As a millennial (well, xennial) I thought I would never be able to buy a house. This past week, we finally had an offer accepted on a dream home, and it was all thanks to one neat trick that you’ll never pick up from the rich commentators on the subject.

Ready to hear it?

Earn three to four times your rent.

That’s it. That’s the entire bunch of bananas.

Everything else is misdirection and fetch quests handed out by the one percent to distract you from the obscene wealth gap in this country. My wife used to fake cry every time I made her avocado toast in the morning, apologizing for the fact that we would never save money if I kept up the extravagance. The investor class is obsessed with the idea that people can’t afford homes because we are all addicted to sitting in “hipster” cafes eating $22 breakfasts while not going to work.

No, we can’t afford homes because wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. Coincidentally, that’s right around the time conservatives began doing everything they could to destroy unions and the labor movement that had flourished around and after World War II. Meanwhile, the wealth of top earners has only gone up. During the pandemic, they raised their money hoards about 70 percent.

Overall, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have had $50 trillion of the wealth they produce stolen from them from those above since 1975. It’s a staggering amount of wealth inequality that has made it virtually impossible to move into stability for poor and middle income families. This is a problem across the board, which is why "get a better job" is also useless advice.

You cannot save what you do not have. You can only cut out so many things in your life until you are down to your basic necessities, of which rest and recreation are two. Acting like everyone should live a joyless life in a rat-infested box until the money gods accidentally drop enough dough down the ladder to bless you with a decent living is madness. It’s how the rich continue to blame others for their wealth addiction.

My family got very lucky all at once. After more than a decade of dead-end jobs, medical issues, recession, and despair, my wife and I suddenly found we both made enough money each month that there was something left over to save. I remember standing awe-struck in a mechanic’s office one day with a $900 bill and I just handed him my bank card. I didn’t have to go into the bathroom to cry and beg friends on Facebook for help. I just, for the first time ever in my life, had $900 I could afford to eat on a necessity and not have to worry about being homeless when rent was due.

Yes, hard work was a part of getting there. I write 365 articles a year and my wife is a nurse. We both grind hard, but we ground hard 15 years ago as well. I have worked a full week every week barring medical emergencies since I was 16 years old, and so has my wife.

The only reason we have this house now is that all that efforts finally coagulated into enough money every month that we could put some away for a down payment. Even then, all it would take was for one thing to go wrong and suddenly half the savings were depleted. We, like almost every American, are always one very bad day away from having everything taken away.

The only way up for everyone is for workers to get more of the vast wealth they produce rather than subsidizing a billionaire class. There is no amount of elbow and sacrifice and sacrifice that will pull blood from a stone. For whatever reason, my family finally made enough to crawl into the middle class. It involved so much toil, pain, outright wage theft, unfairness, and cruelty.

It shouldn’t. The price of a decent living should not be widespread scourging and a permanent underclass. We need to make more, and the rich need to take home less. Don’t let anyone tell you cutting Starbucks out of your life will fix anything.