AIBU to think one adult should be able to support a family with a full time job?

[Kendodd]

Talking about a normal size family, two/three children. Not talking about riches either, just an ordinary place to live and everyone well fed and clothed, all needs covered without state benefits. Any full time job as well, not just some fancy high paid thing.
I know for lots of people working really hard in full time jobs supporting their family just isn't possible on the money.

YANBU - they should be able to support a family.
YABU - they shouldn't be able to have a home and children on an unskilled job.

i know what the thread is about but I was replying to your post which was a reply to another post which specifically referenced that point.

For a family to manage on one wage then salaries would have had to keep up with house prices. When I bought my house my mortgage was for £38500, my salary was £18500, now that house is worth £110000 yet the salary for the job I did now is only £20700, the house price has nearly trebled in 20 years. While ever there are less than 1% pay increases wages will not catch up. When I first started work we often got 5 or 6% pay increases but the mortgage rate was 15%, the mortgage rate now is around 2%. That is why there is a housing crisis because young people can't afford to buy a house on a single wage any more.

@Nat6999

For a family to manage on one wage then salaries would have had to keep up with house prices. When I bought my house my mortgage was for £38500, my salary was £18500, now that house is worth £110000 yet the salary for the job I did now is only £20700, the house price has nearly trebled in 20 years. While ever there are less than 1% pay increases wages will not catch up. When I first started work we often got 5 or 6% pay increases but the mortgage rate was 15%, the mortgage rate now is around 2%. That is why there is a housing crisis because young people can't afford to buy a house on a single wage any more.

This is an interesting post because effectively the purchase is unaffordable but servicing it wouldn’t be due to low interest rates

There’s been a major sea change since 2008 with a withdrawal of easy mortgage credit and much reduced earnings growth

That is why there is a housing crisis because young people can't afford to buy a house on a single wage any more

Yes, and in large parts of the UK, young people can't afford to buy a house with two 'good' wages coming in.

Wfat do you mean by “no state benefits”? Education? Healthcare? Social services?

There’s been a major sea change since 2008 with a withdrawal of easy mortgage credit and much reduced earnings growth

One reason wages have fallen is because our levels of productivity is so low. There is a serious lack of investment into the economy, the only real investment has been stimulus to prop up & inflate the housing market. What's so ridiculous is that for most ever increasing house prices aren't a good thing because it makes it harder to move up that ladder but the public tend to find security in seeing their property go up & it encourages them to spend.

£70k down south ie london area. Well. It's a studio if your lucky.

really?

The thing is when only one income is needed, it's so often women who give up work and that causes all kinds of other imbalances. You could live on one salary in the seventies but people would also turn a blind eye to a man giving his wife a slap, consent within marriage was assumed, women were expected to run around after their husbands and there was little financial independence if you wanted to leave.

There are also a lot of women without pensions of their own from that generation

Min wage or there abouts is not supposed to support four or five people.

It should be but I don't think it's ever going back to that, not anytime soon anyway.
I grew up in an ordinary household with 3 kids supported by one professional working adult, although my mum worked part time when we got to school age as she was bored. My DH family the same. But it just isn't a thing now with the inflated cost of housing

We could have managed on one wage but would not have had quite so many nice things
No way would I have given up my career to live off my husband
We both went part time
Has been brilliant

17% interest on 100K is 17K a year. 2% interest on 500K is 10k a year. We are borrowing more and more to buy, but the cost gap is nowhere near as large as the house price gap. Annual cost on a 20 year loan for that 100k at 17% is 18k, annual cost on a 20 year loan for that 500k on 2% is 31k, or less than twice as much. House prices is the single biggest factor but there is a lot more to it than that. Once you have narrowed the cost gap down to the actual payments you make, the living expenses becomes a bigger factor, and life style expectations have changed a lot. (Obviously, if interest rates rise, many many people are screwed.)

I have just become a single parent becuase my dh passes suddenly a month ago
I am worrying about money on top of everything else, he was the main wage earner so we are over 2k per month down. I work very part time and earn about £1100 per month. I am excluded from benefits because I am getting a death in service payout. Which clears most debts and leaves me with a small capital sum.
I am going to have to get a full time job but that is hard becuase my son has a learning disability, it is so shit. We do live in the north which is cheaper but the wages are also poor.

I’ve just used the pmt function on excel for a quick and dirty and number of periods = 20 hence annual cost for those wanting to look into the numbers.

Why is putting women (let's face it, it would be the woman) back into the kitchen and not being able to earn their own money being presented as an ideal life?

Years ago, when my parents were small, many families had one breadwinner but my maternal grandparents never owned their modest house, never had a car, never had a colour tv, my grandmother washed their school shirts when then got in from school by hand (she never owned a washer) and ironed them dry because they only had one each and mum remembers that they had to wait for their dad to get home on a Thursday with his wages sometimes so Nanna could buy bread for tea which was often bread and jam. Contrast to my paternal grandparents where grandad was a skilled worker and Nanna always worked at least part time, they owned their house, a car, and went abroad for holidays in late 50's.

Life has never been easy on one income unless it's a professional salary, we lived on one growing up but my dad owned a business and mum had worked to get the house deposit together before I was born. I stayed home with my kids for a few years but my ex was, well is a pretty high earner, with a doctorate.

@MauveMagnolia

But that's area dependant because you can buy a flat where my house is for £120k

I don’t think you should be able to support a family on one wage because that means, more often than not, that it’s the woman who gives up work to look after children and even if it meant only having the very basic necessities then it would mean many children growing up without any of the extra things that are available now that enrich their lives.

My family and our group of friends have this life.
We’re all mortgage free or have small mortgages and all aged between 29-32.
We all bought our homes young, between 20-22 and where we live they were cheap. Between £60k-80k.
Husbands all work very hard; all trade / run businesses and we’re all SAHMs.
All have at least 1 holiday abroad per year, days out and very nice lifestyles.
All have at least 2 children, some of us have 3. One family has 4.

@TheRebelle you’re assuming all SAHMs only have the basic necessities. My children don’t go without any extras. Infact they have more than a lot of children I know in families where both parents work.

Mortgages need to be regulated again - it’s cheap credit that has caused the house price expansion. Once house prices are more suistainable, the pressure on social housing eases. Social housing should be for the minimum wage earning families - not for those on normal salaries who can only not buy their own house because house prices are insane.

And I wish people would give it a rest about mobile phones, holidays and cars being the reason people can’t buy a family house. 3 bed semis round here start at £450k and whilst it wouldn’t be unusual to find couples earning £120k between them, once you start taking in nursery fees etc they won’t exactly be living the life of Riley. Some Normal living costs (food, mobiles, entertainment) have fallen massively in real terms since the 1980’s, so it’s entirely possible to eat better/have newer clothes for the same cost as 30 years ago. But you can’t say the same for house prices, where the change is almost an order of magnitude.

I’d also point out that round here, Facebook marketplace/eBay/freecycle do a roaring trade in secondhand furnishings. I would say that the majority of people are not furnishing their first house new.

WRT new cars - you can either pay £350 a month servicing a loan on a £10k second hand car, or the same on a brand new PCP car. Or go without for a few years whilst you save up. So just because you see someone cruising around in a brand new car doesn’t necessarily mean that they have made crappy financial decisions.

In short, I don’t se much evidence behind the argument that no one can afford a house because they buy too much crap/eat out too much.

It's actually quite depressing that so many people want to go back to a life where only one parent works. We know it would be the woman who ended up staying at home in most cases. I honestly don't understand why people aspire to this as some kind of ideal.

My mother's salary wasn't even taken into account when she and my dad applied for their first mortgage. It was considered irrelevant. She did give up work when we were born, because it was considered the done thing, and she was bored and miserable as a SAHP. Her mental health has never recovered. Her biggest regret now is that she wasted her talent and potential.

I really don't want to go back to those times. I don't want my dd's future spouse to earn enough to support her. I want her to be independent and in an equal relationship.

It takes two parents to create a child. Why should only one pay for that child?

@TheHateIsNotGood

I agree with you OP - as a lifelong female 'rights' protagonist who spent many, possibly wasted, decades doing equality rather than theorizing or running to HR with my latest 'grief'.

It used to be the norm for years that a 'man' could support his family as long as he stayed 'in work'; if the lady of the house earned a bit of'pin money' that was good too.

Whilst not ideal if you're a woman, seems that scenario is virtually non-existent now, so either both mother and father run themselves ragged paying the household bills or the father might still have the mindset that all things domestic are woman's responsibility, so she's run even more ragged than ever....progress eh...

Every woman in my family worked. However it wasn't recognised as such or called "pin money" so as not to offend the men who couldn't cope with the shame of having a wife who WOH Women's contributions in or out of the home were not recognised.

The UK is still prosperous post 1979, but the profits are not going into the hands of normal, working class people to the extent they were previously. 'Trickle down' is a complete and utter myth.

Completely agree. The super rich have sucked up every penny of profits. We have people working 50 hours+ in Amazon warehouses and still needing to be subsidised by the tax payer to feed their family while Geoff Bezos is going to fucking space. Its so wrong.