To think we simply can’t compete?

[Molehillminnie]

Mid 50s colleague selling house. On the market for close to £1M. Bought for 1/5 of that 30 years ago. Always going on about how the younger generation should save and be like her.

We’re 15 years younger, have pretty decent jobs etc but there is no way we’ll be able to benefit from property price increases in the same way. The huge jumps between 2000-2008 will never be replicated. Nothing more to say really, just having a rant!

It's not a matter of personal blame, just a dispassionate look at how housing is in this country

If it wasn't a matter of personal blame why mention "boomers". Everyone acts like anyone over the age of 60 somehow behaved in a way that they knew was going to be detrimental to others. Which is just crap really. Hindsight is a wonderful thing is it not?

We bought our first 2 bed cottage in 1984 for £28k, it was a repossession so reduced price. If I had known then that my little cottage would be on the market today for £300k I would have bought 5! Or I wouldn't have sold it for £98k in 1998.

We all take advantage of what's available to us at that point in time because we don't have a crystal ball. No average person could have predicted the state of the economy now when they were setting out as young people.

I'm 62, I support my adult children, have given them lump sums towards deposits if they ever get to earn enough to actually get a mortgage. Every single person I know over the age of 50 is well aware of how hard it is for our children, and every single one of us helps in some way, be that money, time or childcare.

The only blame is for the governments who are consistently a shit show.

The real test isn't interest rates etc its the ratio between average earnings and house prices in a given area. In 1994 DH and I earned about £25k each and were able to buy a beautiful 2/3 bedroom mansion flat in Putney for £120k thats about 2 and a half years of salary. An identical flat in the same estate is currently on for £725,000 - a couple doing the jobs we had would be earning about £120k which is 6x joint salaries making the flat less than half as affordable to a young professional couple now. For those talking about interest rates - yes they were higher but DH and I had a 5 year fix interest only mortgage on that flat and were able to live (comfortably) entirely on his salary and save mine so that at the end of the fix we were able to pay off the capital in full from savings.

My parents bought a 3 (now a 4) bed house in a good location in an expensive city back in 1980 for 7k (up north)

It's worth well over a quarter of a mil now

Their mortgage was £20 a week

My mother didn't work,father a factory worker and 4 kids

Not a chance in hell do we have a chance of buying a smaller house in the same city

I moved away,we bought our house for just shy of 117k for a 3 bed In a much smaller town

We looked at the history of the house-our seller inherited it from her granddad-he bought it for 10k back in the early 60's

My son looked into buying his one bed,no space flat from the council (with both his and his girlfriends wages) and it's worth 150k as it's in the same city as my parents-there is no way he can afford it

He did look into moving to a cheap area and paying rent to save for a house but private rent there is 3 times his rent now (he's council)

My in laws bought their house for 30k in the early 80's,remortgaged for another 10k,paid that off and its worth 3/4 million-just because of its location (just outside london)

Wages are not catching up-we are so bloody lucky-my inlaws bought us our house (we own it now on paper,but pay the same rent as my parents paid back in the day)

My parents love Maggie thatcher because she meant they could buy their council house but it's shafted myself and my children's chance of buying our own home now

Being pedantic, the OP’s neighbor is an older Generation X, rather than a boomer. 😁

I agree that it’s not fair and tbh even people 10-plus years older than you can be in a similar situation depending on when they bought.
I’m 48 and we bought our house nearly 15 years ago. If we sold today, we might get an extra $50K due to all the improvements we’ve made, but not a life-changing amount.

At least we were able to buy, but it’s been a home to live in, not an investment.

Everyone acts like anyone over the age of 60 somehow behaved in a way that they knew was going to be detrimental to others
I agree boomers aren't personally wicked for taking the opportunities that they did. It's just a fact that boomers own 3 quarters of the country's housing wealth while making up about 20% of the population. That's not a matter of their personal greed, but a matter of being born at the right time in history. Of course, they, as a group, have tended to vote in policies that favour the entrenchment of their wealth...

Not exactly bashing is it. It’s cold hard reality. My boomer mother is 60. In 20 years she will be dead. Just a fact of life.

Both my children have houses worth more than ours. Both were helped on to the property ladder by the bank of mum and dad.

My FiL lent us a small sum of money. My mum and dad bought us a washing machine. DH worked six days a week. I worked full time and had a Saturday job for a while.

We have a house we like in a not very good area, but we’ll have to sell soon because we have few savings.

It’s hard to get on the property ladder now, no doubt about it, but there was very little to rent when we were young and what there was, was squalid.

It’s not a competition though.

The sooner you stop thinking of life in that way, the happier and more content you’ll become.

Agree!

I am early 60s and yes we are very very lucky to have been in the right decade at the right time with regards to buying £70,000 houses in the late 80s that are now selling for approx £500,000.

We have been able to be generous with our children over the years because of this good luck and hope to be able to pass on that wealth that we didn’t mostly contribute to, to our children when we’re no longer here - that scenario happening for sure obviously is unknown currently.

Your example is pretty crass and she should be ashamed of herself. However a lot of us didn't benefit in the same way. Wages in a lot of sectors were poor and reflected on house prices and many couldn't get a mortgage then either.

I sometimes wonder where I was during this period, not being rolling in it that's for sure.😳

There was an undercurrent. The post I quoted suggested that boomers wouldn't die soon enough for it to be of any use to younger people wanting to buy now. At best that's a bit crass.

Maybe I'm a bit sensitive about this. I've seen some dreadful ageism on MN and the general tone towards baby boomers is often unpleasant. I'm not a baby boomer by the way.

No. But there is a belief that they have worked hard and earned what they have (exceptions apply) and we just aren’t working hard enough to do what they did.

there’s a weird entrenched belief that success is down to personal skill alone. It’s not. So so far from it. There was a community that allowed that success from free uni tuition, a relatively decent education could be attained based on whether you were academic OR vocationally minded. Grammar schools benefited poorer clever kids. Now they only really benefit those who can afford tutoring to pass the exam.

you COULD leave school with basic grades and work your way up from bottom to the top of the ladder there are very few jobs without that kind of progression track. Many jobs that didn’t need a degree now do leaving a lot of people out of those kinds or jobs or heavily in debt. Some examples are nursing, paramedics etc.

you could raise a family on one FT wage now you need at least two FT jobs and many families now are having fewer children due to financial reasons than previous generations did.

there’s so many more things that have changed between the generations that few even realised have changed.

Yes some of the people of the generations who benefitted a lot personally are very out of touch. Can’t seem to make the connection that a lot of their success is due to general market, economics and political factors out of their control, more so than the fact they worked hard or made incredibly clever and wise decisions.

All that will happen is their children will inherit the house if it’s not taken up by care fees, if you think loads of houses will flood the market at cheap prices you are deluded as I’m sure the ‘selfish boomers ‘ will have produced ‘selfish millennials’ who will either move into the property themselves or develop the property and make a nice tidy profit.

Huge interest rates on a much smaller amount borrowed and they were only temporarily at very high rates. If you look at average interest rates over the 80s and 90s, they weren't that bad over the full decade or two.

But even 15% on £50,000 is a lot less than 5% on £250,000, and like I say, only very high for a short period of time.

Between 1980 and 2000, there were only 7 years when average mortgage interest rates were over 10%, and the highest yearly average was 14.875% in 1989, the lowest yearly average being 5.5% in 1999.

The average mortgage interest rate between 1980 and 2000 was 10.537%.

Tough shit on you basically, you don’t get to decide what house people buy, you have no idea why they may want 4 bedrooms, your life decisions do not mean that other people need to “fuck off out of the market” so you can have what you want, you sound incredibly entitled.

I’m a doctor in my 30s. I had parental help to buy (very fortunate). I still don’t know how I’ll pay childcare in future to fit around my wages. Doctor friends without family help struggling to buy anywhere near in our area. The public assume we earn well despite out wages being incomparable to those 20 years our senior who had cheap houses, no student debt, free hospital accommodation and far higher wages in real terms. We will never catch up.

I’m a registrar working crazy hours, high levels of student debt, paying for my own professional exams etc. I always imagined huge sacrifice for this career, but I thought I’d be very financially comfortable as recompense.

When I decided to become a doctor in the 2000s this was not the lifestyle that doctors lived back then. I’ll never come close to emulating the lifestyle of current consultants in their 50s. With this year’s inflation taken into account I’d need a pay rise of about 40% just to equal 2008 pay.

Doctors have had the biggest pay cut of the public sector. Why am I bothering working so hard for this quality of life when I could emigrate? Makes me think how many young and talented people will leave the UK for better wages abroad.

I have a huge mortgage but I am so so lucky to have had parental help with the deposit, they benefitted from house price rises but my dad was working class and had a very successful financial career so it was mainly of his own making, not just passive due to house prices.

As a Boomer myself it’s so hard to describe the differences between then and now. While housebuying is undoubtedly a very different thing today, heartbreakingly difficult, it was still pretty hard and expensive then - many of my peers ended up dispossessed with negative equity in the 80’s.

And so much else has transformed for the better - especially the status of women in society, access to education and economic mobility, travel, cultural acceptance, financial benefits and support, I could go on forever. I’d rather rent for the whole of my life than bring my daughter up in a world where the “comedy” of Benny Hill was considered suitable family viewing.

But I do feel your pain.

Government's only care about those on benefits or who are very rich. Those on the middle are cash cows to be milked dry.
Builders will build "affordable" (to rent) or McMansions. Again the Squeezed middle " are left out.
The ghettoisation of cities is not being challenged. There is a lack of awareness from those who are "All right jack, pull up the ladder behind us".
Depressing.

No. But there is a belief that they have worked hard and earned what they have (exceptions apply) and we just aren’t working hard enough to do what they did.

Not in my circles there aren't. We are acutely aware that our children have it tough.

Yes some of the people of the generations who benefitted a lot personally are very out of touch. Can’t seem to make the connection that a lot of their success is due to general market, economics and political factors out of their control, more so than the fact they worked hard or made incredibly clever and wise decisions.

Well I guess all you can do about this is be thankful that you are apparantly better educated than them

The thing is, I don't begrudge my parents and others of their time for taking the opportunities that were on offer, I would have done the same. It's not their fault and people who blame 'all boomers' are being ridiculous.

I just find it hard to accept that despite working just as hard, often times getting more of an education and still doing 'the right things', the prospect of owning our own (very ordinary) home is so out of reach for many people. It shouldn't be like this.

I don't think they'll ever be "cheap" again (unless building policy and planning changes loads), but I've read various different estimates that (due to the shape of our population pyramid) more houses will be available. But so many other factors are in play (like net migration, whether care costs will be nationalised, etc.) it's anyone's guess.

I know I've been very lucky with buying my house and years of such low mortgage rates. I've just given DS 2 £50k deposit for his house. I gave DS1 a deposit a few years ago and I bought my dd a car when hers died and she still had to get to work and get DGS to nursery and school. I've helped out with paying nursery fees too for both DGC because I recognise I got a lot of help from my own Mum and Dad. Dad gave me my deposit for my first house and paid for my entire wedding and they both looked after my eldest 2 DC so I could work. Now I'm trying to pass help on to my DC.

You are right that those sort of price rises will not happen again. And also it is impossible to buy on one decent but not crazy salary now. I have however just spent a weekend with a friend 10 years younger than me telling me that I had it easy as they can’t afford to buy. Also telling me about her brand new car on finance, 4th foreign holiday this year, 4 week trip overseas last year and cleaner and cheap rent. I’ve not been away for the last ten years and have sacrificed to buy a house but apparently I’m just lucky. I didn’t say anything but was biting my tongue!

I'm not mad at boomers as a whole.

I am mad at governments that pursue policies that appeal to boomer voters and protect their monopoly instead of doing what they should and instituting policies aimed at redistributing wealth and giving subsequent generations some of the opportunities that the boomers had.