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.

But the average UK salary now is not £18,000. It is £27,600. Many jobs that were once higher paid, are now below the average wage, Status and thus pay of jobs changes over the decades. So yes someone on £27,600 could not afford to buy a £150,000 house. But it is different figures from the ones your originally presented.

Her current job, doing the same as she was in 1972, pays £18300.

She was earning £1300 per year in 1972, also below the national average. She was a finance clerk - it was not a high-powered job! She walked into it at 16 with no qualifications.

And no one could walk into a job earning £27k at 16 with no qualifications these days.
The starting wage for a teacher is less than that.

And in 1972 they would not have lent 3 times a wives salary. Standard then was 2.5 times the man and 1.5 times the womens - if the women's was taken into account at all.

Where I live, £27,600 is a good wage, and it will be a good wage anywhere you can buy a 3 detached house for £150,000.

Sashkin, you have already agreed that what she was paid then was the national average. The job now pays well below the national average. In 1972 clerical jobs were still seen as lower middle class and were better paid. It does not matter if the job is the same, the status and pay has fallen well below the national average.

Where I live, £27,600 is a good wage, and it will be a good wage anywhere you can buy a 3 detached house for £150,000.

But you couldn’t borrow that much on a wage of £27000

And the reality is people could get jobs at 16 that now require degrees. Training on the job was common. So nurses often started work at 15 for example and would be trained up at work. Social workers often did the same. It was an extension of the old apprenticeship model that was beginning to go by then, and has pretty much disappeared in all but a handful of jobs now.
So equivalent if £27,600 in real terms, is a good wage.
Yes house prices have risen above inflation - well above. But too many anecdotes are inaccurate.

And this article explains how since 1970, some jobs salary has sunk in real terms, whilst others have risen.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560909/The-splintering-middle-classes-Traditional-professional-jobs-1970s-left-pay-race-boom-City-salaries.html

Simon I know. House prices have increased out of line with inflation. But I still get irritated at totally inaccurate anecdotes that get trotted out regularly.

My husband is a millennial he worked hard and sacrificed and bought a nice 1 bedroom flat in a deece area with a hefty deposit and zero help with money down from anyone else. His job pays okay but not amazing.

I pay half the mortgage now that we're married and obviously living together.

This thread just sounds like typical snotty millennial whining from gen Y

By totally inaccurate anecdotes do you mean facts that people know to be facts?

By totally inaccurate anecdotes, I mean people who post salary levels as if it was a low paid salary at the time and it was not.

She was paid £26 per week, you said national average was £34 per week. So she was paid quite a bit below national average, and my dad even less as she was a grade above him. You are making up your own figures to suit your own story, read my actual posts.

My original post was to disagree with a PP who claimed that only people on professional salaries (like doctors and teachers) have ever been able to afford to buy houses. That is not true.

You then chipped in to say that I was mistaken about my parents buying a house, because nobody could get a mortgage in 1972. That’s also not accurate.

It was a cheap house then (and is a cheap house now, it’s in Doncaster which is hardly a property hotspot), but it was well within the reach of a young couple on lower than average salaries in 1972. It isn’t now.

"This thread just sounds like typical snotty millennial whining from gen Y"

Oops posted too early cuz my husband was making me laugh.

To finish my thought: This thread just sounds like typical snotty millennial whining from my gen Y pov.

I said average was £32. I did not say that people could not get mortgages then. Of course they could. But it was harder. You said they could buy that house as they had saved a decent amount.

£18,000 is proportionally less against the average salary than the wage your mum was paid. The salary has dropped against the average salary.

To get a mortgage then you had to have references. And usually had to have banked with the bank for a long while, or your family had to have. Simply proof of salary was not enough.

And yes I agreed that house prices have risen above inflation. Of course they have.

I mean people who post salary levels as if it was a low paid salary at the time and it was not

Did you miss the bit where I said my dad was looked down on as a failure by his miner, steelworker, plumber, electrician and BT engineer siblings and in-laws, because he couldn’t get an apprenticeship or job in the mines or steelworks and had to take a badly-paid local government clerical job instead?

Clerical work is not and has never been well-paid. It isn’t as badly paid as stacking shelves or working for deliveroo, but back then it was a long way down the pecking order from normal working class occupations like “miner”.

I await your explanation of how mining jobs were out of reach for all but the upper classes back then

Another comparable scenario to show why millenials are fed up with BBs (in general)

Many BBs I know took early retirement not for health or age reasons, but because AT THE TIME they said that their professions had changed beyond all recognition and had become a more stressful environment than they had ever experienced in the past:
Working conditions worse, perks taken away, hours and workloads increases for no extra pay. Etc. They said all this at the time

However, once settled into retirement they seem to forget this and now berrate young people in the same profession for complaining. Or not succeeding. Or not climbing promotion ladders that no longer exist. Or not living comfortably on salaries that have had real term cuts etc.

I found this on an American friends facebook.

So the US feels the same.

It's just not comparing like for like when BBs tell youngsters to do things the way they did them...doesn't work!

You could walk into my field with no qualifications and work up when I started. You wouldn't get a foot in the door that way now.

My application would have gone STRAIGHT in the bin if I was starting today the way I started not that long ago (well, 20yrs ago, but not long compaired to BBs)

This is what so many BBs don't want to hear, that the way they did it doesn't apply to how things work today.

I think that's the crux of the problem for SOME BBs.
They want to be revered as wise simply by the default of being older.
So lash out if it's pointed out to them that having experienced their youth does not make them an expert in what the youth of today need to do to get a home, or a decent job etc.
They don't have the wisdom that some other BBs have to put themselves in the shoes of young people today, instead they will only filter it through their own experiences

There are ALWAYS people like that. In all generations. They're the person who, on hearing that you're ill, don't say "sorry to hear that" and instead tell you all about that time THEY were ill, and how they cured themselves with something that wouldn't be at all appropriate for your illness, and you should do the same, and if you won't, well, you only have yourself to blame if you stay ill...n

Except. When it comes to victim blaming Millenials for the crappy housing market they find themselves in, the BBs who ARE that way inclined are shouting loudest and most frequently.

BBs also got no university tuition fees, and could claim unemployment benefit whilst a student and housing benefit for their hall fees.

They had it on a plate.

Generalising about the baby boomers is a bit inaccurate too as the years go from the 40s to 60s.Im a late boomer and won't be retiring for another 10years.
Some of us BBS and the gen after are in the squeezed middle with elderly parents and paying for children at uni.
What frightens me most are the teens coming through at the moment who seem to be more depressed ,stressed and anxiety ridden than previous generations.

A BB relative of mine got a permanant professional graduate job with a third class bachelors degree.
Same job today you would need a first, a masters, AND extensive experience in unpaid internships. And even then you would be on short contacts
They are in no position at all to say well, if you just did what I did you could have what I have (but they do. Regularly)

Late to the party on this thread....

I am not a baby boomer, but also think people these days don't like saving and living frugally. I know my parents did. They were home owners, but also mended everything including socks to nake things last.

I mend things (quite enjoy it actually), but this kind of stuff completely overlooks the completely different economy we now live in. Material goods (esp clothes) have dropped in price relative to wages, because of globalisation; other goods and services have massively increased. In the 60s and 70s socks were more expensive than thread/wool; now if I want to mend my socks, buying the thread costs more than a new sock does. Apart from a desire to save things from landfill, you have to admit that it isn't "thrifty" to mend things if a new one costs less than the mending?

Same these days for loads of stuff from electronics to food. In the 60s it was cheaper to make your own clothes/knit; now the wool costs several times more than a cheap jumper. It costs me twice as much to make a Christmas pudding even with Basics ingredients than buying one. Buying ready meals or imported cheap food flown in by a big supermarket chain from Spain or New Zealand is far cheaper than locally-grown produce. And who these days would mend a television when the labour cost of having it done is more than buying a new one?

Importing goods from Asia, technological change, built-in obsolescence, high labour costs - all of these things are very different from a few decades ago. Pretending that it's cheaper to make do and mend and make vegetable stew from scratch is a kind of economy that disappeared decades ago along with the historic mean for house prices.

It's just really dim not to recognise that saving money today isn't at all the same as in the past, and that the changes in house prices compared to wages are real and supported by lots of data. But then the people who argue all this "it was worse in the 1970s" stuff don't want to see the data either. On previous threads like this I took to posting a long Office of National Statistics report on intergenerational spending patterns which very clearly shows that the vast majority of consumer and "luxury" spending is - surprise surprise - actually by Boomers, from holidays to clothes to restaurants to food to technology to cars. But this doesn't fit with the narrative about how decadent younger people are and how virtuous the Boomers are - so every time I have posted this the only response is total denial of the "oh well statistics are all faked and manipulated" kind. Which just shows you what a mindset we're dealing with (and why that generation voted for Brexit despite every logical economic argument against it).