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April 4, 2026 — 5:01am
Young Australians are being locked out of the housing market, and if you’re a parent or grandparent watching it happen, it’s genuinely painful.
Home ownership for people in their 20s and 30s has been falling for years. Your children are buying later than you did, borrowing more than you ever considered, or giving up on the idea altogether, scared off by the size of the mortgage they’d have to sign on for. And, it doesn’t look like the system is going to fix this for them any time soon.
I’ve been having this conversation with my 22-year-old daughter. When you actually sit down and do the sums with them, what it costs to save a deposit in one of our capital cities, on a starting salary, with the life expenses that come with being young, it feels scary.
It’s not impossible. But it takes real discipline, real commitment, and increasingly, it depends on whether family support is sitting behind them to catch them if the economy gets tough or they lose their job.
The money exists in our economy to help. In fact, trillions of dollars will move between generations over the coming decades, from Australians in their late 80s and 90s to their children, who’ll be in their late 50s and 60s by then. By the time that inheritance lands, for many it will be too late to change very much.
A $1 million inheritance at 68 is lovely, and it will certainly help you have an epic retirement. But a $100,000 deposit top-up on a mortgage at 27 or 32 can change the entire trajectory of a person’s life.
None of this is a magic solution, and I want to be honest: not every family has wealth to draw on, and that gap is real.
The rules don’t make this easy. If you’re even a part pensioner, you can only gift $10,000 a year, or $30,000 over five years, before it starts counting against you. In today’s property market, that barely touches the sides of a deposit.
And because the family home sits largely exempt from the pension assets test, there’s a quiet incentive built into the system for older Australians to stay put rather than downsize and use that capital more flexibly.
Nobody designed it this way deliberately. But the message is clear: “Hold on to your assets. Let them keep compounding, and wait until you’re gone to help them.” Frankly, that made more sense in a different era.
So what can you actually do if you’re in a position to help?
Start with financial education
I don’t mean walking around saying to the kids, “you should save more”, but actually sitting down with your adult children and teaching them how money works.
Write a budget with them – even if it only has five expense line items and one income line. Help them set goals they can save for. Show them how compound growth works in both shares and property and explain to them why people prioritise saving for their future life over funding their current one.
And remember, confidence with money isn’t automatic. It’s learnt, and it often starts at home. So if you’re not doing it, they might not be building any.
Help with the deposit where you genuinely can
I actually don’t mean giving them a house. I think the real value is adding to a savings pool that your young adult has build and is proud of that will help them reduce the size of the loan they need to carry or buy a property that has a better chance of growing well.
That one decision can do a couple of key things. It makes repayments manageable, reduces financial stress, and most importantly, it can bring forward their entry into the market by five or 10 years.
In property, we know time in the market is everything. The earlier they’re in, the longer compound growth works for them.
Consider acting as a guarantor
The First Home Guarantee is genuinely useful, but it has limits. It won’t cover properties above the price caps, which in Sydney still rules out a lot of family homes in reasonable suburbs.
It doesn’t help if your child can’t quite get to 5 per cent. And it doesn’t increase what the bank will actually lend, which is sometimes the real problem for buyers who have the income to service a loan but not the asset base to secure one.
In those situations, a well-structured family guarantee can still bridge the gap. The key word is limited. You’re putting your own assets on the line. The guarantee needs to be clearly defined, and only something you can genuinely absorb if things go wrong.
Structure support as a loan, not a gift
This is something that protects you and them. It keeps things fair between siblings. And it changes the psychology. Money that comes with responsibility attached is money that gets used differently. If a relationship ever breaks down, a documented loan also can give you some protection.
Don’t dismiss intergenerational living
Sharing your home with your adult children, or eventually, theirs with you, is a real option that many families are genuinely exploring when housing costs are this high.
Done well, it can strengthen family bonds and free up capital for both generations. Done poorly, it creates tension. It needs honest expectations and clear boundaries from the very start.
None of this is a magic solution, and I want to be honest: not every family has wealth to draw on, and that gap is real. Helping your kids when others can’t is also a form of privilege. But if you’re in a position to act, and you’ve been wondering whether now is the right time, the answer is probably yes.
The best time for that money to do its work, in my opinion, isn’t when you’re gone. It’s now, while it can still change everything.
Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.
- Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
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