To feel resentment that my parents are so well off

[Lissm]

I know I will get flamed for this...
My parents are in their early 70s. My father worked in a factory in a low skilled job and was made redundant when he was 56, and retired on a full pension. My mother worked on and off as a cashier and stopped working at 57.

They have a house which must be worth close to £800k, purchased for £40k, and £200k+ in savings and investments. They are able to save at least £1k each month.

We have worked just as hard as they have but we will never have their sort of financial security. We have 6 months of savings and that's it.

I feel so angry that this has happened - not at them but at the situation.

I thought every subsequent generation would at least enjoy the same standard of living. I dread to think what is going to happen to my children.

Yup. 40 years ago it was bloody expensive to go to Spain, France, Italy or Greece, and Cornwall was cheap if you stayed in a low cost b&b if you could afford the holiday in the first place. Most people paying a mortgage then couldn't afford to pay a b&b anyway.

This is how much our economies and expectations have changed.

I think you’re extrapolating there quite a lot and taking the OP’s post very personally.

Whilst I can see why younger generations might be pissed off that older people had an easier time of it in terms of buying houses, as a Gen Xer I remember the 70's and 80's and although my parents & grandparents bought houses on relatively low wages they also went without holidays abroad, a second car, phone contracts, sky tv etc.

I don't recall it being a time of 'luxury' at all and I don't resent them for still owning their houses. I'm glad they're financially stable in their elder years.

Not sure why people assume all factory work is low paid.

The manufacturing/chemical industry etc., pay a lot to their workers and back in the day had really decent pension schemes.

I don’t know how they have accumulated so much from working in those jobs. Did they inherit some money?. I have clearly gone wrong somewhere. Apart from 4 years when my children were small I have always worked for the NHS. My house might be worth £300,000 my savings are about £25,000 and my income is fine day to day but doesn’t allow for much savings. Perhaps it depends on the value of property in your area? I have never been extravagant. I know that my generation were fortunate compared to this generation but I don’t know how your parents have done it.

I saw an interesting documentary on the cost of living and families struggling to afford a deposit on a house from the BBC archive. ‘1969: How do you live on the average wage.’ It’s also on YouTube. Interestingly, it was people with jobs like ambulance driver, farmer, sales associate. They all commented that their friends who worked as manual workers in factories had a higher wage and better standard of living. In all the families they lived off of a single wage as the wives looked after the young kids.

I wouldn’t say i’m resentful but I do feel a bit frustrated that my mum gave up working at 40 due to health stopped her working a factory job anymore and my dad was 47 (had a genuine life limiting disease and has passed now) and has had a very easy life financially. Bought their house for 70k 35yrs ago, mortgage long paid off. So my mum’s been ‘retired’ 32yrs now. She has probably 70-80k in the bank. The other week when talking about my friend’s mums inheritance tax issue following her death she commented asking how she had managed to save x amount given she didn’t work after a bereavement when she was 48. I reminded her that she hadn’t worked either for years and had saved a similar amount via benefits and pension. Oh yes I suppose she said.

I am 48, not even started a mortgage yet as i’m a single parent and been stuck in SE until kids all completed their education. So heading north and taking a 15k mortgage next year which means i’ll be working until retirement. I earn close to 70k which up north is a decent amount, but here in the SE as a single household income it’s really not amazing. Spending a fortune on rent. I’m glad my mum isn’t struggling but I don’t think she appreciates how much easier it was for her generation. She will sometimes say but we had to pay 15% mortgage interest rate, and I remind her yes that was on 30k loan. I will be borrowing 250k ish.

It’s not bizarre at all. Most boomers are agape at current joint incomes in excess of £5,000 a month. Just for comparison, we bought our house in 1980 for £16,000. Our joint take home pay for two full time jobs plus my DH’s regular overtime, was a little under £400 a month and £200 of that was the mortgage payment, thanks to an interest rate jump from 11% to over 15%. Everything is relative to its’ time.

It’s astonishing to have ended up with an £800k house, having worked min wage style jobs for only 35 hrs per week. My DH works probably double that most weeks in a high stress job and our house is worth less than that. I also worked in a similar high stress job until autistic dc needed me.

That said, if your parents have an 800k house and 200k in savings, they are now into inheritance tax territory and probably should be gifting you/siblings money every month to avoid it. There’s no point in them ploughing 1000 per month into savings when they are over the IHT threshold.

The next generation seem to fixate on housing costs.

And why would they do that?! 🙄

My parents house increased 10 fold in value within 40 years. I’ve been in mine 17 years and it’s gone up around 12 - 15%. There’s no way it’s going to end up in any way approaching the value of my parents house!

It’s not bizarre at all. Most boomers are agape of current joint incomes in excess of £5,000 a month. Just for comparison, we bought our house in 1980 for £16,000. Our joint take home pay was a little under £400 a month and £200 of that was the mortgage payment, thanks to an interest rate jump from 11% to over 15%. Everything is relative to its’ time.

Inflation is a thing...

My parents, as children/young adults, didn’t go abroad. Ever. If they had a holiday, it was a week at a relative’s three towns away.

The only people who went abroad out of my schoolmates were the ones whose dads had building companies or hotels ie a solid income back then. This would be the early to mid 80s. Later, a few more people I knew went in the late 80s and most funded themselves by working after school.

It’s kind of a myth that the working classes were off to the Costa Brava every summer. Most people didn’t do this!

£40,000 back then was a lot of money. My parents house cost far less than that. They must have invested a lot of money into the house.
As for retiring on a full pension at 57, was that a private pension? If so, your father chose to save part of his wages to pay into that.
Working a manual job in a factory must have been hard work too.
Yes they are fortunate. But the issue we have today is the cost of buying or renting a house. It’s far too expensive. All started when the conservatives passed a law stopping local authorities from building more houses. The government allowed people to buy council houses cheaply, yet prevented them from replenishing the stock.
We also have an aged population which take up housing. Don’t mean for that to sound awful, just stating facts.

A lot of older people simply think they will run out of money if they are not careful and will be out on the streets. They are hyper aware of inflation when it comes to buying food for themselves and remember vividly when a particular item cost 20p and now it costs £1. So they just don't want to spend any. But they also don't think about inflation when it comes to giving small amounts of cash to relatives for birthdays etc. I remember when I used to be thrilled with a fiver in a birthday card from my nan in, say, 1985. She carried that on for years and years, bless her, so that by the time I was 25, it just about bought a drink each when DH and I went to the pub. They just can't fathom the amount of money it takes to buy a flat or house these days, it wouldn't compute for them.

Others are so focussed on saving everything to pass onto their children when they die that they overlook the fact that their children need the money NOW while they have young children and are living in a poky flat pay cheque to pay cheque.

Most older people are between the two. They would like to help their children out now but are worried about running out themselves if they need care. I do think most would be shocked if you sat them down and showed them the figures - what 2 average FT salaries can buy.

Is it only old people’s houses that have gone up in value over the past 20 years, or was your parent’s house worth it’s current value 20 years ago, and went up 10 fold in the first twenty years that they owned it?

I understand how you feel, OP, though you have to remember your parents will never rely on you financially and will in all likelihood leave you a lot of money.

I'm in the older generation and I think people now really aren't taking on board how much money is spent nowadays compared to then. Virtually nobody would have been in a taxi, been abroad, bought clothes more than once in a while, bought cosmetics that weren't Rimmel or similar. There were no cocktails, very few people drank spirits or wine, most women had an alcoholic drink only at Christmas. People went to work on public transport, came home, made dinner from scratch and if they were lucky watched TV. That was it. I'm working from home and there have been a dozen Amazon deliveries today in my road of 20 houses. Last night I went out for a walk and saw three Deliveroo guys in my street.

I know it's really unfair re. wages and houses and so on, but you do have to factor in the waste involved nowadays.

Having said that I do think your parents could help you out.

Yes well... that's inflation, isn't it?

The problem is that the cost of property has increased in value (adjusted for inflation) far greater than wages have increased in value (adjusted for inflation).

A dual income of £4,800 in 1980 was a low income - the average salary for two people was £5,000 at the time. So equivalent to 1x average wage at the time.

£5,000 a month of take home pay in 2025 in 2x £40,000 incomes - so two above average incomes.

Affording the house you bought in 1980 on the equivalent of 1x the average wage is probably not achievable today to the couple on 2 x the average wage. That's the big difference.

I must have missed the bit where she blamed her parents?

Yes - all this frothing over something the OP didn’t actually say.

It’s impossible to have some of these discussions when people read into the OP something that isn’t there and can’t look at things dispassionately.

Threads like this make me glad I wasn’t able to have children.

Would you rather your dps had nothing and lived hand to mouth, as many pensioners do?

It’s impossible to have some of these discussions when people read into the OP something that isn’t there and can’t look at things dispassionately.

yep, ridiculous

I think this is more likely. I’m a boomer. We bought our house in 1980 for £16,000. Sold in 2004 for £150,000. We’re in a similar type of property to the one we sold, and the value has increased around 15% in that time. In general the value of your own property ties you to what you can afford to buy unless you go into debt.

I'm in the older generation and I think people now really aren't taking on board how much money is spent nowadays compared to then. Virtually nobody would have been in a taxi, been abroad, bought clothes more than once in a while, bought cosmetics that weren't Rimmel or similar. There were no cocktails, very few people drank spirits or wine, most women had an alcoholic drink only at Christmas.

When was this? How were there so many pubs & campaigns about drink driving if no one drank? 😆