If her parents had had their way, Sierra Nguyen might still be training to become an anesthesiologist.

The child of Vietnamese refugees who escaped after the fall of Saigon, Ms. Nguyen grew up in Martinez, a small city in Northern California. She excelled in the sciences and got a scholarship to Saint Mary’s College of California, where an act of filial disobedience set her on an unexpected course.

After years of grueling labs, she began studying for medical school exams. But one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror holding one of the thick textbooks.

The first thought she had: “I don’t want to do this.”

The second came in the form of a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi, which she had studied in high school: “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

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“And so I did a complete 180, broke my parents’ hearts and, as clichéd as it sounds, I followed my own,” she said. “And I found myself at an art gallery.”

So Ms. Nguyen, now 28, became an assistant at a gallery in San Francisco, a job that involved vacuuming, changing printer cartridges and getting salads for her boss, for $15 an hour in the beginning. She struggled to pay her rent, much less save enough for a down payment on a home in a city where the typical two-bedroom condominium goes for $1.2 million, according to Zillow.

But her gamble paid off: She landed a job at Dolby Chadwick Gallery. She had been there mere months when the pandemic shut down the city, and the world. Into that void, the gallery owner and her new hire began a collaboration — a daily email to the gallery’s listserv that paired a poem and an artwork from the gallery’s inventory. Sales went through the roof.

Ms. Nguyen was promoted to gallery manager, and then associate director and, finally, director, a position that came with a percentage of the art she sold. As the years passed, she managed to set aside about $230,000 for a home purchase. Even then, it was unclear what, if anything, she could afford to buy.

Last fall, she called Pattie Lawton, an agent with Sotheby’s International Realty, and sheepishly asked if she might be able to find a two-bedroom in San Francisco with an $850,000 budget — about $350,000 less than the median price of a two-bedroom.

Ms. Lawton showed up with pink streaks in her hair and a can-do attitude. The properties she suggested included condominiums as well as tenancy-in-common listings, or T.I.C., a kind of group homeownership that is common in San Francisco and more affordable, but comes with added risk.

With a T.I.C., a group of people — either friends or strangers — enter into an agreement to buy a property. They share the legal title, and the agreement spells out the percentage of the building that each has the exclusive right to use. (This arrangement differs from that of a cooperative, where residents own shares in a private corporation that, in turns, owns and manages the building.)

Andy Sirkin, a lawyer whose firm, SirkinLaw APC, focuses on real estate co-ownership, said that a T.I.C. is “like a marriage,” whereby multiple owners share a single parcel of undivided property. The city sends a single property tax bill to the building, and it’s up to the owners to divvy it up.

“There are more shared obligations in a T.I.C. than in a condo,” Mr. Sirkin said. “That raises the level of risk.”

When this form of ownership was created, the owners also shared a group mortgage, so if one party stopped paying, the others were on the hook for those payments. But beginning in the 2000s, a form of financing known as a fractional mortgage allowed buyers to obtain separate mortgages on a fraction of a T.I.C. building, making it possible for someone like Ms. Nguyen to get an individual mortgage, which mitigates the risk somewhat.

As Ms. Nguyen began her search, her parents took the $200,000 they had saved for her college education — money she didn’t need, thanks to the scholarships she had earned — and put it toward her down payment, increasing it to $430,000.

Among her options:

Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:

Dear Eric: My husband and I recently attended a destination wedding 1,500 miles away for the daughter of friends we have known for more than 50 years. We gave a very generous cash gift, despite the fact that we are retired and on a fixed income. We received a perfunctory thank you note a month or so later.

We paid all of our other expenses for lodging, food, etc. The only meal we were invited to attend was the wedding reception, not even the rehearsal dinner, which other non-members of the wedding party attended.

Over five days we spent little to no time with our friends due to how busy they were with the wedding and the number of friends from their local world, who were unfamiliar to us.

Needless to say, it was a giant waste of time and lots of money. At this point, I wish we had just sent a card with a congratulatory note and our regrets. I’m resentful. Please, help me re-frame this to get over it.

— Destination Dread

Dear Destination: Whenever I’m deciding whether to attend a destination wedding or just send a gift, I always ask myself, “Am I interested in going on a pricey vacation to this place and entertaining myself for the entire time in exchange for one free meal?”

Because, while some couples do program all their guests from sun-up to sundown, it’s usually more financially and logistically feasible to only promise everyone the main event. So, I prepare to spend a lot of time on sightseeing tours or reading poolside – or I stay home.

Think of this wedding as a vacation that you probably wouldn’t have chosen for yourself but which you went on nonetheless. Were there enjoyable meals or moments from your time there? Focus on those.

I know you were hoping to have more time with your friends, but you should grant them some grace here. You felt left out of some of the special moments of the wedding, passed over in favor of other friends. I understand the expectation but try reframing your thinking.

See it less as a rejection than as an oversight that came from them juggling friends from multiple stages of life, far from home, on a logistically complex weekend. Any time they spent with other people was not time they were purposefully spending away from you.

Your feelings are valid. Five days is a long time and it’s OK to have gone in with an expectation that you’d be a bigger part of the event, and you should have received a nicer thank you. All that being said, take the good memories from your vacation and leave the rest. It’s not worth throwing away 50 years of friendship over.

Dear Eric: My two adult children sometimes privately criticize or demean the other in my presence. I don’t want to get involved in a defensive conversation about my children, even if I may understand the reasons for the comments. I try to respond with something constructive and change the subject, but sometimes the comments are so bitter it really upsets me.

We tried a few sessions of family counseling that were really unhelpful. How can a parent respond in a way that is loving without validating the animosity between two adults? Maybe my expectation that my children relate to each other as friends is unrealistic.

— Mom Not Mediator

Dear Mom: Animosity between siblings is one of the oldest stories in the book. What book? Honestly, choose just about any and you will find sibling animosity littered throughout history and myth. It’s amazing that people who share DNA and memories so often can’t seem to share the same space.

I understand how sad this makes you. A lot of parents feel guilt when their children don’t get along as adults. The underlying causes can be unpacked in family therapy, when it works for you, but at the end of the day sometimes people just don’t like each other. Not even a mother can make them see eye to eye. It’s hard to accept and it makes for difficult holiday dinners but there is a way forward.

You have to set a clear boundary with your children about what they can and can’t talk about with you. They’re taking advantage of you as a receptive audience and each is trying to win you to their side. Mom’s agreement is the gold medal in the sibling rivalry Olympics. Take yourself out of the game.

Tell them, “I know that you don’t get along and I respect your feelings. It hurts me that you hurt. I wish I could fix it but I can’t. It also hurts me to be brought into this. I love you and I support you, please love me enough to talk about something else with me.”

(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)