On the face of it, this is pretty wealthy isn’t it?!

[umbtellasideup]

A single person owning a home worth 490 (sold for 490 in May) at age 34? Surely that’s on the wealthier side? For context, my friends all sat over dinner last night saying that this person must be struggling to be in that sort of home ‘by that age.’ We are all married and in similar or bigger homes but I don’t think I would ever have been able to have afforded that on my own… are my views of property prices way off or something?!

You'll take some flak for this post! I think I understand what you mean - you may have had very little disposable income - but you weren't "skint" in absolute terms. You just decided to spend what was presumably a decent income on buying houses. Two of them, for some reason!

Yes, it's all a bit 'if you called your dad hecould stop it all' isn't it? Being really 'skint' is not having to buy Tesco value stuff for a few years while you have two assets worth £500k sitting there appreciating money for the future.

I meant that house value isn’t really a measure of wealth - assets vs debt vs liquidity/cash flow is

A house valued at £500k but with £450k mortgage is debt not an asset.

Yes I had absolutely zero disposable income, it was a huge struggle to pay the basic bills for the first year. It got gradually better though.

I relocated from the South East to the East Mids, I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be perm so I rented out my home and was able
to buy a second one as prices were so much cheaper. Then the prices went mad everywhere, I moved a few more times after I got married and benefited hugely from the increase with about £500k in equity now. It’s all from me though, not my other half.

But I was living on value beans and skipping meals when I was single so it took some sacrifice. I’m not sorry though as I’m financially secure but am also not wealthy. The rental is being sold in 5 years and will clear most of my residential mortgage and I will feel fortunate and secure though.

Sometimes you take risks and it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but often what people
appear to have is no reflection of how it actually is. No-one would have known that I hunted for change on the floor or hunted down every bargain to be able to eat. But I did for a while.

Anyway, the relevance to the original post is that you can’t measure wealth by the value of a house. It doesn’t tell you much at all.

It's an odd conversation but I can see how it might be part of a "how did they manage to do that" discussion (a bit like I'm wondering how some of the posters on here did what they've claimed).

My DB and SIL were given a house that was worth 490K when they got married at 21. This was 20 years ago (it's now worth considerably more). I often noticed people clearly wondering how on earth they'd managed to afford the house but being too polite to ask.

This.

DP and I have a property in London each because we had both bought before we met each other (we’re early 30s).

Most of our friends met when they were younger so bought together. Amongst a couple of them, there’s some sort of…unease at the fact that DP and I have 2 properties between us, whereas they only have one. It’s very odd.

Quite.

Get new friends OP 😊

You can absolutely be “skint” if you own property worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

When I first moved into my flat I wasn’t even living paycheck to paycheck, I was living off 0% credit cards because I had absolutely no money month to month due to furnishing and doing up the flat.

There’s an awful lot of this kind of “wondering” on MN and perhaps even IRL.

People can’t seem to get their head around other people having more money than them, or being at a different stage in life. DP and I have what seem like a nice life but we have no kids, so it should be no mystery as to why we can do some things that might be unaffordable to those with sky high childcare bills, for example.

I don’t understand your point are your friends saying that 490k is not a good enough house to be in at 34 or are they saying that the single person must be struggling having bought the 490k house?

The value of a house is an odd thing to fixate on.

A single person doesn't "need" (but may want) as big a house as a family. So could well chose to have a smaller house.

No doubt you were "skint" because you ploughed all your money into the two houses you had, that's not the same thing as being skint, you may have been cash poor but you were asset rich.

Ridiculous. Someone who has half a million is not skint.

A truly ‘skint’ person wouldn’t go hungry to furnish or do up a home, they wouldn’t have the money to do that in the place.
we had all hand me downs on our first home and didn’t spend a penny because we didn’t have a penny to spend. Even furniture is assets and there’s been times we’ve sold furniture to free up some money in the past.

My definition of skint is having little to no money day to day, living off credit cards etc. This was 100% my experience in the few months after I bought my flat.

Ability to get credit cards is a privilege. A lot of people who start off with nothing get into debt with utilities and council tax and then can’t get credit cards.

So what was I supposed to sleep on? How could I heat food? Wash clothes?

I was putting money into the essentials of a home (not kitting it out with expensive gadgets and Italian furniture…) which left me with no money for anything else for a few months = skint.

You could be living in a 500k home, with a new Mercedes on the drive. All it means is that you can meet the monthly payments you own very little of it only debit. Conversely if the person in question has no mortgage then that is very different. The equity in your home is the only bit you own, the rest belongs to the bank!

Absolutely, and I would realise that a couple with decent (probably?) jobs and no children were going to have more disposable income than those that didn't. It's where you can't work out any tangible reason that it's interesting.
Mainly because there's a subconscious "if they've managed to do it, maybe I could do it the same way" type feeling.

It works the other way as well. I've seen people who were given huge amounts of financial help from family, wonder why other people who haven't had the same sort of help haven't been able to do the same things that they have.

Lots of mortgage debt and being wealthy aren't the same thing.

Mortgage free property and a tiny income means you're asset rich but you can't eat or do maintenance on the house.

Perhaps your friend is, perhaps she isn't. Not enough info to say but I'd probably be minding my own business tbh.

I don’t think that’s amazingly wealthy no. £490k is about the average house price where I live.

People have a very narrow imagination when it comes to tangible reasons though.

They discount things like inheritance, wedding gifts, competition/gambling wins, career stints in tax havens, stock market gains etc.

And that’s before you get to the fact that most people have no clue what some jobs actually pay. I have a friend who is an EA to a rich woman and her pay & perks are amazing, but I suspect some people think she’s “just a PA” so must be on no more than £40k. Little do they know…