RENT IN THE CITY VS STAYING WITH PARENTS... THE MATHS SAYS STAY, THE MENTAL HEALTH BILL SAYS OTHERWISE
RENT IN THE CITY VS STAYING WITH PARENTS... THE MATHS SAYS STAY, THE MENTAL HEALTH BILL SAYS OTHERWISE
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RENT IN THE CITY VS STAYING WITH PARENTS... THE MATHS SAYS STAY, THE MENTAL HEALTH BILL SAYS OTHERWISE
Every spreadsheet says move back home. every 23 year old who moved back home says do not trust the spreadsheet.
Let us do the maths first because the maths is the part everybody agrees on. a 1BHK in a decentpocket of pune runs you somewhere between eighteen and thirty thousand a month dependingon how close you want to be to your office and how much you are willing to lie to yourself about what "walking distance" means. Add ten percent for maintenance the society will invent reasons to raise. Add a two month deposit you will fight for at the end like it is a custody battle. add brokerage, which is one full month of rent handed to a man who showed you three flats and answered exactly none of your questions. add the eleven month agreement that exists purely so
nobody has to register anything. then add the furniture, the ten thousand rupee mattress that felt like a splurge and now feels like a mistake, the water purifier, the gas connection saga, the wifi that goes down every second thursday. then add food, because you are not cooking, we both know you are not cooking, you are ordering from the same four places in a rotation so predictable that swiggy has started guessing correctly. By the time you finish the addition you are somewhere north of forty five thousand a month to do the exact same job you could do from your childhood bedroom, in the same city, for free, with better deals. Financially this is not a close contest. it is not even a contest. anybody with a calculator and no emotional investment will tell you to stay home, invest the difference, and thank yourself at thirty five.
And yet. and yet there is a specific kind of tiredness that does not show up on any spreadsheet, and it starts around 9:40pm when you are on a call and somebody knocks and asks if you have eaten. It is not a cruel question. That is the whole problem. Nothing that happens at home is cruel. It is just constant. it is the door that does not lock in any meaningful way, the volume that has to stay low, the friend who cannot come over after ten, the conversation you cannot have on the balcony because sound travels. It is being twenty four and having your day accounted for by people who love you and therefore feel entitled to the details. where. with whom. till when. why so late. why that person. why every weekend. You are not being interrogated, you are being cared for, and somehow the exhausting part is that you cannot even be angry about it properly.
You have to be grateful in real time while being slowly compressed. and then there is the part nobody says out loud, which is that living at home keeps you in the version of yourself your family last updated. at home you are still the kid who was bad at maths in ninth standard. you are still the one who cannot be trusted with the car at night. you have a job, a salary, opinions, an entire personality that exists between 9am and 7pm on the other side of the city, and it evaporates the second you take your shoes off in the hall.
So what you are actually paying forty five thousand rupees a month for is not square footage. it is the right to be unobserved. It is the right to come home at 2am and have that be a non event. it is the right to be in a bad mood without a family meeting about it. It is being able to date somebody for four months before anybody knows their surname. it is silence you did not have to negotiate for. and when people say rent is a waste of money because you are not building an asset, they are technically correct and completely missing what is being bought, because the asset here is a version of yourself that only exists when nobody is watching, and that version is the one who figures out how to cook rice, how to talk to a landlord, how to be alone on a sunday without spiralling. that is not nothing. That is arguably the entire point of your twenties. The counter argument, and it is a real one, is that a lot of people are paying that forty five thousand for a shoebox in a building with no light, eating badly, sleeping badly, and calling it independence because the alternative feels like defeat. The freedom is real but it is not automatic. you can absolutely rent your own place and be just as miserable, only a broker.
Here is the honest version. Staying home is the correct financial decision and it costs something that does not appear on the statement. Moving out is an expensive decision and it buys something you cannot itemise. The mistake is pretending one of these is obviously right, because that is how you end up either resenting your parents for a house they are giving you for free, or resenting a flat you cannot really afford for not feeling like the montage you imagined. If you stay, stay on purpose. renegotiate the terms like an adult, put a number on what you are saving, give it a job, a SIP, a deadline, a plan, so the compromise is buying you something and not just delaying you. If you leave, leave on purpose. I know that the first three months are logistics and loneliness and the good part starts after. and either way stop letting the internet decide it for you, because the people posting about how rent is theft and the people posting about how living with parents is stunting you are both selling a lifestyle, and neither one of them is paying your bills...
-Maitrayee Repal