Living at home after college is often framed as a personal failure, but for KimberMarie Faircloth, the decision to remain in her father’s house for five years while completing law school and launching her legal career turned out to be one of the most formative choices she has made.
Faircloth, an attorney and writer who received her J.D. from Elon University School of Law, returned to her family home not once but twice in her twenties, navigating grief, financial instability and a global pandemic before finally moving out this past December. Now settled in her own flat, she says she misses it more than she expected, and that the cultural pressure to leave was built on a myth she no longer believes.
How living at home after college became the plan
The path back home began in 2018, during her final year at the College of Charleston. Having had a difficult few years, she graduated a semester early, abandoning plans for a Fulbright scholarship in order to return to her parents. The timing proved to matter enormously: the family learned in September of that year that her mother was seriously ill, and she died seven months later. Faircloth has said that moving home early likely gave her more time with her mother than she would otherwise have had.
After her mother’s passing, she attempted to live independently, but moved back in with her father within months. Bills were tight while she was working in a temporary role at a law office, and, as she has put it plainly, she did not want to be alone. Living again with her father and the family’s two dogs, Hemi and Otis, was what the moment required. The rest of 2019 brought further family funerals, and then 2020 brought a pandemic that made her feel, once more, that home was exactly where she was supposed to be.
The enforced slowdown of lockdown gave her space to think. With no commute consuming her time, she decided to apply to law schools, but set herself a strict condition: she would only go if she could secure a scholarship. She sat the LSAT, targeted schools where her score placed her in the higher range of applicants, and was awarded a scholarship to a school twenty minutes from her father’s house. The plan crystallised: stay home, avoid rent, become an attorney.
The financial case for living at home after college
Her father did not charge her rent during those five years. Faircloth has written that she felt guilty about this most days and still does. But the financial consequences were material. Because she was not paying rent, she was able to build an emergency fund, begin investing for retirement, and pay more than the minimum on her student debt for a period, three financial foundations that are difficult to establish simultaneously on a junior attorney’s salary in a rented flat.
Her childhood bedroom became a study room for torts, contracts, and business law. It was where she spent twelve weeks preparing for the bar exam. It was also, once she qualified, where she started her career working remotely as an intellectual property associate attorney. The domestic and the professional occupied the same small space, and she says it worked.
This past December, after five years of that arrangement, she moved out. The reasons were clear enough at the time: she wanted her own space, had begun imagining life in a city centre where she could build a social life, and had a steady enough income to make a move financially viable. The calculation seemed straightforward.
What moving out revealed about independence
The social life she imagined has largely materialised. She now hosts monthly themed dinner parties, organises group hikes, and regularly attends events put on by local parishes. A boyfriend features in her life. By the measures she had set herself, the move has delivered what she hoped.
Yet she says she misses home in ways she did not anticipate. Living alone, she has come to think, suited an idea about what a 29-year-old should be doing rather than a genuine need she had. ‘I bought into a myth,’ she has written, ‘that at 29, I should be doing everything by myself, and that anyone who isn’t self-sufficient is somehow failing.’ She now believes she could have built the social life she wanted while still living with her father, or with a flatmate.
She has set herself a weekly visit to her father and the dogs as a minimum, because missing those visits leaves her feeling disconnected. Looking forward, she says she hopes to have a flatmate or two, and to create regular arrangements with friends where they move between each other’s homes and, in her words, ‘pretend we live together for a few hours.’
Faircloth’s account, published by Business Insider, closes not with regret but with a reframing: that living at home with family or friends is not a failure of self-sufficiency, and that the time spent with the people we love is finite in ways that only become visible later. Her mother’s illness, discovered during that first semester back home, is the experience that anchors the whole account, and the one that makes the lesson feel earned rather than convenient.