You could own a house in just 342 years - if only you stopped buying so much avocado toast!

At this point, you’ve probably come to terms with the fact that one day owning your own home is absolutely not a certainty. If you live in London particularly, the idea of actually owning the place you live in and not having to deal with agency fees and landlords who won’t sort out the damp and the boring, miserable reality of sharing a space with people you don’t really like, who never do the washing up and who always leave a single, rotting pepper in their vegetable drawer is laughably out of the question without help from family, a sizeable combined income, or just an extremely well paid job.

So you’re going to feel prettttty stupid when you find out there’s actually a very simple solution to the problem: you’re just buying too much avocado.

That’s according to Australian millionaire Tim Gurner, anyway.

He told Australian news show 60 Minutes that young people can’t escape the rental market because they’re eating too much avocado on toast.

"When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn't buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each," he said. 

"We're at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high. They want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year. The people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property investment ladder."

So: according to the government, the average house price in the UK is £234,794, a figure that rises to £490,718 in London. If we’re going on a pretty standard 20% mortgage down payment, that means most Brits will need about £47,000 (lol), or £98,000 in London (seriously though – lol). 

And it turns out that £98,000 worth of avocado on toast is… actually quite a lot of avocado on toast? Going on the fairly conservative estimate of £5.50 per serving, most Brits would have to skip 8,545 helpings of avo – and Londoners 17,818. That means if you’d just give up your avocado on toast then you’d have enough for a deposit in a mere 342 years! Start making those sacrifices, snowflakes! If you were actually serious about buying a home, like your parents were, you’d literally invent some kind of elixir of life that enabled you to live for four times longer than 81, the average age of death! Amateurs, the lot of you. 

It might sound laughable, but if you think about it the avocado toast man is a literal millionaire and none of us will ever be able to afford our own homes and we’ll probably eventually die, weeping and alone, in a makeshift hut with toast for bricks. So who’s really laughing? It’s him, isn’t it. It’s him.