I Think We Should've Turned Left Back There...

In today's world, with such a great divide between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, it's not uncommon for us twenty-somethings to feel a growing hunger for a piece of the success pie. How do the wealthy get there? How have we gotten left behind? We're more educated than ever, have resources at our fingers tips via the web and still can't catch up! Many of us have been forced to move back in with the rents after college and settle for a mediocre job. Where did we go wrong?

Now more than ever we're questioning our future and planning our next moves meticulously. Where do we invest our $30,000 a year salaries? How can we drive something nice and keep our car payments under $200 a month? Can we afford the new PlayStation, a quality laptop, and a 3D TV? Chances are we can't afford much of what we want, but we buy them anyway. So the bills go up and our salaries are still the same.

I recently spent a day schmoozing with the wealthy at a high-end event. We were able to have intelligent conversations and get a long well. It made me wonder, how are they so different from me? Other than their $85,000 cars, 2 million dollar homes, and $200,000 boats? How did they land such successful jobs? In all fairness, many of them had quite a few years on me. But I have met many couples comparable in age with much more success than myself and my peers. I can't help feeling bewildered and discouraged. Again I ask, where did I go wrong? Was it investing in my education? Not knowing the right people?

In the early 2000s, investing in real estate was a smart move. We bought our first home, a condo priced competitively, in a desirable location with great potential for a rental property. After making a couple thousand dollars in upgrades and living in it for a few years, we moved out and rented it to a young couple in 2006. Several bad tenants later we placed it on the market for not much more than we bought it for. Two and a half years and one short sale later we're still paying on a loan we had to take out just to sell it. We're renting our new home.

This is a perfect example of a smart move gone bad by the changing climate of the economy. What many of our peers admired us for 5 years ago has turned into a wallet-draining heart ache.

So like many other twenty-somethings we're getting by, paycheck to paycheck, waiting for the opportunity to find that one thing that will make us successful. We've pondered opening a small business, but without the start-up funds have pushed that idea to the back-burner. We've leveraged for raises, worked hard for our employers, and are patiently waiting to move up the corporate ladder. And now we wait. Is that all we can do?

Along with our hunger for success, we also think about starting a family, finally buying our desperately needed SUV and more. How can we achieve it all with such little hope for success?

Our story is not unique. It's something practically every twenty-something is facing right now. It's our quarter-life crisis: drastic changes in personal relationships, facing adulthood, molding our personal identities, balancing the personal and professional, always wanting more and questioning every move we make.