That threads starting "how do people afford....house, car, holiday, etc" are annoying

[bobbytorq]

I don't understand the purpose of the above threads. Is it because people really don't know and think there is some magic answer that eludes them? When people post about how they can afford it, they then get accused of lying or bragging. The simple answer is that people who have expensive things usually have enough money to pay for them. I'm lucky to have lots of friends whose income ranges from minimum wage up to seven figures. There is no hierachy/power/status attached to that and it's just a fact that my friend who earn more can spend more.

Totally agree with this - the financial landscape is shifting so rapidly that it can be baffling.

Also, unless you grow up in a financially savvy family, it’s much harder.

Mine were teachers & really had no clue. I had a shit credit rating when I was younger because (taught by them) I’d never had any form of debt - just had a bank account and always stayed in the black. Had to get a CC and pay off in full each month for a year to get my ratingup to get a mortgage.

DH used to work with a guy who was c. 10 years older than us and lived in a house that was literally called “village name Manor”. Couldn’t understand how he was so rich, turned out he’d been given 10k by parents (a decent amount but not enough to make such a difference, you’d think) when he reached 21 (early 90s), bought a warehouse apartment in a crappy area of London with the deposit & watched it increase in value by 10x over 15-20 years. He was a totally normal guy who had made a couple of smart decisions, so I do understand people thinking there may be shortcuts they are missing.

There is also the point that some people are just better at managing money/ finding bargains. I had a friend complain to me that she couldn't afford a camping holiday in France last year because it would cost £3000. We then went camping in France for 3 weeks and it cost us £1500, excluding food. I guess she just wasn't as flexible about ferry dates/ wanted a bells & whistles Eurocamp type site rather than the simple campings municipales we used, etc etc. She must have been looking at the holiday photos and wondering how we did it 😬

There can be other big differences that until you know someone’s financial ins and outs, you might not realise - like the couple who’s had free childcare from a family member so has been able to save £1-2k a month when their dcs were preschool aged compared to someone with 2 in nursery working the same job.

or a friend who had a big pay out from a injury and it ended up funding her buying a house with 50% deposit so is paying a fraction of someone else who’d bought at a similar time - occasionally you might hear she’s off work with her bad back and not realise it had been so serious.

Thank you for your contribution, Comrade.

Agree, so over them.

‘Omg how do people have more money than me, what about the cost of living crisis?!’

Yawn.

Pretty much.

I think some people look at what all their friends are buying and lump it all together if you see what I mean. So friend A has a big house, friend 2 is always on holidays and friend 3 has a very expensive car. It’s easy to then get it into your head that everyone has big houses, fancy cars and lots of holidays, when actually that’s not the case. And it’s more that different people prioritise different things.

To be fair, it fascinates me how people afford the things they do. Our household income is vv good, but we drive a Skoda and were just saying yesterday how we are unlikely to be able to afford a second hand electric car any time soon! So although I'd never ask it does make me wonder where people get their money from

I think sometimes (not always) it's a validation thing. The poster wants all the responses to say 'don't worry, everyone else is just maxing out their credit and can't really afford these things either, they will all get their comeuppance' rather than exploring the actual reasons that some people have things they don't!

I was making the point that this is the sort of question that (irrationally) I was asking myself. Because I was depressed, and not thinking rationally, and worried I would never be able to move on - just trying to show you why someone might ask that kind of question so you could gain an insight and maybe some empathy towards such questions, instead of dismissing them as merely “annoying”…

Well I am really a head Mafia leader and embezzle gold chocolate coins so olympic athletes can try and eat them

Well I want to reply with this anyway

I don't get it I just think people need something to moan about

Oh don’t be silly.

If you think someone has the same income as you but has a higher standard of living, it’s not unusual to wonder if there’s a trick to managing that that you should no.

There’s nothing wrong with it, and nothing British about it, it happens everywhere.

Very very annoying honestly!

How can people afford it? Because they have extra money! How else FFS?

Obviosuly they have exra money. But I imagine if people are wondering this they're wondering how they have the extra money.

FFS.

They are missing something though.

Not the fact some people are given money, but the fact everyone's priorities are different.

My friend likes to spend on clothes but rarely can afford holidays. I spend on holidays and rarely can afford branded clothes.

I am well confident someone else is looking at these "am I missing something" people thinking "how the fuck are they affording x" as well.

Moreover, one would really believe from here that we are all either on 150k a year or breadline with nothing in between....

I think it can be quite mystifying though. It is difficult to see outside your own sphere of experience.

Family help must make a phenomenal amount of difference. Having help towards things (or things bought outright) such as a house deposit, car, driving lessons, wedding, even uni living costs/tuition fees (rather than student loans) would have freed up loads of money to put towards savings for example, family help with childcare makes a huge difference to someone's net income, these things are not small and yet if you assume everyone has them/forget that other people have them (because you don't) then it can be hard to imagine the difference in lifestyle.

When you constantly have to pay out for basic living expenses and just the normal life emergencies (funerals, urgent travel, car accident, loss of work through injury, appliance dying on you) then you don't have a chance to build up savings for more emergencies let alone save for nice things.

And people usually socialise with others around their same income level, which can give a distorted impression that "the average person" is earning roughly the same as you, and of the scale of "normal incomes". That's why for one person £30-40k will seem like a really high income and for another it will seem impossibly small, and for a third person it might seem quite average/normal. If you think of 30-40k as high, then you probably won't even consider somebody on 100k+ to be a "normal person" at all, you imagine they must be impossibly rich with a highly luxurious lifestyle.

I think the issue there is thinking that people are on the same incvome as you. People I know in same/similar jobs are on hugely different salaries. Public sector is a little easier to calculate but even then, you don't know payscales. A couple of teachers I know do the same job but one is main pay scale and the other is upper payscale with a large TLR adding another 15k to an already higher salary. When I worked in the NHS, there was disparity between posts and salaries became more difficult to know when people moved on to te VSM payscales. One of my friends is a senior solicitor for a bank and earns a 6 figure salary and another is a senior solicitor for another bank and earns a 7 figure salary.

Seriously??? OK I rob the bank on a regular. That's my big secret 🤔
I don't want to sound mean but people can't really be that thick surely?

Think this happens in real life as well, not just weird MN posts. My parents had what would be considered working class jobs, but amassed quite a bit of Wealth on paper through various properties. Whereas DPs parents were solicitors. DPs parents always like to insinuate that my parents must have been involved in something dodgy to have what they have because in reality DPs parents don’t have much to show for their ‘higher paid jobs’.

Its down to various things such as their high paying middle class jobs not actually paying much more than my parents working class jobs. My parents being more savvy when it came to over paying mortgages, my dad being more handy meaning he could renovate properties himself, my grandparents doing childcare so my parents didn’t have huge nursery fees, my parents driving cars into the ground and then buying another 2nd hand one. And mainly my parents not splitting up so they didn’t have to start paying a mortgage again in their 50s.

Absolutely.
Same way like no one buys house without bank of mum and dad, no one is slim without probably having masaive issues and god forbid if you are happy! You are probs just hiding your DH is cheating with local football team, your kids have drug issues and your house is about to be repossessed....

Agree with these comments about the reasons for having more money, and the impact your family’s attitude to money. I grew up in a working-class area in the 89s/ early 90s, so everyone I knew had parents who did the same kinds of job (mostly manual labour) and lived in council houses or small terraced houses. I remember one girl who had more money (judged by always having the latest toys) - her parents were teachers, and she lived in an ordinary three-bed semi. Looking back, they probably didn’t have that much money, it was just more than most of us had.

It wasn’t until I went to university that I realised there were people whose parents would pay all their tuition fees & rent, or buy them a house to live in with rooms rented out to friends, or give them money for a house deposit - it was an alien world to me. This has lingered into my adult life, to be honest. I’m often surprised by how much money people can earn doing jobs I’d never heard of when I was doing A Levels and thinking about university.

I do tend to assume that people are like us and pay for everything themselves, then I realise that people have had large amounts of money for a deposit, or childcare done by grandparents, or grandparents paying for school shoes or uniform and coats, that kind of thing. Meanwhile, my DH has recently had a chat with his parents to see if they’re managing with increasing costs or if we should be giving them some money every month. Completely different.

I agree that these threads are pointless but I also think it's a valid point that people are unaware of the extent of income inequality in this country. Some of our friends work in finance, where the norm is not only a six figure salary but also to receive several times that in bonus. That makes affording several sets of school fees/ lots of nice holidays/new cars etc. quite easy. And as people have commented, may people will also have family wealth/inheritances or gifts from parents.

Ok, so you robbed a bank but I'm sure not everyone who has such conspicuous wealth did that.

Absolutely agree. It seems a bit 'misery loves company' to me - that may come off as nasty but I am not sure how else to explain it.

People have savings. I'm now 40ish and have not been moving up the property ladder every 3 years like some people, so our mortgage is now 1 6th of our take home. DS now gets free hours so we can save the nursery money. Obviously we were not in this situation as new grads at 23 when our bills and food were 90%.

I do think there are "sweet spots" where housing and childcare is relatively cheap, there are jobs and one parent can afford to be part time like I am. Where I live in the SW is one.