"Honey, our child will start elementary school next year" ... Fathers Sighing Over a Real Estate App at 11 p.m. [An Adult's Wrong-Answer Notebook]

[Financial News] It is 11 p.m. on Tuesday, September 29. In a living room where his wife and child are fast asleep, a middle-aged man sits alone on the sofa. Instead of a stock-trading screen filled with red and blue figures, his smartphone displays a real estate app showing actual transaction prices. As he zooms in and out of the map and taps on apartment complexes in neighborhoods with well-established private academies, the asking prices, fluctuating by hundreds of millions of won, leave him breathless.
The child is seven this year and will start elementary school next year. Thinking about it makes him increasingly anxious.
"Kids grow up in the blink of an eye, and we can't keep living in this cramped home forever. Wouldn't it be right to move, even if we have to stretch ourselves, to an area with a good school district before our child starts school?"

His wife's cautious words from the dinner table a few days earlier keep echoing in his ears. But no matter how many times he calculates the deposit from their current jeonse rental and the remaining borrowing capacity on his overdraft account, the amount is nowhere near enough to cross the threshold of a new apartment.

Behavioral economics holds that people remember the benefits they missed by failing to act—known as regret over inaction—far more painfully than losses caused by taking action. It is like how the lingering regret of watching a stock soar after selling it can be more agonizing than the pain of cutting one's losses.
The fathers staring at real estate apps are constantly replaying their past mistakes.
The apartment complex they gave up applying for three years ago because they were afraid of taking out a loan, and the moment they stubbornly insisted that home prices would fall when their wives urged them to buy, come back like ghosts.
The deep sense of helplessness that their diligence—quietly going to work every day and diligently saving their salaries—has turned into incompetence in the face of the massive wave of asset-price inflation weighs heavily on the living room that Tuesday night.


The joy of payday lasts only a moment. Under the government's tough DSR regulations, the borrowing limit for a salaried breadwinner is cut back with merciless coldness. Even if they work harder and raise their annual salary, they now cannot even keep up with rising home prices through borrowing. After checking the cold figure that appears when they tap the "Check Loan Limit" button in their banking app, the breadwinners quietly put away their smartphones.
He always wants to be a dependable Superman for his child, but standing before the enormous wall of real estate, his own wings feel painfully small. The ordinary yet extraordinary dream of watching his child run around a larger living room than other children and put on a schoolbag in a better environment has become, in today's Republic of Korea, a cruel test that proves a parent's "asset class."


But on Tuesday night, don't bind yourself too harshly to the cold figures on a real estate app. You hesitated to buy a home in the past not because you were ignorant about investing, but because, as a breadwinner, you carried the heavy responsibility of fearing that excessive debt might cause cracks in your family's daily life.
The fact that your home has not grown larger does not mean your love for your child is any smaller.
Even with the tender heart that makes you sigh in secret and feel sorry for not having more assets, you are already your child's finest and most dependable school district and refuge. In this harsh reality, your quiet commute tomorrow morning, when you will once again squeeze onto a packed subway to protect your family, is nobler and greater than any glamorous new apartment.
[email protected] Jeon Sang-il Reporter