To think it’s very hard to live in the uk without inheritance or family money?

[Lifesucksthenyoudie]

Just that really. Social mobility seems almost impossible at the moment without a head start. I earn a decent salary (Dh doesn’t but that’s another post) but my standard of living is so much worse than my parents and my mother didn’t work until we were in secondary school and even then part time for peanuts. Nursery fees and mortgage alone wipe us out. I haven’t inherited any money (large family, no chance) and feel a bit stuck. Not after sympathy just interested to see if others feel a bit trapped. Why is our society geared up this way?

You are kidding, right? You seem to forget that that the 100% mortgage came with a 10% interest rate? I bought a house in 1978 that cost £12,000, with a 100% mortgage. I was a teacher. The interest rate meant I was paying £100 per month from a salary of £163 per month. How is that better than now? All figures are estimates (except for the actual salary - I still have my first pay check stub!!)

This thread is a typical race to the bottom “four yorkshireman” sketch that attributes to personal qualities (luck, hard work, modest desires) what are better understood by larger socioeconomic trends.

Is healthcare free?
Is education free and meaningfully tied to opportunity?
How do housing costs relate to social demand? Is there enough, adequate, housing to current standards?
Are the taxes necessary to support the general welfare evenly collected and distributed?

Even something like a privately owned asset such as a house or flat can’t be understood without reference lots of public goods (policing, safety, trash collection, housing for the indigent, health care, education, public transport). The rich can afford all those intangible services privately but the middle class has to be able to access them publically (that is they have to be available at a subsidized public way) for even major assets to be acquired, enjoyed , and passed on to the next generation.

I bought a flat in 1990 when the interest rates were higher than 10%. My flat was £29,000, i earned £500 a month. I was skint but it was doable.

Now that flat is worth £140,000 and someone in a low paid job like i was couldn't buy it without 14k cash deposit and a decent wage.

You bought your house as a teacher, tell me if a teacher could buy your house now????

It's a bit of both, surely.

Yes, an inheritance and/ or family money would have helped. I had neither. I don't even have family bothering to look after the kids or help out in any other way.

But I had low university fees (when it was still around 1.5k/ year) and child tax credits when they were still a thing, before my job started paying a decent wage.

On the other hand, without hard work and scrimping I wouldn't have been able to do or have anything. I lived in some appalling shitholes. Worked my ass off on two hours sleep a night for 3 years. Learned to cook everything from scratch, some months learned to cook from the few ingredients left in the cupboards if I'd run out of fresh food. Darned, mended, bought in charity shops.

I am now classed as a high earner (just, but still). I am a single parent on a mortgage and manage to raise two kids by myself. My car may be 17 years old, but it still just about limps from place to place.

Life is what you make of it, and in some ways people these days do still have an advantage. Just in a different way to the times I grew up and lived my young adult life in.

Neither me nor DH have had any inheritance but we've done ok.

Both son's ( one 24 and the other 27) are buying their own house and have good jobs and have a really nice lifestyle. Apart from buying a few white goods for them both we haven't given them a penny towards deposits. Neither have their partner's parents.

I hate reading all about how people my age, in their 50s, are mortgage free as they have scrimped and saved and been sensible with money. Whilst this is all very admirable, they forget to mention how they got a 100%mortgage and bought a house for 50k You're kidding right!! No 50k houses and 100% mortgages for us. We only had a chance to pay lumps of the mortgage when the children left home a few years ago.

You say this even though the government would pick you up if you went homeless. Try to go to some Eastern European country

And in Eastern Europe there is not big numerical inheritance, the salaries are not so high, yet people have two up, two down or flats, drive cars, all drove under communism also, the food is abundant and tasty, the clothes are beautiful, locally produced and people still live until ripe old age, without social care and hundreds of thousands inheritance. Your point of view is skewed for whatever reason.

So many threads like this. The fact is that the UK is moving away from a society where your income from work determines your outcomes in life and towards one where inheritance does.

If this sounds mad, well, it's exactly how society worked for most of modern history.

Think of an Austen or Dickens novel. The reason everyone was so obsessed with inheritance - great expectations and all that - is that you couldn't, except in very very rare circumstances, work your way from a lower lifestyle to a higher one. No job could realistically bridge the gap between the haves and the have nots.

The factor driving this is that house prices have become totally unmoored from earnings. This means that those who inherit property/money from the sale of property, get MASSIVE multiples of the average annual salary. The average house is now worth about 9 times average earnings. The last time that was the case was in 1876... see above!

If someone inherits a house they now inherit 9 x what they would earn in a year - on average. If you factor salaries after tax into that, it's actually a much higher number. You can't bridge that gap with hard work unless you are a very, very high earner. A low earner who inherits property will be much better off in financial terms than a high earner who doesn't.

We are at the beginning of this trajectory. In a generation or two's time the gap that is opening now will be much, much wider.

I've fucked myself over as I don't have a partner to share finances with, I come from a very low-income background (so no inheritances/help with deposit) and I'm in my mid-thirties and not on the housing ladder yet. After studying hard to get to a top uni and a £50k+ salary I'm worse off than if I shacked up with my first boyfriend, bought a flat in 2014 and gave up my career to be a SAHM.

Half the time I feel like a Georgian spinster, only without the help of family.

Nursery fees aren't forever. Most people cope without inheritances.

Where do you live OP? I think for young people trying to get on the housing ladder or buy their first family home who live in London or the South East and not on v well paid professional jobs their standard of living will have dropped in comparison to previous generations with the similar jobs at their age unless they have inheritance or parental help.

House prices in these areas may have always been higher but since the 2008 financial crash they have risen astronomically. So young families I presume either have to have more of their monthly income go on a mortgage or have a smaller home. Renting as we know in this country is not as secure as some other western countries.

I'm the same age as you and also mortgage free but it was WAY easier for our generation to do this than the one below us, surely?

We bought our 4 bed detached home (now extended to a 5 bed) for £94K in our mid twenties with a £7K deposit. I was earning around £16K I think and DH £24K, so mortgage wasn't that much more than double our joint income. No family help, didn't need it.

We roughly worked out what we would need to give our DC to allow them to do this at the same age on similar incomes and it is a lot.

Sorry but that's ridiculous. It all depends where you live. Ds1 in Manchester already owns a family sized house at 35.

Well explained and so v true. It is sad to see the growing inequality due to the v inflated housing market in some parts of the U.K. Some will have done v well out of it currently but for young people and further generations it’s set up widening inequality.

When did he buy? Did he partner up with someone to do so?

Given the house prices now in Manchester, I doubt that's possible for a single person on an average salary.

If that were the case then all immigrants would be struggling. But they're not. Many are doing really well.

Last year. His partner is a freelancer and earns peanuts. He gets a good salary and they have no kids. But the comment was that no-one can possibly buy more than a starter home and that's just provably nonsense.
If he lived in, say Nottingham, he could get the same house for a lot less.

I think it’s about the choices that you make in life. I come from a developing country and I moved to the uk for a better life.
I worked my ass off doing 4 jobs when I arrived in the uk. This helped me pay for uni part time.
I gradually climbed the career ladder and now on a six figure salary. I also met my husband who is also from humble beginnings and we studied and focused on careers that pays well to change our lives.
Our parents are both in much more financially precarious situations as us. They made different decisions and focused on family and did low skilled/manual work and barely have a decent pension.
I don’t buy into the whole uk is a tough place to be. For many foreigners who work their ass off choosing a profession that helps them improve their lives the uk has been a game changer for me and I’ll say it to everyone that wants to listen that you can achieve social mobility and a good standard of living in the uk but you need to make the right choices and work hard at it.

Helpful!

I think it depends on your family history as much as anything else. I grew up with a single mum who lived paycheck to paycheck. When I started working at 16 I started contributing, about 3/4 my salary to make ends meet as things got more expensive. The rest I saved. Went to uni and needed an overdraft to survive (student loan and grant barely covered my rent so used overdraft for food, books, plus any niceties). Moved back home for my PGCE and first job, so my student loan and then wages paid rent at home (again 3/4ish of my wages and the rest paid for my overdraft). Without meeting my boyfriend (who already had a house, and a job paying double my salary) we wouldn’t have been able to buy a joint house. I’m not on maternity leave, and as an individual I still don’t have any “savings”. As a couple we’ll struggle to move again to get a bigger house, which we’ll need eventually, or the money to extend properly to give us space. My job doesn’t have much more in the way of job progression (I work in a school doing pastoral and there’s only one role above me paying 3/4K more a year).

I wonder what jobs you do, what your salary is compared to your expenditures. We don’t pay for anything overly fancy (basic house bills, car insurance, cheap phone contracts, Netflix, no expensive hobbies or beauty regimes here either).

I would say we lived relatively comfortably, a bit tight if we wanted a holiday. People in the thread saying they have 200K salaries and live comfortably are in a different world. I know there are different meanings to different people and that’s fine. But not everyone can just “get a higher income and get a bigger house”

This sounds like a dream scenario. Any tips you can share? What career are you in if you don’t mind sharing?

I'm in my mid 30's and when I was growing up people absolutely expected/had nice cars, foreign holidays, mortgaged homes and the latest gadgets. The gadgets looked different but they were still expensive.

Depends on your age of course but my parents generation expected and had such things, many of them on only one income.

Quite. I suspect many of the responses here are from people in their 50's or older who are probably the last generation where the majority would have been able to afford housing with two 'average' salaries and no family money to back them up.

The facts and figures simply do not lie. The percentage of people owning property is declining quickly in every age bracket under 70, compared to 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

It is inevitable and indisputable that on our current path it will soon come to a point where it is simply impossible to own a house without some kind of family help.

I hear you OP. Since the house prices have gone up massively under new labour both parents now need to be in work to afford a house, it benefitted home owners at the time but leaves today's generation burnt out, added to that some of the highest nursery fees in Europe.

I think the same. We live in London, both working full time on decent wages, mortgage and childcare are killing us. There is nothing left at the end of the month and no savings