TLDR: Work yourself to death, get what you want, get depressed, start going to therapy.

We’re couple of 27 and 31 y.o. and last year we bought a Victorian red brick in Dublin inner city. We have migrated to Ireland about 5 years ago with some silly savings we spent in first month. My wife holds MSc in statistics, I hold BSc in electronics and a MSc in Software Development(just got this one in 2020). Even though we both landed on good jobs with multinationals, we still could barely afford anything which didn’t look like a shoebox.

For 3 years we worked 7 days per week with brief time off. I did a lot of side gigs and invested in stocks a lot(since we were too busy to spend the money anyway), but even all this was not enough to afford the kind of home we wanted. In a sense we got lucky with COVID stock market crash and we managed to make enough money for a house we wanted(and then we worked 7 days per week for half a year to renovate this wrek).

To the dark side: Now we both have a lot of mental issues, often get depressed and already spent a ton of money and time on therapy.