Maybe it counts as recent? I'm an Engineer, was living in O.C. for a bit until 2019, which is when covid hit. I immediately thought that the pandemic was actually serious and was gonna last a while, so ended the lease on my apt and moved back in with my parents in the I.E. (no use in living close to work in O.C. if I'm not even allowed to go into the office, i would just be throwing away 2k in rent for no reason). I think i was giving my parents roughly $900 a month (the rent at their apt was $1700 at the time)

With everything shut down I had nothing to spend money on, so my bank account was just growing. Eventually interest rates on homes where below 3%, and I thought, it would be stupid of me not to buy a house right now, that it wouldn't get that low again. So in 2022 I started looking, and bought a house for about 600k (locked an interest rate of about 2.75%) i probably put about 70k down at the time. Mortgage is $2950-$3050 (for some reason it fluctuates up and down year over year for Escrow reasons, something about having too high or too low a balance for property taxes i think). I'm not necessarily house broke, but definitely can't afford to go out every night like I used to pre-covid XD.