- Deciding to move back in with her parents after college was a tough choice for Grace Lemire.
- The 24-year-old has been using TikTok to share updates about her plans to save up and move out.
- She told Insider’s Charissa Cheong that she hopes her content can debunk stereotypes about Gen Z.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Grace Lemire, a 24-year-old personal finance content creator living in Massachusetts. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When I graduated from college in 2021, my main goal was to have flexibility in my career, which is why I started freelancing.
I’ve been working in content marketing for financial tech startups, which has helped me make the most of my money. I also got a temporary second job making grocery deliveries after graduation.
As a new graduate, I was thinking about moving into my own place, but I wasn’t making that much money to start with and was also working up to 70 hours a week. Moving out and paying rent would have made an already stressful period even worse.
Throughout college, my parents always told me that I was welcome to move back home without having to pay rent, so I concluded that I would live with them and focus on my freelancing business, which has grown steadily, leaving me on track to earn $150,000 this year.
I started posting videos about my decision to stay at home on TikTok, where I have an account about personal finance and spending, to debunk common misconceptions that young people who are still living at home are lazy or are not working hard enough to afford their own apartments.
People in my generation are facing challenges when it comes to moving away from home
On TikTok, I’ve been sharing videos promoting financial transparency, sharing updates on how I spend money and how I budget. I enjoy this content niche because I think a lot of topics around money are very stigmatized, particularly when it comes to moving out or buying a home.
I think that in the past, it was seen as the traditional route to leave school, get a job, buy a house, and have three kids and a white picket fence. Today, however, because of economic factors like the increase in student debt and largely higher interest rates, it’s much harder for young people to buy houses than it was for my parents’ generation.
Yet, I think a lot of people still believe that having success means moving out and getting your own home and that if you’re not able to pay your own rent or mortgage, you must not be working hard enough. I’ve felt that some older people believe that Gen Z is just lazy, without acknowledging the rate at which things have changed.
This is one of the reasons why I made a TikTok explaining why I decided to stay with my parents even though I’ve made roughly $66,000 so far this year from freelancing and content creation and have enough money to afford to rent my own apartment. I mentioned that not having to pay rent has helped me to save money in the hopes of relocating to another city one day and to make payments towards my student debt.
Having support from my parents, who do not charge me rent and also support me in other ways, such as by helping me pay my phone bill and car insurance, has allowed me to focus on my work and build up a freelancing business that is hopefully going to make six figures this year.
I feel very privileged to have parents who have been willing to sacrifice for me and for my older brother, who also stayed at home without having to pay rent and bought his own condo a couple of years ago with the money he had saved.
I’ve tried to be as honest as possible with my viewers about what living at home is like for me
When I first moved home from college, it was definitely a struggle trying to adjust after living by myself for three years.
On social media, I was seeing other people my age moving into big cities with their friends, while I was back at my childhood home in my bedroom with hot pink walls, thinking, “What am I doing?”
Over time, however, I’ve realized that I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, and have been posting more content about my life.
For example, I share financial updates on what I typically spend in a week while living at home, and documented a six-week trip I took to California, which enabled me to work from a new place, largely thanks to the fact that I didn’t have to pay rent for an apartment at the same time as I was traveling. The response to my content has been largely positive, and people have really appreciated the way I’ve been transparent about what my life and my finances are like.
I’ve noticed that people really do appreciate honesty from content creators. A lot of people who follow me are in their teens or early 20s and say they sometimes feel shame when talking about their personal finances because of our culture of stigma and comparison.
I hope that my content and discussions about my own experience will help them to know that your personal finances are personal and you can decide what’s best for you without feeling a need to seek approval from others.
And if your choice is not the most conventional thing or is looked down upon by other people, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s ultimately the best choice for you.
For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider’s Digital Culture team here.
