‘I’m a millionaire and I proudly rent’: Mrs. Dow Jones says the American Dream needs a rethink

Haley Sacks would love to own a house outside New York City once she has a family. She wants to choose the paint colors, the handles on every door. But the financial creator known as Mrs. Dow Jones also expects that dream will be expensive. Because of that, she says buying a home should be a lifestyle choice, not a measure of whether someone has made it financially.

“I’m a millionaire, and I proudly rent,” she told Fortune’s Ellie Austin on Fortune Daily. 

The millennial creator, who shares personal finance advice with more than 2 million followers, is challenging the money rules younger generations have long heard from their parents and grandparents. “We all still have this idea in our head that when we own a home, that’s when we’re going to be an adult,” she said. “But we have to rethink that because many of us are never going to own a home.”

That pressure is colliding with an economy that has made those milestones harder to reach. Some young adults are adapting by buying fixer-uppers, scrapping together multiple sources of income, and even putting off marriage and children, all to make the American Dream work for them—even if it looks different from what their parents imagined.

“They’re not just postponing life markers,” Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, previously told Fortune. “They’re also taking a different path.”

A home as a lifestyle choice 

Despite her millionaire status, Sacks said she still wants to reach a certain benchmark in her investments before buying property, because she doesn’t see owning a home as an asset.

“I would only buy as a lifestyle choice, never as an investment choice,” she said.

The amount that she would put toward a down payment is better used as a “nest egg” for investing in the stock market, argued Sacks, who is also the author of Future Rich Person. Investing that money in the stock market offers another path, she said, but she did acknowledge that people need to run the numbers on local housing costs depending on where they live.

Sacks said she doesn’t necessarily think of a house as an asset because it involves pouring in more money than just the sale price to make it personal: from the paint colors to the handles on every door. “I know that it’s going to be a money trap,” she said.

Choosing to rent as a millionaire, however, is different from renting because buying is out of reach. Sacks acknowledged that her own path to building a business included family support. After losing her job in 2018, she did freelance writing through connections she had made in media and paid rent with the help of her parents. “I never want to, you know, not talk about that stuff because it’s so important,” she said.

The finances of buying a home

The gap between housing costs and incomes has been building for years. Between 2019 and 2024, the median U.S. home value rose 30% after inflation, while median income for households headed by someone under 40 grew just 9% in inflation-adjusted terms, according to Pew Research Center. By September 2026, a household needed to earn about $121,500 a year to afford a typical home, assuming a 10% down payment and a 30-year fixed mortgage, compared with roughly $77,300 for a typical rental, according to Zillow.

Sacks worries about what happens when people feel the life they want is slipping out of reach. One venue where younger people are looking to build wealth are prediction markets, which she criticized as marketing that makes participation sound like sophisticated investing.

“With the American dream really changing, people are so desperate for a way to make money and to advance themselves,” she said.

Easy access to those markets on a phone can make the possibility of a life-changing payout feel immediate and “addictive,” she argued. “It makes you want to impulsively just put money into it because you want to change your situation so badly that you’re going to go for it.”

As Fortune previously reported, a paper by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago suggested that when homeownership feels unattainable, some households may turn to risky investments such as cryptocurrencies as a last resort to build wealth.

That pressure to catch up is part of what Sacks wants younger Americans to reconsider by questioning whether owning a home should define financial success. As for her own American Dream, the house outside the city is still a possibility—but on her terms.

“If that’s what’s going to make me happy and I have my investments in a good place, then maybe I’ll do it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com