To be so sad about my slide in living standards?

[ColdNow]

I grew up in a not so nice area, but my parents had a big house with a huge garden that they bought on two fairly modest salaries when they were younger than I am now. My mum took years out of work when I was born and although things like holidays and eating out weren't a regular occurrence, my parents admit they were never really stressed about money despite having several children and easily paid off their mortgage.

Fast forward to now, where I did my very best to do the 'right' things. I got a good degree, decent and stable job, married and bought a property before TTC. I'm now pregnant and feeling so sad about our financial situation. We purposely went for a modest property with a tiny garden to give ourselves a buffer, but now with the huge increase in our mortgage repayments and other expenses we're struggling to keep afloat. I would love to work part time when I go back but it's now looking very unlikely that we'll be able to make it work without being extremely stretched. I'm always worried about money and already buy all my clothes second hand, shop at budget supermarkets etc. The main cost is housing though, because we live in an expensive city, but this is the city I grew up in and where all my family and friends are, and moving away would be a very difficult choice to make and remove us from all our support networks.

I just feel so sad that within a generation the things my parents were able to offer me (space, time) I'm not able to offer my child, despite me earning far more comparatively than they did. I'm also the youngest in my family and the older siblings are much better off than me, again just because of time - they got onto the property market much earlier before prices sky-rocketed and now although I don't earn a lot less than them, I'm only just scraping by. I notice this at work too, I have colleagues at the same level of seniority and pay to me but a decade or more older, and the houses and lifestyle they sustain far exceed mine.

I don't know what the purpose of this thread is except to just say that it makes me sad that this is the situation I'm in, and people younger than me (I'm in my early 30s) are even worse off.

priorities are different and life is different, not necessarily worse.
your working conditions are better and you have access to way more convenience items.
your mom might be looking through rose tinted glasses as i'm fairly certain all generations worried about income and making ends meet at various stages.

Property is a complete arse

A big house building programme is the only solution

I understand.

My parents gave me such a great life and although I earn really well the changes in cost of living mean I can't give what they did.

I feel the same, all same circs, except my parents had to be "careful" with money. But we still went on holiday and still had clarks shoes.

Now we cannot afford to go on holiday at all, my house is freezing, and I truly don't know how I'm going to pay the bills.

Thing is though if you look at everything say in a 70 yr time period there will always be spikes and slumps . Things don't stay the same for ever . Look at the interest rates in the 80's , they were shocking .

YABVU. My mum would have loved to have worked. It was a time when, where I live, it was not possible for women to work after marriage in Government jobs which was pretty much most jobs for young women. Apart from the obvious government departments and services, all banks, insurers, electricity providers, telephone companies, service providers etc were government owned and run at that time. The rule was marriage and you did not return. Most private employers did not want young women as they would go off and get married so generally hired men. However, if you were hired there was no rule that you COULDN’T be fired if you got married, it was I to each employer, and if not then you definitely got the boot if you got pregnant. I really don’t think this time was great tbh, and I’m in no way envious of my mum who stayed at home not by choice. Not sure the ‘nice house’ made up for that!

It's mad isn't it?

Property prices are stupid and I feel for your generation. Same for me though - my parents left school at 14, mum stopped working when they married, dad self employed in a small business. They bought a lovely 5 bed detached house for £21k on one income in their early 40s with four kids. Dad drove a jag. We went on holiday three times a year and summer was in the Swiss Alps - admittedly always camping, but how????

Took us until we were nearly 60 to buy a detached house and we have both worked full-time since we were 16 - one in that same small business. And foreign holidays are very infrequent. Just doesn't compute.

15% mortgages on relatively small sums of money is not comparable to what's happening now

Property prices are so beyond ridiculous, that even a relatively small hike in interest rates will cripple some families

Also, the 80s weren't 70 years ago

You aren’t alone in feeling like this.

YANBU. It's just impossible to set yourself up these days. I congratulate you for having a house - it's a massive achievement.

My parents bought a 3 bed semi with quite a large garden in suburban London on one Civil Servant wage.its worth over half a million now.

We have a decent life... but couldn't afford London prices. In Yorkshire we are fine.

A lot of people lost their homes in the 80's . A lot of people lost their jobs in the 80's . Unemployment was high .

Also the 70's were no picnic either .

I know how you feel OP - I can’t help thinking that if I’d been born 10 years earlier, my life would have been so much better in terms of finance and having a much better property. I look at property prices from 10 years before I got on the ladder and they were so much more affordable.

My parents bought a big house with a massive garden in a highly desirable area of town on a single income (my mum stopped working when she got married at 24) back in the 1980s.

I don't live in the UK now, but my friends who are there all have tiny terraces or flats with no or very small garden, IF they are lucky enough to own their own homes, with mums working full time or close to full time. Two single mum friends ended up -- in order to get on the property ladder - getting tiny one-bedroom flats with their children. They will sleep on sofa beds in the living room once their kids need to have their own room. I say "ladder," but we all know that they are unlikely ever to move anywhere else.

I get that things weren't always easy in the 70s and 80s either, but those who benefitted from cheaper housing should at least acknowledge this.

YANBU. DH and I were both privileged in a very similar way to you it sounds growing up. I didn't have holidays and we rarely ate out but we had a bit of land, we had horses, there were 4 of us. DH had a SAHM, 2 siblings, enormous house that recently sold for half a million, his parents bought it for £11k!!!! His parents have been retired since well before 60.
We are very lucky, we have a house, we have a fair garden (ex local authority property) in a nice but cheap area of the country. But we can't afford to consider a third child, we can't afford to consider one of us reducing our full time hours, we won't be retiring much before 70, if that early and we certainly can't consider holidays or hobbies like horseriding right now.

But, other than times like now, reading this thread, I try not to compare with our parents because in the world now, for our generation, we're doing better than many people could dream of and I don't want to take that for granted by worrying about what I don't have rather than the wonderful things we do have.

In the words of Chilli Healer, just run your own race.

I'm not saying my parents had it easy, but their house was about 3x their yearly income. Mine is many many more times more than that for a property that's about a third of the size. I can't afford to buy a house in the not so nice area I grew up in and I definitely can't afford to be a SAHM at all. I'm stressed about being able to afford one child let alone more than one, and I can't see anything I'm doing 'wrong' except being born at the time I was. People I know who are several years younger are not able to even think about buying except those who have family help, and people I know are moving back in with parents in their 30s.

@Kokeshi123 I did not have a mortgage in the 70s or 80s but I disagree. People are, quite understandably, terrified about 5-7% mortgages now. Can you imagine what would happen if they went to 15%? Repossessions, everywhere, exactly like happened in the 70s and 80s. By your reckoning people should acknowledge that interest rates have been incredibly low for many years and they have benefitted from that. Many people over the past decade have been able to buy a house due to low mortgage rates, newcomers to the market would say that was unfair because those rates aren’t currently accessible to them.

Your colleagues who are a decade or more older than you will be in a better position as they will have had more years earning. Hopefully, in another decade you will be better off than your younger colleagues.

It is tough now and it was tough in the 1970s and 1980s. I lived in an area where people were posting the keys through the doors of their building society lender and moving out and walking away.

You should be proud of what you have achieved, and not be sad - life is too short and often it can be a bit shit.

These frequent threads fail to look at the big picture. I'm not saying anyone's "wrong", I'm asking some of you to consider more variables. You'll need to do this if you're ever going to lobby for change.

You know about supply & demand, right? Until the 1970s, more UK households rented than bought. The big change was "right to buy" in the early '80s, which simultaneously took most of the social housing rental opportunities away and instilled a sense that everybody has a right to - and indeed should - purchase property.

That increased demand for mortgaged property, which shows no sign of letting up. Therefore there's more competition for mortgaged homes; this pushes prices up.

Reflecting this, house prices have risen steeply as a multiple of salary.

As you can see, this is great news for the bankers who mortgage your properties. Rates have skyrocketed in the last few years, from a historic ten-year low (note, only 10 years, not the 30 often claimed on here!)

Mortgage rates are still lower than they were in the mid-'90s ... and much lower than the '80s, though this chart doesn't show them. There was a lot of negative equity at that time, something people seem to forget can happen when you're living in a great big debt (I lost my place at that time, been renting ever since).

So have a think about your collective contribution to this situation, and what changes you can campaign for.

Also, this ⬆

I am better off than younger colleagues but realistically, I will never be able to afford the type of house that my older colleagues/siblings can unless I earn significantly, significantly more. That's my point, these colleagues have stayed on the same salary as me for many years but their money went a lot further then than mine does now. I'm out-earning my parents proportionately by a fair bit than when they were my age, but I can't afford anywhere near the property or lifestyle they could. Also considering I'm about to have my first child my finances are likely to be a lot worse over the next couple of years than they are now, given I'll be on maternity leave and then have to pay for the cost of childcare when I return. It scares me to think about it!

But the actual price of houses was ludicrously cheap in those days!

My parents' street is full of old people in enormous houses, while my friends who are my age are raising children in homes less than half the size. Both groups are middle class. Something's gone wrong somewhere.

What? You've got your generations mixed up. The OP was probably about eight years old in the year 2000. Fairly certain women were allowed to work after marriage at that point!

OP I hear you. Same story- I'm mid 30s with 2 young kids, smaller house in less "nice" area than I grew up, despite my parents having much lower paying jobs than DH and I have now. Paid off their mortgage while we were still at school. Zero chance of that here. I do work PT purely because of the fact that where we live there are no nursery places available on one of the weekdays. I'm on a currently projected year-long waiting list for a spot to open up. However the people I work with who are on the same salary but about 20yr older keep asking me in a confused way why we don't just switch nursery for a nanny. Hmm....