To wonder how we managed our mortgage when interest rates were 13.6%

[BlueBloodedBlue]

We bought our flat in 1990 with a mortgage rate of 13.6%

I know house prices were much lower but so were wages.

I'm obviously not minimising the current nightmare situation so many people are facing, I just don't really understand the economics so would be grateful if anyone is able to explain in simple terms please?

Yes no mobile phones, broadband, Sky contracts, Netflix, gym membership just basics. An old banger to get DH to work and pick up food shopping. I think more people will go back to this.

People aren't going to go back to not having the internet or mobile phones are they? Forgetting about how much of life relies on the internet, it's not normal for technology to go backwards.

I agree you shouldn’t….but it’s a tale as old as time….back in then90s I worked 6 or 7 days a week and my partner worked a second job to afford to buy our house and do it up bit by bit….we couldn’t sustain this once children came along …but for 2 to 3 years this was our life

I think because people are coming to buy at an older age they don’t want to do the steps up.
My first place with Dh was a studio flat so small that Dh could touch both walls with his finger tips at the same time and a windowless shower room that someone had the bright idea of painting everything in black gloss.

i spent my evenings peeling off black gloss paint from the inside of the toilet and the glass of the shower door and every nook and cranny of a bathroom and retiling the walls in the cheapest square white tiles as we couldn’t afford to replace any of the plumbed in stuff. (Did have to replace the shower as it was knackered and cracked and the layers of paint and sealant was the only thing holding it together.
4bed detached was after 20 years of property ownership. 20 years of painting and decorations and removing walls and generally living on a building site for months on end.

I wouldn’t put much store by zoopla…. It says my house is worth £400k when the same house next door just sold for just over 300k

I think the lack of empathy from some of us 60s generation is also because we’ve been the butt of jokes for decades, mixed in with mockery and ‘OK Boomer’ as a dismissive response to anything and everything we say that isn’t part of the Zeitgeist. And now the ageism. So it’s easy to look at conspicuous consumption and blame poor spending choices when that has little bearing on the actual issues and causes.
It sets the masses against each other, so those responsible for the greed and the mess escape notice.

You'd think more of the older ones would have wised up to that 😉

So many more women work today compared to the 80s. If a woman did work it was a part time/ low paid job. Also, I think people spend more. It’s not about having a phone, it’s about habits such as having domestic help being much more common

So more women work FT and more households have cleaners. Not hard to join the dots there is it. SAHM was a luxury which was very commonplace in the boomer generation. It's never mentioned in the 'we had it so hard' debate.

I think because people are coming to buy at an older age they don’t want to do the steps up.

That's an important point too, we bought a flat & I spent every evening taking bloody woodchip off (it was everyone) & then bought a house. Some new neighbours are FTBs in their late 30s but they already have a dc so for them it makes sense to go straight to the house & with small dc & working ft they have less time to renovate. Not too mention stamp duty makes frequent moves prohibitive.

In response to an earlier post; was £200 for a 40 hour week a bad wage in 1994?

I've just looked on the BoE inflation calculator, and as of August 2022, that £200 is equivalent to £440.92 now. For context, minimum wage (if you are over 23) is £9.50 per hour.

9.50 x 40 = £380 per week.

It might not have been a fortune, but it's more than the minimum wage equivalent now.

Using August as the check-point on the UK house price index from the land registry.

• In 1994 the average house price was £56,305. As a ratio against £200 p/w wages annualised and gross, that's 5.3x income.
• In 2022 the average house price was £292,118. As a ratio against £440.92 p/w wages annualised and gross, that's 12.7x income.

I am old enough to remember my parents worrying about 15% interest rates, businesses going bust and people handing back their house keys. But none of that changes the fact that the income to house price ratio is significantly different now to what it was back then.

You'd think more of the older ones would have wised up to that

Yes, but even my laid-back, minimalist hippy self gets a bit weary of being seen as a wealth-hoarding, technologically-inept dinosaur. Sometimes by my own millennial whilst she uses my internet to surf the net on her snazzy phone whilst mocking me. 😂

Where do you have MIRA‘s tax relief for a start but certainly helped you didn’t it?

So many more women work today compared to the 80s. If a woman did work it was a part time/ low paid job

That sounds more like the 60s to me. All the bright young things I was at uni with were itching to be employed, independent women, unlike their mothers.

We bought in 1987 and our mortgage rate went up to 15% with Birmingham Midshires. We were absolutely skint, no money left over for emergencies or savings, had to buy food on our credit card in the end. I taught full time in the day and did an evening of Pitman shorthand teaching at the local college, then got a Saturday job as a viewing agent at an estate agents. Our social life was going round to friends houses with some beers, we were all in the same boat. I was always worried about the bills and remember someone from Access phoning me in the staff room at work, I'd missed a credit card payment for £70. Told the man to take it over the phone and gave my card number - then still got a £25 default fine, stupid ass had put it through as £7.

My daughter is in Belfast and wants to buy, I am sorry she's going to go through similar hardship.

Working class Women have always worked, they have never had the luxury of being SAHMs

The slagging off of the boomers really pisses me off.

My boomer parents lost their jobs in the 80s and had cardboard in their shoes to cover the holes.
In the 90s they 'got on their bikes' to find work, clung onto their tiny 3 bed home, lived month to month, no foreign holidays, banger cars, shabby house. I don't begrudge them a comfortable retirement at all.

So when the people who have a new build 4 bed with their pcp new cars netflix and gym memberships bleat on about how they can't afford a foreign holiday I don't have much sympathy.

But look to the house builders, massive profits. £100k to build a house they are selling for 300k with government incentives. Oh and who are funding the tories?

Literally me now in 2022, except I'm 10 years into camping as I can't afford an old van.
oh and drink tea because wine is expensive.

this is just normal young person behaviour, not some special thing people did in the old days that justifies them being rich now

Slagging generations achieves nothing. You can factually agree that wages have not kept pace with house price growth. But every generation had its winners and losers. The whole "OK boomer" thing is offensive and lazy.

My parents never recovered from Black Wednesday - and I am helping with financially supporting them because they are in a private rental with only their state pensions to keep them. They are boomers - if it wasn't for family help they'd be having to choose between heating and eating. Even with family help they live a frugal existence - no fancy TV packages, no foreign holidays, they don't eat out (unless we pay for them).

I'm not sure anyone has said on this thread that every boomer is rich?

SAHM was a luxury which was very commonplace in the boomer generation

It really wasn’t. Every single woman I know worked. It was our parents’ generation who had SAHMs. My dad was really proud that he could support a wife who didn’t need to work. Yet encouraged me to have a career!

Yes I dont recognise this at all, my mum did cleaning, baby sitting, washing and so did the other mums that we knew.

I think a lot of peoples assumptions are based on more well off families.

But every generation had its winners and losers

Have they though? It's not equal.

Yes working class women have always worked. My grandmothers born in the 1910s were cleaners and barmaids. My great grand mother was a dancer who had 21 children but that's a whole other thread!

I was just about to write this. My DP has very working class roots and the women in his family always had to work. My family had SAHM and my mother is still cross that post divorce she had to work, despite owning her house outright at 42.

Ours was never less than 5%, most of the time it was 7-10% , but house prices were lower then, so 3-4 x salary got you something decent

• This has led to a large rise in the proportion of working-age mothers in paid work: up from 50% in 1975 to 72% in 2015. The rise has been particularly large among lone mothers and mothers of pre-school- and primary-school-age children.

•	Overall, the proportion of couples with children where only one adult works has almost halved (down from 47% in 1975 to 27% in 2015) and the proportion where both work has increased from 49% to 68%.

from the IFS

"Increases in maternal employment have been largest among the partners of higher-earning men. 40 years ago mothers partnered with men in the bottom and top halves of the male earnings distribution were equally likely to be in paid work themselves, with employment rates of around 60%. Those figures are now around 70% and 80% respectively. In other words, for every additional mother in employment partnered with a lower-earning man, there are around two additional mothers in employment partnered with a higher-earning man."