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!

I'm 50. I went to uni on a full grant, was entitled to housing benefit as well, worked nights to supplement that. I was supposed to graduate in 1988 but was offered full time work in my rather rarified field at the end of 87 (when jobs were scarce) and so dropped out debt free at 20 years old.

My boyfriend and I rushed to buy a home when the government announced the role back of "Double Miras" in '88 and got a mortgage on 3 x our joint salaries with a 5% deposit. The princely some of 60,000 pounds got us a 3 bed flat in Balham - then considered the arse end of nowhere. Fast forward 12 months, interest rates went crazy, house prices went down, and thousands of 20 somethings were stuck in negative equity. But 15% of a 50K loan is a lot less than 5% of a 500k loan and a pub job and a lodger got us through.
I look at my kids, graduating with enough debt to buy my Balham flat give or take, with a degree that puts them out into the job market with a hundred other candidates for each job they apply for and I can't in all honesty say that they're on an equal footing.

horn
A full grant wasn't available for all. I didn't get a penny. Mum a nurse, dad unskilled - not exactly rolling in it. The cut off was steep - very steep.

All those saying it's the OP's fault for choosing a low-paid job: how would it work if nobody chose to do a low-paid job? Would there be enough highly paid jobs to go around? And would society be able to function even for a day if those low-paid jobs did not get done? The truth is that as long as we have a system where some jobs are very badly paid, we are accepting that some people will struggle to live on what they earn. We can't do without the work they do, but we still, perversely, blame them for doing it.

The only answer, of course, would be a more even pay structure, so that the admin and cleaning jobs would get done by people who were able to have a decent quality of life doing them. Some countries have very deliberately chosen to go down that route. We could, too. It's about political will.

Londoners have always had to move out of London to afford houses. The town I live in in Essex is probably 90% Londoners, and many people commute to the city. The OP could afford to buy a 2 bed flat on the details they have given.

roundthehorn Housing benefit for full timer students was abolished in 1985

There is a new trend fuelled by social media to get everyone tribal, them and us. I am heartily tired of the labels millenials, grey vote, selfish oldies, babyboomers never had it so good. All it does is encourage people to be unpleasant to another group. The Brexit referendum is a classic example of dividing people . Each generation has had issues, problems, different expectations, lifestyles, hardships etc. Britain, unlike most European countries, has had a culture of home ownership rather than renting. This is not always a good think. I agree that it is awful how difficult it is to get a mortgage. However infinitely worse to be sold an unaffordable mortgage @90% and then get repossessed. As for the oldies, I dont know of any that dont appreciate this is hard for young people, but actually, shock horror, it is not our fault. Many of my generation, who live at a very frugal level to give as much as possible to their children, have compromised their own comfort in later years to help out adult children with deposits. Something unheard of in our young adulthood. Of course not all parents can help, but most that can, do. Resentment is not a pretty emotion and it won't help your situation or relationships. You could even find some happiness without owning your home, who knows? The other thing that was not offered to us was all the free child care . The list could go on but that is not the point I want to make. My point is we are not your rivals, lets start agreeing more and just getting on with the very different issues we all face

I agree, Confused. Let us all pull together instead and help each other out when we can.

You can spend your life in jeaousy and resentment or you can just do the best with where you are and what you have. Those able to do that tend to be happier. That does not mean we should not try to enable more young people to buy a property which is something that many want to and gives them stability. it is land cost with planning permission which is the big issue. We have heaps of land in rural northumberland up on the moors where you can easily buy 100 acres for nothing much. As soon as you go somewhere people want to live and the prices shift in almost a perfect reflection of market forces - no jobs in my mother's Sunderland village and the houses cost £50k and then the closer and closer you get to the places with lots of very high paid work and property prices shoot up.

If people could work from home a lot more then they could live in rural northumberland, NW scotland, the Orkneys where some of my ancestors are from or even Costa Rica (property is quite cheap there) or Alaska.

I agree cos in real life you never hear sahms V working mums or boomers V genzees or whatever labels the media give us to polarise people

I’m not too sure it is , my mum and dad scrimped and saved for everything when we were kids . We never had a week away anywhere , never ate out in restaurants . They only shopped in charity shops for clothes . Mortgage rates were very high , but my dad would never own a credit card saying if you didn’t have it you can’t spend it .
Yes House prices are high today but mortgage rates are low and 1st time buyers don’t have to pay stamp duty . I’m sure most of them ho out have holidays and have the latest tech . So unfortunately you can’t have it all .

NEWSFLASH
Life is hard. These threads always turn into the 4 Yorkshire men. Does it matter how much "easier" people a generation ago had things? I'd rather rent forever and never own my own home and live somewhere that my son can be gay, get married and have children; where I can wear what ever I want in public etc etc. There's so much more to life than buying a house.

As a side note, do get a Declaration of Trust drawn up if you're putting in £100K and your DP is only contributing to get the mortgage.

IMO nothing has changed, it was, always has been and always will be a struggle for the vast majority. The difference between the generations is that previously they sucked it up and got on with it. Whereas millennial snowflakes complain, are offended and light candles.

I am 34, a single parent and I have heart failure. I can’t work. I will never get a mortgage and so I am stuck renting forever. It’s life, some people have money, some don’t.

Let me explain about 'white privilege'. It is the equivalent of playing a joker in a card game. if you cannot insult or belittle your interlocutor in any way you play the 'you have white privilege' card. It is unanswerable and renders the opposition, if they have white skin, in a position of abject contempt. They are lower than the lowest merely because of what they are and not because of anything they have said or done or had done to them.

Bit like racism.

Oh. It IS racism.

It is much much harder to buy a house these days than say 20/30/40 years ago - yes there were high interest rates and other problems but I can’t imagine that the ‘older’ generations can’t see that homes simply cost far more now in comparison to when they bought.
As for getting a nice family sized house near good schools...we’ve done it but at huge financial cost and significant sacrifice.

For me the issues that millennial s (and our children’s generation to come) face is that currently older generations are enjoying unsustainable benefits - triple lock pensions, rising social care costs, free bus passes and the winter fuel allowance to name a few. I do not think we can expect the same benefits in our own retirement so coupled with the huge costs of home ownership or extortionate rents, there are genuine issues to be addressed.

White privilege isn’t racism. Nice fragility showing there.

It kind of is though. It's a judgment made about people because of the colour of their skin

No, it’s saying white people experience advantages like not being discriminated against racially.

Regarding white privilege, I think it's somewhat harder to understand in the UK as racism, and particularly casual racism, isn't as much of a problem in the UK as it is in the US. (I believe white privilege is a concept formed in the US).

Haven't read the whole thread but it seems to have gone off piste from time to time.

Not all older people have gold plated pension schemes. We couldn't afford to contribute to a pension at all because our mortgage rate went from 15.5% up to 16%. When it eventually fell to 8.5% and stayed there for several years we thought that was a big improvement. Well it was compared to what we used to pay.

We treated ourselves to a meal out once a year on our anniversary. With a bottle of wine. Our one bottle of wine a year.
Holidays were spent in Cornwall in the tent we had saved up to buy.
Furniture was all hand-me-downs.
Pram and cot were both secondhand (probably 5th hand, actually).
One car, secondhand (as above, more likely 5th hand)

I thought I'd get a pension at 60, and in the 1970s was advised to pay the married woman's stamp (which I later discovered did not go towards my pension - I was supposedly earning a pension through my husband's contributions) so although I have worked all my adult life since age 15, I find I don't have enough NI contributions for the full state pension. I am still contributing to try and make that up by the time I'm 66.

I expect this post won't go down well but it wasn't all sunshine and flower power back then, it was bloody hard work - and cold. Central heating was an expensive luxury completely out of our range, we relied on hot water bottles and granny's handed down thick wool blankets.

I agree with GinnghamStyle - life is hard and there is more to life than buying a house. The freedom we have here - to be ourselves and express ourselves - is priceless and to be cherished.

Some aspects of life for the younger generation are undoubtedly harder. Others are far easier. Better access to health care, improved attitudes to race, religion, sexual preference, etc, are all vastly better in 2018. But, yes, housing is a huge issue for them. When I bought my house, it was easily within three times my salary. Now I would need to earn £300k a year to buy it. Which I don’t or never will earn. My kids won’t either I expect. So it is a problem.

You work "very hard" by doing 27 hours a week...come and join the real world! Most people I know (in the SE) are working over 50 hours a week, kids or no kids. I'm not saying that's ideal, but it means a lot of people wouldn't call your working hours "hard".

I do take on board the varying experiences presented by older people, obviously they had many difficulties which we simply do not have now - or at least not so much.

However, it never ceases to amaze me how many ‘poor’ older people are on mumsnet! Apparently no one ever went out, had heating, owned a car or enjoyed any sort of fun. It was apparently all sacrifice and work.

I believe there is more truth to this if you are more like 80/90 now. The generation of my parents age (65-70) May have started off in poorer areas of the north - my pil in Sunderland, my dad from a council estate in Liverpool and my mum from Yorkshire - but they all quickly found excellent employment, bought large family houses, enjoyed holidays abroad by the 70/80s, are mortgage free and retiring in comfort. As are ALL of their friends, relatives and neighbours. Most of who have enjoyed very average middle careers - admittedly educated and in employment but nothing beyond the norm.

clyd Totally wrong. That is in your small circle. My earlier childhood was spent living in official slum housing. Two rooms, no hot running water and an outside toilet shared with other families. That was in the 60s when there was an enormous difference between how middle class people lived and how the poorer working class people lived.
And back then there were posh working class council houses, the kinds all sold off now. A large proportion of people lived in council houses. So you could be working class well off. The kind of people who now live in modern townhouses. By itself that does not mean much. And plenty of well off people live in Sunderland.
Very very few people from poorer backgrounds then went to university. Because most families had to have the wage of their adult kids coming in. Kids went out to work full time from 15 then. And the big push was to get kids to stay on, as few did outside the middle class.

clyd believe whatever you want. I bought my first house (with my ex) in 1990 and practically starved for the first 3 months just to pay the mortgage. I'm still poor at 57 because I had a disabled child at 40. I've never lived in a house with central heating.
It's nice for your parents and their mates that they managed to suceed, my inlaws did as well, and my parents had a good few years of being comfortably off once all of us kids left home. I'm very pleased for them.
As for being 80/90, no life was still very rough and hard for a lot of British people in the 60's and 70's, things didn't really start improving until the 80's, and even then not for everyone. There's plenty of evidence to support that.

And of course it was all not sacrifice and work. But going out meant going round friends house or going to the pub and nursing one drink all night. Going to the cinema or eating out was a big treat and I meant plenty of people when I was 18 who had never ate out anywhere.

So fun, but less commercial fun. As a kid we would go out walks, have picnics, and play with other kids. All fun things, but not things that cost money.

People in their 80s and 90s dealt with the war and rationing. Many were evacuated as kids. The level of hardship they endured was far more.