To think these baby boomers are missing the point?

[Hundredacrewoods]

I grew up in an area where house prices have quadrupled since 2000. I consider this an intergenerational equity issue. Whenever the topic of house prices and 'millennials' comes up with my parents' generation, all I hear is how hard they worked and how much they sacrificed to get on the property ladder. AIBU to think that they're missing the point? No one is denying that they worked hard and sacrificed. The point is that if they worked just as hard today, and made the same sacrifices, it wouldn't be anywhere near enough.

It's sadly a thing. I work with lots of boomers and it's almost a tic with some of them. Ooh! My parents are slightly removed from the UK, they do watch Jeremy Kyle... so they have some truly weird ideas about The Yoof of Today! It makes spending time with them just a tad unbearable.

But I also work/socialise with many, and they seem to be normal human beings, just getting on with living. Maybe I need to find some more judgemental friends

I'd settling for keeping their mouths shut when people priced out of home ownership put across their concerns, and stopping trying to block every housing development in a 5 mile radius of their own homes
Pretty much.
There is a village near me with a very active NIMBY group. They campaign against anything from a footpath through to 3 new houses being built on a scrap of land in the area. They have even organised campaigns to prevent people renovating their own houses and had a social media campaign to block someone having a car port.

They are whining self centred dickheads who view anything other than bigoted people like them as some crazy threat to their way of life.

Wind turbines?! Woooah hang on a minute. That'll ruin the view out of their upstairs landing window.

New houses? Wooooah that'll mean the footpaths might get busy

They also link up with other NIMBY groups who campaign against new housing - especially if there is any reference to 'affordable'. Nasty pieces of work.

I had some concerns (like a few others) about the impact of traffic when there isn't a main road and we already have a bottle neck. Most reasonable people mentioned that. These baby boomer NIMBY 'i'm alright but don't you dare park your car legally there because it ruins the view of my roses' idiots just object to anything and everything because they've got themselves set up and can't stand the idea of anyone else managing it.

Who knows what they're going to be like when the elderly residents of the village pass and (shock horror!!) there might be younger people living there.

It is becoming ' divide and rule' ( maybe i read MN too much?)

Baby Boomers v Millennials
Remainers v Leavers
SAHM/ SAHD v Mums and dads that work.
Renters v home owners.

I find it all so sad, but we need solutions to all this and the current government are too busy tearing themselves apart over Brexit to care at all ( even if they did give it any thought, which they don't seem to be doing)

Crikey 53rd I shall tell my grandparents, parents, myself, DSis, DH and his sibs, and all of the next generation that they all lived their 20s wrong!

Good lord you’re prickly.

Home-owner rates among 20-somethings have fallen. That means that twenty, thirty, forty years ago, more people in their 20s were living in homes they owned. This doesn’t mean that everybody owned a house, but it does mean that more people did.

Really not that hard a concept to grasp?

Maisy, i know the types you mean.

Could paying back student debts account for some of it?

Here’s a graph again if you don’t believe me:

I think you may be right The80s

Divide and rule; great distractions, they happen all the time - remember The Falklands? The politics were summed up nicely by a sad, bitter man:

Brezhnev took Afghanistan.
Begin took Beirut.
Galtieri took the Union Jack.
And Maggie, over lunch one day,
Took a cruiser with all hands.
Apparently, to make him give it back

Since then we have had so many of divisive political posturings, almost anything in the DailyMail for a start!

It is sad. But it seems to be effective! It does stop us, The Great Unwashed, from noticing the lack of action from our politicians. We barely have any politician worth the title! they are all careerists, seem to have forgotten what the job actually is, even at local level.

I hate the fact my ds2 will have so much debt from just 3 years at Uni- i asked him the other day to look up how much it is, but he wont, its just too depressing! the rate to pay it back is also huge. he will be at home with his dad and I for a long time i guess - its a good job we have a bedroom for him and we get on okay and will be supportive. Not all young adults have this either. ( not that we are perfect parents, but just want the best for them and will help out, advise etc) so many people dont even have this basic help.

thr80s
You're right it is a bit.

Though much as it pains me to say it, one of the ways to reduce it is for people who have been fortunate to get on the housing ladder to not be so bloody smug about it.

I'm on the property ladder in my 20s. I have a 4 bed house in a nice area. I also know I am fortunate.
Sure some people i know are all about the travel etc but that'e their choice. But it wpuld be really crappy of me to start having thr same attitude as some baby boomers eeeh well i didn't takr a gap year, career changed, made sacrifices to retrain as a teacher, we had one old banger car which we used til it died, we don't go out lots, don't go out for food, don't go on shopping splurgea etc. Dear friends in cities. If you were THAT bothered about buying then you'd suck it up abd buy any old shithole in an end of town with high crime rates, high risks of arson, no central heating, no bathroom and you should just accept that's what it takes.'
There are areas of my town I wouldn't live in if you paid me. Too much crime, too much anti social behaviour. No way am i going to buy a house there because some smug person who got their housr for £40,000 in 1993 says 'eh well if you REALLY wanted it'.

Each generation has opportunities and challenges. Older generations (in my opinion) have a duty not to pull the ladder up under them.
If there are older people who've done wrll out of property booms and now sit there protesting and campaigning about new builds and affordable homes becUse 'well when i was a lad we had right shitholes to live in. Why should they have new houses' then they're foul.

@Maisypops why would you want to live in a place with such nasty neighbours. Don't waste your money on somewhere you aren't going to be happy.

Oh, stats! Nice! Pretty colours!

I wasn't being prickly about the numbers (though there are a few different possible interpretations of that graph). I was prickly for the reason I gave! I stated an opinion, based on my experience and was told, categorically, that I was wrong, that my experience was in error... hence the request for a time machine.

That's OK isn't it? To have lived a different life from the apparent MN norm?

Kingsclerelass
I don't live there... that's part of the reason.
That and moving 2 miles away means the same size house is £150,000 cheaper and you get nicer neighbours instead of some Hot Fuzz style cult.

That village now almost exclusively attracts 50+ year olds who want a little bubble of bigotry.

AIBU to think that they're missing the point? No one is denying that they worked hard and sacrificed. The point is that if they worked just as hard today, and made the same sacrifices, it wouldn't be anywhere near enough

Dp and I worked a full time 9-5 job, and another 48hours on other part time jobs each week for a year because although you could get a 100% mortgage it didn't do you any good if your salary was so low that the multiples equalled only 50% of the cheapest property on the market. You still had to come up with the other 50% and solicitors fees etc.
When we bought we bought a studio flat which was a dump.

and was told, categorically, that I was wrong, that my experience was in error.

No you weren’t. You said “that’s the general lot of 20-somethings whatever generation they’re from”, and I said “no it isn’t”. Nobody besmirched the honour of your family

This topic seems to be as regular as the No 6 bus!
We boomers had a good start, grammar schools if you were lucky, free tertiary education, lower house price to wages ration etc., etc., but we also had mainly second hand stuff, nights in or round at friends, fewer possessions. Even now, at almost 70, I'm looking to replace my phone and I'm reluctant to pay for features I won't use not because I can't afford it but because I don't need it. Do you actually need what you have, would your life fall apart without it?
I do feel sorry for young people who are struggling to buy but in Costa I heard a couple of young mothers bemoaning their lot, with a table strewn with empty coffee cups, pastry plates, ipads and high end phones. Were they necessary?

I hate the ' smug' ones - they are the worst types.

You said “that’s the general lot of 20-somethings whatever generation they’re from” No I didn't! I said I THINK...

And you replied categorically NO IT ISN'T

I was replying, somewhat tongue in cheek, to your somewhat absolute response.

Sigh. Curious, it is not ‘the general lot of 20-somethings’ if most 20-somethings weren’t living like that in the past. That’s all I was saying. I have no idea what your brother or your cousins were doing!

Tilly, i understand where your coming from - i do not frequent those places and often think ' i'll go home and make a cuppa' rather than buy a tea out - but the 20 pounds they may have spent ( or whatever) is a drop in the vast ocean to the rising cost of buying a home or getting a mortgage. We do need to stop demonising and try to get everyone realising what a problem it is ( i am not having a pop at you at you by the way - i was brought up by parents who were not home owners and didnt own a car, so i know all about being frugal, i was brought up like it!)

Martin from MSE has told us all to not even worry abut the student loan because many of the loans won't even be paid back. It is depressing reading the statements and how much it goes up every year but they may never have to pay it off at all.

I remember back around late 90s/early 2000s, under the old student loan system, I knew people who were taking out the whole loan allowance even though they didn’t need it (supported by parents) and sticking it in a high-interest savings account and planning to pay it off in whole at the end of their degree and use the interest to go travelling. Hard to imagine today.

I think we need a national campaign that tells people you can get a mortgage on 17k salary. Young people dont know this

Genuinely interested in why you feel that's the case; after all, the details are easy enough to find via the kind of IT considered essential now

Is it really necessary to spoonfeed folk information which anyone with real motivation can find on their own ... and if it is, doesn't that say something about their willingness to help themselves?

FlipperFlap
I agree some baby boomers have been dismissive of Millennials. A lot have been nice. The poster was just explaining their struggles without judgment imo. I don’t understand what I saw to be misplaced vitriol, did I read your post wrongly?

As for your comment about people having predicted and waited for the past 20 years for the next house price drop. The last house price drop was in 2008 and the lowest prices were in about 2011. Some areas of the country still haven’t yet recovered the 2007/8 prices despite other areas having soared. I don’t understand your comment.

I can thing of a few things which might be done to help even things out between the generations:

1. graduate tax instead of student loans, so the burden can be shared by everyone who went to university, not just those unfortunates who go now
2. some sort of cap on rents, as one of the gripes is 'baby boomers' who have made a mint out of the property market using their equity for btls, which stitch up the younger generation even more through high rents
3. less assumption that care homes, pensions, health care and so on in the future are going to be subsidised by the younger generation who are already stretched for the above reasons.