Here are some more.
The kid and the parents get on well. Not all roommates do.
The kid has the flexibility of leaving at any time without worrying about finding a replacement or sticking the roommate with the lease.
You’ve probably worked out food issues long since.
The comfort of being in an already furnished room - one with nice memories.
The big downside is sex, but if the partner has his or her own space, that isn’t a downside.
Also, attitudes about the acceptability of unmarried people having sex are much more likely to be similar across generational boundaries nowadays than they were several decades ago.
Most people probably still don’t want their parents (or their adult children, for that matter) to hear them having sex in their bedroom, but parents merely knowing that they might be having sex in their bedroom is much less likely these days to generate massive familial trauma.
I don’t think it was a mixed message although maybe I wasn’t clear enough. Maybe you missed the " under the same circumstances." part of my post. Or maybe it was the "same amount " part. What I mean is that if it will cost me $1000 per month to live with roommates , I am not going to live with my parents in a similar location if it costs me the same $1000 per month. If my parents live closer than any available apartment , then I am not paying the same rent for the same circumstances as an equally convenient apartment doesn’t exist.
I’m not talking about parents who have a paid off house and the kid(s) pay a share of expenses or a whole bunch of other situations- I am saying there is one single situation that does not occur. ( I suppose it might occur rarely , but I have never seen it.) That situation is the one where the kids ( or the parents, for that matter) pay what the market rent is for a room in someone’s house or to share an apartment to live under those same conditions with their parent. In this situation, there is no benefit to living with your parents except possibly that you prefer to live with them rather than roommates. But no financial or any other benefit - it’s not helping you save for a down payment or pay off debt. Once there is any benefit , it’s no longer the same situation.- let’s say I pay my parents market-rate for the space and also market rate for childcare ( a rarity in itself) - but it’s easier because I don’t need to drop off/pick up. Not the same a s situation where I pay market rent and market child care and also drop off/pick up.If I have to sign a lease with roommates but not my parents, that’s a benefit to staying with my parents.
Maybe an example will help. My next-door neighbor rents rooms in his house.It’s not a group of roommates, he and his wife own the house and they rent the extra bedrooms. The rent includes the room and utilities. There is no lease- it’s month -to-month.They don’t live as roommates, the renters don’t get to use the living room and yard/washer/dryer etc on the same basis as the owners. Everyone cooks separately. Let’s say my neighbor charges $700 for a room- which is about the going rate. Why would my son pay me the same $700 to live under the same conditions? He’d be fine paying $300 to live under those conditions and possibly even fine paying $700 if it included meals and laundry supplies - but there is no way he’s going to pay $700 to live in my house under the same conditions as a rented room in someone else’s and still have all the disadvantages of living with a parent.
I also reserve the right to mock people who, while claiming they “left home” in their late teens, still get their laundry and groceries done by Mom. The mockery is not about where you sleep, it’s about how much of an independent adult you are.
I think you missed post 22, where I paid at least market rate to stay with my parents!
I totally agree. However, since YOU brought it up, I feel I can comment.
I find nothing inherently wrong with an adult child living with the parents, but I am wary of it. Sure, the person could very well be like your daughter. On the other hand, Norman Bates was about her age, and he lived with his mother. (Well, lived with her corpse would be more accurate.)
I won’t apologize for being wary. I think your daughter is more the exception than the rule. For everyone like her, there is at least one other who is living at home because they can’t hold a job or just don’t want to be independent and responsible.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seem to me if you say
“I asked my parents if I could stay with them while I saved up for a house deposit.
They were happy and **I paid them £100 ($131) a month.” **
then you are not in fact paying market rate- I mean, if you’re paying market rate, then you could live somewhere else anywhere and save just as much for the down payment, right?
I was paying that amount in 1973.
As per my previous post, allowing for inflation, this would be about £1,188 ($1,564) today.
That sounds like market rate to me!
I could have moved out, but I got on with my parents (and didn’t want to risk problems with room-mates / landlords etc.)
I have no idea what was market rate in 1973 or now for where you were living- it was simply confusing for you to mention staying with your parents while you saved for a house deposit if staying with your parents didn’t actually help you save for the deposit. And if you were paying market rate, staying with your parents by definition didn’t help you save the money.
Spot on. I rented a nice apartment in Champaign Illinois in 1974 for $125 a month, utilities included. I think it might have gone up to $145 by 1977 when I left.
I can imagine how it could assuming any of the following:
Paying market rent to your parents means they let you off the hook for utilities.
Living at home means you don’t have to buy furniture or other things that add up after a while (like groceries).
You have a kid and your parents are willing to provide unlimited babysitting as long as you pay “market rent”.
Your parents live close to where you work so you can save on gas and car maintenance costs. You also don’t have to pay for parking.
“Market rent” in your parents’ location is a lot cheaper than the “market rent” where you intend on buying a house. Like, if your parents are living in a modest double-wide in Bumfuck and you intend on living in a big city one day.
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They want 2 months rent plus 2-3 months deposit in London? One more reason not to move there…
Everywhere I’ve stayed (including where I live now, in a 1-bed flat in Cornwall that’s under £500 a month) has only asked for one month in advance and one month’s rent as deposit, plus around £100-150 agency fees. I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than £1200 all up to move in, living in Bristol and Manchester, as well as Cornwall.
I’d also argue with the ‘unusual to find a room not let via an agent’; there’s websites like gumtree and spareroom.co.uk which generally have plenty, except in the most competitive areas. In the town I’m in, there are more rooms currently available which don’t go through agencies than do, mostly around £400 including bills.
I’m not saying it’s not difficult to find somewhere affordable, it definitely is, especially the first time if you don’t already have a job, contacts and parents willing to help out, but I think your figures are way out for a room in a shared place in most of the country.
I had a longer reply written *, *but I lost it. The shorter version is that I was never talking about rent, I was talking about cost. One of the posts that **glee **replied to said
Another said
Now if** glee** meant the parents were paid market rent , but covered food/utilities/household bills themselves, then it didn’t cost the same to live with the parents as roommates. It would have been more expensive to live with the roommates who weren’t covering those bills. Which is fine, but it doesn’t mean glee lived with the parents without saving any money over living with roommates.
It almost seems as if people think it’s shameful to gain a benefit from living with your parents or your kid, even though something like 99.9% of the time someone gets a benefit. It’s as if the only way a person could benefit is by taking advantage of the other, so we have to somehow define not paying utilities or getting free childcare as not receiving a benefit
Did you read my post @ 22? 
I gave the actual rent figure for 1973, then showed what that was worth now.
I also added "I was also saving the same amount and by 1986 I had enough to put down a deposit on my first house. "
So I was paying both a current market rent (and enough to cover food etc.) to my parents and saving for my own house.
Staying with my parents didn’t benefit me financially.
As I posted earlier "I could have moved out, but I got on with my parents (and didn’t want to risk problems with room-mates / landlords etc.) "
I read both of your posts- the mention of “I asked my parents if I could stay with them while I saved up for a house deposit.” threw me. I didn’t think you would have mentioned saving for deposit if it was unaffected by living with your parents. I mean, it actually doesn’t seem like you stayed with them to save up the deposit - it seems like you stayed because you didn’t want the hassles of roommates/landlords. Which is fine- but you literally are the first person I’ve sort of known who did that.
THIS!!! I do get the occasional “eww, you still live with your Mom!” comments. I try to ignore them, since I really think such attitudes are aimed at the stereotype of people who move back in with the parents to loaf around rent-free. And because I look nothing like my mother, very rarely I’ll hear comments to the effect of “Oh, who’s your friend?” or “How long have you been a couple?” >.< Yeah.
My mother moved in with me the day my father died. I was nearing graduation from college, and was starting to get the hang of adulting…then, suddenly, I’m throwing half of my furniture into storage so there’s room for my mom in a tiny college apartment. (Full disclosure, Mom paid rent for the storage units – she thought she had a quick sale on the house, so she packed everything up and put what she couldn’t cram into the apartment into storage.) At the time, she hadn’t dealt with household finances since the '70s; when I tried talking to her about spacing out bill payments for budgeting purposes, she thought I was telling her she had spent all of her money. (For some reason, she thought all bills had to be paid either immediately upon receipt or at the first of the month, so she was writing checks left and right at one point.)
Once I graduated and got a real job, house-hunting began. Mom still wasn’t ready to be on her own, so we ended up buying a house together. We’ve been here 12 years, and I think things work out fine. We split the mortgage and other expenses, as well as the general housework. Heck, I’ve even reached the point with my salary that I can pay more than half on our vacations (most often to the place where Mom and Dad were supposed to move when Dad reached retirement). The house is large enough that we aren’t in each other’s space all the time. Financially, Mom is fine, and could easily move into a small place of her own; she still doesn’t want to do that though for some reason. I’m not pushing it at this point. She still needs occasional guidance on bills, but for some reason going paperless really helped her understand the bill-paying process, particularly with credit cards.
I’ve met a couple of people living in the same way.
The generational pressures are different. Divorced parents, splitting a home they can’t live in together any more, but at least one of them can’t afford a whole home of their own unless they move a very long way away. And the adult child works and could buy a craphole with a high mortgage rate. Together, they can buy a place that they both like and gives them just enough privacy.
So sharing with an adult child makes perfect sense.
It only works if you get on really well, which is the only real bar.
FWIW going paperless makes a difference to me. Never had the slightest problem submitting online tax returns. Am actually very efficient at it. Visible paperwork sets off panic mode. Not sure why TBH.
Unless you and your son were part of a big immigrant family and there were multiple generations in the same big old house until the younger generation had too many kids to make one house impractical. Like my wife, who lived with her grandmother, parents, grandma, aunts, uncles and cousins until she was 9, when her parents moved into a brand new house in the suburbs and promptly had a second child. Because even grandma had a “one child per married couple” limit.
I’ll agree that the vast, vast majority of non-disabled adult kids who can afford to move out, do move out, and the vast, vast majority of those left are probably slackers getting stoned and playing video games, but nothing is 100%.
Nope- because I actually grew up in a similar circumstance. My grandparents owned a two family house. My parents , my siblings and I lived in one apartment and my grandparents and two uncles lived in the other until my uncles got married. My parents absolutely did not pay the same rent the previous tenants were paying. I know this for a couple of reasons- one, my mother used to talk about how she and my father had put a deposit down on an apartment a few blocks away and they gave up that apt when my grandparent’s tenants moved out shortly before my parents got married. They wouldn’t have given up that apartment to pay the same rent to my grandparents. Second, there is no way in hell my father would have lived in the same house as my grandparents if it was going to cost the same as another apartment in the neighborhood. Let’s just say my mother and grandmother didn’t really understand the concept of “boundaries”. In most of the multigenerational houses I’ve known, although the younger generation contributes, they don’t contribute nearly as much as renting somewhere else would cost because their parents aren’t trying to make a profit off them as an unrelated landlord would be.
I actually don’t think most of them are slackers - I just think that in nearly all cases it’s not exactly like renting a room/having a roommate. Either someone is saving money or someone is living better or someone needs to be taken care of ( grandchildren or a sick/disabled elderly parent). And it can be either the parent or the child or both who are benefiting.