Breaking Up with My Middle Class Dream
If you grew up in North America, I would bet that for as long as you can remember, you were told that becoming an adult meant buying a house. And like me, you probably never stopped to ask yourself whether that was something you really even wanted.
For me, the house-buying dream turned into a full-on reality check the summer of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing. My husband and I were living with my mom in Canada after spending 5 years in the US, and I was pregnant with our first child. I was on the phone with a mortgage broker—a friend of a friend—who was patiently going over a rough review of our numbers to see where we stood in our homebuying journey. With one income at the time, very little savings, and no “Bank of Mom and Dad” to lean on, it was clear the numbers just weren’t where they needed to be, and I wanted nothing more than to stop wasting this guy’s time and start feeling sorry for myself, specifically whilst lying down in the fetal position.
While I didn’t want to “make it work” at all costs and end up house poor, I was still crushed. Like in so many places in 2020, the housing market in our city was going bananas, making it feel like it was now or never to get in. I had felt that we were “falling behind” for some time, but now, in our 30s with very little to show for our financial foundation, it felt like we might never be able to catch up. As I watched friends and family moving into their first and even second homes, I resented the fact that I had done everything right: I had gone to school for two degrees, worked hard, paid off debt, so where was the reward?
That feeling of falling behind had been building for as long as I could remember.
In elementary school I rode the school bus with my cousins, and we’d point to the pretty single-family homes on the route, choosing our favourites. Some had wrap around porches and even large oaks in the front yard with a swing. At that young age we were already conditioned to believe that a major life goal was to have a bigger, nicer house than the ones we were being raised in. Our families had immigrated to Canada from Nicaragua in the 80s and we all lived in the same rental townhome complex, just a few blocks away from the picture-perfect homes we admired every morning on the ride to school.
As I started to befriend girls who lived in these homes and got to see what life was like up close, I was only more convinced that these people were living the dream. Stay-at-home moms setting out afternoon cheese and crackers, or super successful working moms in dry-cleaned suits. Dads building treehouses, a golden retriever in the yard, each kid with their own room. One friend even had a canopy bed with a sheer curtain wrap-around thing that was popular circa 1997, and I needed no further proof that she was a real-life princess.
“Why do you have two living rooms?” I asked my canopy bed friend.
“We don’t. That’s the family room, that’s the living room,” she replied.
I nodded as if I had any idea what she was talking about.
Looking back, there was a lot more behind my fascination with these homes and the life lived within than a love for crown moulding and hardwood floors. I longed to become the protagonist of my own version, which presumably required a house for the set. I guess I thought that was when real life would begin.
At home, my parents reinforced the idea that this dream was not only the right goal, but totally attainable. My brothers and I were kids of immigrants, so yes, we’d have to work hard to get the nice job and the nice house, but we also had advantages by being raised in Canada and speaking three languages. It all seemed like a mere eventuality.
So, I did my best: straight As, teacher’s pet, sports teams and theatre, student council. I was that kid. And it got me exactly where it was supposed to — the kind of higher education parents brag about. But two degrees, student loans, credit card debt, and a few rocky early career years later, the sacred goal of homeownership was clearly not the eventuality I thought it was going to be.
It didn’t help my frustration that my husband wasn’t on the same page as me at all. He had grown up in Cuba until his early 20s and lived during the Special Period of the 90s, seeing energy, food, and medication shortages as part of daily life. The dream for his generation wasn’t to buy a house—it was to leave the island in hopes for a better future. To him, we were doing great. We were able to live comfortably below our means and give our growing family what it needed. If I really wanted a house, we could work towards it, but he made it clear it wasn’t important to him. It took me a long time to understand that what I perceived as his lack of ambition, was actually his ability to understand what was enough.
Over the next few years, life moved on as a family of three, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were still in some sort of limbo. By 2023, I was pregnant with our second child and watching Netflix one night, I came across Ramit Sethi’s How to Get Rich. Something Ramit says in the documentary stopped me dead in my tracks. At one point, he adamantly pushes back on the widely held belief that buying your primary residence is always a good financial decision. He says that despite what we’re told, renting isn’t throwing your money away and that even as a wealthy person himself, he chooses to rent. I couldn’t believe it. I had never heard anyone with any personal finance credibility say that renting could be the right financial decision.
As I was nearing my due date, I began untangling what I had inherited as a kid from what I actually believed about happiness, success, and living a good life. I could tell myself that buying a house was about stability and security for our kids, but that was a lie. I could say it was about building generational wealth, but there was Ramit and other personal finance experts I was discovering online talking about long-term investing to build wealth that had nothing to do with signing up for a 25-year mortgage. The reality was, I didn’t have the first clue about what it meant to build wealth, much less whether a house had anything to do with it.
One day in therapy, I finally admitted the uncomfortable truth: this whole obsession with becoming a homeowner was really about ego and validation. The “nice house” was just a symbol I’d clung to since childhood that would give me permission to say, I made it.
Sitting with that question—what did success and happiness actually mean for me? —was the beginning of something I didn’t see coming. And spoiler: we didn’t end up buying a house.
Welcome to The Money Rewrite. I’m Mariajosé, and I write for those of us questioning what success really means, navigating social and cultural expectations, and trying to build a life that feels good on our own terms. Money is part of that conversation—but if you’ve ever felt like an outsider in traditional personal finance spaces, you’re not alone. I’m still figuring out exactly what this space will become, but if that resonates, I hope you’ll follow along.