Anastasia Ricci didn't plan to live with her parents for long after she moved back in after college in 2019.
But the universe had other plans for the 25-year old, it seemed.
At first, Ricci decided she would stay with her parents in their Greenwich, Connecticut, home just until she got her feet on the ground in her chosen career of public relations. A move to her own place was in the cards, she thought.
But just weeks after she landed her first job at a New York City PR company in March 2020, the whole world was shutting down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She postponed her move out date.
In the meantime, she fell in love with the space and comfort that living with her parents gave her.
"It was nice to be home with people then," she said. "I was saving my money."
Three years later, Ricci — now an associate account executive at hospitality, real estate, and design PR firm M18 — still hasn't left. Not only is living with her parents more comfortable, she's able to explore the world and make purchases that she would not otherwise be able to afford, she said.
If she wasn't living at home, she said she would most likely be living in the nearby Connecticut city of Stamford, where the typical rent starts at $1,875, according to Rent.com.
"It's just nice to have the freedom to not pay rent," she said.
She's not alone: as the cost of living gets increasingly expensive, more young adults across the country are choosing to live with their parents for longer. In 2021, Pew Research found that people between 25-34 are much more likely to live in a multi-generational home than they were in 1971. Back then, only 9% of this cohort did so. Today, it's around a quarter of them.
Many of those people are like Ricci, with well-paying jobs in big cities — and like her, they are contributing to the luxury retail economy in a way no other generation has at this age, management consultant Bain & Co. found. Insider interviewed four of them this month, including Ricci.
With that freedom, Ricci's diving into luxury goods. Some of her acquisitions include a $1,700 Balmain jacket, a $200 Alex and Olivia dress, a $35,000 Kia, a couple pairs of $450 Christian Louboutin shoes, and a $5,500 Chanel handbag.
She's also been able to travel: recently, she took a $1,200 weekend trip to Miami, sunbathed on a boat offshore, and paid for an expensive table at a club, among other things.
In her view, she's not spending money like crazy. She says she considers some purchases as investments in her wardrobe and life, and that these are things she'd miss was tossing thousands toward rent each month.
In the case of her Chanel bag — her most extravagant purchase — she considered how long she'll own it and future value of the piece when deciding whether to treat herself.
"I'll have it for the rest of my life," she said. "I am taking super good care of it and my daughter will have it in the future. That's the way I've been looking at it — I don't want to skimp out on life if I don't have to."
Correction: February 16, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misstated Anastasia Ricci's age. She's 25, not 24.
