to think if young people spent less on clothes/beauty treatments/gadgets,

[loftladder]

they would be far more likely to be able to save for big things like deposits for a house. I work with people of a wide age range. Those in their 20's and 30's bemoan the fact that they cant afford to buy a house/car/other large item. however, these are the people who visit the beautician regularly for nails/waxing/highlighting/tanning, buy at least a couple of items of clothing per week, and go on expensive holidays/change their phone as soon as a new one comes out..............have they never heard of saving, will the world end if they dont get their nails done, or use a good old bic razor. And are a couple of holidays a year essential. I may be a bit old fashioned, but i managed to do without any of these things, and it never did me any harm!!!

Apologies for typos and auto corrects...

I do think you are all missing the point. Back in the good old days when you could still buy a house for £2.50 and have change for a bag of chips it was still almost impossible to save up for a deposit if you were also paying rent or if you already had children. That hasn't changed.

What has changed is that young people lived with their parents until they could afford their house. Now they expect to move in with their partner, have kids and then save up, and it just doesn't compute.

Frogspawn I think you've underestimated those expenses too. Coffee and a sandwich is a damn sight more than £1 a day. Sandwiches where I work cost £2+ and the coffee is about £1.60, so when you increase that to £4 x 5 days x 100 that's £2000 before you even start.

Poppingin has said it brilliantly.

popping....i am so not out of touch. Despite fact me and DH have degrees and good jobs now, our background was far from wealthy. DH lived in what would be classed as true poverty, and throw in some physical and emotional abuse. I came from quite a poor background too, had 3 jobs during my university days, so i completely understand your fear of poverty. Although we have a good education, we are not in especially highly paid jobs, so our DCs have had no help from bank of mum and dad. But you are right about the gap between has and has nots, and that is getting wider.

Another one here who does not spend on luxuries at all but still cannot save for a property. We never go out drinking, or for dinner, I have a haircut every 6 months if that, I cut dh's hair with clippers, the only new clothes i've bought in the last 2 years are maternity clothes (bare basics), I don't get my nails done, we don't have internet or sky, we shop at aldi, no holidays... The list goes on. The only luxury would be my phone contract, but it's the only internet access I have.

We still couldnt save for a house, and then dh lost his job a few weeks ago so now we are even more flat broke! A house is completely out of our reach at the moment!

loft but the point is that even though your background is not a wealthy one, you had better employment opportunities AND housing was cheaper. As I said upthread, when you were buying property, the average house was about 4x the average wage. Now it's around 10x.

I don't begrudge you (or my parents, or my ILs) that at all. But to say that the reason I can't afford a house is because I spend too much on coffee and have a smartphone is so galling. Can't you see that?

"I do think you are all missing the point. Back in the good old days when you could still buy a house for £2.50 and have change for a bag of chips it was still almost impossible to save up for a deposit if you were also paying rent or if you already had children. That hasn't changed."

That's just not true, tallulah. A lot has changed. The ratio of average salaries to average house prices is bizarrely different to that of a generation ago. Saving for a deposit is only one side of buying a house. A lot of people could have 20 grand in the bank and still be unable to buy anything.

And lots of people did rent a generation ago. The history of this country is riddled with stories of rent inflation, exploitative landlords and overcrowding. Unfortunately, right now it looks like we are going backwards.

So young people can save if they live rent free? really? Well I never.

For a couple, £625 a month for a studio flat in Croydon, £81 a month council tax, electricity, gas, about £300 a month (for two) on season tickets to zone 1 ...

I buy reduced supermarket sandwiches whenever I see them and bung them in the freezer - never pay more than 80p (and sometimes I pick them up for 40p) and I take my own coffee and milk to work - a latte is a weekend treat. And I quite enjoy that little bit of stingyness .

I'm in a naice SE market town. At 22 I got my mortgage. Which we're still paying.

Fast forward 13 years.

We pay our shop floor staff a living wage, not minimum wage. There is no way they can afford to get on the housing ladder here. They are stuck renting. If your stuck throwing half your income away on rent each month why not treat the rest as disposable?

I'm 23 and due to struggling financially I've had my hair cut once in the past year and spent £25 on new clothes in that time.

Now money isn't a struggle then I'll get my hair done maybe 4 times a year, I use a reasonably expensive hairdresser but they do an amazing job. I'll probably not spend more than a couple of hundred pounds on clothes for myself in a year either, including underwear etc since I tend to wear things I like till they get holes in or get too scruffy to wear. I never have waxes/tans/nails/any of that other beauticiany stuff.

We will however be saving a chunk of our income each month with the aim being to be able to buy a house in around 3 years time. Houses in our area cost around £200,000 for a 3 bed semi which is what we'd aim for (1 dc due very soon and we're likely to have a second one day hopefully).

Our only 'big' expense is us both having new cars on finance because it works out cheaper per month than having to take a loan for a much lesser amount (and therefore get a much older and likelier to break car and have higher monthly payments) and if anything on the cars breaks it's fixed under the guarantee.

By the way our rent is £675 which is cheap for where we live and we pay £128 council tax. We're just lucky we earn enough to allow us to save.

tallulah, I made a mistake on the sandwich/coffee

Should have been £5 per day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year

So £2,500 rather than £500

Which barely makes a dent in the house value.

Some utter naivety on this thread. Bonkers.

YANBU I'm amazed at people who claim to rent with no hope of buying and/or have no pension plan in place yet they seem to fritter money away like it is out of fashion.

God knows how any young people (by that I mean under 35) can get a foot onto the property ladder nowadays without some financial leg-up from parents. House prices now are outrageously expensive and way out of reach for most people.
But I do also agree that it's amazing how much money you can spend in a year on everyday luxuries without realising it. When you add it all up, it's quite shocking really!

I don't think my frittering on the occasional Costa and holiday is going to make much of a dent in my debt

tallulah you're right. That is a fundamental change. When DH and I married, we ha dn't previously lived together. We had been engaged for 2 years and saving up till we could 'afford to get married' i.e. till we could afford to buy a house. I lived with my parents (though still paid them some rent) and DH lived in a grotty little bedsit with no heating, no kitchen and a shared bathroom (rent for that was £12 a week!)
Even then, we still needed a loan from DH's parents to help us pay the deposit though. House was £12,700 and we could only get a mortgage of £10,000 (that was 2.5 times DH's salary plus 1 times mine).
I'm sure that a couple in the same jobs now as we had then wouldn't be able to afford the same house that we did though. Relative to income, houses are massively more expensive now.

YANBU - I have often wondered the same thing. I've also noticed that it is often the lowest earners that fritter the most on hair, nails & permatans etc!

YABU, 2-bed flats start around 300-320k where I live in the SE. A 20% deposit would be 60k plus another 10k+ in fees, stamp duty etc. The local median salary is c.26k. Not getting a frothy coffee, some cheap clothes and a spray tan is hardly going to save up 70k. The young people you know in their 20s and 30s are probably pretty despairing at the attitude of people like you. (BTW 15 years ago the 300k properties were c.100k and the median local salary around 22k. Notice the problem here?)

NK maybe it's because they've got no shitting chance in hell of saving up for a house so they'd rather have fun

NK what you mean is "the lowest earners that you know" surely?!

I'm a low earner, and many of my friends are. Not one of us fritters money away on those items.

OP you also haven't thought about the fact that we currently have negative real interest rates - CPI and RPI inflation is massively higher than any interest rate you can get on savings. So those who are saving disposable income are quite literally seeing it shrink in real terms as they do so. You'd have to be able to save loads to offset this effect, which makes it even harder for saving to have any impact. Food prices are rising again because of commodity price speculation in the financial sector, esp for commodities such as coffee. The price differential between home made and shop bought food is a lot less than it was - mainly because big retail/service sector chains underpay their workers - but a coffee at Costa is not a lot more expensive than making a decent one myself. Lots of young people now work in jobs which are freelance or insecure or non-office based: email access is often a basic requirement of the job and a smartphone contract is the cheapest way to get this.

You are incredibly out of touch. Asset prices have shot up in the last 30 years whilst consumer durables have fallen massively as a proportion of the average income. A whole lot more of our economy is retail and services based than it used to be - if people stop spending on nails and coffee where are jobs elsewhere to take their place?

Fast forward 20 years. Who is going to pay for your pension, and how? Think about it for a while....

The OP asks an interesting question. However, it is an over simplification in some senses, yes saving money could help to buy a car or some "large items" but unlikely to scratch the surface of a house deposit unless they want to live in the Welsh Valleys or the Outer Hebrides! But it does highlight the fact that people of the younger generation arent as used to saving up for things, they do have more opportunities to have things more immediately than their parents or grandparent. That is something they have got used to. Yes you will always upset people with generalisations, but it does follow a general trend.

As with most things in life there are many sides to the story. There are genuinely people who will never get to buy their own home, I have friends in that cateogory. They just dont earn enough, never will, and whilst some of them feel frustration that they will always rent, they also want their holidays and a few treats / pamper days, it would be far too simplistic (and insulting) to tell them that they could be saving for a deposit. It could take up to 7 years to save just for a deposit not including all the other expenses. Maybe they dont want to put their lives on hold for that long, I can understand that! !

And anyway, there are people who dont have any desire to buy a home, have a mortgage, get into that amount of debt. OK they might say they'd like to, but when they see how much it costs, it puts the dampers on it. What they say they want versus what they can actually do are sometimes two different things. Its a far off dream they can't achieve. Thats life. I dont have a TV or gadgetry or expensive holidays because I was able to get on the property ladder in my early 20s when salaries and house prices had a connection (nowadays they just don't bear any relationship!) and so my monthly outgoings have always been spent on the boring stuff first before any luxuries! I see people going on 2+ holidays year in, year out, thats their choice!

I think its just pure snobbiness too that they're being judged for tans and nails. What if they were buying second hand paperbacks and discount theatre tickets . . .

Still wouldn't be enough to save for a house! Its really depressing. And doubly depressing when the previous generation or those with high incomes don't realise its not just a matter of choice.