If you’ve taken any introductory United States history course, you know about the “American Dream” — 9-to-5 desk job, fuel-efficient car, single-family home with a white picket fence, a yard, a dog and a couple kids. When described like that, it sounds pretty ideal — a sensible goal that, once achieved, is the perfect, sensible way to live out the rest of your days. However, Hadley Malcolm of USA Today says that after the housing crisis of 2008, the American Dream is much more difficult to accomplish.

Malcolm states that this lifestyle is especially unattainable for the millennial generation — a group of barely-adults, fresh out of college and struggling under the weight of a fickle job market and unending student loans and debt. Her article, titled “To buy, or not to buy a home? For many Millennials, that is the question,” follows the story of a married pair of 26-year-olds looking to buy their first home, albeit with little success.

The problem, as always, lies in money. Most recent college graduates are immediately looking for one thing: jobs. This is understandable, what with the increased student loans needing to be paid off and the increased experience being demanded in many fields of work today.

With a job, however, comes a need for a place to live. In the first few years, an apartment makes the most sense; it’s small, practical and more often than not, very close to where one is working. In today’s market, though, rent is becoming progressively more expensive, leaving little leeway for recent grads to set aside money to be used for an eventual down payment. Furthermore, like rent, mortgages are becoming more expensive as well, requiring first-time homebuyers to have saved money for more than just the down payment.

The real killer in all of this, however, is the fact that the mortgage rate increase from the housing market forced many people to either foreclose on their homes, or stay where they are for fear of not finding another affordable home if they moved out.

With this being the case, if you have a steady job, with a well-cushioned savings account and a desire to buy your first home, the journey would be just as difficult — if not more so — than the journey of a recent graduate with no savings and a too-high rent because there aren’t enough houses on the market from which to choose.

Statistics show that in the third quarter of 2014, there were 18,116 vacant housing units, which was already down from the first quarter of 2011, when there were 18,985. The number took a steep plunge between the third and fourth quarter of 2014, down to just 16,902 vacant units, and has been slowly creeping back upwards since. In the first quarter of 2016, there were 17,677 vacant housing unites. 

Malcolm’s story in USA Today ended on a happy note, of course; the couple found its dream home ($27,000 over its budget) and settled in happily to live out their American Dream. For the rest of us broke millennials, though, the outcome may not nearly be as satisfactory.

This would be the part where I curse out previous generations (namely, Generation X and the Baby Boomers) for ruining the economy and blaming the millennials for it, but I don’t have the time, nor the ability to condense that down within my upper word limit. What I will say, however, is that if you’re a student or recent grad about to go out and enter the big, wide world on your own, remember to save and invest your money. US Personal Savings Rates are down in recent years, at just over 5 percent in the start of 2016; this is definitely correlated to, and perhaps even caused by, an increase in spending nationwide.

I’m no economist, and I will never be an economist, but it’s logical and helpful in any case to have a savings account with money in it; all it takes is a dollar here and there to build up cushion for, as they say, a rainy day in the future.

For more information about first-time investing, a good place to start that I found was an article in Forbes Magazine titled “How To Invest for the Very First Time,” written by Rob Berger.