https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-04-11/in-seo...
The textbook life you're supposed to lead in South Korea (and while South Korea is a very dynamic country that is always changing fast, for the moment, the expectation to adhere to norms and aspire to what your folks did is still a bit higher than you're perhaps used to) is to get married, move into a marriage home you bought - more on this in a moment - a couple of months to weeks before the ceremony to start co-habitation, and get busy having children.
"Buying a home" in South Korea means either outright buying, or very commonly, living rent-free for the duration of a one- or multi-year contract after putting down a deposit that is usually 75% or more of the property value. This system is considered good and desirable, called Jeonse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse
For numerous reasons, the Jeonse system is slowly getting dismantled. Monthly rent schemes are slowly becoming more and more prevalent. This is causing a big squeeze/run on the now-fewer good Jeonse apartments available, and giving many South Koreans the feeling that it's harder than ever to find a home to have, which is so intrinsically linked to this life milestone that for some, it puts getting married out of question.
In addition to the above issue, which is meant as perceptual, it's also actually become economically more difficult to afford good housing. Some of this is very real and beyond the control of individuals, others is peer pressure to allocate money to e.g. luxury goods. Overall it's become tough on couples to afford housing and kids without both parents working very hard, which in turns makes child-rearing difficult to pull off; Korean employers and co-workers are still very hostile to workers with children (don't bring private issues to work, etc.).
(I'm not Korean, but I've lived there for some years, can communicate in the language and read the news, and am married to a South Korean citizen with a child on the way; the latter is one of the reasons we moved away.)
> Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates. The Bank of Korea recently enacted emergency interest rate hikes that brought down the price of condominiums, but the interest rate on mortgages has risen, keeping home ownership a distant dream for many.
Fewer desireable/high paying jobs gets several paragraphs, but again, this would be less of a problem if rents weren't so high - people would be able to live on the incomes available. High real estate prices are sucking the oxygen out of the rest of the economy.
> Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates.
"Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates."