We found this by building a mathematical model to simulate households’ financial trajectories from age 20 to 75. The model, which we calibrated using real-world data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance, the US Census and other sources, incorporates many of the parameters that affect personal financial decisions, such as fluctuating wages and housing prices, as well as baseline wealth, mortgage debt, risk of default and desire to pass assets on to children. We ran the model to reveal how different types of households, across different generations, make different choices over their lifetimes. We found that roughly 84% of people born in 1950 will purchase a home at some point during their working life, in line with real-world Census data showing that 82% of US residents born in 1950 currently own homes. But only 74% of those born in 1990 will reach that milestone, according to our model.