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.

Tories have given us 16 Housing Ministers in 13 years - no wonder there's a housing crisis.

@seenisambol The very last people who could climb certain ladders in professions without a degree are mid fifties now. The job my Mother had is now a graduate scheme, she worked her way up. When I was young in the early 1990’s my friend dated a rather gorgeous French guy . He left France because his degree was worth so much less there because they had far more graduates. This was around the time that Blair was pushing higher education and fees were introduced, he said the UK was making a big mistake. By the time I retired early where I worked expected the lowest grade admin posts to have a degree, it is ridiculous. The UK doesn’t suddenly have 40% graduate level jobs and wages. He worked as a policy writer for a Government dept, very much a lateral thinker. Saw the mess coming.

Similar situation here though a few years older.
For me, I chose not to buy a house in my 20s because I changed job a lot and didn’t want a mortgage tying me to one area. So I bought in my early 30s.
There is such a difference in the standard of living between me and my friends who bought 15 years ago in their early 20s (they have upsized several times and live in 3/4 bed houses, I live in a cramped two up one down).
I understand it was my choice, but it still sucks.

This is what happens when you import nearly one million people a year from supposedly because you can’t find enough carers while almost 6 million people claim out of work benefits. More low paid immigrants, an increasingly unproductive population being funded by the ever decreasing number of net contributors and no more housing. 25 years of political corruption and mismanagement got us here.

But we are making so little dent in paying it off and are unlikely to make much more than a dent over the next 5 years.

That’s how mortgages work - the payments are nearly all interest in the beginning then they reach a tipping point whereby they pay off the capital. A mortgage is a marathon, not a sprint.

The poorest years of most people’s lives are when their children are young, particularly pre school with the obscene cost of childcare but that period is relatively brief.

I really feel for people who took on mortgages they could comfortably afford and have watched in horror as interest rates have risen. When I first bought interest rates were high and I knew what I was taking on, the last couple of years have been a nightmare for some people.

DH and I don't have our family as a support network locally OP. We couldn't afford a property in a city near our families so had to move away to afford our property. That's life🤷🏻

I’m generation X and from my perspective, it is less affordable now for younger people to buy a property. My husband and I bought a nice flat in London when we were in our 20s and both working public sector jobs at low salaries. I don’t think that would be possible today.

I know that my children and my friends children generally can’t afford to buy property in the SE without some help from Bank of Mum & Dad, & of course not everyone gets that. As has been observed, their parents tend to have 4 or 5 bed detached properties so the younger people can hope to inherit eventually, as long as the parents don’t go into care homes (most won’t but you can’t rely on it).

However, we certainly did experience financial hardship at times so it’s not like it was all easy for us. The spike in interest rates to 15% while short lived was scary at the time and many people did get repossessed. We sold our first two properties at a loss and had to move out of London to afford a house, away from our friends & family. I worked part time and most of my salary went to the childminder but I did it for my mental health. Women of an older generation than me didn’t always have that option.

It always seems hardest when you’re at the age where you’re juggling the mortgage with childcare costs. Once the childcare costs ease it’s a lot easier to pay off the mortgage and in a few years @ColdNow you will probably find life easier than it is today, especially if you gain equity from house prices increasing again. I certainly remember worrying most about money in my 20s & 30s because it is the period of highest outgoings while your salaries are not at their peak.

Did your DPs get degrees - if they did then their salaries would be much higher than the average person because at that time few went to uni then. Also their careers would put them in the bracket of safe to lend to.

@Hayliebells its not gaslighting, when 50 yrs ago people had a tv and radio, and 1/5th the amount of shoes clothing etc.
bigger families and less personal space (single bathroom for a family of 5 or more).
first homes were often without furniture for a year or years; bookshelves made with cinderblocks and planks of wood scavaged.
rightly or wrongly people rarely live like this/ save and not use credit and pop a mattress on the floor etc.

OP I hear you I’m the same. At my age and similar income my parents had a large detached house in a nice area, live in nanny, cleaner twice weekly and skiing holidays and summer holidays. All of that is so laughingly out of our budget it’s unreal.

What can you do? They were lucky they’re the only generation that happened for. You can feel hard done to or get on with things.

In London in the early eighties people on two low wage incomes could buy a small flat. Impossible now .

I get it - I'm older than you and did manage to scrape in to a cheaper property market and was lucky enough to enjoy cheap rents in my city when I was in my 20s.

The difference between me and my parents though is HUGE. Typical boomers. Even though they're divorced, both seem to have walked away well off, DM has a few property lets etc. I grew up in a big old house that would cost £1m to buy now, 2 cars, DM took 10 years out of work...total contrast to my life although I have it better than those 10/15 years behind me. It feels unfair and I do worry about my DC.

@LickleLamb One of my parents has a degree but isn't in a particularly high earning profession. Neither of my parents are. They were lower middle class really.

Also, I'm unlikely to inherit much - as mentioned I'm from a larger family with multiple siblings.

House price inflation has massively outstripped both wage inflation and general inflation.

I bought my first house for £24k in 1982, on a salary of a little over £5k.

That house is now worth £360-£440k, according to Zoopla, but an inflation calculator tells me that the £5k salary is equivalent to £22,800 today. (I was astonished by that, tbh, I expected it to be much higher.)

To buy the same house, with the same price to salary ratio, you'd have to be earning £80k.

The only answer imo is to massively increase housing supply by building more homes, both for sale and for rent, and converting empty offices into flats.

Has it ever been easy though?

Admittedly my parents had a three bed detached house with large garden, but it was a doer upper. My parents said that when I was little, they were lucky if they had enough money for a can of paint to paint part of a room each month. I can remember we had two comfy chairs to sit on and we had to squeeze onto those if we all wanted to sit down. My Mum didn't have a coat at one point. That's with no tv, mobile, telephone, electronic games to pay for.

We bought a house with two beds which we knew we could afford if we had a little one. Had hard times financially and had to cut back on heating and food for a while. Took us 19 years to move to a three bed.

I've never lived in a detached house, always been maisonettes or terraces. Only just getting to the end of the mortgage and I'm in my 60s. I also have a degree, didn't help me much when in the 80s customers wouldn't speak to me because I was a woman and wanted to speak to someone more qualified (ie, were a man, however young, even a new apprentice).

I also looked at colleagues who were 10 years older and thought if only I'd been born 10 years earlier.

@HoppingPavlova but we have the total reverse of that now. Unless you have an incredibly well off/high earning partner or an enormous amount of savings/alternative income women now HAVE to go back to work when they have children. We still don’t get a choice. You go back to work and are either lucky enough to have family help or you have to spend inordinate amounts of money on childcare.

Also despite needing to work women are still discriminated against in the workplace. Lots of jobs are not flexible, lots of companies ditching remote working, companies having cultures that aren’t really compatible with child rearing. There was even a post on here the other day where there were employers openly said (anonymously on this forum) that they don’t hire women of childbearing age.

Sorry to digress OP.

I would say a lot of this property madness stems from the internet . People from wealthy countries overseas can buy up properties at the click of a button from their armchair. Canada has put a stop to this . You now have to be a Canadian citizen to buy property in Canada .

YANBU. I really relate to this. I am late 30s. Grew up in a a 4 bed detached in a lovely area with a SAHM. Mortgage was paid off around the time my two siblings and I reached our teens.

Dh and I have two children, the first one just approaching teens. The mortgage on our too small 3 bed semi in a not so nice area runs until we’re in our 70s and we both work in decent jobs. The house is too small for us and money is tight.

It upsets me that my children’s standard of living is worse than what I had growing up and worse than many peers/cousins with slightly older parents have. It just wasn’t the future I always envisaged.

@PolkaDotStripe

Employers discriminating against women in the workplace due to pregnancy has always happened.

I’m in my 50s and my parents didn’t live in a 5 bed house. They didn’t have 2 cars and buy me a pony, mum worked part time, I had swimming lessons and that was it, no fancy holidays to Switzerland or even abroad. My parents did live in a bigger house than me and benefited from a decent pension (dad was a headteacher) but I think to suggest that most folk lived like this is inaccurate. I think some posters’ descriptions suggest extremely privileged and fairly unusual childhoods.
Saying that, I grew up (and still live in ) the north which may have some bearing.

I agree and I grew up in London.

Our biggest house growing up was a 3 bed semi. Everyone has different experiences but this thread does seem a bit slanted towards people whose parents seemed to have above average levels of disposable income.

@RedheadRedBed yes exactly. Not just pregnancy. General employment discrimination against women has always happened.

My brother is just 12 years younger than me. The change in house price to earning ratio during thst time was significant. Salarys also stagnated. The impact of 2008 crash has been huge. When i left school i could get a job as a legal secretary on 22- 24k and they are still 24-26k 26 years later and loads of them have law degrees now. That shift happened during the years between me and my brother.

The lifestyle i have compared to his is much better as a result. Im a generation x and he is a millenial.

We havent had different priorities the landscape changed around us.

With respect OP it sounds like you came from a pretty comfortable middle class background. People have always struggled. I am in my early forties and live in a two bed flat I own in London. I grew up in a large house with a huge garden, but it was rented.

I had what many on here would think was an idyllic childhood - parents available, extended family living near by and involved, loads of space to run around, good home cooked food. But I remember the late eighties and early nineties being a huge time of financial stress and anxiety for my parents. We were frequently threatened with eviction, we had no central heating, I spent a lot of the eighties on free school meals, weeknds were often spent scouring junkyards for second hand replacement cars or electrical items.

I have less space and a different life now but I am financially secure, have a well paid job and am not sent in to a financial spiral by a big ticket item breaking down.