To cancel my guardian supportership

[SmallBuisnessOwner]

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

Ridiculous story's like this of someone 26 with a well paid job working in the media and London spends over 500 a year on coffee. Outside London I don't know anyone like this. Most go out once a week to the pub and get a cheap takeaway occasionally as a treat. I don't think articles like this help anyone.

*Even if you spent £500 a year on coffee, how long would it take to save up the average London deposit of £50,000-60,000?

Yes, if you saved that £500 a year instead, it would still take you 100 years to save up - just for the deposit! *

And then add in the fact that the deposit may be £50,000 NOW, but in 10 years they'll have saved £5,000, and the deposit needed will probably have increased to £70,000. Good luck everybody!

When I started saving after uni (at £500 pcm), a house was £30k. By the time I had 25k saved, a house was £120k and my savings gave me a good deposit but was not my planned outright house purchase.

The Guardian is the number 1 paper for all champagne lefties. There is nothing more annoying than such a person, especially if they are famous. They are so out of touch with what should be Labour core support that it is laughable. They are worse than the BBC. What a mess the whole Labour movement are in. A choice of the likeable, but crazy JC type, or your average Blairite. The Tories will be in power for quite some time unless this changes.

Bin that rag OP........

Well said @bridgetoc

YANBU.

I have read the guardian since I was 17 and now a few decades later I am appalled by the reporting. I very rarely read a balanced unbiased view especially of brexit.

I have thought for a long time that the guardian is being quietly sponsored by the EU to get the message across and some of the headlines are verging on the ridiculous. It is being propped up clearly by some EU technocrats with an agenda (and I am someone firmly on the brexit fence)

What happens to snowflakes eventually?

They harden into ice.

I think seriously I would be so pissed off by now if I was young and trying to start out in life.

Maybe they drank fewer Starbucks and bought fewer iPhones (presumably zero because they didn’t exist yet) but I bet the average baby boomer spent a lot more on newspapers, phone boxes and stamps than today’s wannabe home buyers.

I genuinely don't understand the anti millennial sentiment in some media.

Is it just that the timing of it is such that the huge amount of filler articles coincides with certain things...? I don't know. I'm always mystified by boxing in of any age group.

Have you actually read the article? She is doing it in response to people who have said that millenials should quit buying coffee and save up for a deposit.She basically realises that it is impossible to buy a house in London just by cutting down on coffee in the first few lines. But yes, you are being unreasonable, to expect every single article in a national newspaper to be about people who are like people YOU know.

The writer of the article could easily be able to save £400 - £600 pcm. That would very quickly add up.

Not to a house deposit in London, it wouldn't SciFiFan.

Saving e.g. 500 pounds per month for 5 years would only add up to 30,000 which is not enough for a deposit on a London property or anywhere close to London, really.

All this 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' stuff is crap. You can live like that but it's incredibly hard and depressing. DH and I lived like that for 7 years, scrimping along for a house deposit, renting a tiny, damp flat, eating 99p cans of soup for lunch and making giant lasagnas on the weekend to last for meals for the week instead of eating out. It was fucking miserable and at the end of the time, yes, we had paid for our own wedding and also had a 30k deposit for a house but we were only able to buy because we were in Scotland.

What really changed our lives was upping our income. Or rather DH's income who was offered a job in the US a few years ago and has progessed in his career to the point where he is now earning exceptionally well.

We worked incredibly hard in the UK and saved and were 'sensible' and now I look back at my 20s and think what a waste it was. All I learned is that the global economic system is rigged against working people and the only way to escape it is to make sure you become a 1%-er yourself. Rich people know this already which is why they get jobs in the City and leverage money to make money. You can bet they don't scrimp on small luxuries to afford a basic human right because they don't need to. They will lecture that nonsense to the masses, however, to keep us dreaming big.

I recommend 'Pound Foolish' a book by Helaine Olen that exposes the myth of the personal finance industry and how it has conned people into thinking they are in charge of their own financial destiny at a time when wages are stagnating and working people are under siege from all kinds of economic forces that increase income inequality. It is focused on the US where consumer regulation is weaker than in the UK but very insightful.

I think the reaction to this is a little bit harsh. Particularly as the take home message at the end was that she could afford to save for a house if she didn't fritter away so much. She's obviously painted a massive target on her back for earning a lot more than your average 20 something and living in London.

IME at work it seems to be the younger ones who are going out buying lunch every day, whilst the ones with houses and kids bring lunch from home. The younger ones are also far more likely to have the latest technology. Martin Lewis's point about opportunity cost is a really important one for all people.

I thought it was an interesting and relevant article actually.

And it made me realise how lucky i was to be able to get on the property ladder in the 1980s, when I was about the same age the journalist is - unencumbered by student debt & before every High Street had a Costa or Starbucks.

InionElle "All this 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' stuff is crap."

I totally take your point about wages. However, I have seen posts on here where people are trying to save - not necessarily for a home - and say "I don't where my money goes" which is mad - they should give it to me if they don't know where it goes.

So I believe in tracking pennies carefully but I advance plan so once it's done, it's done if you see what I mean. Also, I have tried climbing up in terms of earnings and I couldn't manage the stress, but that's just me.

I will read that book - if I can get hold of it

Who are these people who only buy one cup of coffee a day? I need at least two or three.

Also in general I like to save "fuck off money" in case of job issues.

Haven't we just done this one? Again? So soon? www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3152073-To-think-these-baby-boomers-are-missing-the-point#prettyPhoto

We need this kind of pressure on the millennials because to keep the inflated prices we need people to be able to buy the houses.
Any kind of frivolity needs to be gently demonized- coffee, cinema, takeaways. If they give up then the whole thing falls down!

An alternative is immigration but as well as keeping prices up they also use state resources like the nhs and compete for jobs. And that pisses people off. Some of them have had the audacity to open takeaway and coffee places. Now that really does take the biscuit.

The take home is if you are a very high earner with little student debt you can make yourself packed lunches and spent most of you youth not doing much in order to buy a shitty overpriced flat eventually.

Only if the flat stops increasing in value far quicker than wages, as has been happening for many decades.

I have only read the Guardian a few times and a few online articles when they come up on Google with their pathetic little advert pleading for you to sponsor them. No thanks. Not interested in what a load of champagne socialists have to say about the state of the world. Or should that be avocado and coffee guzzling lefties.

DH and I had to stop buying coffees en route to work. It didn’t stop us buying a house, many years ago now, but did make a difference to our food budget.

As whiskeyowl pointed out, housing was a lot cheaper.

Contact the Guardian and tell that that having read the article, you feel you could save for your house deposit quicker if you cancel your Guardian membership.

and KitKat1985 wins the thread!

oh I wish I'd thought of that

I look forward to the day when we can all stop using derogatory words like 'leftie' and indeed anything similarly aimed at people with views on the other end of the spectrum.

I don't suppose many millennials actually support them. I'm older and have -a huge debt- house.