Outnumbered - is the lifestyle realistic?

[Mrsemcgregor]

So I’ve been watching Outnumbered on Netflix with my DS (he loves it!) and I’m wondering if the lifestyle they have is achievable in London considering their jobs?

Pete is a teacher in a secondary school and is yet to achieve head of department and Sue is part time in what I assume is an admin/PA type role. I’m hypothesising that their joint income is likely to be around £60k? Maybe £70k. Where I live they would be lucky to be on £50k but I’m adding extra for London wages.

The house they live in is huge! I am not sure where in London it’s meant to be, but their is a scene where Pete mentions problems on the tube so I assume they are within the underground network. It’s 3 stories and at least 4 bedrooms and two bathrooms, a massive kitchen dining area, a garden and a nice sized lounge with a big bay window. Even where I live that would set you back close to £500,000. That house must cost a fortune in London?

Pete’s mum and dad are still alive as is Sue’s dad so I’m assuming no large inheritance, and they mention a mortgage so they haven’t inherited the house.

Can any London mumsnetters confirm or deny that this is realistic?

(I know I have far too much time on my hands and have given this way too much thought )

I work locally & lots of my colleagues are locals in their late 40s plus. They all have 1.2m plus houses & again very ordinary average paid jobs. It's so different now.

@nosswith

Likely bought many years ago. More realistic than many things portrayed in fiction.

Even 40 years ago it would have been massively unaffordable

It was 1992- we bought in London then. our tiny house was £80k but they had paid £110. A house like that would still have been £175-200k then Sorry, when would it have been £175-200k?

My husband and I have a house very similar to that in Outnumbered. We are both teachers with a fairly average annual household salary. We live in the North East so property prices are much cheaper. Our house is also 3 story, 6 bedroom, 3 bathrooms. Its worth around £300,000. Everytime we watch it, we joke that we are very similar in many respects. If we lived in London however, I don't think we'd be able to afford much more than a small flat.

@ancientgran

It was 1992- we bought in London then. our tiny house was £80k but they had paid £110. A house like that would still have been £175-200k then Sorry, when would it have been £175-200k?

In 1991/92 after the crash in Wandsworth. We looked at loads of 2 beds in Wandsworth and they were about £100k- our friends bought a bigger Victorian 4 bed and it was £200k which seemed loads to us. As a recently qualified big 4 accountant my Dh was on £25K and as a teacher I was on £18k (maybe a bit more)

Plus mortgage multiples were really tight. 3 was the absolute maximum and only with a big deposit. 2.5 times was more usual. It was a time of high interest rates.

@BabloHoney

This is hilarious, we have these sorts of chats watching tv too!

A writer on Frasier recently tweeted that the writing team for the show would regularly discuss how Frasier would be able to afford his amazing apartment on a local radio salary

I always assumed he’d made his money in private practice (like Niles) before he went in to radio. (I possibly spent too much time thinking this through )

@shinynewapple2020 Yes but by the last series Pete had given up his full time teaching job and was a supply teacher. I worked as a supply teacher for a time. I got lots of work but struggled to make ends meet as a single person living in a part of the North of England that pretty much has the lowest cost of living in the country!!

@BlackAmericanoNoSugar

We bought a Victorian terraced house in the borough of Wandsworth for £116k in 1995. I saw it for sale around eight years ago for over £800k. If they bought their house around the time their eldest child was born it would have been affordable.

I've never seen this show but am always attracted to house price threads!

The above sounds about right.

Salaries have gone down IMHO. I don't know about teaching though.

it's interesting that some posters are saying that was originally seen as a not-great lifestyle and now is something to aspire to.

@Judashascomeintosomemoney yes I remember seeing an interview with Adam Woodyatt (Ian Beale in Eastenders) who said that Eastenders was completely unrealistic as lots of the characters wouldn't be able to afford the homes they lived in on the programme.

I think it depends on what part of Wandsworth. Some relatives paid about 400k for a lovely house near the common in the 90s.

@JoeBidenIsGreat young postdoctoral academic salaries or starter lecturer salaries are LOW. If anything, their apartment shouldn't be quite so large!

There was a house price crash in the 90s, early 90s I think. Maybe they got a bargain on a repossessed property
I’ve got two friends who benefited in this way. Both paid GBP75,000 for their repossessed properties. One, a huge apartment in a Maida Vale mansion block is now worth about GBP900K. The other, a lovely Victorian terrace in East London is worth over a million.

You may be reading too much into these television programmes. I fell into this trap whilst looking for Derek Trotter's flat in Mandela House. It turns out it doesn't exist!!!
So I have abandoned that foray and and currently going through Google Street Maps trying to locate Tony Hancock's house in East Cheam's Railway Cuttings. So far, no luck.

House price to earnings - the mid 90s was a low spot.

Nope, not realistic. We're in London and have friends who were a school head of year and a civil servant and they could only afford a flat above a shop when their kids were little, and eventually managed to move out to a smallish house not near a tube station that needed a lot of work

My house is exactly the same as the Outnumbered house, except without the side return extension. I’m in Clapham- but in Lambeth, not in Wandsworth. We bought it in 1997 for 200k.

The only realistic house/flat/apartment I've seen in years is Patrick Brewer's in "Schitt's Creek". I'm guessing they made a deliberate decision to keep it real. Now I think of it, apart front the motel rooms the Roses live in, do we ever see inside another character's house?

@ancientgran

There was a house price crash in the 90s, early 90s I think. Maybe they got a bargain on a repossessed property.

Yes absolutely I bought my first flat in 1995 when prices were rock bottom after this crash - the woman I bought it off had bought it at the exact same price I paid for it a few years earlier and was just relieved not to be in negative equity.

I had DS1 in 2008, and all my NCT friends lived in houses just like that.

I bought my first one bed flat in that part of London in the mid 90s. I was on a good salary for my age. It was a huge stretch and I couldn't afford a 2nd bedroom until I met DH and we both sold our one beds flats. Both of us earned significantly more than a teacher by then and we couldn't stretch to a tiny 3 bed terrace in the same area. In the 2000s thankfully the 2 bed made us a good amount and we moved further out to house. No way two people on very normal salaries would have afforded a 3 storey house in Chiswick.

I agree that they bought at a time when house prices were relatively much less expensive - my first house in London bought in 96 almost doubled in price in 6 yrs. but yes, unachievable now. I didn't about it at the time is was out though. Loved it, especially as it was partly ad-libbed I believe,

On a side note, did you know that Tyler Drew-Honey, who plays Jake, is the son of porn stars Ben Dover and Linzi Drew?!

No of course it isn't, it's TV. Just jumping in and sorry haven't rtft but I imagine many many people have said the same before me.

Their set up is highly unlikely but as nothing compared to Bridget Jones and her flat for one in Borough Market on a publishing assistant's salary.

Nor indeed Hugh Grant and his Notting Hill house when he owns a bookshop on the verge of going under. Richard Curtis is particularly bad for this kind of bollocks.

I always assumed Pete's mum begrudgingly helped him out financially.

5e actors are 55 and 58 now. (And a couple!) So if they had bought (together or separately) a property in their early - mid twenties that would have been the mid - late 80s - which is when house prices went up madly. So if they had managed to get in before then then that is reasonable I guess. They could then pool resources to buy their current house.

The impression I always got is that they bought the house pre kids when they were both working full time and had been struggling to hang onto it since.

There was an episode where they planned to sell the house as they were in such debt but that seemed to get itself resolved.