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>What good does cutting out your $4 latte out do (maybe $100 per month), when your rent is $2,500 month for a 1BR?

Easy solution: live with roommates. Cohabitation isnt the ultimate indignity, people are choosing to spend $2500 or more when they could spend less than half that. Even in Manhattan you could live uptown and pay less than that living alone, and be able to catch an express train downtown during the week. With a roommate your rent might even be sub 1k.

I know plenty of yuppies living beyond their means, spending $3000/mo on tacky "luxury" apartments, without much leftover even for things like $4 coffees. Cant say i feel too bad for them.

Or live alone somewhere far from the city center. Get a dumpy apartment in Worcester or Hoboken or [insert cheap city near your metro] and spend a couple hours on the train. Wont be fun but you sure wont be spending 2.5k on rent.

My wife and I once shared a 420 square foot apartment in New Rochelle, NY with our newborn so we could pay for her final year of law school tuition without taking loans. So I know there are things you can do to save money. At the same time, I don't want to hear boomers talk about millennials' spending habits. My parents certainly never lived with roommates in their late 20s, early 30s.

Sharing your apartment with your newborn is terrible. It's so much easier when you get them their own space early, no hearing all the crying in the middle of the night and all.

Preferably across the hall. Really cuts down on shared-wall noise.

I've not only always shared an apartment since college, I've shared rooms.

Millennial, two STEM degrees, live in a 2nd-tier city, and likely a decade more before I can afford a down payment.

So uhhhh....checkmate?

To be fair you don't actually need 20% down. It's recommended but hardly the norm. Plenty of people will do 5 to 10% down. Veterans need as little as 3%.

And depending on your credit PMI isn't that much per month. It also goes away once you've paid enough to hold 20% equity.

As a veteran homeowner I can tell you I paid 0 down on a Fixed rate.

That used to be very easy to do, but got harder after 2008.

Did mine in 2013

Try it now as a first time homeowner.

It can seriously hinder the quality of your bid however. If you're putting 5% down and competing against people putting 20% or even straight cash you're in serious trouble.

Why would the size of the downpayment affect your bid? Isn't that between you and your loan officer? Does it affect how the seller gets paid?

Regardless of reality, sellers see the buyers as being less serious and/or more likely to back out of a deal with a lower down payment.

As someone who bought their house with a smaller than normal down payment it was quite frustrating. I wound up starting to bid much higher than I wanted in an effort to put more room between myself and normal down payments

Note that this only really matters in a hot market where sellers can pick and choose

It's expensive to go under 20%, whether in interest rate or insurance.

This depends on specific circumstances. If the house appreciates quickly you can discharge PMI early. And how much house you buy.

Sort of. There are minimum time requirements for PMI no matter how quickly a house appreciates.

Depends on the State.

Fannie Mae has 3% as well and you can roll your student loans into it if you want via SoFi.

What does that do for bankruptcy rules? Sounds either very good or very bad for people with unmanageable student loan debts.

i generally agree. i think theres some penny-wise pound-foolish thinking going on among people who are critical or eating out or buying lattes. it may sound stupidly tautological, but i think the way to get rich is focus almost entirely on boosting earnings, since that has much less of an upper bound than spending does a lower bound. or course theres more than one way to do it, and i think it would certainly be more satisfying, once accomplished, to accumulate wealth by careful, daily effort rather than managing to find some firehose of money. but it seems like most of the time it tends towards the latter.

Are you sure that's not the availability heuristic talking? People who accumulate wealth gradually over a lifetime of not getting lattes don't make for flashy stories, and by definition aren't flashy themselves. In addition they tend to be older, because that takes time, meaning that in any crowd that skews younger, the wealthy people will likely have taken the maximized earnings path.

im basing it on everyone who i know who is rich or poor? its almost always what they do for a living, not how frugal they are. but i do agree that you can be smart with a modest income and end up with alot of money!

You don't know about the people who are wealthy through frugality since they aren't flashy.

I think millennials simply earn less. That has cut them out of balancing a mortgage and child care while having a stable job. It's pretty easy to work on cutting out lattes and eating out while increasing your earning potential though. I don't think daily frugality comes at the cost of improving your skills or position.

I would never have been able to buy an apartment if my parents hadn't put up their own house as collateral. The bank required 20% at the time, but with the collateral I only needed something like 5%, which I could afford. I had no issues paying the down payments, which came to about the same as I used to pay in rent. A few years later I had paid down enough that they could take off my prents' home from the collateral, and 10 years later I had something that had increased 100% in market value.

I imagine most millennials aren't lucky enough to be able to do this.

Property prices in popular metros mean they should probably be looking elsewhere, but the list of attractive places probably isn't that long. Detroit, maybe? Baltimore?

Minneapolis