AIBU to think my adult life is average rather than privileged?

Actually, there is nolonger council housing in the way that it was understood until the 1980s because Margaret Thatcher introduced right to buy to create a property-owning democracy. There is social housing. There are shared ownership schemes. And there is a massive housing shortage, That's shy the government has a target to build 1.5 million new homes. If you read or watched anything about current affairs, you would have an awareness of such things and perhaps come across more sympathetically than you are doing here.

OP, you could have saved yourself some harsh words with a quick Google search for median salary, average savings per household, and average trust fund amount.

I do find it hard to believe that you genuinely would not realise that your personal experience may not be average just because it is normal to you.

Please please get out your bubble some how. If you have spare time go and help at a food bank. Huge swathes of the country are living in dire situations, council housing barely exists and waiting lists are obscene for what little there is.
you and your daughter are incredibly privileged

@Finchell

I just sold my car (£200) to pay an unexpected bill. I had to get to the dentist, it crippled my budget.

I make my children food and I eat if they leave some. I chose whether I put the heating on (snow earlier on here) or I just go to bed because that £7 has to last, and a child needs shoes. I eat bread from Olio. (It's free. That is a gift, and I'm not being sarcastic.)

We magically didn't get gifted a deposit for a house therefore we magically don't have one. Fucking magical.

Having my (beautiful) baby has left me with serious complications. Yet I will return to my minimum wage role where I care for others 14 hours a day, which I have done for 2 decades. I don't have parents. That was magical.

I did all the right things, I worked hard, I got married, I waited to become a mother, I saved hard but illness, bereavement and the economy and whateverthefuck keeps happening to the world post covid means my budget just doesn't stack. My wages do not cover childcare. I don't break even.

I spend a lot of time trying to make the numbers work. So I just keep cutting out anything excess. Like my food. Like transport. Because I'm a mother, and a care worker and life is fucking hard and tiring.

Wake.the.fuck.up

So, so privileged. Have the honesty to recognise it!

Your post is uncalled for. Do you not read/watch/listen to the news? Do you not realise how privileged you are to have a daughter who has been gifted a property by her grandparents? That you were given £50k to get on the housing ladder and that you earn twice the national average salary? What is the point of this thread? Stop looking at the 1%, look at the 99%, be grateful for the good fortune you and your daughter have, do some volunteer work (you won't do that last suggestion).

What is this??

50k gifted as the "norm" for a house deposit? I don't know about others but I had to do it all myself. And I am NOT well off and neither were my parents.

Multiple gifts of thousands of pounds a year? Nope, never. Nothing you have said remotely resonates with me.

It took my husband and I years to save for a deposit to buy a house. It was mostly about saving work bonuses, having cheap holidays and being frugal. I feel lucky we had bonuses at all. We don't have parents who can't help us out financially. That's just how it is for loads of people.

‘She’ isn’t far off, IMHO.

Not that I condone rudeness.

Not at all, that's just the circle you live in. You seem to live in a middle class circle a couple of generations in.

No one is know was gifted a house. Most people I know are either the first generation in their families to be in middle class professions, or they are sill in working class roles or on benefits. Most the working class either still rent or have saved really hard for a deposit on a low value home and there they will stay. The ones in middle class professions have all took a few years of very minimal spending and living with parents to save up and bought a really cheap house, then overpaid the mortgage to use the house as a savings account before buying a higher value house.

I am currently planning on doing the same, current house is my 1st step and ready for the step up, but I was renting before buying my 1st house as a single parent. Both the rental and my current home were at the lower end of the market so it was achievable without a penny off anyone else towards my deposit. I will never inherite a penny. I get a couple of gifts each Xmas and birthday but zero monetary gifts. No one i know does.

Your life is only average for a couple of generations in middle class background. Anyone coming from a working class family will not have what you and your DD has, but those of us who gave managed to do better than previous generations will hopefully pave the way for the following generations to get what you do. Unfortunately until our deaths we won't be able to give help for our DC deposit as we will be paying massive mortgages up until retirement. But our children will inherite and if they work hard too, their children will be able to get help from the inheritance money

I think you’re getting a little bit of a hard time as I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking whoever your social circle is is “normal/average” and especially if you mix with even richer people you might feel comparatively less privileged than you realistically are. (I know I can fall into this trap sometimes)

But equally, you have a responsibility to do a bit of reading on these things, read the news, see how other people live, do some volunteering etc and realise how lucky you are. It’s a triangle and there are an awful lot of people really struggling month to month both at the base of the triangle and in the middle.

where are all the Mumsnet rich and blagging types tonight?. Why is everyone being so rude to the OP it’s not like she is Marie antionette.

Brilliant 👏

This post has to be a joke ?

This thread is utterly astonishing.

Your parents should probably get a refund for your private education if this is the result.

www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/uk-consciously-cruel-uk-social-security-system-pushing-people-beyond-brink-new/

To echo posters (but in a less aggressive way) this post does seem really strangely out of touch.

I went to grammar school, work as a professional etc and I would find it more unusual to come across adults who are gifted money annually from parents/grandparents(?).

I also saved for my house deposit myself, living at home was a good help but otherwise my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford to help.

This is not a meaningful question in a country where a house can cost anything from £70,000 to millions. More meaningful would be to say the majority ie more than 50% of people in the UK are home owners. I'm left wondering what tge kegacy is of your privileged education....

www.bigissue.com/news/housing/britains-homelessness-shame-cold-hard-facts/

And now I know who the people are who say "There is no such thing as poor, just lazy"

@Finchell There is lack of personal experience and then there is wilful and frankly offensive avoidance of truth. You utterly disgust me.

Me and DH paid the whole deposit for our house by ourselves. Our privalige was that we loved with the in-laws to hammer out savings to get the deposit up to enough. Had we not had this we would have had to save for years.

I've never been gifted a holiday. Privalige is having a comfortable holiday a year long haul, or two smaller ones. Average is one holiday abroad a year, but plenty of people don't get away at all.

You definitely have lucky friends OP, I don't know anybody who's been brought a house outright

Read the news? Educate yourself beyond your own personal life experience? If you are genuinely that baffled by many of the responses please take some time to find out about how life is for others. I’ve posted a link earlier re poverty in the UK.

@Finchell Last week one of my friends had a blocked toilet ~ she had to call an emergency plumber out as she only has one toilet. She was charged £160 for it to be fixed.

She was nearly in tears, trying to work out how to juggle her money around to pay the plumbers bill. THAT is what average life looks like . . . .

Err of course you can. Called living well within your means and saving towards a goal.
I call Bullshit, troll 🧌 whatever

I think you need to reassess what privileged means, it's about having advantages that you didn't create for yourself, that were bestowed on you by others or by who you are, such as your ethnicity, your class, your place of birth and these then enable you to access better opportunities, chances etc and maximize on the head start or advantage you have over more maligned groups. You do have privilege in that you seem to have a certain amount of generational wealth that many other people do not and you benefitted from (at least) a financially secure childhood with enough support and social capital to access a good education and get yourself a well paid job. Understanding your privilege is understanding many people did not have the foundations,platform chances etc that you had given to you, that doesn't mean you haven't worked hard, haven't been savvy etc but you're blind if you think most people have the life you do, £3k gifts a year is a LOT