Young, saving and living with Mum

Known as the boomerang generation, they’re the adult children who can’t afford to buy a home and can’t save enough while renting. They’re moving back home with their parents until their fortunes improve

FOR YOUNG adults who had moved out of the home and were looking at renting for a few years before getting on to the property ladder, more stringent mortgage conditions, coupled with lower wages and even lower interest rates on savings, has meant the future is perhaps not as guaranteed as they might have thought.

In some cases, moving home with the parents was the most sensible in a short list of options; in the safety of the parental home they could save on rent while leaving more adult financial concerns – bills, bills, bills – behind.

But with every action comes an equal and opposite reaction, and a move back to a childhood home can often be seen as a retrograde step.

This is not to mention the fact that, with more than one set of adults in a home, the idea of who is “in charge” is not quite cut and dried.

For Michelle McKeon, a 26-year-old personal assistant from Glasnevin, moving home meant that her goal of buying a home with her partner of seven years, Joe Byrne, would be realised much sooner than if the couple continued to rent.

“We’d have been there for three years saving what we could in one year with Mam and Dad,” says McKeon. So she moved back into her family home in Glasnevin in March of this year – and brought Byrne with her.

“He was more okay with the idea than I was,” she says. “Mam and Dad are very laid back. They would be quite young and chilled, so that was good.”

But concerns obviously remained; McKeon had grown used to doing things her own way. “I was afraid there would be a bit of conflict with the way clean or the way I’d clean,” says McKeon. “I was afraid of the little, practical things.”

For Karen Nason, a 31-year-old Dublin-based PR manager, it wasn’t just the practical aspects that concerned her. When she flew the coop about six years ago, her mother Hilary moved house. “She decided to downsize because it was just her and my little sister,” says Nason. “I’d never actually lived in this house before – so it was a bit of an adjustment. I didn’t know where anything was in the kitchen.”

Nason and her boyfriend Ger Fitzpatrick moved in with her mother when the couple decided, like McKeon and Byrne, to buy. “Mam said, ‘Why don’t you move home and do some serious saving?’ So we’ve been here for a year and a half, and the saving is going really well. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re living at home,” Nason says.