Boomer Calls A Family’s 2K Mortgage ‘Outrageous’ While House Hunting, Saying They Prefer $600 — ‘What Do You Think Bread Costs?’
Have they been asleep for the past 15 years? Are they Rip Van Winkle and wife?
Dmytro Zinkevych | Shutterstock The more we discuss it as a culture, the more it seems that many baby boomers have been so coddled by the easy economy they navigated in their younger years that they genuinely have no idea what things cost now.
Case in point: an encounter a Canadian man had with a boomer couple who were house-hunting in his neighborhood and were demanding home prices and mortgage payments that hadn't existed for ages.
The boomer said a $2K mortgage is 'outrageous.'
LOLOLOLOLOLOL okay grandma!
In his Reddit post, the man wrote that he and his husband live in a very desirable corner of Vancouver, British Columbia, just 20 minutes from downtown and "surrounded by… GOOD schools… in a safe and family-oriented neighborhood."
kali9 | Canva Pro
Basically, it's a utopia and has the home prices to match, especially in Vancouver's soaring residential real estate market, the second most expensive in the literal world. It's also the third most expensive city overall, taking bronze behind Hong Kong and Sydney.
So imagine this gent's surprise when "some boomer" was checking out a home for sale on his street and had pricing expectations more in line with the 1990s.
The boomer and her husband bought their house in 1960 and want to pay $600 a month now.
While looking at the house for sale, the boomer woman came up to the man to ask how much his mortgage was. "I said 2K plus some bells and whistles," he wrote. The woman was appalled
"She said that was an outrageous price, and she is trying to buy a home with a $600 mortgage," the man wrote, adding, "Girl, good [expletive] luck, let me know when you find that magical unicorn."
Ryan McVay | Canva Pro
He went on to explain that there isn't a single house in his neighborhood that isn't "creeping over the 1 million dollar line" and that the house for sale is "sitting at 1.5 million."
But the boomer woman insisted that this was absurd. "I tried telling her that we are the lucky ones because we bought this home in 2016 and put a massive down payment on the place," he wrote. "But no, she just kept going on and on about my outrageous mortgage."
The man called the boomer 'delusional' and wondered if she even knew how much a loaf of bread costs nowadays.
As their conversation progressed, it became clear why the woman had such absurd expectations. "Her [sic] and her husband bought a cute little house back in 1960" and seemed to expect similar prices now.
That is, of course, far from reality.
Global housing prices rose 6% in just a single year from 2021 to 2022, but in Canada, the picture is even worse. Housing prices there rose a staggering 318% since 2000 — even worse than the U.S., where prices went up by 182% over the same period. And, like here in the U.S., prices in Canada shot up by nearly 16% after the pandemic.
"She left before I could ask her what she thinks the price of bread is," the man joked in his post, adding, "Girl, what in the [expletive] do you think housing prices in a decent neighborhood go for these days?"
Many boomers struggle to accept the state of the current economy.
Of course, it is a familiar story by now to anyone who's NOT a boomer. The generation consistently blames millennials and Gen Z's economic woes on laziness and profligate spending when even economists say the reality is incontrovertible: They had it easier than us. By a lot.
The median American house is currently DOUBLE the inflation-adjusted price it was when the boomers were in their 20s and 30s, for just one example — and wages haven't even remotely kept pace.
"I, too, would prefer to pay $600 a month," another Redditor quipped in response to the man's post, which really sums it up. Yeah, boomers, we'd all like to be paying less. But unfortunately, your generation's decades of trickle-down-flavored economic policy and your insistence on voting for politicians who refuse to do anything but make it worse has landed us all in this cesspool.
We all wish prices were better, but as a wise elder once told me, "Wish in one hand and [defecate] in the other and see which one fills up first." Or you could face reality, stop victim-blaming, "pull yourselves up by the bootstraps," and use your enormous resources and influence to actually do something about it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.