It's not just Australian millennials saying: I shouldn't have to give up fun to leave home

Living in the family home with mum and dad well into adulthood wasn’t exactly the plan. It’s not what you dream of when you map out your future in your young, naive imagination. My future was meant to involve one foot on the career ladder, one on the property ladder, and a significant other to share it all with.

Yet, five years after leaving university, here I am – no closer to being able to rent, let alone buy, a place of my own than I was when I graduated. I want my own space. Who wouldn’t? But with stifling house prices, rising rents, stagnant wages and a shedload of student debt, that’s not looking likely.

Some are suggesting that I only have myself to blame. This week, Australian property mogul Tim Gurner chastised young people like me for splurging too much on the likes of avocado toast, a costly brunch favourite, instead of saving for a property. He’s not the only one slinging mud at us profligate youth for our allegedly feckless ways. Earlier this month, a Spanish court ruled against a 23-year-old woman demanding financial support from her parents, on the grounds that she was “too lazy to earn a living” – another criticism often levelled at my generation.

Fair comment, or grossly unjust? Well, it’s not as if I’ve been slumped on the sofa eating cereal in my underpants. After leaving Birmingham University with a philosophy degree, I did what any new graduate would and worked at coffee shops and a golf club in my home town of Barnet, Hertfordshire, racking up more than 40 hours a week while pursuing music on the side.

But although I was earning, an expensive room in a rented flat just wasn’t an option: I’d have had to make some major cutbacks to my social life, and I’ve never been one to continually prioritise saving over doing the things I enjoy. I don’t splash the cash like I’m a millionaire, but I won’t say no to four or five beers with friends. You should not have to give up on fun entirely, in order to leave home.

Our elders may criticise, but our lives cost so much more to fund than theirs did that our twenty-something trajectories hardly bare comparison. First there’s the mobile-phone bill – usually around £30 ($52) a month.

Then there’s the steady drip drip of stag dos (or hen dos) and weddings, which start in our twenties and reach an exorbitant crescendo as we approach our early thirties. These events are increasingly being held overseas. You can’t say no – I was best man at one – but they don’t half hit you in the pocket. The end result is that my savings remain minimal.

I’ve now gone into teaching, but even the beginnings of a stable career aren’t sufficient to carry me up and away.

Sure, I’m finally managing to put a bit of money aside, and ideally would leave my parents’ place in the next few years. In reality, however, I’ll be earning less than £20,000 ($34,900) until I’m fully qualified, and modern life is – if not rubbish – very costly, to say the least.

It’s not like it was for my parents. My father, Patrick, 67, and mother, Margot, 66, bought their first house, in Barnet when dad was 28. He was working for an insurance brokerage and she was an actress.

For many of us millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000), the idea of buying even a rabbit hutch under our own steam would be laughable. The vast majority of my friends still live in the family home, and I don’t know a single one who has bought a place without financial help from their parents. Now there’s something nobody mentions on graduation day.

Analysis of data from the Office of National Statistics this month found some 1.23 million young people aged 25-34 still live with their parents, eight per cent of whom believe they’ll never move out. That’s nearly 100,000 Generation Y-ers destined to live en famille for ever.

It’s not just Britain, either. The average Spaniard moves out aged 29; in America, a third of 18-34 year-olds have yet to fly the nest, with more living at home than with a spouse.

I have the excuse of being male, too: the ONS figures show that nearly 70 per cent of “boomerang kids” are young men, possibly because we’re less diligent when it comes to finding somewhere else to live.

My female friends prize their independence highly, and prioritised moving out after leaving university. My male mates and I somehow failed to plan in quite the same way. It must be that Y chromosome.

So how does all this affect our poor, beleaguered parents? Earlier this month, the “Bank of Mum and Dad” was found to be the ninth-biggest lender in Britain, helping to provide more than 298,000 mortgage deposits last year – more than a quarter. It’s estimated “Bomad” will lend more than 6.5 billion to young people hoping to get on the property ladder this year – money that experts say is unlikely to ever be repaid.

This is fine if your parents can help, but not all are in a position to. Mine lent my 35-year-old sister money to buy a house nearby with her husband, which she has since repaid. But for my 31-year-old brother, who is a teacher, paying back the money he borrowed from them to get a place in Bedfordshire with his girlfriend will be a challenge.

That’s left me and my younger sister, aged 23 and also a teacher, both living under our parents’ roof. We’re all close, but these aren’t the housemates I’d envisaged. I try to be respectful when it comes to bringing girls home but when you’re living in someone else’s place, you have to tread more carefully than you would on your own turf.

Research suggests that a fifth of youngsters believe the only chance they’ll ever have to own a property will be through an inheritance. It plays on my parents’ minds that they will have to be careful as they grow older in order to be able to help me financially. They will probably downsize to save money.

We’re renting a room out to a lodger, and my dad recently came out of retirement, in part due to the high cost of running such a full home.

But mum and dad say they love having me here, so I feel no guilt – for now. On occasion I feel stuck, and worry that I’ll never be able to leave. I worry, too, about how on earth I’d pay the rent, if I ever did.

It’s easy to become dragged down by it all, but I’m lucky to live under this roof. Here, at least, I can have as many avocados on toast as I like.

As told to Charlotte Lytton.

This story was first published at the Telegraph.co.uk.