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The closer we get to all hope is lost, the closer we get to deliverance. Let's just pray the all hope is lost stage isn't unbearable.

All I know is that when I was a boy, for years we were told pretty much that "you ain't seen nothing yet, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better." So far it's been proven true for over 60 years.....and counting.

There has never been absolute material certainty in this life.

Only ever a relative one.

Which is why discussion around readiness for marriage based of material terms have a limited relevance.

What a man needs is the proximate potential to earn. Not absolute certainty of retirement, or anything beyond the immediate.

A man with some kind of physical ability to work is ready to receive the Sacrament. (from the material point of view)

Modern capitalist society affected trads keep trying to insert requirements in there based of their OWN ideas. It's all false and scandalous. Any decent priest will tell you.

Even owning a house is not a requirement.

I mean goodness if we made that a pre requisite to marriage, no one would get married in some countries.

The nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr is abolishing house ownership. Its sad, but get used to it folks. The Sacrament of Our Lord Jesus Christ called Marriage will go though. So have trust.

Where I live the median income after tax is about 58-68k aud or $1150 aud a week.

Medium rent is $700 aud a week

The medium house price is over $1 million aud, ai tells me it's closer to 1.1 million aud. With a weekly mortgage repayment of about $1000.

These numbers were all grabbed from AI but they are accurate enough.

So on a single income of the medium wage, you will have about 300-400 leftover a week if you are renting. Now factor in groceries, bills and other expenses. Also home schooling costs (not sure how expensive this is).

See with these absurd prices it's possible on TWO incomes, but good Catholic men do not want their wives working. So you need to earn above the medium wage to do it or live extremely under means which is hard because prices keep increasing.

It's very bad if an average man cannot afford (quite literally) to provide on an average single income. And don't forget that's just the medium, what about everyone below the medium?

Those below the medium just don’t get married and have children.
Becoming a religious is not without cost, either. Seminaries don’t run for free.
The best course from a purely financial point of view may be to become a hermit or wandering mendicant.

In my experience, North Americans tend to think they need a lot more than they actually do in order to provide for their families. There are ways to make things easier financially, such as limiting new purchases and buying at thrift stores, making everything homemade (including simple cleaning products), living simpler in general, being willing to sacrifice certain comforts and wants, renting and not buying a home (the Jєωιѕн system has made it such that one never truly owns their home anyways). Families of 10+ used to live in tiny farmhouses just fine, even poor families. Women do not need much; if they claim otherwise, they are probably entitled and at least have a remnant of avarice.

According to what I can recall from St. Thomas Aquinas and the Canon law of 1917, religious houses are forbidden from charging aspirants an entrance fee, and are not allowed to charge a monthly fee for room and board during the noviciate, unless the religious house is extremely poor, but they are not to let that be a hindrance to receiving the postulant and ought to ask for donations. St. Thomas taught it was simony to charge a fee for entering a religious order. 

St. Alphonsus Liguori does not recommend marriage unless one is habitually incontinent, simply because it is objectively more difficult to save one's soul in that state. St. Francis de Sales taught that marriage requires more virtue than in any other state. For religious life, he recommends that if one is unable to find a religious house that observes the holy rule strictly, it is better for one to stay home and live as piously and detached from the world as possible, than to live in a lax religious house.