To hate the "if young people gave up iphone and starbucks they could afford a house" attitude

[Creambun2]

Some people really do believe that young people giving up a mobile phone would lead to them being able to afford to buy a house?

The attitude from certain boomers that "I worked hard and had nothing so I could buy in my 20s" and then it is drilled down that they only needed a mortgage of 2/3 times their salary.

Sorry for the shit DM link but this article is simply written to reinforce these stupid views about young people: www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5321703/Woman-reveals-bought-home-20.html

So much unsaid in the article, like where she lived when saving £500 a month (at home rent free presumably), how she describes herself as debt free (really - mortgage paid off @ 21?) and how gasp she has also been to India etc. Lucky she lives in a place where flats are 120k.

Que the comments section being full of the typical baby boomer attitude of lazy youngsters.

Not every boomer is an ignorant a-hole. Some have struggled and continue to struggle and do understand how unaffordable life can be nowadays.

There are plenty flats available for less than £1million!
The people who can't understand how holding back on the lattes (and other stuff, the lattes have become a funny symbol of the unnecessary!) Helps free up money for a deposit are probably the people who struggle to save!

My parents lived in lodgings after they were married, to save up for their house. That's one room and sharing the bathroom and kitchen with their landlady. They both worked from 14.

Different world.

Back for good

Only saying what I've seen. Maybe different for you!

And I ABHOR the daily mail.

There are plenty flats available for less than £1million!

I must have missed the bit where I said there were not

www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jan/29/can-you-really-save-for-a-deposit-by-ditching-coffee-and-avocado-toast-i-tried-to-find-out

As martin lewis says to the young reasonably well paid reporter in the article. It is impossible for her to buy in london so no amount of avacado withdrawal will help.

I'm sorry if this has been brought up farther back in the thread, but smart phones & mobiles ARE NOT luxuries anymore. They're necessities. I'm 37, so an old-ish millennial, and I'm expected to be available 24/7 by my job, the only way to do that is via a smart phone. And I'm expected to accomplish more and more with it, including producing reports and presentations. If I didn't have my iPhone and a good data package I wouldn't have a job.

But @Creambun2 he also goes on to say that she can, if she changes her spending behaviour but, more importantly, her mindset.

Not really. He tells her to save anyway. She may buy IF she meets a paenter and/or get a a sustabtial pay rise.

There are far too many individual circumstances to make any sort of generalization. Three spring to mind:

1. Friend earning £30-£40k. Her parents supplied entire 10% deposit on house in 'naice' area (she wouldn't contemplate living anywhere else, and was picky even about the exact spot she would live in said 'naice' area), and she has a wardrobe full of expensive clothes, goes on many long haul holidays. Clearly, she could have saved money for herself.

2. Myself, back when I was living alone earning £15k, take home was just over £1000/year. I was saving £200/month, £2.4k a year, and if I'd stayed in that area, could have bought a 2 bed flat after about 3 years for saving at that rate.

3. My sister and her husband. Biggest income by far of these anecdotes - well over £100k. But they couldn't save enough to get a big enough deposit for a house in London for their family, so spent money enjoying themselves instead, and relocated up north.

It's not straightforward. There are people who can do it and people who can't. I know a few people who subscribe to the general narrative of unaffordable housing as a way to conveniently overlook their own spending habits.

I agree with @thecatsthecats there are too many different circumstances for a definitive answer.

I think it's a little bit six of one and half a dozen of the other. Mostly it is a case of the maths not adding up these days. House prices are unachievable for many and will always be out of their reach. People who ignore the basic maths and say "in their day" are frankly wrong.

That doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who are spending too much on luxuries and who don't see that it prevents them from saving for a house.

Personally speaking we did it because we scrapped the luxuries. We stopped the nights out and the coffees etc and saved about £150/month. We live in one of the most expensive areas in the south east and at the time our joint income was £35k so saving and paying our whopping rent etc was not easy. We were also paying off debts. We thought it was impossible and not worth saving the money. Over time our salaries went up enabling us to save more and then we received a small (very) inheritance which added to our savings enabled us to buy a small shared ownership house (mortgage of £80k on our small share and deposit of about £5k which meant a higher interest rate). Had we not had the inheritance we would have carried on saving probably for another 2 years. At the time we felt like saving £150/month was pointless but we decided that if we didn't we'd have no chance. We're now out of shared ownership and have bought a slightly larger house.

I don't think for a second that saving £150/month could get you a 3 bed house in the south east now. The reality is different. When we bought our SO house the full value was £220k, when we sold it 5 years later it was £290k! What I think is that if you really want to buy you need to make sacrifices because even if you don't think it will ever happen, you don't know for certain. What if saving a bit led to buying a house. What you do know is that if you don't try, then no you won't be able to buy a house.

Who buys an iPhone? Most people get them with a contract don't they?

And you pay the cost of that phone during the contract, it’s not free!
*
I didn't say it was free, I meant that people don't go out and just spend a grand all in one* go. **

I think there's an element of long-termism involved. Many people don't see the point in saving small amounts, because they don't seem to add up to anything useful. And no, lots of people won't buy houses in their 20s, or 30s, but if you've never saved, and then turn around in your 40s and think, 'Oh I earn enough to get a mortgage now, but I haven't been saving so don't have a deposit', then you aren't any closer to buying a home, but if you'd been putting money aside for the previous 10/15 years, you might well get there.

I think home ownership is something you have to work towards as a longer term goal, for example, you might need/want to work in a more expensive area aged 20 ish, but by the time you're 40, you might not want to. So the assumption that you won't be able to afford to buy where you live now, so there's no point, is too short term a view in my opinion.

We bought our first flat in London on a relaidely small combined income -about 58 k between us, in 2003. But that was in the days of 100% mortgages and we also bought in one of roughest areas imaginable.
In 2005 with dd on the way we moved out of London to a very small two bed house in a commuter area-but in those two years we made about 30 grand on our flat (London house price rises even in the worst bit of town). In some ways we were lucky-those mortgages aren't available to first time buyers now and rightly so-but we paid through the nose for our mortgage monthly and we were prepared to live where lots of others wouldn't...

The housing market is being affected by poor Government policy.

I agree Averino.
Over years of working with families on benefits / really low wages, I've noticed time and time again how they tend yes, I know, massive generalisation but I did say tend to spend much more lavishly on 'gadgets' / 'fashion' / 'the latest expensive thing', and I reckon that it is a mindset that this money is to last until next week, and is there to be spent. It seems to be a feeling of "well, I'm never going to be in a position to buy a house so I might as well spend my cash each week", whereas, if you come from a background of people who have always been in work / families who have taken on a mortgage and bought their own house, etc, then your mindset tends to be different.
I would have said I 'couldn't afford' all sorts of things that the families who were 'in poverty' (according to Gvmt stats) readily spent cash on, but I knew I had a steady income and was saving towards that deposit for my first home.

ThisisnotarealAvo I think the point is, that there are a LOT of people (and you might not be one of them, but that wasn't clear originally perhaps) who actually believe that you don't pay £800 for the credit that the company are giving you to use that phone, and it is that ignorance that some people criticise.

Boomers never had the pressures of modern day people. Mum and dad got them a job with friends they knew, in their home town, accessible by public transport, Monday to Friday, at a reasonable wage

Matter of opinion - unemployment if you were a late boomer was a fact of life in the 70s and 80s; jobs were bloody scarce, and not all jobs were accessible by public transport. You are either on glue or a different planet.

Boomers never had the pressures of modern day people. Mum and dad got them a job with friends they knew, in their home town, accessible by
public transport, Monday to Friday, at a reasonable wage.

Are you fucking kidding?!

Jobs were really scarce when I graduated. I did a post-graduate secretarial course, so I got a job that way - lots of my fellow graduates were unemployed for months.

I moved 200 miles away from home to start my job and lived in a hostel until I could find somewhere that I could afford to live.

No hand up from Mummy and Daddy for me. It was tough.

Its easy to criticise people for eating out, getting take aways and not making packed lunches but when you're sharing a tiny, grotty kitchen with 5 other adults (and not of your choosing) and the living room is someone's bedroom, it's not so delightful to cook a meal or have a night in.

And what's the prize at the end for many? A tiny grotty flat, huge debt and a 2.5 hour round trip commute.