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.

I never thought I'd be 6 years off retiring and in rented. My granddad owned 9 properties and my parents owned a lovely house. Grandads were lost to Care (yes they were taking it all in the 70s too) and my parents divorced and left nothing but debt.
The last couple of decades has cemented the shit show that it is to be a sole wage earner in the uK.

Not berating young people at all. :)
If you read my previous posts, you will see that on a personal level, I chose to enjoy my 20s and therefore delayed myself getting onto the property ladder. For me it was 100% worth it.

I was just challenging the idea that it is impossible to get onto the property ladder as a young graduate in London.

@Gingernaut but the wages were small too?
So yes it's comparable. House property prices auto keyed in about 1989.

For starters, for your scenario, you have to be in a v stable relationship, able to afford the commute and the additional student loan repayments AND lived like a monk for many years

my ex and I ‘lived like monks’ for many years to be able to afford property. That was late 1990s. We didn’t consider that going out, take always, new clothes, eating in Pret etc etc were necessary. We had our sights set on something else. I fully acknowledge that things have shifted and it’s harder and harder to own property but the attitude that you should be able to do whatever it is you want, go out, eat out etc etc and buy your first property just don’t sit right. It might have been easier in the past, but it wasn’t that easy. People had to make sacrifices, property didn’t just fall into our laps.

Haven’t RTFT but definitely not unreasonable. I’m much older than you, but both DH and I grew up in large 4 bedroom detached houses even though none of our parents went to university and neither DM or MIL worked when we were small. We both have good degrees and DH is in a good professional job (I teach!) but we still cannot really afford a detached house in our area. Friends who have them have huge mortgages and no holidays.

Op I really feel for you and many people are in this situation. There's lots of minimising and gaslighting replies here.

But it is shit there's no getting around that.

I was born in 1954. My parents were living in 1 room in a relative's house in London. They got a 2 bed council flat when the house they were in was being demolished. They had another 2 children and managed to do a swop to a 2 bed council house where they stayed for 25 years. I shared a room with my 2 sisters until I left home aged 23.

My mum always worked. When we were young she worked evenings so she could be home during the day and then dad took over in the evening. Everything they had was secondhand. They often did not eat so that we could eat.

We had 3 holidays in 30 odd years and they were cheap holidays in the UK which we travelled to by train. My parents never had a car.

My parents bought their first house (a 2 bed) when they were in their 60's. They had to move out of London to afford it. The mortgage payments were paid by my parents and me and my siblings equally.

Me and DH got married in 1980 and could not afford to buy anything in London. We rented for a year then bought a small house in Kent. We literally had nothing and everything (washing machine, cooker etc was either given to us or we bought second hand.

The interest rate went up and up and up and we struggled. We had to pay train fares into London for work and with all our bills we barely had money for food. We lived on beans on toast for ages.

To say previous generations didn't on the whole struggle is absolute rubbish. My parents started work at 14 and dad retired at 62 and mum at 67.

I know people older than you that would be excited & happy to have what you have

A husband
Property
Job
Trying for children

I think that you should live for the now & your future
You have a lot to be thankful for !

You have lots of positives in your life NOW !

Not true that you could buy a reasonable size house on a mortgage that one average wage could get in the 1980's.

We bought in a small 2 bed terrace 50 miles from where we were living and working because we could not afford anything closer. We both had fairly good jobs but even so we couldn't get the full amount that we needed and had to borrow money from a relative.

The rise and rise in interest rates crippled us and we could barely afford to eat.

I was going to say exactly the same, the rich poor divide is only going to get bigger once millennials start inheriting. The people on this thread complaining about the size of their parents houses are going to inherit massively and are going to benefit more than any other generation, so in the future they are going to be extremely fortunate but none seem to acknowledge this.

I know how you feel. I used to rent a room from a lovely lady whose family bought the house in the 70s for pennies. We paid £650 each per room and I'm sure it's now more like £1000 a room, if they still rent it out. If they sold it they'd have got a million or so. Her family were immigrants and they suffered and went through a lot, so I'm absolutely delighted that in this aspect they were able to make their way in the country and the world, and she was a lovely landlord. But that sort of situation is just never going to repeat itself. Me and the other friends I lived there with now all own homes but despite all being extremely successful and high earners, we'll never be able to afford a house anything like that - the contrast is so stark. It's crazy to me that you can both make six figures in London and consider yourself lucky if you can buy a 2-bed Victorian terrace that was literally built for factory workers at the very bottom of the income scale but is now as much space as all but the very wealthy can hope for...

I think about it thus:

The period of (very approximately) 1975 to 2006 was a bit of a blip. A blip - good or bad, depending on how you see it - where home ownership rocketed. More and more women worked outside the home - either full time or part time after marriage/children and more people became more qualified as the school leaving age rose. Workplace pensions, job security, employee rights etc. all became the norm. And, simultaneously, more and more stuff became available to buy: more cars, more clothes, foreign holidays etc.
There were high points and low points during this time and some people won and some people lost. However, as a society people became materially hugely affluent.

Go back to the 1920s, for example, and look what a person doing an average sort of job could afford. Life, for most, was abjectly shit. E.g. my grandfather grew up as one of 7 kids in a rented two-up two-down in a crap bit of Birmingham... until his father lost his job and they had to move to 2 rooms begged off a family friend. That's a more extreme example but it wasn't rare....That's part of the reason why the welfare state arose - the building of council housing etc.

Today, we're more or less reverting to that former 'norm'. Britain was hugely wealthy 150 years ago but a tiny handful of people were laughing all the way to the bank while the ordinary working man and woman (including the growing middle class) lived month to month or week to week - not necessarily in bad conditions, but not in nice ones either. And that's what we're going back to: a tiny handful of very rich people and everyone else muddling on.

So that's how I console myself. A great many of those who were working adults in the 70s through to the 00s had a lot of good fortune. They worked no harder than the generations before them, or the generations after them. It was a particular point in history; a blip where a lot of people managed to buy a home and accumulate wealth really quite easily. A generation of canny tycoons who made their money through unparalleled ability, work ethic and cunning they were not. They just got lucky in that respect.

Society - government - could choose to make the "blip" the new norm (albeit a much toned-down version) but who would that benefit? The cynic in me thinks a society that lives paycheque to paycheque in rather more easy to control than one that has a lot of assets but what do I know.

But all of that said I would still rather live in my crumbling shoebox than live the life of a woman in frankly any period of history before about 20yrs ago. I look back at the women in my family history - including my own mother - and thank my lucky stars that my life is better than any of theirs.

This exactly. The cognitive dissonance is quite peculiar.
I'm deeply conscious that my mum is a homeowner and because of that, when she dies, I'll likely be in a much better position than my fellow Xennials/geriatric millennials whose parents never owned a home. That widening gap is really scary as no matter how hard you work, how well paid you become, it's almost impossible to save the sort of amount that another person will be given just because, back in the 80s, one person's parent had some good fortune and bought a house and the other person's parent didn't.

@Mytholmroyd I’m sure you think that your parents were living the high life but compared to today were they really? Yes, they were able to buy a decent house but I’m sure they were frugal in their day to day life. Did your mum drive? Even if she did she probably didn’t have a car. I expect she cooked fresh meals from scratch every day which is cheaper. She may have made clothes and knitted. New clothes were not purchased often. Certainly not like today. Most people purchased furniture slowly as and when they could afford it. I expect she walked most places too. I don’t think she would have eaten out very often. Life was very different then and people lived cheaper simpler lives. They may have had several holidays a year but I’m sure they saved all year to be able to afford them. People didn’t splash out in those days but lived very much within their means and definitely not on credit/hire purchase. It was a completely different way of life. Much better in lots of ways.

Yes, you were very lucky and presumably living down south, but not everywhere had rocketing house prices back then. It depends entirely on where you were living.

I bought in 89 in the Midlands and sold in 2002 and made less than 20k on my house and I’d improved it hugely but the area hadn’t changed. 🤷🏻‍♀️ My DH was living in Bristol when I met him and had bought a 2 bed terraced house for 50k in the mid 90’s and sold it for 150k, less than 10 yrs later.

Simply not true.

Houses in relation to earnings were for many years highly affordable for anyone on average earnings.

My DD was start of band 5 NHS, so in the southwest where average house prices are around 250k, a cheaper 2 bed house in a rougher area, say 180 to 200k, thats 6 or 7 times her pay.

25 years ago, that same house would be approx 40k, a nurse in 1998 was on a starter pay of 13k, so that house was 3x their earnings and even more affordable as they had no student debt to repay and whilst saving for a deposit, their rent was also equally affordable, average rent for 2 bed here is around 800 to 1000 pm, HMOs 5/600, 1/3rd to 1/2 take home pay.

We had it fucking easy!

It is always hard to do fair comparisons and people today can only deal with today's issues and they probably are used to a lot more than we older ones ever had in some ways. Indeed one of my diary notes from the 90s was along the lines of my father had given us £1k each for Christmas but not to tell our mother because she thought we had so very muchmore than our parents did (which we did compared to their early married life with rationing after the war, national service calls ups for men etc).

We could only afford to buy in 1984 out here in zone 5 (never inner London). In fact my career (London lawyer) the trainee wages today are double (AFTER) inflation of the wage I got in those days. So in that career people are better off. Obviously rents are at least double in zone 5 even after allowing for inflation and people have 9% student loan payments which will be partly why they are so much better off and some like my sons live at home so have no rent to pay so infinitely better off than when I was their age.

A couple like we were in 1984 - ahead of department teacher in outer London and London trainee lawyer today would be on each about £50k so £100k. you can borrow about 4x joint salary now (it was 2.5x in my day) so they could buy a freehold tiny little house like we bought back then but they would need a 5% deposit so about £22,500 so each of them would have to save up about £11k, not an impossible sum particularly if you flat share like most people my sons' age or if you are lucky enough to be able to live with parents.

Great post @Flatulence. You’re absolutely spot on.

I would like people who are banging on about eating at pretty and buying coffee to look at the average cost of houses vs average wages over the years. It's pretty simple. Even in times of high interest for most people paying for accommodation vs wages is at an all time high.

Something I've noticed about people is they do like to attribute any good fortune or luck of circumstance to ability or hard work. Yes I'm sure you worked hard to buy a home in the 80s or whenever. But what the op and many people are experiencing now is they do that hard work and still can't do those things.

No one is taking away you're hard work from you. It's just about acknowledging the difference in circumstances.

No one can argue with the fact housing is more unaffordable, the problem is the example is always the nice middle class 1930s semi.

And in that example yes it's true but I don't think all of us would go back to all housing conditions of 40 years ago.

My mum lived a tenement with shared toilet (as in with other flats) until she left home to get married. My dad lived in shared digs. It was normal for people to live as lodgers much further into life

Life for those brought up in middle class households in the south east perhaps has declined (but probably should be recognised as pretty privileged).

Same with 'my mum didn't work '. That didn't apply to lower income groups. Women may have done the childcare but here they gutted fish at 4am, or did cleaning or evening work, or both.

I wouldn't fancy redding thousands of lines like my grandmother did. That was bloody hard work

I'm not sure about 'not living on credit' - everything we got for Christmas was through a catalogue paid off weekly, and my mum rented her TV until the 00s.

Very true - they came from poor working class families neither of which had ever owned a house or car (well my grandad drove a Bentley but he was a chauffeur!) but my dad was a very hard worker - worked four jobs at one point to fund his climbing hobby etc. My mum was indeed the epitome of thrifty and yes made a lot of our clothes and cooked every day - she worked hard in the home. It is still a marvel to me though that they could achieve what they did property/car/holidays with no inherited family wealth.

I doubt they could have done it today - we have made it much harder for our children to maintain a similar standard of living/own their own home. It's not too bad in Yorkshire where I live as property prices aren't bonkers comparatively but how people live in the south, I have no idea. I am sad for my children and other young people.

@YouHaveAnArse exactly. Living within their means and not going into debt.

This is spot on. All the mums when I was a kid in the 80s/early 90s worked - but stacking shelves, in pubs, assembling switches, in supermarkets - around their husband's work. They had no choice; childcare was non existant/expensive and their husband's wage alone wasn't enough. Many of those women (my own mum included) stayed in unhappy, unhealthy, marriages because they couldn't afford to go it alone.
It's worth noting, we weren't poor - we lived on a 60s-built housing estate of mostly owner occupiers in SE England - but things were so tight financially for pretty much everyone. I have so many more choices than my mum did and for that I'll always be grateful.

I lived with my mum alone who had to work hard to manage financially. Definitely a no frills upbringing, but I understand what you mean. It feels a bit like a game of survival in life just now. I thought I was relatively well off but have struggled the last couple of years. I do have savings and investments but I’m loathe to cash anything in as I might feel even less well off in future so I only spend what I earn.