost of living and soaring housing prices are reasons why young adults live at home in the Greater Toronto Area.”
That Toronto is expensive and very few can afford to own homes or rent them is certainly not news (the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in this city recently reached $2,000 a month). What is news, however, is the fact that a soaring cost of living has drastically changed the face of adulthood in this city.
Residing with your parents well into your twenties, once a sign of arrested development and a serious barrier to getting a date, is now evidence of maturity and financial prudence.
It suggests a young person who values security in their thirties and forties — and ostensibly in retirement — more than they value having fun in their twenties.
I had a lot of fun in my (nearly finished) twenties, but if I had known just how unattainable home ownership would become and how quickly, I’d have delayed that fun by a few years and stuck it out in Richmond Hill at my parents’ place. A word of wisdom to anyone who recently graduated from high school or college: if you are living at home with your parents and you’ve been told to get out as fast as you can, ask yourself a few questions first. What’s more important? Paying for your own apartment in an attempt to appear more adult or living at home for a while to save money, so that, come 30, you will feel like an adult?
Of course, things aren’t nearly this simple. Many people have parents who live far away, who drive them insane or who wouldn’t take them in to begin with.
But if living with your parents, rent free, is an option for you and it’s a good option — one that affords privacy, access to laundry and the occasional complementary meal, staying put in your childhood bedroom might be the most grown-up thing you’ll ever do.