To wonder why the older generation can't admit that things are harder for millennials?

[ExtraPineappleExtraHam]

So we just had our meeting with a mortgage advisor. They will lend my dp £45,000 (not even enough for a bedsit in this town) and so I'm not even bothering to do mine as I earn less. We work very hard (44 hours and 27 hours) we just have low paid jobs and pay childcare for two under 5's!
I talked to my stepdad who compared it to when he had to borrow £36,000 to buy his first house in the early eighties. That was 3 times his salary and his wife stayed at home. He paid it off in six years. It's not the same. He was given a mortgage which was enough to buy a nice house in an area close to family and where he worked. He didn't have to have a bank manager saying 'well if you move to Wales or up north?' He didn't have to rent forever and have nothing to pass down to his children. It's not the same!

That is £25/week.Just one saving that can be made.

I agree. It's not the eating out or buying coffee out every day, per se, but the attitude behind it. If they're spending that money every day when they could be packing lunches and drinking coffee from home, chances are there are other places they could cut back as well. It all adds up.

If you are qualified to teach there is a shortage of teachers, so why are you not earning more money doing that?

Teaching is a really bad career at the moment. Just check out the threads on the staffroom board.

And the house I first bought is now worth £60k. In many places you can still buy.

PurpleDaisies
I agree teaching isn’t great right now. But needs must going down the mines was considerably worse but someone had to do it. And then that leads to the reason as to why british farmers have to ship labour in: because British workers these days won’t do it. When dh first came to the U.K. in the early 90’s and after I graduated, we took any job we could get for as little as £2 an hour. The country was in deep recession and you didn’t see people with work ethic going round complaining they couldn’t get the job, the house, etc they wanted.

Where’s the gumption? Where’s the grit?

some Things are worse and some better.

Yes we brought our first house in 1988 for £34000, 3 bed detached but we struggled to pay the mortgage and had to be frugal. We had 2 young kids and the mortgage rate show up from 12% to 15% in one day on black Monday!

We didn’t dream of sky TV, hen do’s abroad, weddings costing 10 000, holidays abroad or meals out. It was hard.

There were no help with child free costs! I would have dreamed of a free place at nursery for my 3 year olds.

I think some of the 20 something’s including my own 5 would have struggled in our shoes

Agree though every generation had its own struggles

I think the thing is nowadays people won't give up there mobile phone contracts, gym memberships, eating out, 2 cars, holidays etc etc to save. I'm 38 we gave up everything to start with so we could get on the housing ladder - our first sofa was out of Travel lodge as they were having a refurb and our first table was a TV box. My husband was on an apprenticeship wage of about £4 at the time and I was about the same, I'm not saying it's easy but some people want it all.

The millennials I work with take endless holidays, at least one or two of which a year are long-haul. They've all been to Thailand, Australia, New York etc, plus a good few mini-breaks to Amsterdam, Milan etc.

They have designer clothes and designer bags. They have expensive gym memberships and go out for brunch every weekend.

They live in rented flats with on-site gyms, all ensuite bathrooms, and every mod con you can shake a stick at.

Their outgoings are ENORMOUS.

By contrast when I was in my 20s I took one holiday a year, to Spain with my parents usually, or a package to Greece for £200 with a girlfriend. That was it. No spas, no mini breaks. I lived on a friend's floor and rented several shitty rooms in shared houses until a family tragedy meant I could afford to buy.

I'm not saying one generation has it better than the other, but millennials have NO idea of how older people cut their cloth...

I read tft before thinking about a reply but the OP seems to have disappeared.

If you are qualified to teach there is a shortage of teachers, so why are you not earning more money doing that?

School budgets are incredibly tight. I am top of the main pay scale. There is no possibility of my school letting me go through the threshold to the upper pay scale as they don't have the budget. It's easy to find a teaching job if you are an NQT at the bottom of the pay scale, not if you are further up. I could earn more money if I got a leadership job but I would have no time to spend with my own kids then.

THE OP ALREADY HAS PROPERTY according to her previous threads as pp have pointed out.

You don't work 2 x full time hours between you!

The OP would be on low scale of teacher's pay. Surely that is better than what she says she is getting now.

I know we've established that the OP isn't exactly on the breadline.
But around the general topic of this thread, a report by Moneysupermarket has just come out, and this is an extract from it:

Netflix, Spotify, Deliveroo and Uber are considered by many young consumers to be staple services – but not everybody is willing, or able, to foot the bill for that late-night takeout and Stranger Things binge. Stretched parents are increasingly being called upon to stump up the cash to cover the lifestyle costs of a generation of cash-strapped “kidults”, research suggests.

inews.co.uk/news/uk/netflix-spotify-deliveroo-habits-cash-strapped-kidults-leaving-parents-stretched/

And a further quote:

“With living costs rocketing, it isn’t surprising that adult children are finding it difficult to be completely independent and afford their monthly rent and bills, let alone their lifestyle expenses,” said Sally Francis-Miles of MoneySuperMarket. However, she said, the data indicates that instead of making sacrifices and altering their lifestyle, young adults are relying on their parents to plug the gap.

The housing market is tough, no doubt about that. But today a smartphone is considered a necessity, takeout coffees are a given, and people aren't willing to give them up. Whereas for the older generation, scrimping and saving for a house was simply 'what they did'. Yes house prices are high, but there's also a set of lifestyle expectations among millenials.

My first wage in the mid 80's was £15 a week working in a travel agents. I was employed on a 6 month YTS scheme and my wage rose to £30 a week after 6 months.
My mum and dad bought their house but it was a thirties semi with single glazing, a gas fire to heat one room and an outside loo. I had a potty under my bed until I was 15yrs old and ice on the inside of my box room bedroom window. I can remember wearing hats in bed in the winter to keep warm. Holidays were spent staying with my grandparents. We couldn't afford family holidays. I left school at 16 and because I'd had a Saturday job, I managed to find a full time job reasonably easily. I worked as staying on at school simply wasn't an option.
I considered myself lucky that I didn't end up working in the local factory. Better money there but so depressing. If I was a boy I'd have ended up working down the mines. My first holiday abroad was to France when I was 19 and I paid for it myself but it was cost price and a perk from my job. Sure, I knew school friends who had been to Benidorm and other exotic places but it certainly wasn't the norm. Luckily I had ambition and studied in the evenings and eventually got a degree when I was 30.
Maybe you can't afford to buy a house down South, (neither can I) but you grew up with far more opportunities than many women of my generation had.
I still blame Thatcher for creating the North/South divide and basically fucking over a generation of people who had the misfortune to be born in less affluent circumstances.
It's a matter of expectations. Having an education was a much greater prize than affording a mortgage on a house. When I got my degree, I thought I'd made it!

We still have some single glazing in our house. I don't see it as a big deal.

When I met my late husband he was doing an apprenticeship, I was working full time. He finished his apprenticeship and went to work for someone else, saving to buy his own business. Once he had his business up and running he saved to buy me an engagement ring and proposed. We then saved for the deposit for our first home.

This took time and a lot of hardship but that's how we bought our home. Nothing worth having ever came easy but that's how it was late 70's early 80's.

*"why did you have 2 kids before sorting out your jobs and buying a property"

This is really a rich person's question. The assumption that people are in jobs that pay progressively more with time. *

Not at all. A ridiculous feature of the housing market is that it costs more to rent than to buy. So a rational approach is to get over the deposit hurdle and on to mortgage repayments before you have children. However it's not necessarily desirable to base your life wholly on rational choices

because until the mid 80s central heating was considered an expensive luxury, and the majority of houses didn't have it

Nonsense!

I think it's an old fashioned view to not have kids until you can afford them but that's what my generation did. They waited until they could afford to buy somewhere then waited until they could afford to have kids. So that meant my DH working hard at getting a promotion so I could have a precious time at home with my kids as there was no paternity leave and maternity leave was meagre.

*because until the mid 80s central heating was considered an expensive luxury, and the majority of houses didn't have it

Nonsense!*

Maybe not mid 80s but not that long before. Only 30% houses had central heating in 1970 and it was about 1979 before it reached 50%
www.statista.com/statistics/289137/central-heating-in-households-in-the-uk/

My degree is the same as yours, OP. I was earning more than you are now working full time 30 years ago. I was a single parent. You need to set your sights a bit higher career wise.

Meredinto
It no longer costs more to rent than to buy since house prices have skyrocketed in many regions of the country. I know this holds true in the areas I am familiar with in the south, London and the midlands.

Many of us want to believe that if we work hard enough and make careful choices then similar opportunities - such as buying a home, should be available to us. If you are faced with the stark reality that no matter what you do, you won't ever achieve what your parents or (at a glance anyway) the majority of working people have. Maybe some anger is understandable. If 50%(?) get degrees the competition for a 'decent job' is still fierce and loaded with debt at the start. When you are still young and what you got into debt for, isn't actually delivering what you expected, what a let down this must be. It's not all just life choices.

We are also drifting away from a memory of real hardship as pp have said. Warmth, accessible food and transport, easy communication, the ability to wash and dry clothes (generally accessible). Access to information at your fingertips. Affordable food and a range of food options and costs. Affordable clothing. Hot water. Plenty of hot water. One generation ago this wasn't the case.

When we learned about bar graphs 40yrs ago, the most common answer on our class chart was the one hair wash, one bath a week option. Flannels and soap and water the rest of the week. There was also much less tolerance - rampant sexism, exploitation, racism, whole communities losing their jobs without the likelihood of any opportunity. Abuse. Illness. Lack of social mobility for the majority. Holidays abroad??? Nope.

Maybe we've traded one set of hopes for another but not even realised it was happening.

I had central heating as a kid. But I didn’t get central heating once i left home until 1995. Where I went to university it was very very common not to have central heating in student lets in the 1990’s.