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?

Yello The locations of big 4 firms is directly linked to where their clients are. PwC have an office in Uxbridge and I think it is EY with an office just outside of Gatwick.

Personally I would prefer to work for one of the regional big4 offices at the start and then transfer internationally. You can always transfer to the london office but it isn't needed for progression. We have people transferring from the regional offices all the time to the NYC office and here in NYC we have our research teams sitting in an office in the burbs, not Manhattan.

Vet is one of the "posh" professions with a massive generational divide. 14 years ago starting salary was 28k plus house plus car. Now it's more like 20k provide your own car (big enough to do your job) and you might get lucky with a room in a shared house owned by one of the directors...

Then partnership prospects were real, now they're illusory and might be dangled at interview but the reality is more and more practices are owned by big groups like CVS or Westpoint.

No major salary leaps - generally inflation from starting point - and it's not unusual to encourage more experienced (and therefore expensive) staff to move on.

Okay so everywhere in the SE is mega expensive and unaffordable except Luton which is a total dive with no decent jobs and nobody wants to live there. Have I got that right now or is Liton not even in the SE and therefore I can't say that it is an area of the SE with affordable housing stock?
Being serious: I assume Luton like other areas outside of London has jobs and people who work and buy houses because I'm guessing it has NHS, social workers, schools, offices, councils etc etc....,
But I live up north so clearly have no understanding that life exists outside of London.

Oh dear, I'm afraid several things on this thread have made me laugh (bitterly, as one of the under 30s who no longer has faith that they will ever buy).

The two things which made me laugh most would have to be: Capricorn's insistence that the correct way to do it is to live at home with parents until you are ready to buy, as that's what she had the privilege of doing. Hahaha. My dad made it very clear to me how unwelcome I was at home after the age of 18. He kicked up a huge fuss when I had to move back in for 10 weeks after leaving uni as boyfriend and I had to wait to start our tenancy together.

And the idea from Six that apart from exceptional circumstances, most people in jobs like teaching should be able to buy. Hahaha. I'm a teacher, a few grades higher than the starting salary now, and part of a secondary school department of largely young women. The only one who owns property is over 30 and had a HUGE amount of help from her parents. The rest of us live in tiny flats and move often, particularly the single ones.

The reason I was talking about Luton rather than Manchester or Leeds is because I was responding to a poster who said the entire SE had zero affordable housing and even 90 minutes commute from London a small flat is unaffordable. I asked whether Luton was considered the SE. I did make it clear that I wasn't suggesting people commute from Luton to London.

The SE is expensive because to a lesser or greater extent it is all commutable to London. Luton is off - at a guess the areas closest to the station are probably much more expensive but like many towns the outlying estates have shite links into the centre with none at London commuter hours and you could commute from further and take far less time. Plus if you're coming in late you'd be/feel at risk. Like the dodgiest bits of Manchester as a lone woman you might well feel threatened.

Luton is far enough to be an expensive and "long" commute without having any of the expected benefits of moving out. You'd be likely to be stuck there as prices don't rise in the same way as better/more popular places.

Is Luton a long way from London? It looks very close on the map on my office wall, about the same distance as Stevenage, which I know as being 'very near to London' when I go to London on the train. When we go through Stevenage station there are loads of people that get on and look like they are going to London for work.

People commute from even further than there and I'm not saying that's a good thing - I once met someone who went from Doncaster every day - her season ticket was over £10k per year .

And unfortunately I agree with the PP who said the main effect of HS2 if it ever happens will be to widen the area considered commutable to London. The big jobs with the big salaries will stay in London and people will travel there each day from Leeds, probably being the only people who can afford to use the service without booking months in advance and going at really inconvenient times.

Anyway we have proper law and accountancy firms in Leeds (KPMG and the like) and were miles from London.

I know. I am from a proper Northern city with a proper financial center and worked in such an office for several years. But you don't get cities with strong financial services/professional services jobs near london, because they get drained by london becase you can commute to london! Just like you don't get KPMG offices in Huddersfield and Bradford...

I'm specifically talking about Luton being a bit shit and not really having much in the way of jobs.

That's the sort of info I was hoping for random and it explains it well. Like I said, my geography is rubbish and I don't have a good understanding of commuting into London. I have lived in and around Manchester and like most areas outside of London it has shit public transport links. There is just no money targeted at public transport outside of London. We used to live only 10 miles from the centre of Manchester and DH worked 2 miles outside of the centre of Manchester but it would take him 2-3 buses to get to work (depending on how much walking he wanted to do) and it could take anything between 90mins and 2 hours in rush hour. I suppose the difference with Manchester is that you can commute by car without being subject to a congestion charge. On the days DH travelled by car (most days) it would take him around 45 minutes and only cost him £20 per week in petrol.

Okay so everywhere in the SE is mega expensive and unaffordable except Luton which is a total dive with no decent jobs and nobody wants to live there. Have I got that right now or is Liton not even in the SE and therefore I can't say that it is an area of the SE with affordable housing stock?

Yeah pretty much ;-)

How is Luton not part of the south east? It's bedfordshire! We live in Dunstable and my husband commutes to Barnet every day.

I live in zone 5 (of London underground) outer London and plenty of people won't live here because they are too entitled and spoilt so they never buy anwhere, more fool them. My son bought in Chesham last week (he works fairly near there). It is obviously in both areas a lot more expensive than the County Durham/ Sunderland homes of my parents and indeed my mother's family could not afford to buy - it wasn't the case people could always afford to buy, plenty of families were always only one step short of being homeless, in tenements and the like in the past.

SO yes life is often hard. My parents and grandparents tried to deal with all this by not having children for ages - I am talking 10 years or even 20 in my grandfather's case until they could afford it. That way you have years without babies to get a deposit together. It's still not easy but that did help back then in the 1930s and then the 1950s.

Luton is very expensive too.

I think all of 'the big 4' have a presence in Manchester, don't they? DH used to work for one and regularly travelled up there and certainly his company had a proper large office with some of their top consultants so not just a satellite office with admin staff.

sixthemagic - u think manchester has bad transport? But its got trains, an international airport, trams and buses - loads of really cheap buses. how can u say public transport is bad? Where we live in the south buses stop at 5pm to the nearest town and to get to the slightly larger town is quicker for my son to cycle the 15 miles than by bus. we are 15 miles from the nearest station - and we live in a town centre, not in a field

Young people can afford to buy houses. Sick of reading that young people will never get on housing ladder, young people need help from parents to buy blah blah blah. Massive generalisation. I know lots of people whose children have all bought without any help from anyone. Housing is cheap round here.

But apparently there's no jobs outside of London that pay more than minimum wage.

Manchester transport is actually quite decent. It doesn't serve everywhere in the conurbation equally well, though, which is a problem. There are some definite blackspots and there's a huge difference between being on a decent train or tram route and not. I can think of some commutes that would've taken 1.5 hours on the bus if you were going from the outskirts into the centre, especially if you were having to cross the centre too, and especially 10 years ago when the trams weren't as extensive. Would be interested to hear which areas six is referring to, see if anything's changed now.

I have also heard that Leeds is the largest city in Western Europe without a mass transit system, which if true is ridiculous.

Mustard, it isn't a privilege to live at home with your parents beyond the age of eighteen. It's very normal.

Your father sounds at best incredibly selfish.

That's true Hyacinth the bloke on look north has literally just been asking one if the councillors about it.

Mustard, it isn't a privilege to live at home with your parents beyond the age of eighteen. It's very normal

YOU stand a better chance of moving in with my parents so you can save than I do, my mother does seem to prefer random strangers to her own children , never mind that the bed was removed from the "spare room" during my first term at Uni and I was never allowed back…

and I'm not unusual..

Well, you're not unusual in the sense that there are many care leavers, teens from abusive homes, teens from homeless families and so on.

But it is not the norm for parents to refuse to let young adult offspring live at home.

Yes our transport in Leeds is shit. They've spent millions arguing for decades about various mass transit schemes and got nowhere.

I live in a large village 5 miles outside the city and we have one bus an hour, there are supposed to be a few extra at rush hour but more often than not they are very late. I would hate to have to use them for work. We do have a reasonable Park and ride service but it only runs 7 til 7 so you don't have to be far outside office hours for it to be no good.

Baby boomer here. (Dons hard hat)
In 1976 D.H. and I, newly engaged, applied for our first mortgage, we were told by the building society manager we had to open a savings account, save regularly for a year then when we had 10% deposit saved plus legal fees to reapply. We did this by not going out much, cutting right back on spending, etc.
We found a two up two down terraced house that we could just about afford. We got the mortgage.
We lived there for three years, sold it for a profit which we ploughed into the next house. Soon after moving in the interest rate shot up to 17% but our wages didn't.