to want to literally throttle people saying "5% is nothing, interest rates used to be 13%" etc etc

[XCTX]

Yes, yes they did. But there is NO context here and also no comparison

interest rates were 13% at a time when the average house price was 60k and cost 4.5x the average salary.

The average house price is now 284k or so, and is c.7.6x the average salary.

People are coming off fixes and suddenly seeing their mortgages increase by 40, 50% and it is infuriating me that some are minimising this problem by comparing one finite moment in time with no context.

38k per annum for childcare? Bloody hell, ours was never more than £800 a month, which was eye-watering enough at the time. You could employ a nanny housekeeper for a good deal less than that!

It was bad. We were both full time teachers with a baby in full time nursery (no relatives nearby).

The whole of one of our salaries went on the mortgage.

We bought a tiny house in 1990 at the market peak that then lost a third in value, within months.

Everyone around us thought we were idiots for buying in the first place.

But. We got through it. You can too, if it comes to that. There's the message.

I haven't read the whole thread but just wanted to point out when interest rates were 15% mortgages were much much smaller. Our mortgage at that time was around £26,000 however salary was also less and it was still a difficult time. Now I'm older and more financially secure I worry for my children and nieces and nephews and what the future will hold for them.

Imho we could do with a lot more rage that this is cyclical. We should never have come back to this place.

I grew up in a single parent home in the 80's. We had no money and it was terrifying. The thing that is getting us through now is that that fear lasted for life. We have a comparatively v small mortgage, we bought a doer-uppers and stayed away from London and did all of the things to limit exposure in the good times that we could.

The price of that is that we don't have the graduate degrees or career opportunities or half the money of people who had the inherited confidence to take the risks. It's suppression of anyone who doesn't have inherited privilege. And they are the people who - just like last time - will be snapping up the repossessed city flats at a few thousand quid a time and just getting richer.

I'm fucking furious. How dare this libertarian joke of a government bring in policies to DELIBERATELY turn us into repossession America? When did we vote for this? What manifesto was it in?

Intergenerational anger is just another side of the cards they are playing with. I'm fed up of it all.

It was horrific. I knew loads of people who lost their homes from 89-93.

And the scale of price crash was staggering. My house was valued at £87.5k in early '88. I eventually sold it for £49k in '92, and I don't think they got back to the 1988 level until the latter part of the '90s.

One of my friends whose home was repossessed then has never been able to buy again. She still jokes sometimes about how much she still owes the Woolwich building society, and if the debt was transferred to Barclays when they took it over.

It's terrible financial ignorance, but YABU to actually want to murder people over it. The mortgage costs will go up the same whether you kill the ignorant or not.

... I mean, unless you're saying that you'd escape your mortgage by getting to live in prison for free, which seems extreme.

Yup. Even before interest rises the mortgage on our 2 up 2 down in a fairly downmarket area is over £1k a month (cost £250k in 2019). We aren’t even in London!

I get your point but it's irrelevant what the average house price was or multiple of salary because people aren't buying today with mortgages that are more times their salaries than before.
You bought a house with a mortgage of say four times your salary then and you do the same now. The difference is if you bought with the interest rate already at 13% then that's what your affordability was based on.
If you bought at 8% and then it went up to 13% you'd be in the same position as those today who bought at 3% and now fearing 8% (or whatever). It's the increase that is the important factor.

I grew up in that era. We also had an outside toilet and our bath was a tin one that hung on the back of the wall in the pantry, but it was shit, it wasn't ok, we were always cold and hungry. We had a miserable childhood while our parents smoked and drank their wages away. We were eventually taken into care.
Life should not be like that for our children and grandchildren . We can't help them financially, but what we can and do do is help with childcare as much as possible so that they can work without having to pay extortionate childcare bills.things have to change, and soon. Future generations must not go back to those days. They need help and they need it now.

We've gone down this route, but at £14/hour plus pension, national insurance etc, it is terrifyingly close to equivalence.

Massive pensions??? Do you know how much the state pension is?

No, it's people who have long and bitter experience of runaway inflation, the pound crashing, fuel supply crises AND sky high interest rates.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Well said.

Let's not forget you couldn't get bananas in England during WW2. (sad)

I couldn't agree more. Our mortgage had gone up 3 times before we even moved in. I was 19 years old, we happily went without so much but it was a very worrying time. If it puts it into perspective i earned £66 a week in a full time job.

Exactly this. My mum is one of these morons who refuses to accept that anyone has ever had it worse than she did. Or if they do it's entirely their own doing.

Your parents smoked and drank their wages away. How does that compare to people working their arses off just to keep a roof over their heads?

I read some analysis saying that 3% now is roughly equivalent to 15% then when you look at size of principal and that payments are no longer tax deductible.

it was clearly shit then, and will clearlY be shit now. But agree, I’ve only ever heard it said in the ‘you don’t know you’re born’ way rather than the lovely collegiate way a poster up thread expressed it.

Oh god I had this exact conversation with my mother.

Their mortgage was 15k and ours is nearly £300k. There is no comparison.

You have to consider that the whole financial situation in the late 1970s/early 1980s was very, very different.

Whilst you might find it infuriating, I'm surprised that some of you haven't built any contingency plans into affording your mortgage should interest rates rise, and I'm staggered how many think carrying a regular few thousand debt on a credit card/overdraft is the norm - we grew up in an era where you spent a little and saved a little. If you took out a mortgage, your bank told you that you had to consider how you would mange if the interest rate went up 2 or 3% (not treble).
You were allowed to borrow 3x1 salary + 1 x the other salary. That was it. Not 5x
Maximum term 25 years. No 35 years. Yes house prices were cheaper, but so were salaries. It's all relative. Our childrens starting salaries are more than 100x now - DH took home less than £20 a week

Credit cards were still relatively new, although for a main purchase eg a car or a 3 piece suite you could get hire purchase, which you paid off a bit at a time. There were no zero rate on purchases or on balance transfers with your credit card - that was a thing of the future. You were told to use it sparingly and pay the balance off in full each month. However it was usual when you bought a house to furnish it secondhand and upgrade in time. It wasn't instant new everything. You knew a bit of DIY and did it yourself rather than pay a fortune to get someone in. You took your holiday (if you could afford one) at a campsite in Margate paid cash as opposed to using your credit card for a holiday in Spain.

Many, many of you are fortunate that you have fixed rates to cushion for a few months / to some extent. Back then you had no choice or opportunity to cut back on something till your fixed rate ended - if the bank rate went up, the mortgage rate went up immediately.
There was no such thing as interest free credit cards - if you didn't pay in full each month you paid a lot more for it in interest, so you tended to save the money and buy it later rather than have it now and not worry about paying it for months.

Jobs were not as readily available - unemployment was high, average salaries were low - around £6K - today it's around £38k according to ONS - but I was lucky I knew a pub landlord and was able to work Friday and Saturday nights and do the cleaning every morning before normal work till I managed to get a better paid job. many, many of my friends had to hand in the keys to their houses and flats, loosing thousands they'd put down as deposits but finding they couldn't sell their house for even the amount left on their mortgage as house prices had dropped so far - and thought that would be that....only to find months/years later their bank chased them for additional interest payments of thousands.

Aaaargh! Some people are now shifting to saying “oh well actually rates are historically low at the moment”! Read OPs correct point again - house prices are currently so massively inflated relative to salaries that - in terms of affordability - a 1.8% mortgage now is equivalent to the long term average of 5ish%. A return to the long term average absolute 5ish% rate now will cost people what 16ish% did back in the good/bad old days

The only way to compare absolute rates between now is if median wages massively increase in real terms and/or house prices massively drop. The former certainly doesn’t look like happening any time soon. The latter…well let’s see

Not at all. Particularly as I bet it is only being said by people who are at no risk of needing to pay 6% now. And, as you say 6% of 250k (or whatever the average mortgage is these days) is £1250 a month (I think. I suck at maths) and is not remotely comparable with 13% of 60k which is £650 a month. Wages have not doubled (even if both adults in a couple work, there’s still the gender pay gap, AND people don’t have the spare capacity to pick up extra hours if both already work AND many more households are single adult anyway), but mortgage payments seem to have.

You bought at 19 years old. Try doing that now.

Whatever we've experienced in the past we should want better for our kids, grandchildren and our society.