To think, as a 'millennial', that we do have it quite good?

[kokosnuss]

Hate the term, but the common narrative amongst 'millennials' is that the baby boomers stole all the houses and good pensions, leaving none for us.

AIBU to think that yes, many baby boomers are in an enviable position (paid off mortgage, pension, savings), but only because:
(and I'm thinking only of my own working class grandparents and their friends here, others may have different experiences)

• They started working and saving early, often as soon as they finished school at 15, and had little opportunity to go onto higher education; many would have gone into jobs the millennial generation might consider 'unfulfilling' (e.g. my Grandma was a sewing machinist). They also led lives my generation might consider 'unfulfilling', e.g. simple (meat and 2 veg) food, no foreign holidays, few trips to restaurants, events, etc. Their lives were very much lived in the home i.e. very cheaply and expectations of life were very different.

Of course, many baby boomers now enjoy an expensive lifestyle, with lots of foreign trips and new experiences, but only because they're enjoying the fruits of years of careful saving. They haven't always lived that way, but there seems to be an assumption on the part of millennials that they have. So whereas my generation might only finish education at 21 or later, and then want to spend time travelling, or building up experience towards a 'fulfilling' career path, they also want to live what they consider to be a 'fulfilling' lifestyle, e.g. gadgets, subscriptions, foreign trips, going to events, restaurants, bars, the latest fashions, etc. And then are surprised when they have no savings or pension!

I'm nearly 30, renting, and only just in the position my grandparents would have been in at 18/19 - steady job, actively saving for a house, making regular pension contributions. But I don't blame anybody else for that, because I've had lots of opportunities and experiences in return that I know my grandparents (and female grandparents in particular) didn't have.

AIBU?

I’m sure there are also many houses that are priced at a lot less too in Surrey Laurie

I think every generation faces different challenges and enjoys different privileges. But my mum and dad, as very normal, not rich people, have been able to retire (both of them were in their late 50s when they retired) with a fully paid off house. I will have to pay larger contributions, for more years, to receive a much smaller pension at a much later stage of my life, and I don't own a home. They never had student loans to repay. They could afford a house on one income. They themselves admit that in terms of housing and pensions, basically the things that make a difference between a decent old age and a struggling one, they had it much easier than we do.

As a Millennial I saved and bought a house in my 20s work FT with a family and did it without moaning about my parents having it all. they really didnt - i remember them scraping for every penny

sinceyouask completely agree & with what the other poster said re retirement.

I don’t know many of my generation who will be able to retire relatively young with a good pension, mortgage free.

I say this as someone from generation X so neither a baby boomer nor a millennial. And as someone with a large house a household income well into six figures.

There are several economic changes that make things more difficult for milennials.

1. House prices are vastly higher now and have outstripped inflation and income increases by many many times. My next door neighbours let school at 15 with nothing, worked 9-5 In low income jobs (they were not entrepreneurs who made lots of money) bought a four bed house for £7k. It is now worth roughly £900k. Having no qualifications and a low wage job will not result in enough disposable income now to buy any accommodation. It may not even be enough to afford rent.

1. The nature of pensions have changed drastically - the thing you are paying into is on completely different terms to the pensions baby boomers have if they paid into one and worked for a company. Final salary pensions, where you get your highest salary every year for the rest of your life however long you live and however much you paid in are the norm for baby boomers. They no longer exist for milennials except in some public sector jobs. you save in, your employer puts in less than they used to, and there is a pot at the end - whatever it is worth buys you an annuity (guaranteed yearly income). Because everyone is living much longer the annuity you can buy is much much smaller than even 10 years ago and is usually about 1/5 of your annual salary.

1. The job market is wildly more competitive at every level. In the City/top jobs markets for graduates, you are now competing against the wealthiest and most elite graduates from all over the world - not just British graduates. The majority of graduates on the most competitive schemes are not British.

So don’t be too hard on yourselves - the maths is just completely different to what baby boomers had to deal with.

Plucked I think the points you make about the uncertainty of the times the BB lived through are very valid. However, I have to pick up on this.

They are now getting Ill and dying at a real fucking low point in the NHS, so sadly for a lot of them, those pensions will never get used. I actually pity the baby boomers needing heart operations and hip replacements right now.

The BBs are living longer and in better health than any generation previous to them. Throughout their lives they have enjoyed, in the form of an NHS, an incredibly high standard of healthcare for free.

If the NHS is in decline at this point (and I agree) it will not be the BB generation that suffer the worst of the fall out. By a long shot.

I can see both sides of the argument, however I am in the YANBU camp myself. Being a thirty year old who has had no foreign holidays, started working at 16 and has a £10 a month phone, internet and netflix, I can live a perfectly good life in my own home with a small mortgage

My colleage on the other hand who is a year younger than me is always moaning about having no money but always buys lunch, has at least three foreign holidays a year, Iphone X , new everything and earns the same as I do.

Its all about priorities. They keep telling me I have it easy. I had no help and worked hard. My first house was a 2 up 2 down. The next a wrecked repo I did up bit by bit for several years as and when I could afford it. Most people wont settle for anything less than 'Insta' perfect and living in a flat for a few years to get them onto the ladder wont be good enough so a fair few people do it to themselves in my opinion.

I think the short answer is that it's complicated, and dependent on who you are (m/f, aptitudes, start in life etc).

I'm a millennial (just). I do own my own (mortgaged) home, take holidays, have been able to start a family - but I deliberately fought my way into a high-earning profession to do so. Friends in healthcare/teaching/admin etc at my age often cannot.

I feel lucky in that furniture, food, clothes, leisure activities, holidays and even cars can be had much, much cheaper than they could 20 years ago - that really makes a difference to how good I feel I have it.

I’m sure there are also many houses that are priced at a lot less too in Surrey

Well of course there are. You do know what the word 'average' means, yes? And why it might be used as a benchmark?

The tax paying population is shrinking. The NHS is unlikely to exist when i’m older & Im pretty sure I will never receive a state pension.

Saying that people could buy a house if they didn't drink lattes or have Netflix is rather like complaining that people have student debt because they were too profligate to save up their £3 a week pocket money from the time they were 8. :-/

Materially yes, things have changed. But I do think attitude plays a huge part. When we moved to the city we live in now, one of my DH's colleagues turned her nose up at where we were planning to live - apparently it's a 'rough' area. Well tough shit it was all we could afford - we bought a complete wreck and did it up. It's gorgeous now and the area isn't 'rough' at all - just not fancy enough for her taste. We've now paid off our mortgage and we're looking to extend or move. I'm sure others look at us and think we're 'lucky' - we're not. We just managed our money very carefully and didn't go straight for the big house and the huge mortgage. There are ways around any situation but you have to be prepared for things not to be 'perfect' all the time.

Well of course there are. You do know what the word 'average' means, yes? And why it might be used as a benchmark?

Yes of course I do, there’s no need to be a funny fuck, my point was you buy where you can afford.
We couldn’t afford a house over £500k until now but I’ve been on the property ladder for nearly 15 years!
Our first house was in a shitty area with drug dealers at the end of the road and drunks around but it was all we could afford, we stayed there for 3 years and then moved up the ladder.

I will have to pay larger contributions, for more years, to receive a much smaller pension at a much later stage of my life, and I don't own a home. They never had student loans to repay. They could afford a house on one income.

How much pension your savings will buy and how much your home costs are all tied up with interest rates. BB couldn't help it that Governments across the world decide to opt for cheap credit.
We didn't have student debt but income tax was higher so PAYE+student tax+NI are pretty much the same now as then.
As for affording a house on one income: blame feminism. Millennials complain about the gender pay gap but forget that BB weren't far off from the days when you had to give up your job on getting married, there was no SMP (no time nor money) and your pay didn't count towards mortgage calculations. Would you prefer to go back to that?

It's swings and roundabouts. Some things are better, some worse.

Employment is a tricky one too. We may have good levels of employment at the minute, but the quality of that employment is a lot worse than it has been at other times in history.

Many on zero hours contracts, with all the uncertainty that brings. Conversely, those with 'good' jobs on paper are often required to work much heavier hours under more pressure than in previous generations, with knock on effects on mental health and family life, which make a lot of these jobs unsustainable in the long run.

BestZebbie - take it from someone who owns a mortgage free house - if you can afford 2 Costa lattes every week without going without anything else, you can afford a house. It might not be the perfect house in the ideal location but you can afford it. Whether you're willing to make the sacrifices it takes to actually buy that house is another matter.

Our first house was in a shitty area with drug dealers at the end of the road and drunks around but it was all we could afford, we stayed there for 3 years and then moved up the ladder.

That option is still going to be wildly expensive for someone on 40K in an area where average house prices are half a million.

www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170530-the-avocado-toast-index-how-many-breakfasts-to-buy-a-house

worth sharing this

Gen Y and Millenials have it way easier than any other generation. All this "never had so much pressure" moaning is pure nonsense.

They have information at every turn, they are never left "not knowing" anything, it's all at hand. The world has been designed around children, everything is about the damn children (I have children, but I object to the world being so obsessed with them and ignoring the adults who are responsible for them). They are supported at every turn - every little hiccup in their life there is somebody or some organisation or a handout of money or offer of counselling to pick them up or an organisation arguing to protect them and prevent them from ever experience any hardship or challenge to an oh-so-perfect-and-damage-free life. They are being treated as young helpless kids well into their 20s, through the benefits system and council care, whereas other generations had to look after themselves from 16, and my grandparents had to look after themselves from the age of 14. Some get given handouts of money from parents and helps with mortgages, or even get flats bought for them by pandering parents whereas we all had to scrimp and save for every penny to pay the rent for years before eventually affording a property. I get that property prices have increased, I get the proportion has increased and this is harder, but the disproportionate response from family members in their handouts cancels this challenge out in many cases.

The school system is so spoonfed and easy, the exams are meaningless now (to be as an employer as I have written elsewhere, I ignore everything about A-levels and GCSEs - they are so easy now it is meaningless to appraise any candidate on these, whether they have a degree or not). The degrees are largely pointless and most students should have done apprenticeships or got jobs and not gone to uni, but there we are - university places on a plate, and the perverse belief that they get to live in plush accommodation and don't have to work over 3-4 years. We lived in the dingiest of rooms and shared houses straight out of The Young Ones and I worked every evening, weekends and all term breaks to fund myself through university on top of a measly grant. Not one penny from anyone else for 3 years.

I could go on. It is all so incredibly easy nowadays. I even hear that parents are accompanying their teenage children to open days at universities now, something that would be laughed at and never lived down in my day, honestly how ridiculous is that.

Help, money, support, guidance, clear pathways, know where they are and what they need to do, all the opportunities in the world, all the knowledge to exploit those opportunities (whereas most of us didn't even know what jobs were available, let alone know what we had to do to get them and know anybody who held those positions). All so incredibly easy.

So yes OP, yes, you have it rather good.

Are you f**ing kidding me? Care to give some examples? Don't forget to mention sexual discrimination, sexual harrassment, health and safety (now a joke, once a luxury), racism and homophobia in your reply.

Also buying the affordable house in a run down area is a lot more attractive in your 20s. If you are a FTB in your 30s (allowing for uni/saving a deposit) you will need to think about school catchments too. Catchments were not such an issue in the past.

If you think your generation (on average) are on to a better thing than your parents generation (on average), you are sadly deluded.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/18/millennials-earn-8000-pounds-less-in-their-20s-than-predecessors

OP, you make it sound as if us Baby Boomers were born in the dark ages, with all this stuff about leaving school at 15 etc. I was born in 1956, so very firmly a Baby Boomer. We had a great education, in small classes, helped by grammar schools for some of us. We got full student grants so could go to university without being in debt and at 23 I was able to buy a nice little house in Walthamstow for just under 4 x my pay ( £6k p.a. pay, £23,500 for my house ) You could drive around in a cheap car and insure and run it for peanuts. Cars were so simple most people's dad could fix them. You could go to loads of evening classes for very cheap rates and learn new things. Freddy Laker made a trip to the US a reality.

DS1 earns a healthy £50k, but my old house was recently resold(wish I'd kept it!) for £550,000 - 11 x his income. He is paying back his student loan and would find car insurance far more expensive than I did. So he is not having it nearly as good as I did.

I agree with Tillytrotter that despite having some things easier we were far more frugal with our spending. My first cooker was a reconditioned one that cost £4, my sofa was from my grandmother's cottage and a friend of my parents who was down sizing gave me most of my other furniture. I do remember paying 15% interest on our mortgage after we were married but as our mortgage was manageable I'm not sure it hurt us.

'Are you f**ing kidding me? Care to give some examples? Don't forget to mention sexual discrimination, sexual harrassment, health and safety (now a joke, once a luxury), racism and homophobia in your reply.'

Well said Barbarian. Up until the Equal Pay Act of 1970, it was entirely legal and totally normal to pay a woman less than a man, simply because she was a woman. Some women were earning less than half what men earned, for exactly the same job. There was no way around that - if you were a woman, you earned less and that was it. The 'answer' of course was to get married to one of the men who could afford a £5000 house on his salary - but don't forget that that man could then legally rape you whenever he wanted, and bash you about a bit as long as he didn't go too far. Other adults could also beat your children up as long as they were teachers and many also did other things that no one ever talked about.

Ah the good old days. When being a woman or a child was totally totally shit.

if you can afford 2 Costa lattes every week without going without anything else, you can afford a house

FUCKING PRICELESS

What is that? £6 a week? £312 a year?

Forgoing 2 cost coffees would allow someone to save up the £30k needed to get a 1 bed flat in london (£300k about as cheap as you can find) in 96 years.