Critics of so called baby boomers

[Pixxie7]

What is wrong with you people comments like waspi women are grabby and baby boomers have all the wealth because they bought their houses for a few thousands. I started work at the age of 16 with a salary of £7 a week, worked all my life. Did not have access to pension contributions until I was 52. Paid nearly 50 years of national insurance, which was for my pension which is not a benefit but a right, only to have nearly £50,000 stolen by the government. Imagine how you would feel if this happened to you.
Not saying you have it easy but you have far more opportunities than we ever had.

Every generation thinks every other generation has/had it better and ignores the shit bit.

Its shit about pensions. But your generation did have good in some ways. My mum is a similar age. Her first house was 7k in 1976. A house of 24k would have been quite a nice first home or expensive area.

I bought a cheap house. But I live in the north. Elsewhere in the country i would not have ever been able to buy. Your home will also have gone up massively in value. I wont get that either.

But its better in certain other ways especially as a working women. Not perfect, but better in some ways.

Maybe everyone just needs to stop bitching about how easy everyone else has it.

Ok thank you.

How about a little fact checking?

Millennials are half as likely to own a home at the age of 30 as baby boomers because of higher prices, low earnings growth and tighter credit rules. In the 1980s it would have taken a typical household in their late 20s around three years to save for an average-sized deposit. It would now take 19 years. Millennials are now spending an average of nearly a quarter of their net income on housing, three times more than the pre-war generation, now aged 70 and over.

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/28/proportion-home-owners-halves-millennials

I agree but my op was in response to waspi women being called grabby. No it was a standard 3 bedroomed house bought in 1984 although it was in the south.

Perhaps you should check your facts, very few people of that age could afford their own homes. I am not in my 70s yet.

No it was a standard 3 bedroomed house bought in 1984 although it was in the south.

How much is that worth now? Yes a standard 3 bed house in the 80s. My mum is a similar age. Perhaps a tad younger, in her early 60s. They bought a 2 bed. So you did get a better house and 10 years later. Still cheap.

I bought during the property boom. I had to choose between university. University fees were now in place and had I have gone I wouldnt have ever owned my own house. For me, it wasnt really a choice.

I had no idea ibwoild become a high earner in my 30s. FWIW, mum and dad paid into a private pension for mum when she gave up work. So there was the option. Work place pensions werent the only option.

I have sympathy for having pension age changed. But to pretend you are the worst done to and that property wanst easy to get is ridiculous. I dont know any of my parents friends who didnt buy a house. 3 of my aunts and my grandparents all bought their council houses dirt cheap (dont start me on the chaos that caused the country), after you bought yours.

We can agree there but nothing I have said is meant to be personal. The one thing we did have that even my own children didn’t was freedom to play outside without fear.

The link between retiring earlier and unequal opportunities is fairly straight forward, it was done to address the abject poverty of women over 60 without occupational pensions and no state pensions The Beveridge Commision in 1942 highlighted just how bad their plight was compared to men. Although pensions were low in 1948 the new act tried to address some of Beveridge’s concerns. Even with universal state pension though in 2006 the government published a paper showed that only13% of women were entitled to a full state pension, compared to 92% of men. And women received much smaller employment pensions, if any. The one and only benefit women had over men was their historical pension at 60 brought in to allievate their disproportionate poverty that had been going on for over a century.

Nobody wants women to keep retiring at 60. Their employments rights have changed significantly in recent years. And in future many women will have employment pensions like men. They are much more equal now. WASPI women are in that transition period between the scandalous situation of our parents and the much improved rights of women today. They were treated badly by being subjected to two lots of changes without time to plan and without proper notification.

Immigration has affected house prices, as has the concentration of jobs in the south east due to the loss of heavy industries in north , the development of banking and finances in the City, these having huge salaries, have pushed up prices. Also rich foreigners wanting to buy investment property in a stable country like the U.K./ Australia push up value at the top of the market.
Me and DP do not have degrees. We are retired and able to help our adult DCs buy houses.
You should think about who you vote for. Labour are keen on IMigration . As are SNP. The fact they are staffing hospitals doesn't mean they don't need housing.
Goodness knows why govs have not built housing. More housing means lower prices.
I agree that house prices are crazy but write to your mp. It wasn't a conspiracy by baby boomers.
Last time I mentioned immigration the next post accused me of xenophobia (young person). Please stop blaming baby boomers start blaming the Gov.

The thing is your house was 5 times the national average earnings. Now it is around 10. I get you weren’t advised to get a private pension. I wasn’t either. I’m late 40’s. I get you’re pissed off. Everyone’s pissed off for different reasons. We can’t go back, just have to go on. If I had my time again, I’d pay into a private pension. I won’t even be getting much of a state one.

I'm a baby boomer, and I do think things are harder for my dds' generation, Besides university fees, houses are relatively far more expensive now, especially anywhere in the SE or London area. And that is even taking into account periods of very high interest rates.
Many people now have to pay much the same in rent as they'd have to pay for a mortgage - the great difficulty (or impossibility) is so often saving enough for the hefty deposit.

IMO boomers who bang on about smartphones and avocado on toast either have no idea, or must be wilfully ignorant of current realities. Smartphones are a fact of life for the majority now - times do change. In the same way things like a TV, a phone in the house and a washing machine, would have been unheard of for my grandmothers for the first few decades of their lives.

How has immigration affected house prices again and where?

That sounds a tad overgeneralised

So you bought a house for eight times your salary. That’s a bloody bargain. These days an average salary can’t buy a house for that, especially in the south-east. You need reaped lots of benefits.

I think the way the Government handled it was very poorly thought out and it should have been done in a much more staggered way to reduce the impact on the women involved. I have a lot of sympathy for these women and think most people would feel aggrieved in their position.

Most baby boomers have DCs and know not to bang on about avocados - they know how hard their DCs work. There are fewer jobs in the regions so imv the commute distance is greater as jobs are concentrated in a few cities.

You've litterally been given facts about home ownership and housing costs and your choosing not to believe them. If you own a house, there is the option to downsize to fund your retirement. Many in my generation will never have that, and they won't get a state pension in their 60s either.

I do have sympathy for the waspi women in that the government moved the goal posts twice and the second change was badly communicated.

However, I think older people tend to lack empathy for millenials. It's worth remembering millenials are in their 20s and 30s now - struggling to buy houses, in debt from uni because we were told it was the only way to get a decent job, careers screwed over by the recession. And it's easy to blame the older generation for some/all of that, especially when they are so keen to blame things on us!

Ok, so I have to respond to the comment from OP about kids being free to run around outside...

Fewer kids get killed by cars now than then
Fewer kids drown
And no more or less are kidnapped of murdered.
Parents spend twice as much quality time with their kids now than they did in the 60s

Maybe some of these mortality stats are because kids are supervised better? Whatever the reason it doesn't bode well for the safety of kids out roaming back then.

But we live in an age of pure information flow, which causes a better understanding of threats and creates more fear. Laws have changed preventing children from being home alone or out alone.

This whole 'in my day' rubbish starts from an overly rose tinted perspective of the past and progresses into a total failure to recognise how the world has changed.

Try having some empathy for your children and grandchildren, rather than conducting a contest about whose life is harder.

If you’re not even in your 70s yet, why don’t you just keep working? It’s what my generation will have to do, I doubt many millennials will be able to retire at all.

And also, you have a lovely big house in the south that you can sell to fund your retirement. It must have doubled in value many times over since you bought it so cheaply, why don’t you just do that?

I would also like to know the answer to Hesafriendfromwork's question

No it was a standard 3 bedroomed house bought in 1984 although it was in the south.

How much is that worth now??

I can't believe you have 3 children in their 30s, yet still don't seem to realise how difficult things are for their generation.

Ugh can we all stop this pathetic behavior please? When did different generations become so pitted against each other and ridiculously in competition about who has it harder? We are all just humans trying to do our best. I hate this ‘I was born at this time so my life was harder than EVERYONE who was born at this time!’ It’s just juvenile, pathetic, idiotic, and distracting from actually important issues.

Uggggrrrrr...
Avocado toast, immigrants, mobile phones....are all to blame for the housing crisis.
Not.
Would everyone please stop banging on about how if milennials stopped eating posh food they would be able to save for a deposit. I bet they shop at Lidl like many of us.

When did you buy this really expensive house ???

That's a very expensive house at that differential !

I bought in the south east - house £32k, income £10 and £11k respectively. So our income a year was two thirds of the worth of the house (and was the maximum we were allowed to borrow)

Be honest - your house is worth well over a million of FREE MONEY that you didn't earn ? So that makes up from your pension personally doesn't it?

And if you want to know what a hard life was lets look to the wartime generations...we all have it easy compared to them.

I'd rather be poor in old age, but own a house of my own.

Now, I'm going to be poor in old age, but will still be paying rent, as I have never earned enough to be able to afford even a tiny flat, thanks to all those people who bought a house for a 'few thousand' making a hell of a lot of money on the property market. And I'll be amazed if there's anything resembling a pension in 20 years, so I won't be retiring at all.

Immigration has not affected house prices. Yes rich overseas investors buy the super prime houses in Kensington but those types of houses were never in reach of ordinary families.

I live in London, nearly everyone on my street who owns a house is British born from all over the UK. They are mainly professionals so higher earners. The few council houses are rented to older British families. The rentals are a mix of younger people in house shares. A bit further out in the cheaper part of town, the rentals and higher occupancy rentals have more immigrants.

The owners of those properties are usually Brits. My friend who lives on the next road owns two of those houses which she bought for her pension and to get rent to pay school fees just as house prices were starting to go crazy.

Immigrants are not impacting house prices where I live because cleaners and foreign builders cannot afford to buy around here. They may have pushed up rents but not house prices. There are many Brits owning multiple homes for rent.