To wonder how the next generation will afford a house?

[Housepricewoes]

DH and I want to move to what will hopefully be our family home, in 2 years. Work commitments means we can't do it sooner but I'm stressing about how much house prices might rise in that time.

That got me thinking about how today's children will ever be able to buy a home.

I know it's a very British thing to aspire to home ownership but rightly or wrongly it is the norm.

Many of my friends and extended family have only been able to get on the property ladder with a significant hand out from the bank of mum and dad, but unless their circumstances drastically change, they are not going to be in a position to do the same for their children.

What do you think will happen about houses with the next generation?

'This must be the most overindulged generation of children in history. Whole class parties at a venue at 4. Multiple after school 'activities'. Smart phones 11. School trips to New York. Don't get me started on Proms.'

Bollocks! Plenty don't have any of those extravagances. EVERY generation is always looked down on by the previous ones as being spoilt and over-indulged.

My sister and I are in our 40s and had multiple after school 'activities', class parties in village halls, no phones, though, as they didn't exist then in smart form so no one had them.

Im just watching the first episode of How to gey a council house. The places and homes are so ugly. Why anyone would choose to live there when you can live in beautiful areas for so much cheaper with beaches, woods and surrounded by natural beauty, and buy a place as a couple on a low wage.

we own a council house. we live in zone 2 and it was the only house we could afford. we couldn't get the same floor space in a period place in our neighbourhood.

council estates vary enormously. we saw a few that were pretty rough loooking. but like all things there is variation. of course, while there is very little you can do externally (our house looks ok from the outside. not brilliant, but ok) you have full control over the inside. they are generally less ornate, but I have seen some pretty brilliant ex council houses.

oh, i would love to own a house on a beach. no jobs there though. but i love London too.

'The places and homes are so ugly. Why anyone would choose to live there when you can live in beautiful areas for so much cheaper with beaches, woods and surrounded by natural beauty, and buy a place as a couple on a low wage.'

Because they can't get a job in such a place? Or they would have to quit their low-wage job, find a LL to take them unemployed in all these mythical cheap places of natural beauty, and find another job there.

These beautiful cheap areas of natural beauty tend to be full of second homeowners and low in employment opportunities.

I don't have an i-pad, holidays abroad, buy coffee from Costa, have big parties, buy new clothes, go to the hairdresser, run a car, get takeways, go to the pub, my laptop is second hand and i have had it 5 years. I pay for swimming lessons, because that is a life skill, but I cant afford music lessons, or any other activity for dc.
I still can't buy a house.

They are low in employment opportunities if you mean low wages but you can buy a place if both of you are on minimum wage or close to it. Tax credits fund nearly all your childcare and you can be 5 minutes from the beach. Looks a lot less stressful than living in the areas on the show. The people had such bleak lives they were clinging on to and for what?

One massive difference now is that, whereas previously having a few O-levels got you into a better job than having no qualifications, the benchmark is now having a degree which involves a minimum of 3 years study and is more likely than not going to result in a big chunk of debt at the end of it.

How much did you owe when you started your 'professional' career maria?

Young adults these days aren't even starting with nothing, they are start on a minus amount ie, a load of debt built up just to give them a chance to make good.

expat come September, moving to England might be considered 'emigrating'

sometimes I look at my friends who moan they will never get on the property market and think well bloody work for it. they want a holiday every year, new phones and tablets and a brand new ready finished house but they don't want to put in any effort

But I and lots of others I know haven't had any of those things either: I'm in a high-skill job with four degrees and a decent salary and still can't buy, because even the doer-uppers in my bit of the SE are 320k+. Studio flats are over 200k. The local median household salary is just over 36k.

And I've worked 70-hour weeks for ten years and I can tell you even if I could afford a doer-upper I have no way of actually doing it up - all this "I learnt to do the plumbing myself" stuff isn't even on the table if your job requires a 10hr+ day (especially if you have a child as well). When am I going to learn to do up a house, in my (broken) sleep?

So many on this thread just catastrophically miss the fact that Prices. Are. Too. High. It is a bubble. Even if you've saved up a deposit. Even if you have help from mum and dad. Even if you have a high-powered job. A decent professional graduate salary for someone in their thirties is still nowhere near the amount required to buy anywhere in lots of the SE, and no, it is not normally easy (or even possible in some cases) just to move and find a job elsewhere. When people in the top income decile for the UK can't even buy at the bottom of the property market, no, it isn't just the same as for previous generations.

'They are low in employment opportunities if you mean low wages but you can buy a place if both of you are on minimum wage or close to it.'

No, I mean low employment opportunities - seasonal work on zero hours contracts. Yep, lenders fall all over employees like that. I live in just such a place.

Expat - my children are in their 40's and they had none of those things growing up. We weren't poor. Their friends didn't have them either.

I'm well aware that child poverty has gone up since the Coalition, which is a disgrace. But there's an odd disconnect on these boards, whatever cross-section they represent, between the angst over parties and proms and the concern over children's future housing costs. It'd be handy to at least have the money for a deposit on a rental flat. And the save up and wait mindset will serve them well whatever their future.

Unless we build some more homes, the problem will continue. There will be people with money to buy even at today's inflated prices. In London, there is a shortage of properties, not buyers. Ime, it's the young couples whose grandparents managed to buy in the 50's and die without having to sell their homes and pay for care, so their parents have inherited the cash to give them a boost. Or the ones who've saved up a deposit through moving in with their parents.

And in lots of the country, N.Ireland, Scotland, Cumbria, the North East, the Midlands, people are in negative equity and houses have not recovered from the post-banking collapse. Too early to see what the long-term effects of that will be.

DH and I are on just over £100k between us. We have ended up with a £320k semi detached doer upper in Surrey which is fine and the area we wanted but you would think we could have bought something pretty amazing on that sort of money. But we only bought last year and had to borrow half our deposit from DHs dad so to allow for paying that back, paying to do up the house and making sure we won't be shafted if the interest rates rise it's the best we could do.

Friends looking in the same area now are struggling to find anything under £400k as everything is sealed bids and going for £40-50k more than asking.

It isn't as crazy as London prices but the Home Counties have gone a bit mental!

And yes we were gifted the other half of the deposit from my parents. Everyone else I know who owns bought many years ago and/or has money in London property. Anyone I know who isn't on the ladder yet I don't think ever will be.

Total tangent here nikki but are you saying your deposit was half from your parents and half from your DH's parents but you are only paying his parents back?

Doesn't that feel a bit strange?

THe reason we have phones and tvs and new clothes isnot because we are richer today, it is because they are now very cheap. I remember when my parents bought our first tv and it cost a fortune.

How much can you raise if you sell all your gadgets and you live with no tv and laptop for a year? 500Pounds, 1K? You don't buy a house with that.

'Expat - my children are in their 40's and they had none of those things growing up. We weren't poor. Their friends didn't have them either.'

We weren't poor, either. And had birthday parties, ballet lessons and swimming lessons. Our friends did, too.

It had no bearing on house prices.

I don't think smart phones are cheap and children don't need them. Or their own tv's, or laptops, or tablets. They don't need flash parties or intercontinental school trips. Even my dd thinks the gc's have 'too much stuff'.

Expat - well it did for us, in that interest rates were 15%. Housing costs were directly relevant to the amount we had to spend.

I'm just pointing out that if times are changing and there is no longer the expectation that being able to buy is the norm, it might be a good idea to
scale things down now. Money in the bank will always be useful, whether to rent or buy.

ThE school trips are expensive indeed and they have gone mad. And smartphones.
But my post was in response to people saying they bought houses because they had no tv and wore second hand clothes. Tvs and clothes are much cheaper today and houses are very expensive so a second hand jumper wont give you the key to a house.

'Even my dd thinks the gc's have 'too much stuff'.'

So why does she let them have it? She can take it away and sell it and put the money in the bank. Or not buy it for them.

Thymeout you have won the "15% interest rate" bingo on this thread! Congratulations.

Seriously, 15% interest rates lasted for less than a year, and were substantially offset by MIRAS. First-time buyer interest rates today are around 6%+ (not these nice low rates that people get who have loads of equity, sorry to tell you); and real prices (prices adjusted for inflation) have more than tripled since the 1990s. Just an example: 6% of 300,000 is more than 15% of 100,000. 6% of 150,000 is more than 15% of 50,000. And the effect of MIRAS dampens that even more. But the capital borrowed today is 3 x greater. Have wages tripled in real terms since the 1990s?

Still think you were worse off with 15% interest rates?

Laquitar in the last thread like this several posters insisted that young people today couldn't buy houses because they spent too much on expensive coffees every day - and still carried on insisting that even when they were shown that saving the price of an expensive coffee every day would take eighty years just to save for the deposit needed on an average house in the South East, never mind the crest if the house.

I think I worked out that you'd have to drink the equivalent of sixteen shop-bought cappuccinos a day before giving them up meant you could save a deposit within five years.

Those who think the problem is smartphones and new jumpers are living in fantasy land.

My parents lived thru the fabled 17% interest rate. Their mortgage was £10,000. So, about £35,000 in today's money.
17% of £35,000, or 3% of £260,000?

And, again, many, many, many of us are living without all this "stuff".
And paying our 60-something landlord serious coin to live in an OK house in an OK area, spending our "disposable income" (ha ha) on re-plastering the walls, mending the garden fence, painting the walls, re-grouting the shower, because the LL will do fuck all. Because, if I move, another desperate family will grab my crumbling house near a good school with both hands.Because they can't afford to buy either.
And so it goes.

*rest of

I do agree that many of us will end up living in a worse place than our parents. My parents, the two junior civil servant baby boomers who.could afford a detached bungalow in commuting distance of London, now £450k, made some well timed moves and ended up worth over a million. They are supposedly looking to move to our commuter belt town, but to buy the equivalent of their sprawling mansion here would be a couple of million. DH and i are both doing well for ourselves- i earn the combined salary of both my parents at the peak of their careers, and dh earns even more. Yet my parents wouldn't even consider buying our (very nice) semi, it's much too small for them to downsize to, the two of them clearly need a five bed house to rattle around in.

i think you cant generalise too much because of the spread of ages and backgrounds of posters, but i would agree it is likely to be the case for many young families born of baby boomers

x-post traininthedistance!
It doesn't seem to matter how stark the actual facts are, does it? After all, you can prove anything with facts..