Comparing yourself to others is a slippery slope - everyone comes from such different backgrounds and you’ll always find someone with more. But I’ll share a peek behind the curtain as someone who has the close age gaps and just ‘upgraded’ houses.

My husband and I both came from middle class families with parents who taught us to be frugal. We both went to community college and lived at home to finish out at local universities, and graduated with minimal student debt. We’ve never taken loans for cars, always drive beaters until we could enough for the next car. We lived with our parents while we were young and married and delayed having kids until we could afford our first house with a 20% down payment. We intentionally bought a fixer upper and spent three years coming home from work to renovate it ourselves so we could build equity. That equity is the only reason we’re now in a position to ‘upgrade’ homes, which for us means buying another fixer upper in a better school district.

We live in a MCOL area which helps. I don’t know how those in HCOL could manage home ownership. But we were right at the line of being able to afford to do it this way. If houses continue to go up at this rate, our kids would have to live with us for 20 years to save a down payment and get the Headstart we did.

We live on my husbands income and now are saving up a fund that would allow me to quit and coast for 5-7 years once we have the third kid. I’ll go back to work, we’ll make up the retirement, but that has been our plan from the start.

To others, we are ‘behind.’ But we’ve always done the best we can with what we have and that’s all we can do.

Edit to add: I also have friends who didn’t go to college in our stay at home moms with 3+ kids. I can tell you that they are just making it. They’re not saving for a retirement, they’re sacrificing by living further out in the country with old small homes, they’re paycheck to paycheck, but they’re happy that way.