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!

Agree, SuperBeagle

I can see both sides.

Some of the older generation think millennials would be able to buy a house easily if they gave up their iPhones ("well we didn't have those back in our day"). I confess to feeling a bit sick when ILs upsized to a large 4 bed detached house a few years ago purely as a status thing. 3/4 of the bedrooms are rarely if ever used. When there are young families who will never be able to get on the property ladder.

On the other hand I have friends from uni who graduated with me over 8 years ago and spent a couple of years travelling before going into temp jobs because they "don't really know what they want to do". They still live with their parents but moan constantly about how they can't afford to save for a rental deposit and how hard their lives are but they manage to go on holiday several times a year to the likes of Thailand etc.

Sick of hearing this millenial/baby boomer crap which is nothing more than a media construct.

But all you so called millennials have no clue about how life was 30/40/50 years ago. You really have never had it so good. Dont blame "older" people re housing. Blame past and current Governments both Labour and Conservative for both have been completely useless and incompetent and have made the country what it is today. A third world nation.

I also agree that caring for elderly parents full time just isn't possible for many families. My dad has dementia and whilst it is currently early stages so with my mum being there he doesn't need external carers yet... if/when it gets to the point where he needed round the clock care I won't be able to provide it. a) our house just isn't big enough and we can't afford to extend it to include another bedroom, b) I'm 30 and have a job I need to hold down and a 3 year old to look after (soon to be a 3 year old and a newborn), c) although our children will get older and less demanding I don't think it's fair or appropriate for them to grow up living with someone with advanced dementia.

DH's nan had Alzheimers and his granddad looked after her for 8 years before he died. He went to the toilet once and when he'd finished she got out the house and disappeared for about an hour before DH and his mum found her. Just one example of how normal homes and families aren't always able to keep up.

All the women who provided substantial elderly care, and it was always women, did not work. You can not work full time and look after someone. And for many people work is essential to pay the rent/mortgage.
Where more people care for elderly relatives, there is either no choice - subsistence societies with no welfare state. Or there are less women in the workforce. Or people retire earlier.
At the moment we have a Government that wants its citizens to work until a much older age, but also to care for elderly relatives themselves. The two sides do not square up.

We got a mortgage easier but I can remember when interest rates zoomed up to 14% because we followed Bundesbank and if my parents had not helped us out we would not have been able to buy food. Many of my generation could not go to University. I think only about 10% did. Many left school at 15 and went straight into the workplace. No foreign holidays, parents had no disposable income at all. As children I often had to wear second hand clothing from my older sisters. That said because everyone I knew was in same boat it was not too bad.

have made the country what it is today. A third world nation.

what absolute bollocks.

My chance in sorting out some old papers tonight I found a note from about 1982 or 3 of potential mortgage calculations called " house purchase sums".

It has 15% interest rate on repayment mortgage on there over a 20 year term. It concluded I could not afford to buy on my own (I was married a year or two later which meant we had two full time incomes and could buy). It ends "Problems: a 20% deposit is too high".

Its also getting and keeping a job thats much harder. More casualisation and uncertainty, needing 2 degrees to stack shelves, long hours for skilled jobs. So its not 'just' houses. Other things like pollution too. But of course theres less racism, sexism, better medicine.. i think its both better and worse

OP, please don't lump us all together. We aren't all too stupid/selfish/ wilfully ignorant to realise that certain things - especially the cost of housing in many parts of the UK - are a lot harder for our children than they were a few decades ago.

Yes, other things have improved, Most goods are relatively considerably cheaper than when most of what you bought was made here and not in China - but I can't think that makes up for the relatively vastly increased cost of buying a flat or house to put them in.

OTOH it's true that expectations in some respects are often higher, but then that's often true of the generation gap. The things one generation take for granted would have been luxuries to the previous one.

My granny never had a TV, and her own mother never had a radio - despite loving listening to it when she was at her children's houses - my mother often said she bitterly regretted not even thinking of giving her one. Though of course it would have been a major expenditure then. And for most of her life my great granny had only gas lamps.

In the mid 70s, shortly after we were married, my Dh bought a state of the art colour TV for his parents, who until then had only had a black and white rental. It was vastly more expensive, comparatively speaking, than such things today.
Nowadays, sad to say, it's frequently more likely that parents will be treating their grown up children to things they can't afford, often because of the cost of mortgage/rent/the ruinous cost of childcare.
And yes, I am well aware that not all parents are in a position to do so, however much they might want to.

It is so hard to assess. Pollution - eek - i have relatives who mined coal and there was a fair bit of pollution there and a relative in London when they had those pea souper fogs etc. Pollution today is as nothing compared with the past actually.

Getting jobs - at the lower end there are certainly a lot of zero hours and poorly paid contracts. however when I graduated hardly anyone got jobs as there was a massive recession on. I applied for loads. It was really terrible. Large parts of a whole generation of graduates in those years did not get a graduate job and plenty got no jobs. At the moment we have very high employed in the UK compared to much of the past. It varies around the country howeve r- I had to move hundreds of miles 30 years ago away from all family to get work and I suspect it can be similar today.

Long hours come and go. Plenty of my ancestors had half a day off a month - those in service. Others had a standard 6 day working week - many commercial businesse had Saturday as a standard working day too and you got just Sunday off. My son works his 5 days over 4 so has three days off a week something in over 30 years of work I have never once achieved!

Comparisons, as this thread has shown, are so difficult. There have always been wealthier families who always bought houses and poorer families who struggled across the generations.

On a whole I think life was a lot tougher physically if you go back to the 50/60s etc and EVERYONE (unless rich) has always struggled with those first jobs/first homes. I don’t think the rise in stress and mental anguish caused by today’s technological and always ‘on’ society should be discounted by the older generation. I have peers who have been highly pressurised at work, with colleagues committing suicide and breakdowns common place - what I’m saying is, there have always been problems.

However, by middle aged our parents generation (those aged now 60-70 ish) had achieved far greater financial stability (on average!) than any of that generation now aged 25-40ish. Unless you’re talking about central London which has also been a world of it own - by middle age it wasn’t unusual to own a family sized home or have a secure job, now those things are either completely out of reach or a serious mark of success.

I do believe most young people can get on the housing market - the crucial difference is that many then become stuck in tiny starter homes or flats because the jump to an actual family sized home is ginormous! It is the fact that the younger generation will struggle to ever reach the same level of security (which is what home ownership is about) is the issue - not how they fare or what they expect in their 20s. It’s their 30/40/50s + that will be the problem.

Even older people who don’t think their pensions etc are all that great should spare a thought for younger people who won’t even have that.

The grass is always greener somewhere else.

I know it’s easy to dismiss comments on here as whinging but no one actually begrudges our parents their achievements - I think most young people just want some new policies that focus on younger people and families for a change - even if that meant wealthier pensioners losing some of the benefits they don’t need. It’s not about making poor people poorer - simply planning for a whole societies future.

Well the moaning minority claiming to represent the younger generation seem to want what they perceive as the good bits the prior generations had, but none of the difficulties and hardships. So they want cheap London centric housing, but they don't want opportunities limited for women, lower life expectancy, higher costs of living, no car, no holidays, no conveniences, no mobile phones, no higher education opportunities except for the minority etc.

As I’ve said London is a world of its own and has probably been a separate issue for many years. I live in the north so nothing to do with London centric housing.

I think it’s reasonable to expect to work every bit as hard as your parents generation and achieve financial security by the time you retire. As it happens my husband and I are doing just fine but I see many well educated, hard working peers who are struggling with zero hour contracts, job insecurity even at higher levels and house prices (compared to wages) which are far far higher in comparison to the older generation.

Every generation has new innovative - I’m sure our grandparents and great grandparents thought the baby boomers had it easy and expected too much. However there has always been social mobility, until now. The next generation is the first to not be expected to do as well as there parents (ie current baby boomers) and that fact should not be ignored or swept under the carpet because it makes people feel protective about their pensions and benefits.

Many things are easier but with innovation has come problems - an nhs that can’t cope and yes, so many more opportunities for mothers - the other side of the coin is that financially many now have to work and are overstretched and unhappy caring for small children at the same time as ageing parents.

No one thinks previous generations had it easy but please take off the rose tinted glasses - there is true hardship for many young people today and more to come in the future.

*Badlad
have made the country what it is today. A third world nation.

what absolute bollocks.*

Well ok then, i concede,,its a second world country.

In support of my outburst i say it has a failing NHS, social care, lower quality of life than many 1st world and European countries.

Lower life expectancy.
Lower cancer survival rates.
highest population density
Smallest most expensive houses
poorly constructed houses on small plots.
General lack of open space
crap transport infrastructure

Thousands of Victorian terraces which would have been pulled down decades ago in developed countries but which are still tarted up and traded

If i had a choice of a country to be born in it would be either the USA,Canada,Australia/NZ. In Europe it would be Spain/France/Italy in that order.

Unfortunately due to a quirk of fate i was born in the UK but am not a UK citizen,,,

This generation have more at their fingertips than their parents did and their parents before them.

My nephew graduated a couple of years ago in an inadvisable degree with a drinking classification (2.2). Has worked a since graduating in a few low paid jobs - retail etc so fair play to him for getting off his behind. Not interested in moving more than 2 miles from where he grew up. Hasn't a spare penny to his name but out every week, new clothes every time I see him, new car on lease, iphone contract costs him over 50 quid a month, 2 holidays last year, credit card debt etc. And he and his girlfriend (similar boat and mindset) were moaning like hell they couldn't get a mortgage to buy anything near them.

Its not about not buying iphones and being able to afford a house, its about the whole instant gratification mindset. The pair of them could reduce outgoings by hundreds a month and look at a longer term plan to get where they want. But no, if you can't have it immediately its out of reach and there is no longer any concept of saving or waiting or striving.

When i was a kid if we couldn't afford it we didn't have it, and if i wanted something I had to save for it. And that mentality has stood me in good stead all my life.

ohgoodnesssakes

Oh COME ON

It is not a new thing for people to drink/spend away their weekly wage

People did that in my (gen X) generation, in my parents generation, and disproportionately in my grandparents post war shellshocked generation!!

If you know your feminist history you will know that if anything, men blowing the whole families money for the week is LESS common now than in the past.

When i was a kid if we couldn't afford it we didn't have it, and if i wanted something I had to save for it. And that mentality has stood me in good stead all my life.
Maybe you didnt
But to apply that to past generaltions in general is fantastical bullshit.

The whole bloody town (or what felt close to it) used to be out on the rip on payday in the past. Especially in my grandparents.

The end of the week/month is much like any other day these days....

You're quite right. I spent the odd evening converting cash into wee myself in my youth - but same principle applies to my generation in its time as this one.

I had friends back then who spent a fortune on clothes, makeup, designer this and that. They were the ones that didn't buy houses in their 20s. Its about what matters to you in that moment.

You want to live in London with all the attractions and excitement for a 20 something - then fine that's the choice you make. But don't expect to be able to buy property there, and don't expect cheap rent - you make your informed choices.

You want to buy a home in your 20s - well then you'll have to accept you might need to move somewhere that's not your first choice, and not get everything you want, and not trade your phone in to the latest model every year, and not have an exotic holiday every three months etc.

You can't always have everything you want when you want it. You have to make choices.

The difference is, the people in my and my parents generation who pisses away their youth got to catch up

And the ones who were sensible had faith that they would reap the rewards

Theres less hope now

There have always been people who wasted their money/opportunities etc in every generation - perhaps they never ended up doing well, who knows.

My point is that young people today just starting out can make all the good decisions and work hard yet by the time they retire they are predicted to be less well off than current baby boomers.

They won’t have the same pensions or retirement age, they won’t have the same benefits and they won’t have been able to secure the properties that ever increase in price to give them any security or the option to downsize - small flats and starter homes which might be achievable do not increase in value as much as larger family homes and mean you have nowhere to downsize too. This is even IF a younger person is able to get on the property ladder - sky high rents often stop deposit savings.

These are sadly facts.

Crunchymint
Idk why you and others say it’s cheaper to buy than to rent. It isn’t anymore because house prices are through the roof in many areas. Rents now in the south/midlands appear to me to be lower and in some cases significantly lower than mortgage repayments. I can’t say for the north. It most certainly was cheaper to buy when house prices were depressed 8 years ago. Those times are long gone from my calculations.

My mortgage just for example is 1.5k but Dh and I own more than half the property. If we had a 10% deposit in it, we’d be paying almost double but it wouldn’t rent for more than 2k leaving a massive shortfall. This can be replicated in smaller 2 bed terraced, studios etc. I think I posted something about it way back.

Interesting, where I live rents are more than monthly mortage payments.