to feel screwed over by our society, can't afford a home, can't afford children, can't afford car

[Lauranda]

I'm in my early 30s, had a great up bringing, do a job I like and got married last year. I do feel very lucky.

However where we live in the south east, all we can afford to rent is a badly converted 1 bed flat with a damp problem. Can't really save much and are very economical with our money so can't see ever affording anything bigger and could never bring up a child here.

My parents managed to get a large 4 bed Edwardian house on one sallery when I was growing up and dads job level was about the same as dh. No way could with double sallarys afford anything near that lifestyle.

Parents keep saying my time will come, but looking at the statistics that seams very wishful thinking. Parents have kindly offered 15k to help get a house but to be any use would need much more than that and to pray interest rates never rose much.

Am I alone in just being unable to afford children even though we both work full time?

I haven't read the previous posts, just OP but IMO you find money when you have children, yes they cost for bits and pieces, but there are so many great 2nd hand sales around, mum2mum market being one very regular one. Plus people are very generous, giving bits and pieces all the time. You stop going out, so that saves cash, and they don't really eat much, if you bf then that's 6 months free food, it's just nappies and own brand are pretty cheap.
Yes it's a massive struggle getting on housing ladder, but people are doing it later and later these days, so don't stress that it's never going to happen.
The SE is massively over priced, it's a crazy bubble, have you considered moving elsewhere?
Don't despair, it will happen x

I'm really torn with this one. On the one hand I totally see where the OP is coming from as it is unfair that previous generations have had it easier with regards to buying property and seeing equity within those homes rocket so they can then move up the property chain with some ease.

However look back to the generations before the baby boomers and you will see a very different picture where many people never owned their own property and didn't expect to either.

OP you do have choices: stay in the SE or move to a more affordable area which obviously won't be as convenient for seeing friend, parents and having free childcare.

Even if you stay in the SE it doesn't mean you can't buy your own place eventually (lots of saving, work longer hours, do an extra PT job etc) and it certainly doesn't mean you can't have a baby. I think the dilemma you have is one which faces many people and whilst I have sympathy for that I also think you do just have accept that things aren't as easy now as they were for previous generations.

If I was the OP I think I would look at moving out of the area and consider renting more cheaply for the short term so I could save for a deposit.

Kids might not cost much for the first few months when they are babies, but if you factor in hundreds of pounds a month in childcare costs when you have to go back to work then of course they cost a lot.

We expect to have things that my grandmother never did. It isn't that our generation is being stitched up, we have higher wants and expectations

too right I expect more than my grandparents did, humankind has prospered and progressed massively since then, I want a share of it.
If the tide is rising my ship should be floating!!

The things is, with the rise in prosperity of other countries like China, Britain will become less wealthy. This is clearly happening in the US. We can't just assume that living standards will get better over time. A quick look at history will show us that that is not how the world works.

fan the biggest increase in homeownership occurred between 1970-1990 so your stat from the start of the 70s is misleading. Owner-occupation reached a peak then started declining.

Those who claim it has always been as tough to buy - then why are the majority of the over-50s owner-occupiers then, large proportions of them mortgage free? They must have been buying just when you claim it was just as hard as today. So, just on a basic level without even looking at the figures, when I go out and out in the UK and I'm surrounded by owner-occupied housing owned by people 50+, how is that? How did all those houses become owner-occupied, lots of them before two-income households were the norm? It patently just can't be the case that buying a house has always been as difficult or more so than today. Houses for most of the second half of the twentieth century simply did not cost between 10-20 times local median income (as our city council data shows average prices are where I live).
In fact, for most of the postwar-2000 period it was easier despite one income households, strict income multiples, no smartphones etc. Wage inflation, MIRAS, incentives like Right to Buy etc. all helped. There was a brief spike in real terms in affordability in 1988-9 just before the Lawson boom ended, but the 1990s was then one of the most affordable times to buy property, average prices reaching a low of 2.9 times average income in the mid-90s. The real spike in asset prices, dwarfing by a mile any of the peaks and troughs during the 1950-2000 period, came after 2001.

Obviously the prewar period is different, but then the entire point of the postwar economic settlement, Beveridge, the welfare state etc. was so that the majority of people didn't have to live like they did in the 1930s. Unless you want to go back there (many neoliberals and Tories quite frankly and openly do), then it's a specious comparison.

We expect to have things that my grandmother never did. It isn't that our generation is being stitched up, we have higher wants and expectations

Goodness, it's pretty entitled of us to expect things like modern medical care, technological advancement, the Pill, an indoor bathroom, which my grandmother didn't expect in 1950... She was a cinema usherette married to a plumber and the first on her estate to get a phone, a TV for the Coronation and an indoor loo - what an entitled madam! Her grandmother had never heard of such a thing and only had a chamber pot to wee in, I have no idea why she had such entitled expectations compared to previous generations.

You have two jobs, parents to give you cash and presumably your health....quit whining about how unfair it is and fucking DO SOMETHING. Are you waiting to have it handed to you on a plate?
No sympathy for people who cant be arsed to work towards what they want, instead choosing to whinge about how its societies fault they dont have what they want.
Grow up.

wasnt it Thatcher and the loosening of the financial markets, casino banking, then subprime lending and various other things all feeding in together

as for this with the rise in prosperity of other countries like China, Britain will become less wealthy
Whatever the 'experts' predict no one knows what will happen, the world economy is immensely complex and one small change can have massive and unforseeable ramifications.

There can be huge differences between the same generation too. I have friends who bought around 1998 and were in a position to purely as they met long term partners at this time. Just a couple of years later house prices had doubled and the rest of us had missed the boat.

At least these friends acknowledge that their present position is entirely down to luck and timing, they didn't know any more or work any harder just happened to meet long term partners sooner.

oh for sure a lot of it is down to luck, you do need some good luck to amplify the effects of good judgement!

Iseen depends on how invested the commentator is in the question - the stupider Kirstie & Phil style estate agent types will claim it was all about buoyant "demand" and planning restrictions, the UKIPPERS claim it was immigration, the HPC/MRA types claim it was feminism and women working, ZeroHedgers that it was a Bilderbergian plot by China to annexe all our Western currency.

Most serious economists would suggest it was caused by a combination of central bank policy after 911 to lower interest rates below levels they should have been, an environment of foolhardy credit expansion bubble-era thinking by banks, money coming out of the bursting of the tech stocks bubble in 1999, overreliance on erroneous mathematical models leading to mispricing of risk in the credit markets, and just general bubble era madness everywhere to be honest, including buy to let and ordinary people getting into stupid collective ways of thinking about property investment.

Lots of factors, but the big main ones are credit expansion, risk misallocation and central bank interest rate policy in 2001-2007 in the West. The BoE/Fed had explicit remits to target only consumer price not asset price inflation. So when asset markets started inflating, interest rates were kept lower than they should have been been because the central banks were turning a deliberate blind eye.

Oh and in countries like the US they allowed their housing bubble to deflate a bit after the subprime crisis - so housing values started to fall and the economy rebalance a little.

Here, in the UK, instead we propped up the housing market to save the banking sector through massive taxpayer guarantees and quantitative easing, which has started now to create another mini-bubble peak on top of the existing bubble values. Sensible as always in the UK

"We are all living fodder for an extractive elite"

^ This

Those who claim it has always been as tough to buy - then why are the majority of the over-50s owner-occupiers then

They were probably buying at a specific time in history when it was fairly easy to buy in London and the SouthEast. Most of the time it has not been easy.

A friend of mine said to me yesterday that London is now for the super-rich and the homeless...

There are no winners when you start comparing generations which is exactly the point I was making upthread, it is all just different. Every generation has its own challenges.

We bought our first home in 1985. DH and I both worked in central London, to get to work from the flat we bought we had a bus ride then a train journey then tube which was why it was affordable. Maximum mortgage was twice the larger salary plus once the lower but interest rates were about 12-14%.
DS and his GF are looking to buy now within travelling distance of London. Prices are way higher but amounts borrowable are higher and interest rates are far lower making them achievable for some.

I think it is hard now but it always has been in different ways. We all just have to get on with it

we lived in London and wanted kids. Moved to Edinburgh, still a great city and bought a 2 bed flat and now own a 3 bed flat with 2 boys aged 10 and 12. Why wait for SE to get cheaper, look for a job elsewhere.

whatever - I am not 50, but fairly close to it. I couldn't afford to buy in London. I moved out to somewhere cheaper to buy. Prices have gone up where I live, but there are still plenty of cheap properties for sale.

People looking to buy during the last ten years are in a far worse position than people who bought in the previous two decades. The graph in the link below shows this. People are just moaning or having higher expectations, things really are worse.

www.housepricecrash.co.uk/graphs-ftb-average-house-price-to-earnings-ratio.php

are not just moaning

whatever - I am not 50, but fairly close to it. I couldn't afford to buy in London. I moved out to somewhere cheaper to buy. Prices have gone up where I live, but there are still plenty of cheap properties for sale.

Yes I know. I am around the same age and did the same thing.