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?

frikadela Late 50's

Housing ladder mentions in books

It's a much less popular search term now than it was in 2006 though

You're right frikadela01, the older generation didn't really have 'starter homes'. Starter homes began to be built in the late 80s.

My parents went from renting a one bed flat in North London when dm was 21 and df was 25 in the late 1960s, (they had me aged 2 and dsis newborn at that point), to buying a four bed detached in the home counties on just df's salary. Dm has never worked.

Dh and I will never be able to afford a house like that four bed and we are aged 50 and 38 currently and dh works full-time and I work part-time (25 hours a week).

Dh's parents also live in a house that we could never afford. A three bed semi, which they bought on his father's salary as a minimum wage paint sprayer, back in the early 70s. They were renting a 3 bed house before that. His mum did work - school dinner lady - 10 hours a week, term-time only.

Its just not fair I got a degree in media studies so I wont take anything less than a graduate pay scale job but their are none.

There just might be other reasons why you are not offered a job - try learning how to spell.

(I am a 58 year old graduate earning barely more than NMW - welcome to the real world).

The whole 'not wanting a starter home' is more because it takes so long to save for a deposit, by the time they are in a position to buy, they are beyond the starter home stage.

Exactly. By the time we are in a position to buy a house, we will be way past the starter home stage too. We have 2 dc as it is(yes I know should have bought before they came along etc etc), and whilst we're not after a mansion by any means we do need at least 2 bedrooms, ideally 3. We currently rent a modest 2 bed semi - we would be more than happy to own a similar house in the future. It just wouldn't be practical at all to move into a 'starter flat' at this stage in our lives. Ultimately we just want a home.

In an ideal world yes, everyone would start at the bottom and work their way up but often life just isn't that linear for everyone.

Unfortunately for us it seems like we won't be in a position to buy until we get inheritance from either set of parents. Which is horrible to think about but it's the reality for a lot of people from our generation. It's very sad, but we will keep saving in the hope that one day we can do it ourselves.

I know a young couple (26), want to buy. They however want a three bedroom with large kitchen diner for dinner parties. They are not prepared to move into an ex HA flat (one bedroom) to begin with. That's what many of us did when we first purchased, then worked our way up as we earned more, had a baby etc. I am if course not speaking for every young person.
But that said, a mobile and Sky contract makes no difference these days.

Problem is IMO that people are allowed to own as many houses as they want. One each I say :)

I actually can't understand why people are being so insensitive on this thread.

We bought our house because we got money from the in-laws and we live in the northeast where we got a two bed terrace for 109k at the very VERY bottom of the market (the previous owners through in The furniture as they were so desperate to sell due to a redundancy). Our house is worth nearly 20k more less than 5 years later (we know this because it's been valued and the house opposite that is identical to ours went for 130k last month). We managed to cash in on someone else's shit luck and we've always acknowledged that. When that house came on the market we were lucky that the in-laws put their hand I their pocket to make up the rest of our savings, if that hadn't happened we would have been saving just to keep in line with the interest.

If circumstances had been slightly different we wouldn't have got our house.

I'm not sure what drives people to be so quick to blame people for not being able to get on the housing ladder. Is it guilt? Ignorance? Spite?

Yes there might be SOME people who spend rather than save and that's why but there's always been people like that and they are in the minority, the vast amount of hard working people would love to be able to just save for a few years and have enough for a deposit, it's just not the reality.

My mother says this stuff as well, how everyone could afford a house if they just gave up their luxuries and how women are all working these days and neglecting their kids because they want to have big house and loads of holidays. What really gives me the rage is that we were only kept above the poverty line when I was a kid by the very low rent we paid on a Housing Association House - £30 a week in the middle of London. My parents did not save a penny the 12 years we lived in that house, pissing all their disposable income up the wall instead. When I left home, a neighbour grassed them up for living in a family home when they had no kids. HA came round and said they needed the property but couldn't evict them. However, they COULD incentivise them to move by giving them £20,000 to buy their own property. A couple of months before they were made this offer, the housing market in London crashed, so this 20 grand turned out to be enough for a deposit on a lovely little two bed bungalow that they then sold during the upturn for a very good profit and re-located to Scotland where property was cheaper. They now have a two bed house and an investment flat and have blown all the money they made from their windfall, leaving them with a mortage they didn't have to have. They have been handed everything and yet constantly slag off others for not working hard enough to have what they have AND constantly tell people they are poor and people on benefits are living at their expense. I am fortunate enough to own my house and I STILL want to flush their heads down a toilet when they start gobbing off. Sorry, don't know why I added that.

I bought in the early nineties when I earned about 11k a year bought an absolute shit hole and paid around 14% interest, I lived in it and slowly slowly did it up. My dc have both bought this year in the SE, they both went without, phones holidays, clothes going out also they widened the locations they looked at, everything cut to the bone to raise deposits. With interest rates at fuck all they pay the same percentage of their salaries as I did on their mortgages. Your dm has a point we baby boomers weren't given houses ffs the nastiness and jealousy on this thread is vile I worked my arse off to buy a house both my dc late twenties have managed it the same way.

Krustykittens that really made me laugh.

Nobody is saying that the baby boomers were given houses we're saying that for a lot of people cutting back on sky packages and your iPhone won't get you enough to buy a house and that it's infuriating and insensitive to ignore the housing crisis and blame the people.

There is some truth in saying people are spending too much to save.
Me and DP could save between £500 - £700 a month if we cut down on our lifestyle but it is quite difficult to do it. We could save even more if we didnt have to pay such a high rent which is due to the stupid house prices.

BUT some people really do struggle with it all and cant afford to save and I know people who fall into both categories... Both types would be helped by lower cost of rent though.

I don't see a starter home necessarily as a one bed flat. I see a starter home as a traditional 2 up and 2 down but then those are the cheapest types of properties where I bought my first home. The flats there are all new builds and cost more than a 2/3 bed terrace. These terraces have been around since 1900-1910 so the idea that starter homes didn't exist until recently has got me a bit . A 2 bed terrace in reasonable condition in parts of my town can be picked up for around £80k. I can go a few miles away to a more desirable location and pick up a similar property for £300k. There is something between one bed flats and nice 3 bed semis with gardens back and front.

starter home
2 bed terrace
£480,000
www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/42312487?search_identifier=54ea0c56fe042f5739f3bd6c393e7cac

Maxwellthecat - what, in a bitter sort of way?

The whole property ladder concept doesn't exist any more (unless you're extraordinarily lucky)

15 years ago you could get a foot in… values go up.. you take a small step up to a slightly better property.. and so on.. until you're in a family home

That just doesn't exist nowadays, if you're gonna commit to a mortgage you need to be sure it's somewhere you're happy to be tied to because you may be stuck there long haul.

The "jump" between "starter homes" and "family homes" is around 60k where I live.. so a "starter flat" isn't much of a stepping stone.

Starter homes can be very hard to shift too when you come to sell, people want family homes. "starter flats" only sell when investing in property is a good deal.

Prices are as likely to go down as up these days, a "Starter home" - i.e. somewhere that doesn't suit your longer term needs, is a very foolish use of your money!

"Your dm has a point we baby boomers weren't given houses ffs"

Houses then were worth two or three times annual income so, while not given, they were much easier to get.

"my dc late twenties have managed it the same way"

I bet they're not low earners though and/or they have partners who also have good jobs.

I could post a 2 bed terrace n a northern town for £89k peace but it doesn't say much about the national situation does it? We also have 2 bed terraces here for around the £500k mark but I wouldn't consider it a starter home for the majority of starters .

Oh MIL drives me nuts saying stuff like this. Apparently the 2008 banking crisis and recession didn't exist because people were still drinking lattes in town.

Baby boomers didn't start off their working life saddled with student loans. They had better employment opportunities, more job security - not have graduate jobs paying minimum wage or zero hours contracts. They did not have to pay extortionate rents had more opportunities to get on the housing laddder at a reasonable cost.

Oh yes

"I know a young couple (26), want to buy. They however want a three bedroom with large kitchen diner for dinner parties. They are not prepared to move into an ex HA flat (one bedroom)"

Just the mention of dinner parties tells you they're not average young people.

The crucial difference between now and the much vaunted 14pc interest era is that (a) high interest rates meant high inflation, so high pay rises - the debt shrank by a large percentage each year (b) The 14% was for a matter of weeks, the average was around 8%. (c) When rates fell so did mortgage costs.
The problem stored up today for the future is there are minute pay rises, massive mortgages with both people working and just managing and only increases in interest rates ahead.

There you go peace and there are plenty for less money too.
www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-54855346.html

Of course nobody in the south east is going to find a 2 bed terrace for anywhere near £80k but there are plenty of people in Blackburn who wouldn't buy that £80k house because it doesn't have the right postcode and then they will tell me that they are priced out of the market despite having a joint household income of £30k.

We bought our place (cheap terrace) about 3 years ago after renting various grotty house shares and studio flats. We were both working full time but lived on one salary and paid over £800 a month rent excluding bills. Over the course of a year we saved £25,000 putting almost every penny of the second salary into a save to buy ISA. We had no holidays, no takeaways and shopped exclusively at Aldi. I was also pregnant at the time so no booze!

For a childless couple with reasonably paid jobs it is definitely doable. However we had to move over 50 miles away from where we actually wanted to live and make a lot of compromises.

If you earn minimum wage or have a large childcare bill it would probably be virtually impossible.

In only 3 years the value of our house has allegedly increased by 15%. If we hadn't bought when we did, the house would have been out of our price range.

I was speaking to a Spanish colleague the other day who said: "You British are the only people in the world who celebrate when the cost of living goes up"

It is very difficult for people, nothing like as difficult as in the days of my grandparents of course but still very difficult.

Hoseer I don't think generational fights help - plenty of pensioners rent and exist on a low state pension. they are not all jetting round the world on luxury cruises. There is more similarity between the less well off older and younger people than between old and young in general.

It is also hard to generalise as in some places property is not too expensive. The house my father's father eventually owned (he could not have my father until he was 49 because he could not afford housing! and he left school at 12) is worth £60k today. My mother's mother never owned anywhere and died in Sunderland lunatic asylum.

My daughter bought with her husband in her 20s and they saved and saved and both chose high paid work which is not possible for everyone but some of their friends who could have done the same chose low paid work like art instead and obviously cannot buy so there is still an element of choice for some graduates. My other daughter had to buy, let it out, sleep on friend's sofas, live at home etc etc until she could move into her place - she bought in her 20s. My son bought in his 20s last week and is going to rent out his place until he can afford to live in it.

One reason my children can buy and others cannot is their mother always worked full time without career breaks and picked high paid work and paid their school and university fees and can also help towards a deposit. It may not be fashionable to say so but my children are in the position they are because of feminism and my never going part time at work and slogging it out in full time work over 30 years without a single career break. Might sound dull but it certainly helps financially.

I don't see any point in writing about how awful the places we used to live in were as it just because a generational competition.

My advice remains buy before breed, buy as soon as you can and buy with two incomes and buy even in a really grotty area with dreadful commute and it tends to pay off.