To think in London, your choice of partner matters more than a career?

[zippythetoad]

I work in London, came from a working class family in north, state comp, went to Cambridge, blah blah.

Work in a well paid job in financial services. You’d think my kind of salary would afford a nice house etc. You’d be wrong.

Looking around at people in the office, some of the same background as me, the only people who have actual houses or are starting families are those who have married someone with generational wealth.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work, you will never catch up to someone who has bern given a £1-2mil contribution to buying a house through inheritance or family. This all boils down to whether your partner comes from a family who bought London property in the 80s or 90s.

Erm the more pragmatic side of me thinks you have a point, generational wealth makes a difference but I think in the most part it’s about how much rent you were paying in the build up to saving for a deposit. My rent was always 65-70% of my income, which despite not being legal, still happens. The people I know in London who own, either do it through the shared ownership scheme or the because they didn’t have £1700 rent pcm to pay.

edited due to typos

@TedMullins Why is it so surprising people might expect to be able to afford a nice home when they have a good income?

London house prices are famous for being ridiculously high and disproportional to salaries. OP isn’t the first to have observed that even with a good job, the kinds of housing they can afford are pretty modest.

I haven’t called anything ‘a shitty terrace in a shitty area’, they are your words not mine.

Plenty of Londoners' parents bought London's property in the 1970s and 80s and have done well out of it, but not many have done well enough to give their kids that kind of money, especially not if they have more than one child.

Deposits of £50k maybe, possibly double or triple that if it's an inheritance, but £1m-£2m per child is surely a rare exception?

No, apologies that was another PP who described their house like that. I don’t think the London market is fair and reasonable but it’s not a secret that it’s propped up by foreign investors who leave entire apartment blocks and houses empty and drive prices up to insane levels so I don’t know why anyone’s surprised their money doesn’t go as far in London.

It’s also just a complete lie that people on 6-figure incomes can’t afford to buy anything, which is what some people claim. They can, they just don’t want to buy what’s available in their price range because they think it’s beneath them. I do take issue with that, because it’s just snobbery, and there’s an attitude of never feeling like they have enough (see previous poster describing their own home as a shitty terrace!) A 4-bed detached isn’t a pre-requisite of a decent lifestyle, but I’d argue that gratitude and humility will make your life feel a lot nicer. I’ll save my sympathies for the minimum wage service workers who keep London running and don’t stand a chance of ever owning property there.

My husband works in FS. Hasn't been given any money by parents, not directly anyway.

My family have some generational wealth (although I was certainly not given 1m ++!!)

DH has moved the lever far more on our circumstances with his job than I have with the initial leg up.

We are 40s, so it may have changed a bit more since.

@TedMullins

Is it ‘snobbery’ for a family with 2x good incomes to want to buy a 3/4 bed house in a decent area to raise their 2 kids in?

It’s completely normal for people to want a decent quality of life. It’s also completely normal for people to aspire to own a home big enough for their family.

People don’t want to feel warmed by feelings of ‘gratitude and humility’ being stuck in an overpriced two-bed flat with two kids, they want to have enough space to live comfortably.

Actually, it’s mostly luck to be born earlier before government policy deliberately allowed assets (houses) to grow faster than incomes.

It made the government popular among older voters but is paid by impoverishing their children’s generation. We also benefitted from that luck by first buying in 2004, though aim to downsize to fund deposits for our kids, so in reality we would have been better off without house price inflation .

Oh come on! Jellyfish is jumping the shark if they claim they can’t afford anything more than a shitty house in a shitty area when they are on £250k even if their husband earns a pittance.

On those kind of incomes they probably can afford a 3/4 bed house though - just not in their narrow definition of what constitutes a good area. People on MN asking for advice on where to buy in London have literally cited tower blocks and chicken shops as things they don’t want to be near to, so yes, it absolutely is snobbery if you refuse to accept what you can afford because you think it’s beneath you.

Plenty of people raise families in flats, again the fact that’s seen as some kind of failure screams snobbery to me too. If you’re earning 6 figures you’re literally in the top 1% of earners, so stamping your foot because you can’t afford to live far enough away from the plebs isn’t a great look. If you don’t think people should be grateful for their lot in life when they’re doing better than 99% of the population then you and I have very different values.

There are exceptions of course. I know a few guys in their 30's who've made enough money from commercial property to buy their own homes in London. No inheritances. But I agree not the norm.

Sorry but it’s completely accurate. I have two small children so am
also paying £3k/month in childcare. The next step up in the housing ladder would cost me an extra £5k in mortgage per month, which I don’t have.

You are projecting a lot here.

If you earn six figures you are in a wildly better position that most. It’s not top 1% (more like top 4% in the U.K. now) - but nonetheless a very, very good income.

It doesn’t however buy you much in the way of housing in London.

People wanting to live in a nice house, in a nice place, is pretty normal. It’s no wonder people find it annoying they can’t actually afford to do so despite being considered very high earners.

You’re completely missing my point, which is that their concept of a “nice lifestyle” is narrow and likely born of snobbery. They CAN afford a family home in London on salaries like that. Just not in the area that might be their first choice. Yes, it’s a sign of an overinflated market. Yes, it’s annoying. But also… tough? Nobody gets everything they want all the time. It certainly doesn’t mean that a nice lifestyle can’t be had in the areas of London they can afford. The attitude is the problem, the feeling hard done by, rather than just embracing and making the most of what they’ve got and can have.

99% of people will never catch up with people who have been given a 1-2mil inheritance, you are comparing yourself to unrealistic situations

What age are you? most couples in London struggle to buy a house before mid thirties, and I’m talking about highly trained professionals

Trying to meet a man with generational wealth is very difficult as they are in high demand and usually marry someone from a similar background or someone stunning looking

You need to be more realistic, are you surrounded by wealth that makes you think this way of thinking is normal?

@StormKevin

I think your definition of a well paid job in financial services in London is different to mine if you can’t afford a nice house. Unless by nice house you are restricting yourself to Knightsbridge etc

Maybe it’s very well paid for her age

"Some commentators call London's property market an “inheritocracy”, where up to two-thirds of purchases involve some kind of family help. The issue for most millennials is that inheritance happens very late in life: the average 20 to 35-year-old is not expected to receive their inheritance until they are 61." TIMES Feb 2023
Six figure salaries put you in top percentage of earners but as always in london there are people who earn more/have trust funds/GPs pay school fees etc so one doesn't feel that well off by comparison. All well & good saying don't compare, if the job/s are portable you can relocate outside SE but may not be able to command same high salaries.

Another reason we should end England's massive and corrosive concentration of wealth and people in London.

They are how@JumpinJellyfish described the only thing she could afford on a £240k pa salary with a DH working in the arts.

Why are you telling me this? That is literally why I asked @JumpinJellyfish how old she and her husband were.

This is all very ‘I live in a cardboard box in the middle of the road’.

Why should they be grateful to have a considerably worse standard of living than someone born 20 years earlier?

Yes people want to live in certain areas - near reasonable schools, a commuting distance that allows them to see their kids, somewhere safe etc. They want enough space to give their children their own bedrooms, privacy etc.

Seems a reasonable thing to be annoyed that this is increasingly unattainable even with a very good income.

People with these kinds of incomes (and far lower!) were comfortably buying property in nice areas of London to raise families not many years ago.

Would we agree that there's effectively two kinds of property ladders in the UK now.

One, a stepladder, consisting of flats in London/London commuter belt and houses in the rest of the UK. Houses appreciate slightly in value over a long period but are bought out of necessity rather than as a financial investment.

Two, a long ladder, with gold at the top, consisting of houses in London. Value appreciates massively and enough to give next gen a substantial inheritance. Can only be afforded by those with substantial inheritances themselves.

The problem is, who can afford houses when they're all £1m+ in the London area? Foreign investors?

We're going to end up with a two-tier society consisting of only the generational poor and nouveau poor (formerly middle class) versus old money and the super-rich foreign investors.

Yes and I stand by it!

I am in the top tiny % of earners, but the best I could afford at the time that I bought my house 5 years ago was a run down fixer upper in an area that was described then as “up and coming” and still hasn’t up and come anywhere. Maybe I timed things wrong. Since then I’ve had 2 kids and now have a humongous childcare bill which makes it impossible to move the next step up the ladder. I could afford to buy something similar-sized in an objectively nicer area now, but the £100k stamp duty doesn’t seem worth it.

I appreciate that in so many ways I am extremely lucky but the point of this thread is that a very high income isn’t enough to buy you a normal middle class life in London anymore, and it definitely used to be.

Why should they be grateful? Because the fact they can afford anything at all in one the most expensive cities in the world still makes them insanely privileged. They have choices that people earning the average UK wage or below will never have, like remote working allowing them to move outside of London for the house they want (high-paying senior roles are far more likely to have the flexibility to do this).

I’m not a housing market supporter or even a fan of capitalism - I don’t think housing should be for profit at all, and I’ll always vote for the party prioritising the interests of the poor and trying to equalise things (which many high earners won’t do because it would disadvantage them, they’ll vote the tories in and maintain the status quo then continue to whine about their money not going far enough).

London is undoubtedly too expensive and action absolutely needs to be taken, ban foreign investors buying up entire blocks and leaving them empty for a start. But if you can afford a property - any property - in London you’ve got security. My sympathies are with those who can’t ever hope to have that, not people who could have a perfectly nice lifestyle if they shed the prejudice and entitlement about “shitty” areas (which more often than not aren’t even shit)

I’m sorry but describing my local area as shitty is actually literally true - there is dog shit all over the pavements, including very often outside my house, plus loads of rubbish, fly tipping, prostitution. A teacher at the local secondary school got stabbed after school the other day on the high street. A gang of teenagers sell weed on the corner of my road.

On the plus side I can get into my office in 20mins which means that I can actually drop my kids to school and see them before bedtime despite working insane hours.

If you want to call me prejudiced and entitled for wanting something more than this for me and my kids, and thinking that I should be able to afford it then I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

I'm not sure I agree with this tbh. Partner and I bought in London in our 20s. Not a house, but a flat in zone 2 which suits us nicely. We did have parental help but only because we were offered some money after we'd put in an offer on a flat; we were going to buy the same property regardless. Normal jobs too, I was on £47k and my partner on £59k, neither in financial services.