The reason young people can't afford to buy houses

[GrabtharsHammer]

Is because they all have iPhones and Sky telly.

So sayeth my mother.

Nothing at all to do with the ridiculous house prices then? They are baby boomers and bought their first house for a few thousand quid on my dads modest salary.

Apparently the youth of today just need to get rid of their gadgets and telly subscriptions and then they will easily afford a deposit and mortgage.

Are everyone's parents this judgemental and out of touch or am I just particularly lucky?

(Fairly lighthearted) AIBU?

In fact Capricorn76 you've just incompletely showed yourself to have absolutely zero understanding of property, so why don't you toddle off with your uniformed views?

Do you actually understand how buying at auction works? No. Thought not. The sheer stupidity is almost like religion... the denial of facts to maintain belief.

Working class people like you haven't a hope in hell of buying one of those properties. Do a teeny tiny bit of reading up and educate yourself a little bit.

Eh??? What Sky package and iPhone have you got that costs 2 grand a year???

I know someone who pays just over £100 a month for sky, so adding that to your phone bill that's pretty close to £2k a year.

The vast majority of people living in the inflated houses could not afford to pay that mortgage value today.
That is the flaw in the ponzi scheme.
The 80k workers houses inflated to 450k would be just that, workers houses.
For this to continue needs evermore people entering below, this has been supported by BTL for a decade. BTL with finance is over, legislation is seeing to that. It will take a few years to filter through.
Hopefully sanity will return once again.
A salient point would be a reduction of 30% valuation in London and the SE would only take us back to 2010, arguably still overpriced levels.

Too bad, Wayfarer. We aren't going to agree, and I was there, albeit as a child and teenager, which you weren't. I voted Remain by the way, so thanks for tarring me with your ageist brush.

I wonder how small family millennials with boomer ancestry will be regarded in years to come. Will they have to pay for their good fortune? Redistribute their wealth to poorer friends as they are no longer in the same boat? That'll be fun to watch.

Think it's time to step away from the keyboard YelloDraw......take a break and relax...

2 days a week working in McDonald's to earn about 9k. Er, no, try a day or 2 a week as a primary school supply teacher, living in the North East... Not holiday or sickness pay. No work in September or July or most weeks either side of half terms.

Well why on earth is she paying that much?

Basically my point is that for most people sky and iPhones do not cost the same as a deposit for a house. If my phone wasn't paid for by my business I'd be on a much lower tarrif and you can get sky cheaply.

I am extremely lucky and I own my house but I can see it's not as simple as just 'trimming the fat' and scrimping on Netflix to get on the housing ladder.

That's like telling a depressed person to 'get more sunshine' or a person with a metabolic disorder to 'eat less cake'.

It's a real shame that instead of listening and sympathising with each other we immediately go to finger pointing and name calling.

The generational divide in this country is horrifying and it's just going to get worse if we keep talking about 'greedy baby boomers' and 'lazy millennials'
How about when someone says they are in pain we believe them and try and work out why, and if our actions can help rather than just getting defensive.

I said that £9k a year is way below average for a full time worker over the age of 25 in London so bringing up anecdotes about pay rates for part time teachers in the NE is a bit irrelevant really isn't it?

I am extremely lucky and I own my house but I can see it's not as simple as just 'trimming the fat' and scrimping on Netflix to get on the housing ladder.

^100%

The facts are that living standards are worse and this generation is going to be the first to experience a decline in wealth. But noooo, it is just they buy too many frapachinos in starbucks! Lazy fuckers.

On what planet is 250k "affordable"? I was trying to say 250k was not affordable to single people on a 'normal' salary... and that 250k was about the cheapest you could get anything for...

Every generation has to make sacrifices to get on the housing ladder, and many succeed only because of some luck, or hard saving or family help. Way back up the thread, someone posted that Gordon Brown's predatory raid on dividend relief for pension schemes kick-started the BTL boom because the protection for pension savings was stolen, so final salary schemes no longer rolled up to fund adequate pensions and people looked elsewhere to replace that secure income stream, and found it by buying smaller houses that could be let at market rents, funded by mortgages, with the capital growth a nice bonus.

The Victorians built huge swathes of terraced homes, which are still more than acceptable, but no-one does that now because planning rules prevent it.

Through luck and babyboomers' birthdates we are fairly secure, but the outlook for DC is much less rosy. We are delaying retirement to fund the university costs and will sell up to share the proceeds so there's something for a deposit. Can't see it working otherwise.

You've got to look at it in context of how shit renting is, too. If you could get a council house or some security in renting, then maybe it wouldn't be an issue. But not being able to afford a house is really problematic in that it is very hard to plan your life, including things like children / work / childcare / children's education, if you could suddenly be asked to move at a month's notice through no fault of your own.

If you have a SAHP or a nanny, maybe not such a big deal - you find a new house, and get on with your life. You have to pay £Ks in moving costs though, and that is a big deal, and maybe your children have to get 2 or 3 buses to school, but if you have a SAHP or a nanny you can cope.

If you have a precariously balanced life with a school, a nursery, no car, a job, no work flexibility, and no spare money - you are going to struggle to hold it all together. You're going to lose the job and then how are you going to find somewhere to live at all?

Sorry, just to explain that point - the reason why that is relevant is because it's fair enough for exceptional levels of earning / saving to be required to buy a house, when buying a house is a niche activity for the privileged / heavily investment orientated. But it isn't. 50 years ago, you got a council house. you didn't need to have £30k in the bank and an upper quadrant salary just to have somewhere to live where you could rely on things basically staying in one place while you got on with your life. Now you do. is that fair?

A couple both earning £20k a year will be able to get a mortgage of £140k (3.5 x salary). How long do you think it would take that couple to save the £120k deposit they need capricorn?

A single person earning £25k would be able to get a mortgage for £100k (4 x salary). How long would it take them to save the £160k deposit they'd need capricorn?

People working part time on low wages have probably never been able to afford to buy, almost anywhere, apart from possibly pockets of very low house prices - small terraced houses can sometimes be bought for around £30k or less.

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-53375783.html

The problem now is that even couples of two people on above average salaries can't afford to buy in London/south east, or need very high deposits, which are hard or impossible to save for when renting. And people on lower salaries can't afford to live near work, or are trapped into renting at a monthly cost higher than a mortgage.

Everything else aside, it is extremely hurtful when a member of your family seems to have turned against your generation.

I have always been very close with my grandma but I have had to hide her on Facebook due her incessant posting about 'the pampered generation'
She posts about how a war would toughen us up (despite herself having never been alive during a war, a fact she conveniently misses out) and seems to be getting more radical by the day (why on earth would you want to send your grandkids to war that's insane!!) She posts things from Britain first about being allowed to say golliwog (her pet subject) and about bringing back the death penalty. At first I tried to engage with her about it trying to work out where it was coming from but she's old and I don't want to fight with her (any discussion would appear aggressive). She makes a virtue of being uninformed, three of her son in laws work for Nissan and during the referendum speaking about it was banned in her house despite her massive vote leave posters everywhere. She said 'I don't need to be told what to think, I made my mind up the second there was an announcement about the referendum and I am not going to read anything or watch any of the debates as I know my own mind'

She is a wonderful woman but she has changed so much recently, despite herself having an iPad, a kindle, Sky tv and a laptop she is vitriolic about young people using technology. She does this really mean impression of people taking selfies, and thinks it's hilarious so does it all the time despite it obviously making everyone uncomfortable. She also comments about what we spend our money on despite the fact we can afford it and have never asked for a penny off her.

It's an awful situation to be in and because she spends her days in the darkest echo chambers of the Internet she feels her views are totally justified and that she's the victim, even though NO ONE HAS EVER EEEEEEVER said anything about the baby boomers to her.
It's put a massive strain on our relationship, I have loads of friends and members of my family who have very different views to me but this is totally different, it's like a personality transplant.

Earning £9k a year in the NE isn't relevant to Londin house prices because house prices in the NE are generally much much lower. A 1 bed flat in London might cost £250k minimum but in some areas of the NE you could probably get similar for less than £100k (still couldnt buy it on a single income of £9k though)

While I don't doubt that some 'I want it all and will still moan that I can't save a deposit' folks exist some of the examples here are so far from my own experience as to be baffling.

In the real world: none of my peers are buying takeaway coffees every day. In the rural Midlands the nearest Pret is 44 miles away. We take homemade sandwiches or microwave leftovers/slow cooker bulk meals for lunch at work. The car is 14 years old and painstakingly maintained because an unexpected bill sets us back months in house savings. We've lost chunks of our savings due to unplanned rental house moves, once because the landlord defaulted on the mortgage and a court summons arrived for them in the post. We sit on a sofa donated by SIL because she couldn't fit it in her downsized house after a divorce. Our last foreign holiday was in 2008. I'm earning only pence per hour more than I did before going to university.

I'm not saying any of this for sympathy, in fact I count ourselves very lucky as we are almost there - another 6-12 months of saving in this shitty rental house and we will finally have our deposit. But it gives me the rage that people think our iPhone contracts will have had any impact on the bloody long time it has taken, or reflects on the wider problems with affordability, jobs, housing policy generally, NIMBYism and this bitter generational divide that has sprung up.

It is true in some cases, I know of someone who has a shiny new car every few years, lots of holidays to foreign countries (Dubai, Spain and australia this year alone) always has labelled clothes, the latest gadgets and lives in a rented home with 3 more bedrooms than she needs as a single person, you can get a 1 bed flat for 300-400pm, a 2 bed for 450ish, a 3 for 500-650 and a 4 bed, for 750 plus.
Yet she complains that she is 'too skint' to buy a house... when around here you can get a decent starter home on a 15-40k deposit dependent on the mortgage you can get and the exact area you wish to live in.
BUT. there are far many more situations where no matter how much you cut back you just don't have the time (ie if you're in your 50s or older) or deposit for a mortgage and that is a huge problem

In a lot of cities a lot of people do have takeaway coffee every working day, sometimes more than once. Pret lunches or similar are also common and taking your own lunch to work is often seen as a bit sad and miserable.

People often spend close to £10 a day on these items, which is a couple of hundred quid a month. While giving these up is never going to magic up a deposit on a London property, it's definitely an extravagent way of living, whether people realise it or not.

My grandfather (86) spouts about how I should "live for a month in what you earn in a week".
No telling him that three weeks' salary only just covers mortgage and bills and a lot of the rest goes on the car (needed as I work 30 miles from where we live)