AIBU to wonder why a pensioner struggling financially would not use housing equity?

[Powerbungalow]

I'm not being unsympathetic

Theres a lady on the news at the moment, saying how times are tough and shes only cooking one meal a week - imagine she's eating cold food.

One thing that stood out though "I own my own house and it costs in maintenance" Depending on where she is, would you not get a life time mortgage or sell and rent? She has a big asset, why not use it to have a better life? I know I would.

She may be holding on to it for inheritance, but she didn't say - if so, then can her family help. It just seems totally crazy

Me.

Well she is as she has lied about me and there’s no context as she’s name changed so I can’t refute her claims of me moaning about what I ‘get’ when I “get” sfa as I live on my private pension that I paid into for 43 years.

If she stopped name changing I could see the context and refute it.

Cowardly imo.

Just admit you’re in love with me.

I think you’re not very well if that counts?

Then maybe stop quoting me?

"I imagine the calls for older people to release the equity in their homes is - as is usual with threads like this one - driven by envy and spite."

Or alternatively driven by the fact that the people making those calls believe the country is maxed out in terms of taxation of working class people, services are poor, we need to spend more money on things like defence and there just isn't the cash around to allow some people to sit on millions of pounds worth of assets while getting further state support.

"Stop being so entitled and accept the old person living in a house worth much more than they paid for it WILL be you one day."

I am yet to be convinced that most people today will see the gains in property that occurred in the SE during say 1995-2005. An example include the changes in the London flat market which will feed into housing at some point. My place has barely risen in inflation over the past decade.

Unless you see scope for people getting considerably richer with more money to spend on housing (how is that going to happen?) then it is unlikely that house prices will rise significantly, unless we are going to allow a whole load of money to pile into the country from outside to chase up prices ?

Well no as you blatantly lied about me.

House price growth isn't measured in just 10 years but over the course of, say, 40 years, it is pretty much unheard of for house prices not to rise substantially.
If you want to cherry pick a decade, I'll give you 1988-98, when interest rates rose steeply and house prices slumped into negative equity in some cases.
Prices recovered then and they will in the future.

If she is choosing between heating, eating or leaving money to her family then that's completely stupid

Can you post three examples of people doing this?

Oh my god what are you talking about? This is an anonymous, online forum. Get a grip. Stop quoting nonsense at me and stop stalking me across Mumsnet, it’s pathetic.

But if you look over the last 40 years you will see a very different pattern. The 80s was responsible for huge growth for example particularly in London.

We aren’t going to see that huge growth again because of a number of different factors eg demographics, lending criteria, wage stagnation, affordability etc

lol, I don’t even know what to say to this nonsense and I’m not even young.

But you don't know that any more than I do.
Posters on here are very keen on hyperbole to prove their point - no house growth, no pensions, working until you drop - when the fact is no one knows how things will pan out.
If someone had told me when I was 30 I would be living in a house worth £350,000 I would probably have reacted the same.

Why is it nonsense? I'm interested.

Surely the single parent has a harder time than the student? Because of all the other stuff they need to deal with

Stats I have provided earlier on in this thread from the DWP shows that of the 1937-1946 cohort of people in the UK, only 36% of them were in FT work for more than 75% of the time. So who are all these people working from dusk til dawn from the age of 15-65?

Quite

Across mumsnet? One thread. Is lying a habit?

So they can starve and freeze in their beautiful house that is run down because they can't afford to maintain it

Cool

Did you not search for me to see if I was a new poster or not? And from that you have concocted this wild narrative that I am somehow on a mission to destroy you. Again, get a grip. I don’t care about you. I am contributing to a discussion about pension policy.

My house was bought for x in 2005. To keep place with inflation it should be worth about 1.8x now.

It's actually worth about 1.5x. So it hasn't even kept up with inflation over the 20 year time period. What it will do over the next 20 years or so I don't know, but I doubt it will "rise substantially".

There are flats around my area that are struggling to keep up with their 2005 purchase price.

It's only certain types of houses and certain parts of the country where prices have risen by large amounts.

None of the posters who are up in arms have said anything about those statistics yet. But I guess the DWP is also out to get the poor pensioners. I knew the figure was lower than people would think but even I was surprised by how low it actually is! Only 36%!

It's not a debt in the way a family would need to pay back, they wouldn't be inheriting the house

You have confused me, we don’t know what?

The changing demographics? We know we have an ageing population, there are more over 60s than over 20s now.

We know that lending criteria has changed, you can’t get 95% interest only mortgages, you can’t self certify without any proof.

We know that wages have stagnated and economic growth has eluded us for nearly 20 years.

Affordability is a factor because interest rates of 5/6% with today’s actual prices have the same squeeze on incomes like the higher interest rates of the past.

Of course a house you buy today should be worth more in 10 years, due to inflation but decades ago we had huge above inflationary gains and today many properties aren’t even keeping pace with inflation.

What do you think is going to drive huge property price growth like we saw in the 80s and 90s?

But you see I don’t think that’s relevant. Both individuals are working the same number of hours and contributing the same NI and taxes. Why should their individual circumstances matter? Because if we are saying that they do, then we start making moral judgements about who “deserves” more or who has worked “harder”, which is where the current cohort of pensioners fall down.