To think I some people have really got it right! BUT HOW?

[whalesandsharks]

So as the title says...

A few couples I know (all mid 30s-40's)
Seem to have it all sorted very fast...they are set up so well that they aren't exactly rich per se but are "untouchable" (for want of a better word!)

Two examples are...

One couple...she works part time...2 days a week (in a professional role) and they have 2 rental properties (not big ones, two apartments) that he mostly manages.
They have no mortgages which helps massively I know!! But all parents are still around so no inheritances as such.

Another couple...he works part time doing odd jobs (plastering of a shed, tiling a floor etc) and she is a teacher working a 3 day week. Again no mortgage....

They all have dc, how have they done this?? They have skipped through the pandemic untouched, nothing changed.
Here's me and dh working out asses off in 9-5 jobs, one dc(can't afford another one right now!), renting (can't afford to save) dh was furloughed and had just got back to full pay and then yesterday I was told I am getting made redundant 😫

I know I'm venting but how have they done this, is there a magic trick I don't know of?? These people didn't attend private schools and lived in the same village as me growing up. I am at a loss as to where I went wrong!

I dont think its ALWAYS being given money. Sometimes its making decisions that makes things easier.

I went to a sec modern school, no real expectations. Did not go to university. My DH did though.

For us it was:

Marrying late
Stopping at 2 children
No ex's around especially if there are other children involved. Maintenance needing to be paid
Working FULL TIME. This was key to us
Not going to the pubs a number of times a week or out to dinner a lot
Buying in the surburbs of London and accepting that we would need to work in and around London. Clearly you had to fund the season ticket but West of London has always held its pricing

@toffeekiwi I'm sure lots of people are mortgage free in their 50's and beyond (assuming this from your post) and that's not what the OP is talking about. These couples are younger and haven't been paying their mortgages off for 30 years! I'd bloody hope to be mortgage free by then

[quote whalesandsharks]@NYCDreaming I wouldn't say so to be honest, their parents aren't exactly minted. That's my thinking though, I could understand it if parents were loaded and it was obvious a such. But there's no obvious logic.

[/quote]
My in-laws lived very frugally, both had menial jobs. They bought a cheap house when they first got married and never moved up the property ladder, so no large mortgage. They then inherited a modest amount but refused to spend a penny of it, so it was invested over a period of about four decades.
If you'd met them, and knew their lifestyle, you'd have no clue that they were actually quite well off. It suited them for people to believe that.

In our case my DH has a well-paid job that doesn't sound like it would be well-paid at all.
We were in a group of friends some years ago and there was a discussion of salaries, at the time the average in the group was about £24k. DH was earning three times that, he kept his mouth shut.

Just because they made a cash offer on a rental property doesn't mean they are mortgage free on the house they live in, surely they could have a huge mortgage on their home and used the money (cash) to buy a property to rent?

Sometimes what you see on the outside is not what is going on inside. From the outside we have no mortgage, both have jobs, 2 children, look comfortable.

In reality, we have no mortgage because my husbands dad died when he was 18. He would much rather have his dad.
Yes we have jobs for now, but my husbands is very uncertain.
We look like we live comfortably, but in reality we both live out of overdrafts, have loans and will be up sh*t street if he loses his job.

For us the secret is an inheritance. All our parents are still here though, our grandparents and parents agreed that our generation would all inherit the grandparents estates so we could get on the property ladder.

A huge amount of it is down to luck. Plenty of more intelligent, harder working couples will fair much worse than us and it certainly isn't down to anything they've done. There's of course lots of people who worked their arses off and got themselves in a great position that without any outside help, but while I don't want to undermine their efforts, there is always an element of luck to success. People just don't like to admit it, either to themselves or to the world.

I have a lot of apparently affluent friends.

Some of them are in a lot of debt but have lovely houses, cars, best of everything. They won’t advertise that usually so you just presume they’re minted.

Some of them were given money, more than you’d think.

Some of them have taken lots of risks to get to their current position, i.e 100% mortgages, borrowing the max available to them. My DH and I are very risk adverse and could have a much nicer house if we had not constantly been worried about house prices falling, losing our jobs etc... and just borrowed more back when it was easier to.

I also think childcare has a part to play. Many of my friends have
never had to pay childcare due to grandparents. When I think about how much my kids have cost me in childcare (worth every penny obviously) that would pay for my double extension! It’s not on a par with the other things but it’s notable.

I suppose we are in a similar position, late thirties, both working half time, kids in private school, we own four properties and rent out two (the fourth is used as an office).
I bought early and very strategically, identifying an undervalued building in an undervalued area of the city and increasing the equity in the flat dramatically within two years. Did the same the second time around, still single, and paid off the small mortgage in two years. Being in a couple then allowed us to buy a complete shithole and renovate it until it was valued at a third more than the total of purchase price and renovation. We now live in a very nice place with a mortgage of 200 quid per month because the purchase price was so low.
Having said that we are quite frugal. We’ve never had a car and buy a lot of things secondhand. We work hard in the hours we work and spend what we earn thoughtfully. We have a small house in a not yet desirable area.
Both from families that made really bad financial decisions and have had zero help, not even with driving lesson or university fees.
We’ve been through the big life milestones at similar ages to friends but they have always had cars, bought the biggest houses they could afford in overpriced areas just before the property bubble burst etc. so we have ended up in different positions.

They may be investing wisely. We have used a financial adviser who is also a fund manager for the last 2 years. He is getting an average return on our investments from the start of over 15% currently. We’re in our 50s.

Had we known about this and done it in our 20s, even with very modest savings, we would be absolutely loaded by now.

This is a strange thread. You don't know what goes on behind closed doors and no one knows what is around the corner. You don't know they've been untouched by the pandemic or that they are untouchable (no one is).

@Dillo10 we are not in London!

These people, unless they're investment bankers with bonuses the size of my entire mortgage, have ALWAYS been given money.

Nope. This is our position, near enough, and no-one's ever given us a bean. OH single parent family, me council house and shit state school. A combination of really hard work and good financial sense.

DH and I got a mortgage when we were both 19. Maybe they got a mortgage when they were young too and have paid it off?

Focus on yourselves and count your own blessings. You only know what other people want you to know.

I think a lot of it has to do with age ('I'm late 40s) or when people buy properties. We are not wealthy by any stretch (and I've just taken a 20% salary cut and lost 40% of my work so we're even less wealthy and I suspect my job will non-existent in about 3 months) BUT we are mortgage free and that makes a massive difference in terms of weathering the pandemic.

We are mortgage free, not because we had family money (as a lot on here seem to imply) or because we have worked ridiculously hard (although we have worked relatively hard and both had full-time relatively well paying jobs at various points) but we handled our money carefully and we bought our first property in 2003 when the market was less crazy in terms of prices. We didn't save at all when we were paying the mortgage as the interest rates didn't make it worth while so every spare penny went to over-paying the mortgage.

There is no magic bullet, a lot of it is luck and good timing, owning a property makes life easier in a lot of cases. I'm sorry you're struggling, it's shit and I'm really sorry you've been made redundant. I hope things turn around for you very soon.

My DS and BIL are in a completely different financial league to us, despite similar backgrounds, educational opportunities and earning roughly equal amounts. The reason for this is that BIL bought his first property outright in his mid-twenties, while we bought ours with a 40% deposit several years later. BIL was able to do this with his share of the compensation package his family received when his dad was killed in an accident during his teens and buyng in London in the early 2000s has financially set them up for life. But I'm pretty sure he'd swap circumstances with us and our four healthy parents if he had the opportunity.

I know what you mean though - I don't know how people seem to do it either! Comparison is the thief of joy and all, and I'm very much in the 'privileged and lucky' group and grateful for it, but I would love to know how the heck people afford their nice cars etc sometimes!

There will always be different types of people regarding spending and saving, of all types of income. Some people prefer to accumulate money, either because they wish to fund something big, or simply because they were brought up to not spend without needing to. This means there will be a percentage of people out there who have a lot of money saved but don't spend it and therefore don't show it. They are much better off than they appear. We had help from both our parents to buy a house together in our early twenties in a cheapish area. If you are mortgage free it is much easier to save and if you come from a family of savers it's second nature.

I have friends and the husband always worked but the wife hasn't since having there child 16+ years ago
They have a very small mortgage but they have inherited money several times £10 k here and there helps , gave them first deposit then several times after paid of parts of mortgage, plus buying before houses shot up so lots of equity etc in first house
They do admit to being very lucky
All other family members i know in good positions all together young and bought young prior to houses going so crazy
Youngsters i know buying having huge mortgages in some areas just to have a flat and have had some help with parents wither cash or living at home cheap to save
Me and dh in forties still not on property ladder and was just about to before covid then i lost my job so we have had to dip into savings plus in sw house prices have actually gone up ( more people moving out as wfh possible )

We were mortgage free by our 40's ( as are our children, following exactly our example) and live debt free.

We had zero parental financial help. Everything we have we made or earned ourselves by hard work, living poor, saving hard, buy quality, make cautious investment. Not many younger people today seem so share our notion (or experience) of either frugal living, or how to live within their means.

We are mortgage free, and mid forties.
Inheritance is the secret. There's no way we would ever have been homeowners otherwise.

These people, unless they're investment bankers with bonuses the size of my entire mortgage, have ALWAYS been given money.

And often even if they are. I know a few investment bankers, city lawyers and other very big earners from university and almost all of them came from money in the first place. I was a bit shocked that my friend who has earned six figures from her mid-20s still got her house deposit from her parents, but then she bought a townhouse in a nice part of London and the mad part is that she still wouldn't have been able to afford it (it cost £1.2 million) without family help, that's how mad prices have gone.

It’s luck, timing and decisions about the future. I’m probably one of the people you describe. No inheritance, single mum but only working part time and in a nice house, etc. I didn’t have any student debt and got on the housing ladder in 2000 and had tonnes of family support when DS was little BUT.....

I had a job for a few years that paid big with big bonuses. I was pretty certain that it couldn’t last so I squirrelled away all those bonuses and paid down my mortgage. Guess what, it didn’t last and after a brutal 3 years I ended up being paid off to leave quietly. On the outside it looked like I took an 18 month career break then went back into a no-stress part time role. How fabulous, lucky me. In truth, I spent that 18 months applying for loads of roles and couldn’t get another job because of the fall out from the last one. I had to make a pretty drastic change to our lifestyle and my retirement expectations. It’s not great for me. I feel like a huge failure and it’s impacted my mental health, but probably looks brilliant and like I’m totally sorted on the outside.

A PP definitely got it right about timing - I think there are many people in their late 30s/early 40s who just scraped into Gen X, with lower tuition fees and access to 100% mortgages. I was the last year without tuition fees, and then bought a property with a family member (no parental help, but buying together meant we could buy a much bigger place).

Yeah, this.

There are people who have made a fortune because of the batshittery of the UK property market in the last 20 years, basically by purchasing sufficiently early and in the right location. The key is to be early enough in the 00s that prices were still low, but late enough that credit was easy. 2004ish is a sweet spot. That's not to say all purchases made then have led to riches, there are people who bought at that time who are in negative equity, but some have.

People in their mid 30s wouldn't generally have been able to get in early enough, the odd 36 year old who first bought at 19 notwithstanding, but some of those in the age cohort you mention would've been early to mid 20s in the relevant time period. Let's say a couple are 43, both bought crappy flats in the early 00s for not much before they met, and decided to hang on to one of them as an investment when they moved in together. And imagine the flat that was crappy in 2002 has become much more desirable in the ensuing 18 years. It happens. If it was in London, and the couple decided to move somewhere cheaper then, well, that's a good chunk of your answer.

@formerbabe

I'm amazed how many people I know in their thirties, own job, own home, seemingly independent, whose parents are still regularly handing over cash.

Really!? My parents helped me get on the property ladder and I’ll do the same for my kids. You don’t stop wanting the best for them at the age of 18. If I can help I will in anyway.

I wouldn't assume that just because their parents are still around that there hasn't been any help through inheritance. My FIL passed away a few months back and because his passing was sudden he never spent the money he had saved over the years to pay for his care in old age . Therefore we will have a larger inheritance than expected and so be able to help our DC to get onto the housing market with a substantial deposit .

@shinynewapple2020

I wouldn't assume that just because their parents are still around that there hasn't been any help through inheritance. My FIL passed away a few months back and because his passing was sudden he never spent the money he had saved over the years to pay for his care in old age . Therefore we will have a larger inheritance than expected and so be able to help our DC to get onto the housing market with a substantial deposit .

Yes, we got family help but for both of us it was actually money that each set of parents inherited from their parents but felt that by that point in their lives would do their children more good than them. It wasn't a huge amount from each set of grandparents - none were particularly well-off - but because there are two of us, DH is an only child and between us we lost three sets of grandparents in two years it ended up making a huge difference.