Annoyed with friends/family...house purchase

[CocoCookieCream]

So we bought a good 4 bed house recently (in Sussex), after upgrading from a 1 bedroom flat (in a more expensive London area).

And some of the comments from friends/family make me furious:

-You must have got a hand-out from your parents.
-Must be good to have rich parents.

Also, it's not just the comments but some of the attitudes people have had when visiting. E.g. pointing out flaws, rolling eyes, nasty looks, veiled comments.

Has anyone else experiend this?

It's quite hurtful for 3 reasons:

1. I only wish friends/family well, and don't see their success as my downfall.

1. It took 10 years of saving, making money on the side, savings 50% of salaries, forgoing holidays/nice cars to be able to afford the house.

1. My/our parents are not rich at all. Since and even before buying the house, we are/were more well off than our respective parents by far. (But I guess no one knew/knows as we never spent/showed off our money, etc...).

I mean, why are friends/family such ***.

It's just jealousy, OP. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, isn't it. Makes people who can't control it say and do things that aren't pleasant.

Don't let their behaviour upset you and, especially, don't let it ruin your enjoyment of your lovely new home!
Congratulations on your achievement, OP.

It’s jealousy, my family are facing homelessness and I would never begrudge any of my friends being able to buy a home! It’s something to celebrate

Pay no attention to resentful, jealous people. Good luck to you, I'm delighted you have a nice house.

It's very hard when people can't just be pleased for you

I actually lost someone I thought was a good friend, in the sense that after I bought my first flat, she told me bluntly that she didn't want to see it because she would be too jealous.

She sort of ghosted me after that. Then she invited me to a party ten years later but I didn't reply.

She used to spend her money so much, it was as if she was earning twenty times the amount she had.

But I suspect she wouldn't want to hear that other people were saving in addition to having parents who could help.

Enjoy the house OP.

OP we sound very similar.

Also saved a lot for 10 years to buy a very nice new build house in a fantastic location.

You would not believe the comments people make including very close family. But it all comes from jealousy of the inability to achieve the same, and often lack of will power.

We also did not indulge ourselves at all in that time.

I use to get offended but now I just credit myself with achieve something that is considered envious.

As my son would say…

Don’t let anyone steal your happiness

It's soo fucking tedious all this 'you were privileged' stuff. Are we really supposed to begin every sentence with 'I know I was privileged but...'

The majority of people are grateful for what they have, most people think 'there but for the grace of god...' at some point in their lives. We can be happy for someone who achieves what they wanted to whilst still feeling empathy for those who didn't. It doesn't need saying out loud in every conversation in order to justify everything.

And it doesn't matter even if you were privileged, it's still not your fault that they didn't get what they wanted. And the expectation that you need to dumb down your own achievements in order to make someone else feel better is patronising in the extreme.

No one needs to apologise for or explain to anyone else how they got to where they are now whether that's high or low. All we have to do is know ourselves that it was through a mixture of birth, circumstance, opportunities and personality.

Enjoy your home OP. Ignore the people who feel the need to drag you down and cultivate people who are happy for you regardless.

All this 'calling out' and questioning of every detail of our lives is completely unnecessary in most situations.

Aww OP - they are just jealous!
Enjoy your lovely new home!
We live in a rented place as we never had the foresight to buy, but honestly, I would never begrudge anyone for making it as far as you have. Good on you and I hope you get some new friends in your new place that are a bit nicer!

@WhoAre

What *@SpidersAreShitheads* said

Yep. You are privileged. Very much so.

Are there any other parents here that want their children to stay with them in the family house? And/or considered buying a multi/generational home?

Good grief no.
I'd rather sell up, buy a 1 bed flat, and give them some money each to help them on their way

I'm not planning to do this ^ btw , but I do NOT want to live in my adult dc's homes, no.
My parents were horrified at the thought of ever ending up living with any of us either.

Don't get me wrong, All of my dc have lived here with their partners at one stage or another, on a temporary basis - you do what you can to help - but I have no plans to grow old in my dcs' homes.

"On the other hand, we didn't buy a Lexus/Go to the Caribbean/other"
or "No we just worked & saved fucking hard"

Yeah fuck 'em OP. You've done very well and should be proud - and as your friends, they should be happy for you.

This constant whining about privilege is just so, so dull.

Congratulations OP on your new house. Your friends and family are mean spirited (as are a few people on this thread). I would relook at some of these relationships. I am in my 50s and have learned to ditch the drains and keep the radiators, even with very close family, life is much better. Hope you enjoy your new home.

@BethDutton

Congratulations OP on your new house. Your friends and family are mean spirited (as are a few people on this thread). I would relook at some of these relationships. I am in my 50s and have learned to ditch the drains and keep the radiators, even with very close family, life is much better. Hope you enjoy your new home.

Even better-be a radiator instead of congratulating oneself on one’s moral superiority and making sneery comments about one’s friends. I was initially full of sympathy for the OP but read her further posts and they appear just as bad as the jealous friends!

I’m with @SpidersAreShitheads too, sorry.

@MorningStarling

Tbh you if you're able to save 50% of your salary then you are in a very privileged position indeed. And this point made me roll my eyes:

Although, for our first flat we were gifted £3k, as we were a fraction under deposit requirements and wanted to make the offer on the flat before it went! But that was a decade ago, lol.

So... you did have help buying! If you hadn't had that three grand, you wouldn't have got that flat. You'd have had to have saved more. You'd then have found prices had risen and potentially had to save even more, whilst presumably paying rent.

Your purchase of the new places is presumably partly funded by the sale of your old one, that you had help with. Therefore by definition this and any future properties you buy were bought with the benefit of a financial gift.

Your position is like an old-Etonian arguing that he doesn't benefit from going to private school because he is no longer attending it. Any connections he made or qualifications he achieved are not in any way related to the school he went to, even if they continue to define his life.

1. Earning enough to save is not a privilege if they have worked hard enough to earn the money that allows them to so that!

1. A gift of £3k is not the same as some of the £50k plus gifts made nowadays towards deposits. Yes it was nice and yes a gift.

1. You comparing her to an Old Etonian denying their privilege is at the least misguided and at the worst ridiculous.

1. You sound as jealous as her friends. The OP says that she and her DP are better off than their parents presumably as a result of their making their way in their careers. Why are you trying to drag another woman down?

Sounds like you've got shit friends/family unfortunately, just ignore or correct them and enjoy your house.

I think a lot of people just dont have the financial self discipline needed to buy and to keep owning. Though arguably almost possible to purchase anywhere these days if people keep putting it off and leave it too late in life.

I imagine a good half of these jealous types know they are useless with cash and would fritter money away even if they were earning six figures. They would just keep renting and finally wake up one day and know they have thrown it all away.

Not meant to offend anybody renting of course. Sometimes circumstances and bad luck mean we can never ever own a home. And yet 20 years ago I knew plenty of people who lived for the day with their money.

Lots of people work extremely hard, overtime, sacrifices, etc and it translates into success not measured in £.

Of course its good to be proud if your achievements, financial or more meaningful, but suggesting that youre uniquely successful because you’ve lots of money is a bit... silly? Shallow? Ill educated?

Its incredibly mean spirited if your “friends” to try and bring down your new home. Do they perhaps also have a materialistic view of the world and value people for their bank accounts / possessions? Sounds like it as you’ve clearly messed with the way they see you, and they need to bring you back to their original perception.

I recently moved house from tiny cottage to somewhere pretty fancy. I’d be furious if people were rude about it: I know some would be surprised because I’ve a cheap old car, don’t spend on clothes etc and don’t use my job title when people ask what I do for work. So they’d probably wonder if I’d robbed a bank. But no one has actually asked or commented.

We had friends who put their house on the market and tried to move to the same street as us when we moved. They assumed they could easily afford it as they had lots more equity and are over 10 years older than DH.

Turned out they couldn't afford it (in part because they could only get a much shorter term mortgage now due to their age) and they didn't take it well. At all.

The bloke clearly got a bad case of hurt male pride. He did not like younger family he saw 'below him' doing better as he clear felt it upset the social heirachary.

We do have a bigger house, but we also have a really scary mortgage - not oodles of money lying around - which we will have to repay and that will affect our lifestyle for years, long after they've paid off their mortgage.

Not only that but we have always had very modest cars - unlike them and we made the conscious decision to only have one child, in part because of the cost of having two - unlike them. So not entirely uneven - just different financial priorities and life choices really. He also had a bad problem of buying a load of shit he didn't need and other friends (not us) made a standing joke that when his wife eventually got him to clear out their garage (as part of the move that didn't happen) she found all the multiple things like expensive lawnmowers and power tools that he just kept buying because he couldn't find the old one and other useless gadgets like an electric scooter he used once and never used again, that he had failed to tell her about.

He just seemed to think that he should have more by rights merely due to the fact he was much elder.

We are now very much ex-friends. We are very much better off without them and we were very much vindictated by his later behaviour and mutual friends were shocked about it, to the point that they had to step in and tell them to back off.

If the people you value aren't pleased for you, ditch them.

OP, congratulations on your new home, & well done for managing your money well to achieve this.

You did say a couple of things that caught my eye…

‘ Going from £3k help on a first flat (to make up a minor difference/deficit in deposit requirement), to buying a £xxxk - £xM house 10 years later, is really no comparison!’

‘ A drop in the water. We would have saved the difference in a month, and just bought a different property. (But not the one we saw at the time / caught our eye).’

It’s great that the shortfall for you to get on the housing ladder was just a months’s saving for you, that someone kindly helped you/lent/gave you enough money to make the difference & that you would have got something else otherwise. You say ‘minor difference’, ‘drop in the water’.

But you do know that for most people saving £3k is a month is just not possible. There are people who work as hard as you do, put what they have into everything they can, are as careful with their money as you were, do good works …whatever they do or don’t do, £3K is still a lot of money to save or come by in a hurry.

It must be lovely to earn great amounts, I finally had a house makeover after being here 15 yrs ( small inheritance), it was always enough to pay bills.
Just never any increasing pot, changed jobs from £1400 to new job to £9000, yes I own my house, £3,000 drop in the ocean?
Only cat and I, yes ok cars, by still your comments bit rich

Congrats in your new home! I'm sorry if it feels like your friend and family aren't happy for you, but this comment does sound a little bit judgey.

Are you 100% sure nothing you're doing/saying if coming across boastful and it's putting people's backs up? That would be question to myself if it was more than one friend...especially if they were actually good friends all this time.

Sorry i used quote wrong....this comment sounds a bit judgey:

"Hmmm. I think I only mentioned it to one friend, as they asked how we could afford it. But bear in mind, getting married relatively young at 23 & 24, meant we could both contribute towards bills. And our respective friend and family circle/cohort decided to spend their earnings on BMW, Lexus, holiday abroad each year, takeaways, etc...whereas we didn't. That same friend just bought a £45k car on PCP which doesn't entirely fit on his driveway (facepalm)."

It is pure jealousy. Rise above and be proud of yourself x

Yeah, I hate that. When we moved into our new house we took our mum’s to look around and all we got was ‘oh, the living room’s quite small. Isn’t it, isn’t it?’ and ‘I thought you said the garden was bigger than that?’ I wanted to cry when they were both doing that. I would never dream of doing that to anyone.