… to think that no one wants to speak up for the younger generation?

[SnowBells]

I don't know what it is. Maybe political correctness gone mad.

Pensioners who are already wealthy get winter fuel allowance, etc. Each time this kind of stuff gets mentioned on things like Question Time or something, people shout and whistle, showing complete disregard for the subject, and no real debate can happen.

I am not talking about the pensioners who aren't well off. But a huge proportion of pensioners did profit from the higher house prices - something not likely to happen for the younger generation.

Our kids have to pay to go to uni. My generation will retire much, much later. We also have to pay for inflated house prices.

And yet, there will be people who say 'but we've paid our taxes'. Well, we pay taxes and our kids will, too, but we are likely to get A LOT less back. I just feel there's a huge generational wealth divide. And I wonder why no one wants to discuss this properly? Why do people want to stop a debate before it has even had a chance to happen?

Everyone will die. Your legacy is the next generation. So why not speak up for what essentially will be your only legacy?

amicissimma

I think the others have already replied to your post sufficiently. Housing is the single most expensive expenditure these days. If this has gone up by XXX%, then it does not matter if a washing machine is now half the cost than before.

I admit that clothes or so might be cheaper now (Made in China!), but quality has also gone down massively, meaning you need to buy more often. How do I know that? I still have a coat I wear that used to belong to my gran. It must be over 30 years old (gran died in the early 80s). I wore it for years through high school (classic design, so works well with anything). And yet, it looks as good as new. They don't make them like that anymore these days. I'm a little worried we are losing the skills to make quality things.

amicissimma

You have to look who those people are - sure, the baby boomer generation, like my PiLs paid less than 10% of their salary into mortgage (bought cheaply a while back) in 2010.

My generation pays more around 50% of their income into housing.

Average of that would 30%… as in your example.

How old were you when you bought your first flat? Plus inflation was very high through the 70s into the end if the 80s, so a high initial mortgage payment rapidly reduced in comparison - PLUS, as previous posters on this thread have pointed out, you also benefited from MIRAS, so the costs are not at all comparable.

My parents were both working class, first to go to university with grants, bought their first flat aged 22 on my dad's training contract income, no deposit required (yes this did happen in the late 70s), it cost about 1.2 times his gross salary. They traded up two years later, aged 24, to a 2-bed house that cost just under twice my dad's then salary. In the early 80s they bought a very nice house in a very nice area (needed some work, the previous owners nicked all the carpets too) - it cost 2.6 times my dad's salary at the time. They still live there. To afford the same house now at 3.5 times income someone would need to earn over 120k per year. Local median salaries where they live are less than 20k. There are vanishingly few graduate jobs locally. Not SE.

amicissimma: at a rough estimate my parents pay less than 15% of their income in food and housing (no housing costs apart from maintenance); I pay over 65% of my net household income in the cost of food and housing. Our actual household incomes are numerically about the same. My parents are on pensions. Does that explain something of the statistical effect of the average.....?

amicissima

I can only speak for me and my friends - back in 2007 (and I know this well), we paid 50% of our income into rent. Lucky landlord, eh?

And data is easily manipulated.

Hence, in science, statistics is questioned a LOT. My scientist DH rolls his eyes at the mention of statistics.

Every single one of these threads always comes back round to house prices.

But the point is that that data doesn't tell you anything at all about how the cost of housing is generationally or geographically distributed. Neither does it show you the massive inflation in house prices over the last 12 years - because most houses were bought before then and a fairly large percentage of them are mortgage free.

train

I think we've been telling amicissima that several times (in different ways), but the penny doesn't drop.

The majority of home owners, amicissima, is of a certain age. They bought their houses a long time ago for a lot less money than needed today. At the same time, their wages have likely increased. Hence, the low % of income spent on housing in data.

Younger people typically spend a lot more.

amicissima

Look at this distribution (from ONS):

Focusing on the household reference person (HRP) who is the oldest full-time worker in most households or a person chosen from the household based on their age and economic activity status, 76 per cent of those aged 65-74 owned their own homes - the highest across all age groups. The proportion of owner occupiers among those aged 25 to 34 has declined from 58 per cent in 2001 to 40 per cent in 2011.

snowbells - interesting link; and of course the owner-occupiers in the oldest group are the least likely to be mortgaged (so will likely have very small housing costs) and the youngest group the most likely to be mortgaged (so will have very high housing costs).

All the available data shows that objectively, yes, young people today do have it harder. This is partially obscured by the usual cosmetic and technological standard of living increases (of course current university accommodation looks plush compared to the 1980s; of course consumer durables seem nicer. I doubt that most 25-year-olds wouldn't swap their iPhones for a house and stable job though). That's partly how modern capitalism works: it buys you off from noticing how exploited you are with ever shinier toys. It's human nature to overlook all the things you had and think others are somehow getting a better deal. What's both upsetting and puzzling is that from the boomer generation this amounts to acting jealous of their own children: I don't understand why more boomers don't say "gosh young people today have it dreadfully hard compared to when were were young. Now we didn't have as many clothes but we did have optimism, freedom, good jobs with good prospects and reasonable hours, the opportunity to have a family life, a genuine popular culture which revolved around our generation's interests, no-one suggesting we should be answering emails all weekend. How can we expect young people to pay enough taxes to keep us in a comfortable old age with good healthcare and a happy community if they don't have the opportunity to earn well and have and house their own families in turn? If they're overburdened who is going to look after us when we need it?"

But most older people don't say things like that - instead you just get the 15% interest rate kind of stuff, you don't work hard enough lower your expectations we paid in it was harder for us" competition. If you mention something that is just incontrovertibly true, they gloss over it as if you haven't spoken (for example: try telling my parents and their friends, for example, that in a professional job these days it's a routine expectation that you'll work 60-70 hours a week, including answering emails and dealing with work from home, and how you recall your dad coming in at 6:10 on the dot every night and taking three-week holidays every summer.... well, it's tumbleweed. Perhaps with a small guilty silence before returning to complaining that young people seem so stressed all the time....)

Someone upthread was saying they were not going to be well off after helping their four children through university and with house deposits. but don't you get the point? If things were as they were 40 years ago you wouldn't have to.

If things were as they were 40 years ago, it's doubtful all four would have gone to university.

Wouldn't it have been silly to buy property in a declining market? Where would the sense have been. Only now after five years of deep recession has property started to increase again. Perhaps youth has been excercising some common sense.

it buys you off from noticing how exploited you are with ever shinier toys

Oh indeedy (shinier and obsolescent) .... but it's not BB producing them is it ?

Trouble is that it's a global thing with previous gen profitting from cheap oil ($20-50/bl) and energy with 3 billion population, and the West having a vast and overwhelming powerbase.

Now oil will be $100++, forever essentially, and the rise of the East and their ever increasing slice of an effectively shrinking resource pie to be divided between 7-8 billion.

It's not hard to see why relatively speaking the current generation are finding it hard to grab a slice of that pie.

So while the picture that is painted for the UK is accurate, the real drivers economically are global.

I can't understand it when people say I paid my Taxes.

Don't they also understand that those same taxes have been used along the way to fund education, infrastructure, hospitals etc.

"Payed my Taxes"doesn't equate to a savings fund.

In the 70s lots of people did not go to uni, they went straight to full time work at 15 or 16. So retiring at 65 = 50 years of working. 50 years of paying taxes and national insurance.

I still have my old pay slips from the 70s and I will look up and see how much I earned and how much my mortgage was to work out the % (not for a bun fight, but just for comparison). I'm another one who had a flat with not much in it. A second hand fridge, no washing machine or TV, a side board from the Sally Ann, book shelves made from bricks and a plank of wood and bits and pieces from various family members.

The slightly younger baby boomers who left school at 15 would I think be 57/58 now so still working paying taxes and NI. They will be for several more years. Many of them are renting too because they lost their jobs, homes etc. during the high interest rate days and had to start all over again.

There are winners and losers in every age group.

I do feel for the younger generation OP. The first thing to go was the EMA for poorer teenagers staying on at school......Nobody seemed to care much here on MN or anywhere else.

I have two sons still living at home (17 and 18) I worry about their future and the debt they will have if they go to university. My eldest two are still paying off students loans in their early 30s.

People my age paid their National Insurance contributions on the promise of a basic state pension. The key word is "insurance" when you pay into such a scheme you are entitled to get back what you were promised and not be means tested and have is stolen from you because you also chose to take out a private pension. Or because you were careful all your life and have savings.

Everyone (apart from the very rich) struggles when they are young and newly married/setting up home, we did as well.

Of course young people are getting a bad deal. It's pure daftness the number going to university these days. They get in with very basic A level grades that people our age would never have got a place with. Then they have to take out loans to pay for a degree that isn't that good from a university that isn't that good either.

Some degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on, yet young people will be paying off loans for years for something that just wasn't worth the money. Many young people I taught who now have degrees are working in jobs they could have got at age 18.

We need to give young people more realistic expectations and have on the job training and apprenticeships so they don't start their adult lives with massive debts.

You didn't need degrees then for many jobs you do though eg teaching,engineering....

Also we're not talking about those just starting up but all families.

And re pensions sorry but we have paid in just the same thanks.Utterly sick of this sense of entitlement from older groups.We have and are paying our pensions.Just like you what the country can afford to give back is less.Unlike you we accept that.The older generation like to just stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to accept it as if somehow they're more deserving.

They're not.

I sympathise with both camps, and suspect that the emotional (moaning) reaction to circumstances of modern life has far more to do with disappointment than with relative income & expenditure indices. Every generation feels short changed by modern life.

I am a MC, middle of the road, average joe in my late fifties, with children in their thirties, and do see things from both sides.
On my part, as with many of my generation, I was in sight of retirement, only to be told that I cannot officially retire for years beyond the date I had planned for. I am already tired out by working, in a way I could not have imagined even 5 years ago, and the prospect of continuing to the new pensionable age fills me with worry. I have no private pension because (like so many women in my age group) I am now divorced and the expected 'family income in old age' went out of the window with the ex. I own a decent home which will now need to be sold to pay for my care in old age, so I cannot even ensure that my children will gain from the assets I have managed to accrue over a lifetime.

Along with many of my generation, I feel utterly cheated. The expectations, on which my life was planned, were not pipe dreams but 'realities' sold to me by successive governments. I may understand why it has all gone to hell in a handcart, but understanding doesn't make me feel any less resentful that I was sold a deal which guaranteed me retirement at 60 with a pension, and the opportunity to pass the fruits of my lifetime to my children.
Just at the point when my generation need to benefit from the 'deal', the government have reneged on the promises. It is not really much surprise that we are bitter, and moan about it.

The next generation down have their own resentments, which have been outlined here in detail and are utterly justified. I have one child who has made it into home ownership with her DH, on their own, at the huge cost of having any kind of a life outside of work, The other child would never have attained the home ownership goal without my support. They feel just as cheated of expectation as my own age group, because they quite reasonably believed the "work hard and you can have it all" rhetoric.

And the youngest? the up and coming? someone told them they could have glittering futures if they had a degree. Of all the generations, they perhaps have the most justification for resentment. It is hard to swallow discovering that years of education may buy you a job pumping petrol or serving coffee but not put you even close to the career plan which was supposed to enable your future.