home ownership?

I come from a family of renters: both my mother and father (separated) rented all their working life, and bought a home when their retirement came, because they decided to move to a place where real estate was cheaper. It didn't prevent them to have a great life.

about retirement

Are you an employee? If you are, you're already contributing to your retirement through CPP, so at least part of your needs are already taken care of. Is that sufficient? Probably not, but it'll still be there later when you need it.

I went through kind of the same situation a few years ago: my wife had a baby and wasn't eligible for EI after the birth, and then she decided to change career, so was back to studying for a while. It was hard, and quite tight, and we had to cut quite a bit on spending for a few years and didn't save much, but it was well worth it: she's now in a better situation she could have been before, and we organised our lives to live frugally enough to catch-up on our savings, so we now are in a good enough situation.

Do you have to live tighter now to save more? Maybe: you can run the math and decide if there are some things you can cut, reduce or replace without affecting your life too much.

But in the end, that's ok not to save if you're too tight. Just do your best to save what you can and to catch-up when you can!

In a world that seems to get more expensive faster that we can make more money it doesn’t feel worth the extra stress to try and save right now. If you find yourself in a similar situation how do you think about retirement or home ownership? Have you given up? I’m having a tough time stomaching the idea of living even tighter now so I can maybe have a retirement.

To me, giving up on saving is simply not an option. Unless you're planing on dying, you will retire. Given that retirement is not a choice, so is saving for retirement because CPP is not enough to sustain my current standard of living.

That doesn't mean you have to tighten right now, because your partner is already making an investment in the form of education. When that's done you can evaluate if it makes sense to get back to investing in the regular kind of investments. Investing in your kids is also something, though be careful to not dump a world of expectations on them - too many people think of their kids as their retirement fund. But back to saving, in my humble and ill informed opinion, you can afford to do a tactical retreat for now and get back to saving later, but do get back to it even if it's only after your kids leave home.

I did give up on buying property in Vancouver. I'll probably buy something in a small town after I retire, like @Affaires de Piasses parents lol that's my kind of role model.

You're right that inflation is beating wage growth this year, but most years it doesn't. So this year might be worse than average, but most years won't :)