I’m a millennial truck driver who works 14-hour days, six days a week and I’ve already bought my first home

A millennial truck driver who works 14 hours a day, six days a week and already owns his own home has issued a cheeky wake-up call to wannabe homeowners, warning young people to work for it.

NSW man Josh, 33, was recently able to purchase an investment home in Adelaide using a self-managed super fund and his $200,000 annual trucking salary.

At the age of 24, he built a house in Narellan, about 60 km southwest of Sydney, which he plans to sell before retiring to the regions of the state before he turns 40.

Josh only had one semester left in his economics degree when he decided to drop out of college and give up his office job as an accountant to find a way to “make money faster.”

He worked in retail management for several years and received up to four promotions in that role before deciding that management was “soul-sucking.”

Josh received a harsh reality check when he and his then-partner split shortly after purchasing the Narellan home, leaving him to handle the mortgage alone.

Friends recommended he become a truck driver, a job that paid good money and the opportunity for Josh to work alone and on his own terms.

But before that, Josh was forced to work three jobs to pay his mortgage, and warned that making money and saving wouldn’t always be “comfortable.”

“I went from studying finance to becoming a lorry driver,” he told Daily Mail Australia.

‘I used to think that this kind of work was below my level. You won’t always feel comfortable, I had to leave my comfort zone to make money.’

Josh describes a chaotic month of packing and operating machinery in a warehouse, doing “random jobs” offered by agencies.

One day he worked 30 straight hours to keep his new home.

Josh believes it’s about whether millennials want a home and financial security, or take a vacation and enjoy a better work-life balance.

Whatever the goal, he recommends spending a significant amount of time building a realistic budget that takes into account all day-to-day expenses.

Josh, who is now married, was forced to adjust his work-life balance after his long hours began to cause problems in his relationship.

“I worked six days a week from 5:30 am to 6 pm, all to have a fun day out shopping and buying designer stuff,” he said.

‘I spent a few weeks of overtime on a handbag. But we (he and his wife) would still miss each other and get grumpy because we didn’t see each other.

“So we’ve been communicating about what we want from life and from each other.”

Josh currently works 60 to 70 hours, six days a week, but plans to reduce this to 40 to 50 hours in three to four days a week.

This week Josh and his new girlfriend decided to buy a new home in regional NSW. They hope to move next month and eventually retire in a few years.

The couple has plans to spend some time working and traveling before pursuing Josh’s dreams of growing his own fruits and vegetables and brewing beer.

“Realistically, I should be able to pull the plug within a few years,” he said.

University of Sydney economist Gareth Bryant said the homebuying battle isn’t boomers versus millennials.

He says it came down to housing equity – whether they own real estate at all.

Mr Bryant told Daily Mail Australia that even if young people work an extra job or two and spend less frugally, it is still almost impossible to save for a meaningful down payment.

The lucky millennials are those who entered the real estate market early and reaped significant rewards, or come from a family that owns real estate.

Gareth said the majority of young people buying homes in Australia’s competitive housing market did so with the help of the ‘bank of mum and dad’.

As a result, Australia has some of the most unequal income-to-wealth ratios in the world.

“Historically, the path to buying a house was to get a job, save money, buy the house and pay it off when you retire,” Bryant said.

House prices are now so much higher than incomes. Homes used to cost two to three times more than the average income, now it is seven to ten times as high.

“If you look at Boomers, two-thirds had bought a home in their early 30s, but now less than 50 percent of millennials of the same age can afford a home.”

Mr Bryant said home ownership would continue to fall.

“House prices are rising and people’s jobs are becoming increasingly precarious,” he said.

“People are thinking of ways to advance their legacy by donating money and letting parents guarantee their children’s mortgage loans.

‘It’s a lottery. Some people have that home equity and others don’t, but it’s not just a generation story of millennials versus boomers.’

In 1984 the median house price in Sydney was $85,900 and the median full-time salary was $19,656. With a mortgage deposit of 20 percent, this meant that the average individual borrower would have had a debt-to-income ratio of 3.5.

In 2023, the average house price in Sydney will be $1.334 million and someone with an average full-time salary of $95,581 would have a dangerous debt-to-income ratio of 11.2 even with a mortgage deposit.

That’s well above the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s “six” threshold for mortgage stress.

House prices in Sydney are so expensive that a house in Mount Druitt, 30 miles west of the city, typically costs $819,589, CoreLogic data for July shows, and a mid-skilled borrower would be in mortgage stress trying to pay it off. pay.

A record 387,000 migrants moved to Australia in 2022 and house prices rose again last month in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, even as the Reserve Bank has hiked rates 12 times since May 2022.

Outgoing Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe noted this month that the 1.5 percent increase in new homes fell short of Australia’s 2 percent population growth, one of the highest in the developed world.