AIBU to wonder why a pensioner struggling financially would not use housing equity?

There would be a glut of £2 million houses on the market there will be bought up by global equity companies.
Prediction it won’t happen

You sarcastically quoting my responses turns this into an argument rather than a discussion, which is why we end up going round and round in circles.

I didn't say, "That may be your experience, but statistically it was uncommon." I brought first hand experience. You brought secondhand details through your grandparents. There are versions of "normal" for that time period, just as there are today. The devil is in the detail.

That, together with your insistence on looking only at aggregated data while dehumanising pensioners, is what turns a debate into an argument, followed by a circular tug of war.

"Statistically, the current generation of pensioners is the wealthiest ever, and the following generations are statistically never likely to see wealth on the same scale."

That depends on your measure of wealth.

Pensioners are not the main reason we are in this position. Statistics only give you the starting point. You then need to investigate the detail if you want to design effective, proportionate and sustainable policies.

Who failed to build enough homes? The post war baby boom years were 1946 to 1964, so today's pressures on funding pensions should hardly have come as a surprise. Who failed to act on decades of data showing an ageing population that would be supported today by a shrinking working age taxpayer base? Who oversaw low levels of housebuilding and bureaucratic planning systems? Who oversaw financial deregulation and cheap credit in a market with too few homes? Who effectively allowed housing to become a commodity rather than primarily somewhere secure and safe to live? And who, rather than addressing those structural problems, increasingly relied on rising house prices and property transactions as an easy source of tax revenue? What about Inefficient public spending - it is easy to spend money to divert attention, it's much harder, requires greater skill, and takes longer to see the payback when you invest sustainably or to give a hand up not just a hand out.

Our system is interconnected. No party gets a pass on poor policy and taking the short term "easy" path. Where we are today is result of decisions taken by successive governments, of all colours, over many decades. What is the point of just looking at who you and some others think are the winners of the game and leaving a broken system in place?

Does the system need rebalancing? Absolutely. But whatever the answers, the reforms need to address the causes, not just the symptoms.

What nation?

@NorthXNorthWest I was not allowed to watch ITV as a child too so I don't think it has totally died out!

Individual experiences are irrelevant. I never mentioned how my grandparents experienced plumbing. You can repeat that you had an outside loo with as many commenters as you like. That wont change the statistics. 7% of a population having something is unusual, however you slice it. That isn't a personal attack on your experience. You sarcastically quoting my responses turns this into an argument rather than a discussion. Which is why we go round and round in circles.

I did talk about the statistics for my generation. The only reason I mentioned my own generation being cold/hungry in retirement is because that is what this whole entire thread is about. Why don't pensioners sell up/release equity to make their retirement more comfortable? Except my generation is even less likely to have an asset to liquidate.

The main issues with equity release is bad press, the regulations have changed and it is much safer now, and should be considered an option if needed.

No stamp duty for the 60+/retired who are downsizing would be a good move from govt. to encourage people to move out of big homes that are becoming unmanageable, freeing up the housing for families and reducing the stalemate that happens higher up in the housing market.

And we were utterly forbidden to watch ITV

I knew it! Posh!

Back in the day there was no "do you say tea or dinner". "Not allowed to watch ITV" differentiated the Classes 😂

Yes, we had our own washing line, @NorthXNorthWest - with one of those poles that you hooked into the middle of it, to make it higher - but not a bought one - one my dad had made.

Ahh - the rented TV - I remember it well - from RadioRentals. Mum and dad went on renting for years, because that was the only way they could get a black and white Tv - mum Disapproved of colour TVs, and only got one when it became impossible to get a B&W one any more - and even then, she turned the colour down on it, so it wasn’t too bright for her.

And we were utterly forbidden to watch ITV - commercial TV was even less acceptable than colour TV. I used to have to sneak into the front room while mum was gardening, so I could watch General Hospital in ITV. All this changed when Channel 4 started, and my mum discovered Countdown. All of a sudden, when she wanted to watch something on commercial TV, it magically became OK.

Bath free washing and an electric mangle? Tres fancy! That would have marked you out as positively middle class where I grew up. Next you'll be telling me you had your own washing line, so there was no mad dash for the undersupplied communal ones at the weekend.😂 I can still remember how excited my mum was when she rented her first washing machine. We even got a discount because we rented it from the same place we got the telly from!

We'd have been jealous of them too.😂

For years my mum used a single tub washing machine that had an electric mangle mounted on it, @NorthXNorthWest! Fancy, I know.

Mondays were wash days, and she would fill up the tub, then the laundry went through in a specific order - white sheets first, in the hottest water, then the rest of the whites/lights, working down to the darkest colours and grubbiest things. Everything went through the mangle, then was rinsed in the sink, and finally into the spin dryer to get things dry enough to hang up. It made a massive difference to her life when she finally got an automatic washing machine.

The point is that viewing current issues purely through the lens of generational "winners" and "losers" oversimplifies the complexity of comparing generational opportunities and experiences. Few people would disagree that there are serious problems which need to be addressed, particularly around housing affordability and funding retirement . But reducing decades of social and economic change to a simple "greedy, heartless, had it all, old oppressors" v "helpless, vulnerable young people" narrative is not a sound or reliable basis for making balanced, proportionate and most importantly, sustainable, policies.

As for getting into the detail, if you tell someone that the experiences that they and those around them lived through wasn't the norm when you weren't actually there, but they were, you shouldn't be surprised when they push back. Statistics are useful for identifying broad trends, but they don't tell the whole story.

@NorthXNorthWest

My nan did indeed have a mangle in the yard
My great grandmother had a huge one in her kitchen.

Did she have a mangle too? Dead jealous of our friends who had one. No more hand wringing and things dried more quickly!

but apparently that may be your experience but it statistically was uncommon. according to @HairsprayBabe It is you or is it Harmony...

If ya know, ya know😉

Banging on about whether people did or did not have certain electrical items in the seventies is fairly pointless, it was 50 years ago. These things were seen as aspirational and luxuries to save for or rent then, nowdays they are generallly affordable (even cheap) every day items acceasible to the majority of people on ordinary incomes. That is just progress and the ability of manufacturers to drove down costs.

Being able to afford a TV or mobile phone with half a weeks wages is great, the average house price being many many multiples of the average annual salary, not so much

Honestly, there seems to be an attempt to rewrite the Seventies as some sort of utopia. It wasn't. There was plenty about life in the Seventies that, in terms of hardship and poverty, would leave much of today in the dust. Equally, there are problems today that many of us, including young people, never had to deal with. Why does everything have to become a competition between generations? Why is the only solution for one group to be sacrificed?

@NorthXNorthWest
@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius

Me too, I was in primary school until 1976.
Freezing and that loo (sand) paper!

My nan did not have any indoor toilet or washing facilities until 1981 or 2.
They used the kitchen sink and I remember the tin bath hanging in the yard.

We had outside loos at school. Absolutely freezing in the winter with tracing for paper toilet rolls. Ah the good old days of luxury!😂

that may be your experience but it statistically was uncommon.

NTS 2024: Household car availability and trends in car trips - GOV.UK
Not an outlier

Tv Licences: Statistics - Hansard - UK Parliament
Not an outlier.

Lavatories - Hansard - UK Parliament
12% = 1 in 8, less common which I have already said, but still not unusual, especially in certain part of the country.

I am describing my first-hand experience, you are sharing a second hand perspective. It's perfectly possible for your grandparents' experience to have been different from mine and for both to be true. It isn't reasonable to claim theirs was the only norm.

IMO, statistics should be the start of the conversation, not the end of it. They are great for identifying broad trends, but they also fall short because they are an aggregation. They can't tell you how any individual, or even significant sections of that population, actually lived. That's exactly why statistics so open to misuse. Context is everything. A headline statistic may be factually correct, but without the right context it can paint a completely misleading picture. There's a reason the saying, "Lies, damned lies and statistics", exists.

Today's young people are less and less able to afford to buy property, and there certainly isn't enough social housing provision. So they will not be in the same position when they retire. So if we do end up old, freezing and hungry we (statistically) won't even have any assets (a home) to be able to downsize or exploit for equity release.

I have young people of my own, and I want them to have at least the same opportunities I've had and more. The problem with today's politics is the constant push towards a binary mindset because it makes it easier to justify poorly designed policies. Pensioners are portrayed as the undeserving, asset rich, "life of Riley" generation with their foot on the necks of poor young people, who are portrayed as the deserving victims. Real life is far more complex than that. Politicians should be focused on finding fair and proportionate solutions, not pitting one generation against another.

I see pensioners and young people as diverse individuals and subgroups, but all still very human. It's also interesting that, when you are talking about pensioners, aggregated statistics to describe one homogenous group are apparently enough to tell the whole life story. Yet, when talking about young people, we're suddenly encouraged to think about individual circumstances, lived experiences and the human impact of cold and hunger...

As for "exploiting equity release"... many equity release schemes have historically offered very poor value, with lenders often benefiting disproportionately. That's one of the reasons many people have avoided them. This morning there was a man on TV who said his mother had taken out an equity release loan of around £30,000 and, by the time she died, the lender ended up receiving the full value of the house, around £250k, as part of the repayment. They didn't even know she had taken equity release out. I haven't verified the details, but if it's true, they're consistent with many other stories about older schemes, where compound interest effectively stripped homeowners of most, or even all, of the equity in their homes.

When we moved to a small Shropshire village, in the early 70s, the tiny village school had outside loos. When we were using the girls’ loos, we could hear the boys in the adjoining loos trying to see who could pee furthest up the wall. 🤢

DH and I and DC1 moved from Scotland, (we had a council highrise with a nice bathroom there) to the North of England in the early 70s. We rented a terrace house for a couple of years, like all the neighbours’, the toilet was in the yard.

We did have a phone put in, a party line, so we could keep in touch with my mum who also had one, unlike DPIL.

@NorthXNorthWest that may be your experience but it statistically was uncommon. That is the issue with threads like this. Statistically the current pensioners are the wealthiest ever, and the following generations are statistically never likely to see wealth on the same scale.

There are anomalies to the statistics, that doesn't mean the statistics are wrong, and you cannot create national long term fiscal policies on the anecdotes of outliers. I am a home owner, all my friends are home owners. That doesn't mean I think all or even most people my age are homeowners. Because I know that statistically 70% of people my age are not.

Current pensioners hold approximately 49% of the nation's total personal wealth,(statistically) with around 60%-90% (depending on the study) of their wealth in property. 80% of current pensioners are home owners, 15% are council tenants - that is 95% of a generation in secure housing. The average age the current pensioners bought their home was 24. Leaving ample years to pay off a mortgage and save and invest additional money.

Todays young people are less and less able to afford to buy property, and there certainly isn't enough social housing provision. So they will not be in the same position when they retire. So if we do end up old, freezing and hungry we (statistically) won't even have any assets (a home) to be able to downsize or exploit for equity release.

We had a few friends with outside toilets well into the 1970s. Nobody batted an eyelid. It was becoming less common, but it certainly wasn't considered strange.

Many people didn't have a TV at that time. We probably got our first around then, rented from Radio Rentals or Rumbelows. We couldn't afford a colour one, so we made do with black and white, complete with the obligatory coat hanger aerial.

We didn't have a car or a washing machine and neither did most of our neighbours.

Our "phone" was the urine-stained, often vandalised, red public phone box around the corner. Again, very few people had a home phone.

We thought people who had a colour TV, video players, atari games, owned a car and had a telephone were wealthy.

True poverty at that time often meant going without or making do with an inferior version: a coin-operated TV at extortionate rates, a black and white TV when colour was norm, or a manual TV when remote controls were the norm. No VHS player and no hiring films.

That was entirely normal back then Even then, we still had more than some. My parents (both working full time/overtime/additional jobs) like many millions were much poorer than your grandparents. So your point is?

@TheyGrewUp Both were common re: owning/not owning certain "mod cons" in the 60s because for cars, TVs and phones personal ownership was around 50% by the end of the decade (depending on the area growing from around 30%)

Any points about "not having an indoor loo" are actually the outliers as over 93% of houses had indoor bathrooms and loos by the start of the 60s this is a big jump up from the start of the 50s when only 50% had one - so some current older retirees may remember early childhood without an indoor loo, but by the time most of them were teens they would have had one.