Can’t believe how much money my parents have amassed

[Tallular819]

My parents started out with nothing, not a penny from their families. My mum was a dinner lady, Dad was a secondary school teacher.

They paid off their mortgage in their 40s. As children we had a holiday abroad every year and multiple uk holidays throughout the year.

They had a lease car which would be replaced every 3 years with a new one.

They paid for mine and my sisters weddings and house deposits.

They’ve travelled all over the world in their retirement and I’ve just found out they have £200k in savings.

WTF?! DH and I have comparable careers, we run 1 old banger of a car, we have 1 uk holiday per year, we’ve stopped at 1 child, we’re on target to pay off our mortgage when we reach retirement, we have a grand total of £4k in savings. We don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t buy expensive clothes.

Its just hit me how vastly different our financial situations are. I didn’t appreciate just how different the cost of living is today compared to 40 years ago.

It’s gaslighting. But if you don’t follow it it wont fund their retirement you see. Its like a carrot

@Papyrophile thanks for those amazing articles

They are a weeks wages now and they were a weeks wages then. Difference is when you bought one in the 80’s it was repairable and lasted beyond the guarantee

I bought my washing machine in the 2000s and it is still going strong, and has had one small repair job done. A lot of things last longer than the salespeople would have you believe,

Oh come on it's not like that at all.
In my experience 1989 my husband's weeks wage was £90 you could not buy a washer for that. You can buy them for around £200 now the cheapest. I wrecked mine on Friday with a £2 coin I've ordered new parts and will be able to repair it myself thanks to YouTube!
There are loads of things cheaper now like kids clothes.
My post was just saying that getting a new automatic washing machine was a huge deal!

I think selective citation of facts isn’t just limited to one generation!

if you want to see how much consumer goods cost in the 70s and 80s, google the Argos catalogue from that period and google
an average salary. @Luddite26 is correct. And if you are a reader, you may want to know about the ‘net book agreement’… not pivotal but again another example of the glory days being not quite as glorious as painted. I already mentioned the ‘army pension’; nadda if you didn’t retire out of the service, despite having served for years or decades. Don’t wear rose tinted spectacles.

someone said upthread that a postman with a wife not working could easily buy a house back in the day. Well, I’m sure there was the odd one but it certainly wasn’t common. There were no halcyon days of mortgages being handed out willy nilly in the 60s and 80s or 90s. The 00’s brought Northern Rock handing out mortgages in cereal packets for a period; look where that ended. The proportion of people owning their own home vs renting was 50% in 1971; that figure in itself is surely
a clue about the ease of buying a home?. Mortgages were much harder to obtain. They were rationed for periods, some buildings societies wanted you to have been a member for years, have years of salary paid in, didn’t include a woman’s earning etc etc. there was no Martin Lewis summary of providers competing for your custom.

there were terrible financial crises too. Mortgage providers seemed less inclined to extend a term or flex at all. In 1991 1% of all mortgaged properties were repossessed. People experienced negative equity. Depending on the mortgage and provider,
some people owed money still.

as I mentioned up thread. Houses were a different proposition. My parent’s 1970s new build came with chicken wire fence, no soft or hard landscaping, no central heating, no double glazing, no fitted kitchen, no tiling in the bathroom, no flooring. Not saying this was a bad thing; at least you got a chance to buy cheaper. Older homes were available that needed modernising; so, no inside bathroom, possibly only a kitchen in a lean-to if it was a terrace, no heating lots of repairs. Again, was this a bad thing? No. At least you were in there. Now, the passage of time means this sort of property has already been upgraded and even slightly shabby at a lower price is rare.

the other driver for property prices going up is women working; double the wages in a market that is not flooded with homes and of course the price will go up to match the income. Again; I can’t see women working as a bad thing (!) but circa 1970s and 80s it just wasn’t feasible for most people to run dual careers; no maternity leave, very few nurseries.

i think it IS harder for generations coming through. How galling it is to be told otherwise comes through on here, however, it’s also possible to think that you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb spending wise. There are so many consumer habits that weren’t there in previous generations. Big weddings, hen do’s, cars, phones, subscriptions, eating out, holidays,
days out, new kitchens,
home makeovers. It’s tough when all
these things get normalised but worth remembering that they were not always there.

How old were your parents when they started work - and how old were you and your husband?

Was your mother a dinner lady before having children, or did she have more lucrative employment prior to that?

Once your children can support themselves and inflation diminishes your mortgage you will become more affluent. It seems a long way off now but it really isn't.

I think the polarization here is the result of Just World hypothesis. The unwritten rule that many of us internalize which says that good things happen to good people. People very rarely acknowledge how much of their success is due to luck or privilege and very often over focus on their own efforts to explain their success. In reality, success, however you measure it, is probably a combination of hard work, careful planning and luck.

I also think there is some willful blindness in boomers - because they are the generation who overwhelmingly voted to take away things like free university education. If they dont blame the challenges younger people face on the people themselves, they may have to face the fact they have changed the world so future generations will not be as fortunate as they are.

Again, re: wilful blindness of boomers voting to take free education away, in the 1970s about 8% completed a degree. That figure is now around 37%. So, debate aside of whether it’s better to have broader, poorly
funded access to education or narrow, better funded access to education or whether it’s possible to do both, historically you must acknowledge that only a minority of boomers benefited? A lucky minority I grant you, but a minority none the less so the comment re: re wilful blindness of a generation is a bit sweeping.

My parents started work at 17, DM as a trainee SRCN and DF as a naval pilot officer trainee. Now, both would be expected to have degrees before beginning their training. My grandpa started working at 14, sweeping factory floors before being selected for the draughtsman's office, and eventually ended his working life as Head of engineering standards for Concorde. There is no equivalent path now.

@Hotflushesandchilblains I don't think the post-war generation voted to take anything away from an increased student intake. Whether you think it was worth doing is a different question. When I went to university, Bristol in 1974 for full disclosure, there was a very rigorous filtration system. If you took CSEs, you wouldn't qualify, only O levels counted. Then three academic A levels, and for Bristol then the minimum was 3 x B grades. So fewer were accepted and enrolled, but they had already proven that they were among the smartest. I think a bit more selection early doors would help to restore the value of a degree... because it doesn't have much value now.

I don't think OP ungrateful....she's never once in her post asking/ expecting any more handouts from her parents.....she's merely venting at the state of affairs with the financial landscape and cost of living these days...and rightly so. I think you might have misunderstood her gripe

Just to put a different perspective on this as someone who has just retired - we bought our own house at ages twenty one and twenty three - a run down end of terrace that needed doing up completely. We were only allowed to borrow 2 1/2 x my husband's wage and 1 x my wage, you definitley couldn't borrow more than that. It was a 25 year mortgage so in 25 years it was paid off! We did move to a slightly better house when we had kids but we kept the same length of mortgage and just paid more as we had better jobs.At one point interest rates were 15% and my entire salary went on the mortgage each month so we simply cut back on expenses. We were really poor!! However one other difference is that we started our first home with EVERYTHING second hand and mismatched (except our bed), there were no mobile phones, and the only entertainment expense was the TV licence. We had one car and hubby dropped me off for work every day, which as he started earlier than me meant I had to hang around waiting to start my job! We never ate out and there weren't really many fast food places except fish and chip shops. So yes I am very happy to have paid off my house in my forties, but our standard of living was WAY lower than most people expect and experience now.

But that’s my point I bought one in 2020 and it lasted a year Almost to the day after the guarantee ran out an LG which I believed was a decent brand too.

as for the usual 15% argument, my ex-husband bought a house and practically two weeks later it hit 15% but it was backed down again within a matter of weeks. It was never a sustained 15% because variable mortgages were all that was on offer. it was very rare to fix your mortgage in the 90s. The average for 1990 was still 10.5 which I’m not saying is nice and comfortable, But given the multiples were so much lower

It's not a judgement on how people live now, it's a fact of life. I may be a "boomer" but all my expenses have gone up, too. I have WiFi, phone, laptop etc. I do live in the same world as my son and his family so see all this. I didn't have these expenses when I had a young family (and was a single mother for part of that time) - because, as I stated previously, they did not exist then. I'm not saying how young families should spend their money, I know you have to have these things. Life is different now, as my early family life was very different from my great, great grandmother who was widowed with a baby in 1867 with a miner's pension of 1/6 a week. It's the price of progress.

I'd swap your life for mine. I'm 47 and I have 21 years of mortgage to pay off. So I'll be paying off my mortgage until I retire.

My kids share a room as we can't afford a bigger house. I've always worked full time, went back to work when DDs were 9 months old. So quality of life is pretty low despite reasonable salary, because of house prices.

I don’t think anyone actually voted to take away free university education? I believe the Blair Government took the decision but it wasn’t in their manifesto. If you blame anyone blame the Scottish Labour MPs who voted for it despite it not impacting Scotland. I don’t believe the Gov would have had a majority to pass it without those Scottish MPs (I stayed up to watch the debate and vote).

They benefitted because they could get good jobs without a degree. Nowadays a degree is far too often used as a weeding out blunt instrument by employers which means youngsters need one for a good job. A lot of students have noreal interest in going to uni but feel they have to, or indeed may have to for some jobs/professions!

It’s not Wi-Fi, mobiles and laptops that are stopping youngsters from buying houses. It’s the almost exponential rise in rents and house prices compared to flat lining wages.

Well said. I don't live in the UK, but when I was young there was a far bigger percentage of homeowners in my country than in the UK. Reading MN you would think that several decades ago everyone in the UK owned their own place and that young people are so much worse off, it's just not true. I have been waiting for ages for someone to point that out (I didn't like to do it myself as I don't live there.)

As in the UK when young people here did buy their first home they scrimped and saved to pay the deposit and the mortgage, they relied on most things being second hand, they didn't immediately replace the kitchen and bathroom, if they were grotty and outdated then they just lived with it until their financial situation improved.

You were talking about the 80s, I pointed out that I purchased my washing machine in the 2000s - probably around 2010. Some of my friends have fairly new washing machines, I haven't heard of anyone who has had to replace one in a short amount of time. My ex-DH recently had his repaired, so it's nonsense to say they can't be.

As for 15%, I'm not in the UK and our interest rates were quite a bit higher than that when I got my first mortgage, and it didn't back down within a matter of weeks. Young people aren't the only ones to suffer. Maybe you should read a few books on people's lives in earlier times - I could lend you one about the downturn in farming where I live and how many people were forced out of their farms, many of which had been in the family for generations.

You think kids sharing a room is a modern thing? 😅When I was young most kids shared a room with their siblings, you could have quite large families living in average houses, boys in one room, girls in another. I attended the funeral of a relative just the other day and her husband spoke of her sharing a room with her two sisters.

@Yourcatisnotsorry We are slightly too young to be boomers but are older Gen X. We haven't had a mortgage for 20 years just like the scenario you described, we have made far more than 200k. If someone had only made that much then they were not very good at the game or had some difficult personal circumstance.

First of all homeownership in the uk is declining, 85% of pensioners own a home, a pretty massive percentage imo - pretty close to "everyone". Mortgages obviously weren't all that hard to obtain, or there wouldn't be so many older homeowners.
And why are you under the impression that people don't scrimp and save? It just takes longer because the amounts are larger and first jobs don't pay enough to get a mortgage even if we wanted to.
I'm also not sure why you think we're all buying brand new furniture and renovating instantly. We're not, obviously.

Spectacularly missing the point that housing costs have risen enormously whilst wages have stagnated. Most young workers can’t buy a home let alone think about buying new furniture. They’re paying a huge proportion of their wages on rent, usually to elderly landlords who’ve bought up properties to augment their pensions!