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 agree op no wonder there is an increase in mental health issues. The future looks bleak for those that are at an age where they want to take the next step but cannot. My dad also (I'm 35) was able to look after 3 children, buy a second home with mum being a sahp so with just one income. We were able to go on holidays abroad etc once a year. The opportunities my dad had we never had and we are way more experienced and qualified than my dad ever was at the age where he had all of these. I'm also from a generation where we had toys, clothes, bikes, first home computer, PlayStation, McDonald's for a treat so my lifestyle was pretty much the same as my dc except we had more freedom then to play outside whereas now I can't imagine ever letting dc play outside unsupervised.

Even going back to 10 years ago where it was a few years into my career it was still better then than it is now. I3 years into my career now and my salary hasn't increased that much but housing, rent, bills, cost of living has. Before anyone says get a better job, the salary I get paid is pretty much the average that most people get paid in this country. 10 years ago I knew quite a few people who weren't working in professional jobs but would do seasonal cash in hand jobs in the evenings to pay for something like a holiday or a new car but now I have friends who are degree level educated married and are both regularly doing extra jobs in the evenings/weekends do be able to cover extra costs that aren't even luxury but necessities. Think of a teacher doing cleaning on the weekends where the husband looks after the kids and the husband who works in the public sector then doing extra shifts in catering in the evenings when the wife comes home from cleaning.

But realistically, even if I ate out every week and bought fancy gadgets it wouldn't have harmed me much anyway, because the amounts spent on those things don't even touch the sides of a house deposit.

YABU for this alone.

I spent twelve years (16-28) having part time/full time jobs during education. I didn’t eat out at all, didn’t get coffee etc. I bought a house with the money I saved. A few hundred a month makes a huge difference over 12 years. My friends did the same. They bought houses too. Life is full of sacrifices to achieve what you want; it doesn’t fall into your lap unless you are the 1%.

TBH you are incredibly privileged. You’re early thirties and own a house in an ‘expensive city.’ Lots of people can’t even afford to rent in expensive cities, or cheap cities.

I know it’s not a race to the bottom, but you are very out of touch, OP. You have and had (growing up) a lot more than most people. Be grateful.

My parents bought their first house shortly after leaving university at the end of the 60's for £2000. The largest mortgage they ever had was £28,000 in the mid 80's.

DP and I were refused a mortgage as graduates in our mid-20's, rented for years while scrimping a deposit, watched prices spiralling ever upwards (see the steepest section in the late 90's / early 00's in the attached graph) and eventually managed to buy in our early 30's, 7 years after first being refused a mortgage, for £310,000 with a mortgage of £270,000. We were only able to do so because I'd switched career and we'd relocated to the SE, both to boost our incomes.
DP and I paid 155 times what my parents paid for their first home 35 years earlier. According to the Bank of England, inflation rose by a factor of 8 in that period. Even in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, our mortgage was 17 times what my parents paid a generation before, and the deposit that took us nearly a decade to save was more than double (in real terms) the full price of their first property.

I completely agree. My husband and I are professional services and thirty years ago would have had a very high standard of living.

things are increasingly tough for younger people. One answer in the short term is to move to a cheaper area

To some extent though its about different priorities. It sounds like you chose to meet someone, get married then buy a house and have a baby. I'm the same age as you, maybe a couple of years younger and i bought a flat,met someone, bought a bigger house together, had a baby, bought a bigger house, then got married.

Everyone does things in different orders. If owning a property is important to someone, asit was for me, that should take top priority as property prices are pretty much always going to increase

My siblings are about a decade older than me in their mid 50's one aside we spent similar amounts on our houses, ours is the worst by far. It's not too bad, I don't think about it much, but they always host and after christmas I'll feel a bit rubbish for a few days. Then I look at the youngest in my team and I could weep for them. We need a massive housebuilding programme, and it can't all be rabbit hutches on brownfield sites in the cities, there is demand for homes in the countryside and small towns too and some greenbelt will have to go.

I know this doesn't apply to everyone but those spending tens of thousands on weddings - have simpler weddings and use the rest for a house deposit. One solution for some.

This thread is once again ageist and parent bashing. You have no idea what its like to have no mobile phones, internet, sky tv (a tv......) no central heating. Women having no rights at work, so discriminated against. No car, walk or bus everywhere. No University for the working class kids as it was just not expected. Things bought from a catalogue "on tic".
No foreign holidays. (No holidays in Uk for some of us.) School uniform second hand or hand me downs (school cardigans hand knitted). No contraception (early days and no abortion). No vaccinations. And it goes on and on..............

Add in to that the wealthy buying up property for investment, charging high rent (leaving people less able to save for a deposit), making more wealth, buying more investment property - leading to fewer houses on the market which pushes prices up, beyond what the average person can afford.

We could tax this wealth better but we don’t and so those with the assets accumulate more and more and more.

I'd like to see stamp duties and the like (where this applies) not applied to downsizing the family home. I may downsize years early so a family can have my larger home under these circumstances. It's a big disincentive and makes downsizing less affordable.

My parents bought their massive 5 bed house in the 70s for £2k, on a single wage and with a mortgage from the council. We sold it a few years ago for more than 300 times what they paid for it. It's mind boggling. But in many other ways they had it tougher than the current young generation, as others have said.

@GarlicMaybeNot

it wasn’t right to buy though.

its population growth and the rise of smaller households.

in 1970 there were 55 million people in the U.K. now there are 68 million

thats a massive increase of around 25%.

we have not built enough housing to meet the rise.

its not about whether people rent or own or if there is council housing. If the population was stable and there was enough housing to go around the price of housing (which is the big issues in falling living standards) would be stable too.

but the U.K. is short of housing. So demand is ahead of supply.

So prices to both rent and buy have risen massively.

council housing is relevant as we have not built enough housing full stop. If we’d built more council homes that would help but more private homes would help too.

and the population rise has been driving by British people living longer.

while net migration over the time is a few million (maybe 5million) it’s mostly older people living longer so needing housing for that has created the excess of demand for housing bs supply.

We need to move on from this. I had a lot of those things as a late generation x.

And some are mixed. I didnt need a degree to do my first job, now they ask you to have 50k of debt to do the job..

My brother and those younger than him have a much lower standard of living.

@Baffledandalarmed I fail to see how I'm out of touch? I acknowledged that people younger than me are in a much worse position and I know I'm lucky to even get a foot on the ladder at all - many of my friends can't even do that. (We are paying most of our incomes to our mortgage just to do this - mortgage distress is exactly what we're in.) And I also worked very hard from the time I was a teenager and made a lot of sacrifices to get here, with no family money for deposits or anything like that. But my point is, the sacrifices we made and are continuing to have to make are yielding comparatively poor results compared to people even just a decade older than me, let alone my parents.

OP, solidarity, we are in the same boat. DH and I far out-earn our own parents (DH's mum didn't work and mine was an NHS nurse) but have a worse standard of living.

@ACynicalDad I'm not sure that building over green areas will help, if the new houses just get purchased as second homes / airbnb

The people who bought their houses (me included), 15-20 years before the OP have experienced non of those things.

Genuinely wondering how many people lamenting how hard it is to get a house deposit together spent 20,000 plus on their weddings? (I do see weddings of this price and higher posted about here). We spent 1000 on our wedding, rented for many more years after while we worked extra to get a deposit. Maybe a new approach needs to be scaled down weddings and using the money to get on the housing ladder instead?

People work much harder for much less now.

Women especially.

Women weren't forced to give up their jobs 45 years ago. I am that age.
I mean I was working 45 years ago not that I'm 45.

No vaccinations? I mean, I suppose if you were born before 1796, when Edward Jenner invented the vaccine, you probably did have a poor standard of living compared to current generations...

Is it telling that this gets no response?

You are saying that you can't afford to work part time
Have you looked into how much childcare would be ?
It might work out that it doesn't pay you to work if you need full time nursery depending on your income of course ?
Also again depending on your income you can sometimes qualify for help with nursery fees.
Also have you looked into whether family or friends can do child care as you say one of the reasons you live in a expensive city is because family and friends are nearby . You say it would leave you extremely stretched ?
Maybe look at other expenditures that could be cut so you could afford to do this ?for instance things such as eating out / takeaway meals / transport costs / gym
Membership / holidays how many times to do you go away a year ?
You maybe surprised where your money goes and a few savings could make all the difference.

Genuinely wondering how many people lamenting how hard it is to get a house deposit together spent 20,000 plus on their weddings?

I'm in my 30s and my partner and I would never spend money on a big wedding (unless our financial situation changed considerably). His sister did that and regrets it now. My other friends who had big weddings either did it after buying a house or it was paid for by parents.

I understand your frustration OP, I'm late 30's and single so will never really be able to buy (only if I get an inheritance, which is a grim thought). Couldn't afford to live where I grew up, it's gone super expensive.

But realistically individuals aren't to blame - people just made the choices and took the opportunities available to them at the time. I would have done the same if I could. It sounds as if you are blaming older people somewhat, it's not their fault. Blame the government policy of selling off social housing stock, blame a growing global population all fighting for dwindling resources etc.

As for people giving out about older people in larger 'family' houses - what's the answer then, kicking them out of their homes?
My mother is one of those people, almost 80 years old in a large 4 bed house. But at her stage in life she values her community, her neighbours, the familiarity of her surroundings, her garden that she loves. She has looked into downsizing, but in her local area there aren't really bungalows, only new apartment buildings with very little outside space and very large management fees. Perhaps if the government incentivised downsizing.

Realistically, things can't always get better and better indefinitely, there has to be a levelling off somewhere, and we are beginning to see it.

Take heart OP, I'm sure your children will no doubt blame you for the ills of their generation in time.