Your turn

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His name is Nathan. A Millennial, location unknown. He’s 36, two young kids, steadily employed in a government job (lowly paid, it seems). Renting. Hating it. Scant savings. Financially illiterate.

This guy has less than twenty grand to his name, yet vexes about home ownership. Clearly he cannot afford to buy. And yet he suffers from the relentless social pressure to be a homeowner – as opposed to a failure. He says he’s depressed. Worse, he is ashamed in front of his daughter, son and wife. All because of real estate, it seems. It underscores how skewed, and wrong, our values are – to judge a man based on an asset. A financed one.

He reads the blog, but obviously I have not gotten through to him. It’s ‘Chinese’ he says.

So this time I’m handing it over. Consider that this note arrived in your inbox.

What say you?

Hello Garth,

I apologize for bothering you as I’m sure many people message you for similar reasons. I don’t even particularly expect a response at minium maybe this will just be therapeutic rambling on my part.

So why am I E-mailing you, well to give you my little bio my name is Nathan Jamieson I am currently 36 years old and I work as a blue-collar federal civil servant since 2018. I am married with two kids, my daughter just turned 4 this summer and is starting school soon and my son will be 2 in February. My wife works in the states currently part time as this helps with our childcare and so forth, she is a PhD psychologist.

So going back in time to being younger never been good with money, never had anyone in my immediate family know or teach me anything about money. Certainly never learned anything about in school. The teaching I got only ever amounted to “save your money!”. I know absolutely nothing about investing or any of that.

Not to get all psychological with you or pouring my heart out but I’ve always had a kind of depression around money. What I mean by this is that all things of great monetary cost e.g a house seemed and still seem like such a impossibility that I don’t even try or I will buy myself knick nacks toys so on and so forth to make me forget about these hard life problems.

Home ownership is currently my biggest problem, even back before real estate imploded everything seemed like such an impossibility back then when things were “good” that now its even worse I wonder is there anything I can even do. My wife and two small children are currently stuck in our 700 sqft apartment mainly because of course my many poor financial decisions and inaction and also due to the world imploding and because our rent is only currently 1,000 dollars and as you know there’s no where else I can go for better or bigger. I feel absolutely ashamed my daughter and son and wife are in this situation and my kids shouldn’t grow up worse off than I did I am hoping it’s not too little too late.

Many people I respect at work read your site and have pointed me to it. I admittedly have poked around and read various articles a lot of it is Chinese to me at this point hopefully that will change. I just don’t know where to begin the little money I do have saved up is about 14,000 dollars to my name. I have no RRSP or any other acronyms you can think of I just have half the money sitting in a TD savings account rest in chequings. No assets worth mentioning other than our car payment.

I Just feel so absolutely hopeless and depressed over it all. I make about 4 grand a month net without working overtime which I’m trying to do a lot more of as much as I can but I don’t know what I personally should be doing? Who should I be talking to? I feel so hopeless that anything seems scary to do like who’s the right person to deal with the money I do have? How do I make sure I am being as safe and smart as possible? Why would any of these financial planners/ advisors help me? Can they even help me?

If you can somehow possibly point me in the right direction or person or something that’d be much appreciated. I also understand if you can’t and I appreciate this in general