To think there is a serious problem with the housing market in this country

[Kitchendisco21]

I was just about to buy my first home having spent 10 years saving a deposit. Thanks to the stupid help to buy intervention, the houses I was able to buy are now 50k more expensive so I am completely priced out. I am so utterly sick of it.

And no, I can’t move elsewhere/ get somewhere smaller/eat fewer avocados! I have been saving for a decade.

Aibu to be so fed up. I read last week that 98% of keyworkers couldn’t buy a home in the uk now. When will people actually wake up & see what a major problem there is? I am so angry.

In the 60s, 70s and early 80s, the cost of a house as a percentage of income was usually around x 2.5 annual income. A man on 4 or 5k a year could buy a house on one wage. Today, the cost of living is proportionately much steeper and totally out of sync with wage rises

It's definitely not snowflake moaning

Nonetheless, in my experience, everyone seemed to be much less well off in the '70s and' 80s than they do today. Standards of living were generally lower.

Nonetheless, in my experience, everyone seemed to be much less well off in the '70s and' 80s than they do today. Standards of living were generally lower

You think a man was on £4-5k per year in the 70s🤣🤣🤣

I think this is where people don’t realise the reality.
Whilst you can study average incomes for the year the reality for most people was far below that.
Yes there were people who earned huge amounts and people in managerial positions but mostly people were struggling on an income of nearer 1/2 that and if you were a woman even less. We might have had the equal pay act and companies stopped advertising pay for a job as men’s salary and women’s salary but it didn’t stop people being paid vastly different amounts for the same job.

That is why most people were poor.

If you are referring to the 60s as well then your figures are way off

The average annual UK salary in 1966 was £891 Per year

Even in 1977 it was about £3500 but with 33% tax that would have been less take home pay than today.

£4-5000 would have been a huge amount.

In 1980 Dh was earning £1800 per year and I came out with £960.

This thread shows that people who quote the ‘olden days’ and reminisce about times gone by are totally detached from reality. Quite frankly, to sit their and romanticize how people got on the property ladder in the 60s and 70s and then lived through mega interest rates and high inflation, is ridiculous. With attitudes like this, honestly no one can help them.

Whilst you can study average incomes for the year the reality for most people was far below that. Yes there were people who earned huge amounts and people in managerial positions but mostly people were struggling on an income of nearer 1/2 that and if you were a woman even less. We might have had the equal pay act and companies stopped advertising pay for a job as men’s salary and women’s salary but it didn’t stop people being paid vastly different amounts for the same job.

Why in the name of all that’s holy, or while we’re talking about life in perfidious Albion, all that’s shit, do baby boomers refuse to see that THIS HAS NOT CHANGED??

In fact employment is now less secure and lower paid in real terms than it was back then. All the controversy about zero hours contracts and the gig economy passed you by has it? And the need to have degrees to get any jobs that pay anything negates the vale of that extra pay now education has been reduced to an exercise in pay-for-tick-box-certificates.

It’s the people currently not working and still being paid, ie pensioners, who are insulated from modern working realities, not those of us being chewed up and spat out of the system right now.

Right now, and for the last 20 years of laissez faire ‘free market’ enterprise. This is not new - you refused to listen when it was 20 years ago and now there are no good options left.

@MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes

Whilst you can study average incomes for the year the reality for most people was far below that. Yes there were people who earned huge amounts and people in managerial positions but mostly people were struggling on an income of nearer 1/2 that and if you were a woman even less. We might have had the equal pay act and companies stopped advertising pay for a job as men’s salary and women’s salary but it didn’t stop people being paid vastly different amounts for the same job.

Why in the name of all that’s holy, or while we’re talking about life in perfidious Albion, all that’s shit, do baby boomers refuse to see that THIS HAS NOT CHANGED??

In fact employment is now less secure and lower paid in real terms than it was back then. All the controversy about zero hours contracts and the gig economy passed you by has it? And the need to have degrees to get any jobs that pay anything negates the vale of that extra pay now education has been reduced to an exercise in pay-for-tick-box-certificates.

It’s the people currently not working and still being paid, ie pensioners, who are insulated from modern working realities, not those of us being chewed up and spat out of the system right now.

@MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes - you are another poster who is lumping all "baby boomers" and now, "pensioners", into one amorphous, stereotypical mass, whose financial circumstances are all the same, who don't give a toss about younger people, and who are totally and deliberately responsible for the very real financial challenges they face. So government decisions and actions, and financial crises and upheavals, have played no part at all - it's all the boomers' fault? You do not speak for me. As someone in their 60's, I find this insulting and offensive. Just as younger people rightly find being called "snowflakes" completely unacceptable. The sad thing is, this "divide and conquer" mentality isn't necessary. We could actually work together rather than against each other. I have young adult children, and am no way "insulated from modern working realities", and........I still work too. I posted yesterday that I have a direct debit to Shelter. I'm still waiting to hear how other people complaining about housing are doing something about it. Doesn't have to be money - you can campaign, demonstrate, get involved in politics.......

I agree with @LindyLou2020
I bet all the people posting Ill-informed bile and hatred for “boomers” probably think they are right-on and oppose discrimination (in theory) too.

Btw as an offensive old git boomer aged 58 I still have a massive mortgage, am still working and paying plenty of tax,
I have never voted Tory either so most of the shit people complain about I feel the same but these were not policies I approved of or voted for so you can totally fuck off blaming me for it.

Why in the name of all that’s holy, or while we’re talking about life in perfidious Albion, all that’s shit, do baby boomers refuse to see that THIS HAS NOT CHANGED

So if it hasn’t changed then why blame those born in the 50s and 60s.

In the area I'm looking to buy, a 3 bed mid terrace with no parking has gone from an average of 700k in 2019 to 850-900k now.

Its sickening.

I can only dream of a 3 bed semi with a garage.

In fact employment is now less secure and lower paid in real terms than it was back then.
I don’t want to go all 4 Yorkshireman sketch, but this, like all crappy generalisations, doesn’t bear actual scrutiny. Unfair dismissal with employment tribunals didn’t exist until 1974. The right to request flexible working didn’t exist before 1996. No minimum wage until 1998. No legal right to paid time off until 1998. The picture has been changing but its simply not right to say its shitter now than ever - some things are better, some worse.

@DynamoKev

In fact employment is now less secure and lower paid in real terms than it was back then. I don’t want to go all 4 Yorkshireman sketch, but this, like all crappy generalisations, doesn’t bear actual scrutiny. Unfair dismissal with employment tribunals didn’t exist until 1974. The right to request flexible working didn’t exist before 1996. No minimum wage until 1998. No legal right to paid time off until 1998. The picture has been changing but its simply not right to say its shitter now than ever - some things are better, some worse.

No maternity pay until 1975 - and only 50% of women qualified. Maternity leave started the same year. Yes, it was all beer and skittles.

@Racoonworld

There also won't be a crash. For a crash to happen there has to be more supply than demand. Houses are selling fast despite high prices. The hundreds of new builds they are building in my area are flying off the market as soon as they are put on, there is so much demand. There is demand at these prices and people can afford them.

Don’t tempt fate. I’m pretty sure people were saying that in the mid 80s and were astonished when the mother of all crashes hit. All those new builds might be affordable now, they won’t be when unemployment rockets as it surely will.

@dontdisturbmenow

A decent, secure affordable home is a basic human need It certainly is, but more and more want more than basic. They don't want the flat in a busy area. They want the nice 3 bedroom house with a nice garden. They want brand new kitchen and bathrooms, perfectly decorated bedrooms.

The reality is that this is a luxury and one that indeed, many won't be able to afford until their 30s or 40s, maybe even 50s.

You have to start somewhere and that often is with anything far from ones dream home, but safe and secure.

Yes, I bought my first two up two down terrace £10,000.

However the market encouraged people to develop properties, these properties have already had a makeover the FTB market for renovations is tiny in comparison to yrs gone by.

In my first houseshare, my roommate said, "you know your rent covers the mortgage." I was shocked! How is anyone every meant to get on the ladder. I hope you do manage to find something.

YANBU. The only way to buy nowadays, realistically, is with inheritance/parental help/saving while living at home for years of your adult life. I don't know many first time buyers who have saved and bought with their own deposit.

I will never own, that is a fact. I won't have the equity to help my DCs with later on in life.

Property developers are a law into their own who need resigned in. Not gonna happen though.

Need to be reigned in

Who wants to be paying a mortgage in their late sixties? Madness

Many people in their late sixties, and beyond, are paying rent. How is that different (other than the obvious).

Some of us have no choice but to be paying off a mortgage into late 60s.

We saved for 7 years for a 5% deposit and will be paying of off until I am 67.

Many people in their late sixties, and beyond, are paying rent. How is that different (other than the obvious).

Because the context of that particular discussion was a poster claiming that for can people who already owned a house, ‘moving up the ladder’ was not only a good thing, but a thing that most people should expect to be doing. Despite it involving borrowing much more, probably over a longer term (at least one person on this thread has admitted to a 35 year mortgage) and going back to the start of a new mortgage term with each move.

Given the choice, who would load themselves with a ton of housing debt extending to your late sixties and beyond? Because that’s what ‘moving up the ladder’ involves when prices are increasing but average salaries are not.

The choice in this situation is not between paying a mortgage and paying rent. It’s between accepting that you will probably stay in the same type of house you are in now, unless you expect your income to increase considerably, and loading yourself up with more long term debt in order to ‘move up the ladder’. I did the maths upthread.

As other posters have noted, paying tons of interest on mortgage debt is the best way to impoverish yourself in the long term. If you keep extending the period over which you pay a mortgage, you increase the amount of interest you pay to lenders. They love long mortgage terms. All that extra money you pay in interest over a 30 or 35 year term, or even, God help us, a 40 year term, compared to a 25 year term, could have been going into a pension. Instead it’s servicing mortgage debt for your entire adult life rather than for 25 years, which is what a standard mortgage term used to be.

Property developers are a law into their own who need resigned in. Not gonna happen though

What needs reining in is actually reckless lending. When a bank agrees to lend you a ton of money over 35 years in order to buy a pretty normal house, and when lending is based on ‘affordability’ at current rock bottom interest rates without a thought for where interest rates might go over the next 35 years, something is going a bit wrong in the market isn’t it?

It’s one of the reasons why prices no longer hear any relation to incomes.

If banks lent less, prices would come down. They keep lending because people are gullible enough to fall for the myths that you can’t ever go wrong with bricks & mortar and you must buy at all costs even at insane values etc etc, plus it’s profitable business for the lender. The longer you are on the hook, the more they make.

Property developers are at least bringing more available housing to market.

Because the context of that particular discussion was a poster claiming that for can people who already owned a house

I don’t know what a ‘can person’ is. Not sure what happened there!!

@Iamthewombat

Property developers are a law into their own who need resigned in. Not gonna happen though

What needs reining in is actually reckless lending. When a bank agrees to lend you a ton of money over 35 years in order to buy a pretty normal house, and when lending is based on ‘affordability’ at current rock bottom interest rates without a thought for where interest rates might go over the next 35 years, something is going a bit wrong in the market isn’t it?

It’s one of the reasons why prices no longer hear any relation to incomes.

If banks lent less, prices would come down. They keep lending because people are gullible enough to fall for the myths that you can’t ever go wrong with bricks & mortar and you must buy at all costs even at insane values etc etc, plus it’s profitable business for the lender. The longer you are on the hook, the more they make.

Property developers are at least bringing more available housing to market.

I've loved everything you have written on this thread.

Reckless lending is a function of our ridiculous money system. Mortgages are thin air money as much as QE is. Banking reserve requirements are one big joke. Think this is a conspiracy? Then I urge anyone to read the Bank of England paper on
Money in the modern economy.

www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-in-the-modern-economy-an-introduction.pdf

Buy crypto and say f**k you to the whole system in my opinion.