To be jealous of older generations who were able to buy houses because their bosses exaggerated their salaries?

[HonestTealPoster]

Yesterday I was at the spa and got talking to a man who was older than me (I’m 33 and I’d put him in his early 50s at most).

He told me that when he was in his 20s, he and his friend were able to buy properties in the area of South London where I grew up.

Despite not earning particularly much at the time, his boss wrote a letter stating that he earned £90,000 a year! He openly admitted that he wasn’t earning anywhere near that amount but the letter helped him secure a mortgage. He also received £5,000 from his grandmother towards the purchase.

I’d heard stories about people being able to do things like this years ago but I’d never actually met someone who’d benefited from it!

I was genuinely gobsmacked. Imagine being able to get on the property ladder like that.

AIBU to feel rather envious of how much easier some people had it when it came to buying their first home?

YANBU. You can be jealous but it’s not going to help you. If you want to live like people in their 50s did 30 years ago, get rid of your mobile phone and internet, get a landline, stop eating out and buying take away coffees, ditch the avocado toast, netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime, your car, and your foreign holidays. You’ll probably save up quicker.

That wasn't typical and was an idiotic thing for both employer and employee to do.
Property was cheaper then, especially in the south, when compared to salaries, so it was much easier to afford. In parts of the North even now a small house is affordable for young people with ordinary jobs.

This is such a patronising response. Many people in their 20s and 30s already live frugally, but even if not, buying fewer takeaway coffees and cafe lunches would not be sufficient to bridge the enormous gap between house prices of thirty years ago and today.

Oh give over

Things have changed and the massive gap between salaries and house prices can't be solved by saving the price of a Netflix subscription and a few lattes.

This has got to be a wind up. Noone is that out of touch surely???

i am early 50’s. Most people I knew when I was early 20’s had cars, it was 1996 not 1950!

Some employers could be dishonest, just like some are now. No one with regular employment, say teacher, nurse, council worker had their employer lie about their wage.

Everyone in every generation has some things better and some worse than the last. My nanna said she is jealous that my generation were allowed an education when she had to leave school at 14 and the highest job she could hope for gave her a little pin money.

One person’s unlikely anecdote about illegality isn’t something to be jealous of. Mortgage companies need bank statements and pay slips. They don’t accept informal letters.

It was idiotic behaviour by Lenders and caused the financial crash in 2008 due to Sub prime mortgages.

Perhaps a few people were winners but most people didn't think it was sensible to exaggerate your salary, if you intended on paying it back.

Wrong place to put the blame! Massively widening inequality of wealth and income makes anything else pretty irrelevant. Name changed to admit my boss did similar for me last year and I wouldn’t have a mortgage otherwise, although we did find a way to do it that made it legal, it was substantially the same situation. So it does still happen, but people aren’t likely to talk about it if it’s recent!

OP did say she was at a spa 😂
Unless it was a freebie maybe cut down on the spa visits if you want to buy a property OP.

If this is for real, you’re just revealing your lack of critical thinking skills and how brainwashed you are.

indeed! Frankly that sounds like bollocks to me OP

when I got a mortgage I had to supply copies of payslips and bank statements going back a few years

the idea that one letter from someone's boss was sufficient is absolute nonsense

he was just exaggerating because he wanted to impress like some twatty people do

if of course any of this actually happened and isn't yet another intergenerational conflict rage bait thread

Firstly, I wouldn't take some shite some guy at the spa says too seriously. There is likely to be a fair level of exaggeration there. Secondly, and assuming that it is actually a true story, surely that just put him in a position of buying a house that he couldn't actually afford on his salary?

Instead spend the money on 20 cigarettes a day, 3 nights at the pub a week and building a conservatory, like everyone did 30 years ago.

Lol. 30 years ago was 1996, almost 1997.

I assure you takeaways, foreign holidays, and indeed cars were plentiful in the 90s.

We also shock horror had basic mobile phones and dial up internet.

“AIBU to feel rather envious of how much easier some people had it when it came to buying their first home?”

Well, some people have it easier both then and now - and many have struggled.

Regarding the comments by @AMillionTomorrows, I know people who spend money like it’s water (hundreds of pounds a month on takeaways, beauty appointments, drinking) then complain they can’t get in the property ladder.

I'm in my 50s and wasn't able to get a mortgage by getting my employer to exaggerate my salary. They wrote to the HR department in the same way they do now. I also didn't inherit any money or get any help towards it.

This isn't why this generation can't afford flats. You can see the difference easily from my life:

My flat cost £98k and there were two of us earning £24k each (we were trainee solicitors in City Law firms). This was in the mid-90s. The same flat now would probably cost around £550k. So you'd need to be earning over £125k each to match what we earned - and find a large deposit (assuming you can get a mortgage of 2x joint income).

But trainee solicitors in my firm the same stage don't earn that, they earn £56k - so they couldn't afford to buy my flat without a large amount of help. This is why properties are unaffordable to Gen Z.

I had an employer who made my wage look a few grand smaller so that I would qualify for a grant for my MA. In reality, it was the accounts lady who did this, with permission. She was a proper salt-of-the-earth, hardened white wine spritzer drinker. I loved her. It changed my life. Possibly not relevant, but things were a bit more devil-may-care then.

Of course, I can’t independently verify his account but I’m not sure why I should automatically assume he was lying either. And obtaining a mortgage based on an inflated salary doesn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t afford the repayments. It means he may not have qualified for the mortgage under the lender’s actual affordability criteria, which isn’t quite the same thing. Either way, I found it interesting to hear a firsthand account of something I’d previously only heard about anecdotally.

Well quite. I am 66 and first bought in 1981.

Things were different and I had no CH for the first year but I had a car, nice clothes and make-up, a Sony Walkman, often had tea or coffee if out shopping, and a v nice social life. Also, as many of us did then, 10 cigarettes a day.

Mobiles, coffee culture, avo on toast, uber, much in the way of takeaways, didn't exist. Life was just different, more expensive in some ways, cheaper in others.

On a smaller scale I needed a mortgage of 23k to buy the flat I wanted, I had a £9k deposit. My earnings afforded me a mortgage of £20k. I explained to the bank manager that I would have a lodger and the extra wouldn't be a problem. He said "if you write your income is £9,200, I'm not going to question it."

not sure he was telling the truth BTW. Even in 1979 when we bought our first house, they demanded several months pay slips. As we also had our savings with the building society they refused to give us what we asked to borrow as they wanted us to put all of our savings into the deposit. There was a mortgage famine at the time and there was a waiting list to get one. As it happened the house we wanted was taken off the market, but we were able to transfer the offer to another property.
I’m not moaning, my generation has been very very fortunate.

You could get a 100% plus mortgage back then. My husband got one about 130% which bought a flat, paid off his student debts, furnished the flat and paid for us to have a holiday. This was in Scotland with Northern Rock. Funnily enough, the company went bust!

Yes this was common my boss did it for me but i lnew it would be ok because the mortgage payment was still less than the rent i’d been paying.

This was not my experience at all. We bought our first house in 1996 or 1997 and the building society wanted all the paperwork still asked for today. Proper payslips (albeit paper not digital), however many months of bank statements showing salaries going in. Credit checks. I remember it distinctly because I was on a 2-year rolling temporary contract at the time and there was some debate over whether they would count my salary because after two years I might be out of work.