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Thanksgiving is the American holiday that gathers people around a table and asks us to remember why “home” is more than walls. It is stories, recipes and photographs in a hallway — a place where keys and wisdom pass from one set of hands to the next.
Gratitude does not cancel truth. It clarifies it. And the truth for Gen Z is that the entrance to the American Dream keeps sliding just as we reach it.
That is why the talk of a 50-year mortgage feels so out of tune with this season. Homeownership is supposed to make time work for you. You build equity while you build a life. But a half-century loan, an idea floated recently by President Donald Trump, would reverse that rhythm. It would trim a monthly payment, then stretch the cost across most of a lifetime while delaying the moment when you own more than you owe. The math stings, but the message stings more.
You can hear how it lands with young people in the places where we think out loud. A recent TikTok by @advicefromlouisreloaded used buying a $400,000 home as an example to show how unappealing a 50-year mortgage would be because of the towering lifetime interest you’d pay on such a long loan. The video also noted that since the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old, it wouldn’t be paid off until someone was 90.
Tens of thousands of TikTok users liked the video, and the comments read like a chorus. One person joked that we will all be working seven jobs. Another warned that housing could be tethered to employment so tightly that leaving a bad job would mean to risk losing your roof. Humor softened the edge, but the feeling underneath was clarity.
For me, the conversation is not theoretical. When I moved to St. Paul last year, my parents urged me to sign up for Realtor.com alerts so I could watch listings for starter homes and think about buying instead of renting. They wanted me to get in early and start building equity. Those emails now land in my inbox every few days. Prices, photos, square footage. On the surface, it is just information. In reality, each alert pulls me back to that conversation across my parents’ table about timelines, interest and equity. Those are big words when you are still learning how your first full-time paychecks fit around groceries and student loans.
