Budget: 'I can't afford to leave home on £1,500 a month' and other claims.

[dessertz]

The BBC are focussing on a few brave volunteers to see how they will be impacted by the budget. Today's headline focuses on a 23 year old apprentice who is hoping for a rise in pay so he can leave home:
BBC News - Budget 2024: 'I can't afford to leave home on £1,500 a month' - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyv8y68e25o. Surely £1500 would be enough to afford a flatshare in Newbury? I mean, it might not stretch to a batchelor pad, but a flatshare should be affordable. It's more than most students live on at the same age. He is being paid reasonably for an entry-level job, and his pay will presumably go up when he qualifies.

The other one I didn't understand (in the same article) is the single mum earning £150k who thinks she is being punished for having children because she's earning too much to qualify for child benefit. 🤔

Hopefully the beeb just took their comments out of context. 🤷‍♀️

HMOs tend to include all bills. Standard stuff.

Definitely not enough for transport food and personal spends.

Let alone running a car.

30k is starting price for leaving home these days I would say. Gross that is.

Newbury is in the SE. DS has an apprenticeship in the SE on about the same money, and lives in a shared house. It certainly can be done.

I don't think people on £150k should be moaning about not getting freebies. Honestly, the entitlement of some people.

She says go back 40 years, most 23 year olds were married and had their own place. It's true just look at your own parents/grandparents I'm not sure why people feel the need to insist rents always been this high.

As ever, that depends - my mum was 23 with a child, and their own house at that age. At 23 my dad was indeed lodging having just completed his apprenticeship - he was able to buy a house soon after with my mum (with the savings from living cheaply while an apprentice, and increased salary from his job).

Lodging or staying at home while doing an apprenticeship is entirely normal.

My ds plans to buy a cheap property as an investment 130k and rent rooms out but this is when he is 21 and am not sure if he will be allowed good credit. East mids.

He is currently 19 earns 24.4k saves well lives with me but I think even with good savings I am not sure if he can be granted a mortgage so young. They only gave him a 700 pound credit card to build up his credit in his first full time job. It is really difficult to establish.

On top of that he intends to move to London age 21 in an HMO himself.

He will do well to achieve both of these by 21!

Friends keep saying he will move back home lol.

No one, it's miserable, but if they aren't working, someone else is paying.

My parents rented a place but it was a peppercorn rent and it was tied to their employer.
My grandparents were tenant farmers so never owned their own homes.
My great grandparents on my fathers side were jobbing farm hands who went from farm to farm and frequently spent the night under hedges.

Of course there are going to be individual variances but it is an indisputable fact that rents proportion to income are much , much higher than forty years ago. It’s a fact.

Those saying the apprentice can afford it - most rental agents use an affordability multiplier. On a £1500 net income I think he’d only be allowed a rental of around £600 a month. So he might have found that no agent is willing to let to him on his salary given the going rate for a room in a HMO is higher than that.

Isn't it always "tight" when you're young and starting out??
Where is this perception that young people move straight into their own plush homes complete with everything they need as a right?. My parents started very low, my mum had to rent a room to be near my dad who was in an old style men's only boarding house in a room.
Then it was a bedsit when they could afford one.

My mum said they had to save and save for basic household items.
They went into live in a rich area in house worth 1.75 mil today.
Most of my peers also rented rooms to start off with and had few basic amenities, we use car boots and charity shops and freecyle for all sorts of items including irons and furniture.

In my own early days as a mum it was all yellow sticker food, one youth hostel night away a year for a while and certainly no hair dresser hair cuts and nails.
I saved up for two years a pound, two pounds in tins, to start a rolling fund of several hundred for our 3rd year, so we had a small cushion for Christmas and birthdays and holidays.
We are much more comfortable now (depending on today's budget) but still no where near some people's levels on here.
But I, never expected to move into a plush flat with everything there.

Yeah poor people are such liars, aren't they.

This place sometimes ....

Have people only just noticed now how bad things have been ?
Bring rent controls in and everyone would be moaning. No winning.

I stand corrected on the costs front.

There isn’t an amount of money in the world that would see me willingly give up my own basic human rights, not to mention the appalling treatment of the other immigrants who my lifestyle would be built on the back of.

A lot of people on here are the same people charging unaffordable rents and moaning about the minimum wage going up.

Class enemies, as we used to say.

Yeah poor people are such liars, aren't they.

No, It's just that (just as I did, and my parents did) you have to manage your expectations. When you're on a training wage, you can't expect to have everything right now - it's going to be tight.

When I was 23, and on a little bit less than him (20 years ago of course) I did rent a whole flat because it was me and my boyfriend. It was cold, and empty (we had no furniture, got stuff second hand as time went on) and a long commute from my job, because it was that or a houseshare and we wanted the space together. We would heat one room, I commuted on an ancient moped, and we ate yellow sticker stuff. It got better, but it was hard that first year.

And that was a proper job, not the lower training wage.

Most house or flat shares are advertised and administered by private landlords, not agents.

Why would an apprentice be saving a deposit to buy? Surely he’ll start saving once he earns a better wage? I moved out at 18 and didn’t save anything until I was mid 20s and saved for a house deposit then. The fact is he could move out if he wanted to. Yes money would be tight but it’s not the case that it’s financially impossible.

Yes definitely. And suddenly grown a social conscience what with means testing of WFA…but only for certain people

You earned almost the same as him, 20 years ago.

20 years.

greycloudsabove do you live in Dubai?

Didn’t suggest they shouldn’t work?

@GettingStuffed

But in Bristol there are plenty of properties, and if you are flexible about where you live it's not as expensive eg the surrounding towns and villages are cheaper. Dsd pays £600 for a 2 person flat share

But he has the choice to get a weekend job?
Bar work on a Fri/ Sat night to increase his earnings?
I stacked supermarket shelves and did babysitting when I was training
Gave me extra cash until I qualified.
Everyone I knew did this.

What they really mean is " I want / should be entitled to live a fancy lifestyle and not work extra"
So unrealistic and lacking in personal responsibility!

We're talking about 40 years ago so not your great grandparents. Your grandparents not owning their home is irrelevant because we're talking about renting anyway here.

Just saying it all peaked a couple years ago even before covid rent was a lot more reasonable than now. I know so many people renting a room in a shared house well into their thirties even people with kids.
But now all the 40+ year olds are crawling out the woodwork to claim it was exactly the same back in their day.
On a different thread they'd probably all be bragging about how they were married with kids and their own place at 23.
Obviously there's always been people that had a hard time but I seem to know so many people renting a room in a shared house with kids now but I'm sure someone will come along in a minute to tell me it was exactly the same 30 years ago

Plenty are advertised by lettings agencies, I see them in the window in Newbury all the time. Even those that are advertised online directly by the landlord might still have affordability criteria - it’s to protect the landlord’s income, not the tenant.