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.

Those things do all add up though. In the past people didn't have to do things like buy their kids computers for school and expectations were lower. It is amazing how fast the small expenses add up.

Other things too like, they could leave school at 14 and get a good job. Their kids wore hand me downs (most clothes don't last that long now). Less outside home activities and they were cheaper. Child entertainment often meant running around the neighbourhood playing with other kids. Sure appliances might have cost more but they lasted so much longer.

They might be small things but cumulatively that would have helped the older generations a lot.

This is supposed to be the first generation that is less well off than their parents. I'm older (62) and my life is much better than my parents. I don't think my dad ever went on a plane (I didn't until I was 27). We never had a car and holidays were with my gran in South Wales.
Housing though, I think has been totally buggered by right to buy. It got Thatcher a lot of votes, but not allowing councils to rebuild was criminal IMO. When I grew up almost half the houses in my area were council houses. Now they're rarer than rocking horse shit.
The Tories fiscal drag doesn't help either. The amount you can earn before tax should be about £15,000 by now and the high rate should start at around £60,000. But the bands are frozen for the foreseeable.

Not read the replies but to be fair interest rates have historically always gone up and down- my parents bought their first house in the early 80’s when rates were at their highest and it was a really tight for them at times. There’s a whole host of people from their generation who paid high rates whilst borrowing and then have suffered low rates on their savings for years- less than ideal when they were probably planning on savings augmenting their pension/retirement.
It sucks but unfortunately life’s not always fair.

Why doesn't she sign her large house over to her children and rent then?

I feel your pain OP. I am in my mid 40s and my husband and I bring in a really decent wage between us for the area we live.

we never managed to buy a house as the market crash in the late 2000s meant that we couldn’t get a mortgage and once I had our daughter it’s meant we have never been able to get a deposit together. We have paid so much in rent that it’s eye watering.

The thing is decades ago, the essentials were affordable and the luxuries were expensive.

Nowadays the luxuries are affordable and the essentials are expensive.

Well, exactly.

You don't want to bo reading the full thread @MargotBamborough because it's enraging. That point has indeed been made. This thread seems full of people taking about the sacrifices their parents generation and those before made, without mentioning the fact that they themselves (who likely did buy 20 years ago), haven't made many sacrifices at all. I'll hold my hands up, I haven't. Not when compared to the sacrifices that those who are just staring out today would need to make to be in the same position. Yes maybe we had to forgoe a holiday for a few years, but current FTB would need to do that too, and more.

The housing crisis, inflation makes home ownership difficult/impossible for many people. However people also lost their homes in the 70's, 80's and 90's. We lost ours in the late 80s and it took years to recover. When I look back to my mum and dad and their friends on average incomes in most cases they owned a house - maybe run down, in what OP calls a grim area. Spending was essentials - stuff for children at the minimum (including Christmas), limited new stuff, not everyone had a car, and people were hit with mortgage rises and unemployment. Yes, and all the extras like phones and subscriptions did just not exist (I know that is not a popular thing to say on here). However if you took all that extra spending away..and lived as people did in the 70s and 80s you would consider yourself having a very frugal life.

I can buy a 32 inch flat screen TV for £150. My grocery bill for a week is more than that. Previous generations would be aghast at that I'm sure. Remember when we would hire televisions?!

Indeed.

So decades ago people went without luxuries in order to afford the essentials.

Today people cannot afford the essentials no matter what they do so they cheer themselves up with a few luxuries and try not to think about the future because it's too depressing.

The fact that you are a homeowner means you are doing better than many of your peers: https://propertyindustryeye.com/millennials-set-to-rent-for-longer/

The line that jumps out is 'However, with the average millennial now aged around 35, we’re approaching the point where those who haven’t bought will likely be renting into retirement.' So I'm sure there are many people your age give or take a few years who would love to be in your position of even owning a home at all.

I know it's not a race to the bottom, but I think you need to reframe your attitude a bit and be appreciative of what you do have. I think my parents generation, the so-called baby boomers had life the best that it will ever be in the western world, and it's all downhill now - so there is no point comparing yourself to that generation as the world is such a different place now, and will never go back to those days.

Oh and she also thinks there is no crisis in social care, we’re all just too lazy and selfish to look after our family elders at home. She put her own mother in a care home 150 miles away however, and rarely saw her.

Because making small sacrifices nowadays is utterly pointless. I once heard an elderly lady say how in the 1970s her and husband would share a shandy in the pub because they had to buy a house and be careful. There's literally no point in doing something like that now.

I was born in 1978 and my mum
was working as a civil servant for the military. She had to give up her job when she had me! I find this shocking!

She could have easily continued with this role as she earned more than my dad and he would have happily stayed at home. She drove and the depot was in the next village.

Exactly @Comedycook .

I think the whole house buying thing has changed as well though. Buy to let has really changed things. "The ladder" has no bottom rungs.

When I got my first job, me and a friend bought a crappy do-er-up-er bedsit together. Shared THE room... for 2 years, did it up then moved up etc.

Now buy to let landlords scoop those up and people are trying to enter on the 3rd or 4th rung with a family. It is different.

I don't think this is about living standards really. More about the dynamics of the housing market which have changed really significantly.

Exactly. Even if you cancelled your netflix subscription...the yearly saving wouldn't even pay for two days childcare at a nursery.

Yes. My parents rented a TV and I think it took up more of their disposable income than a current young person owning a mobile phone and a TV.

I don't think it's as simple as being selfish. So many are caught between the needs of parenting and the needs of elderly people, while also having to work full time. And it's women bearing the brunt of this. It's not selfish to realise you can't do it all.

Also, I live in France, where lots of people do rent long term. Although everyone I know who is in a position to buy has done so, so I don't think it's true that most people are more than happy to rent if they have the opportunity to buy.

If you rent, the amount your rent can be increased by is capped by a very small amount each year. When I was renting an apartment in Paris I think the landlord was not allowed to put the rent up by more than 10 euros a year.

And it's very very difficult to get tenants out, even if they trash the place and don't pay their rent you have to take them to court to get them out and it takes years. Serving them two months' notice because you want to do Airbnb instead is just not something that is allowed to happen here.

Hmm @Floppyflop, you're the same age as my husband. Why talk about your mum, let's talk about you. What did you buy your first house for, and what would it cost to buy now? Were you forced to give up your job when you got married (if you are married)?

She's in her 30s. I'm older than her and my mum worked in a public sector role full time. It was the 80s and 90s, not the 50s.

Once more:

The UK has a higher percentage of social housing (council housing) than most European countries… and a worse housing crisis than most of them.

The main problem in the UK is that longer lifespans, higher divorce/single-dom rates and immigration have pushed up the number of households, but the building of homes has not kept pace, because it is difficult to release land to build here, and building styles which allow you to pack more people into a given area (apartment living rather than detached houses, and pushing people towards public transit/walking so that less space has to be devoted to housing and parking cars) are culturally unpopular in the UK. Everyone wants a detached house with space to park at least a couple of cars… but how?