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?

@MirrorClocks

There were NO benefits for families apart from child benefit, Not really true.

Well there was MIRAS income tax relief on your mortgage interest, the "married man's" extra, tax allowance. Also at various times, there was family income supplement (from 1971), income support, etc.

wow first reply and you already got avocado toast AND netflix in there, generational stereotypes bingo is off to a great start 🙄

Two things can be true; yes most people could probably cut some luxuries and save them instead, but equally people in the 50s,70s,90s, weren't all bastions of financial prudence and restraint, they still spent money on other stuff, the only reason they didn't buy iphones and netflix was because those things DIDN'T EXIST!

Council housing was much more readily available back then. You talk about women not being able to flee from domestic abusers, I would say it’s no better now such is the lack of social housing. It might be acknowledged in a way it wasn’t back then, but acknowledging it and having a supply of houses for these women are two different entities unfortunately.

Whilst you’re right in that there wasn’t benefits other than family allowance, you could work in a NMW job and still buy a hosue and that would be impossible now. And the fact there wasn’t the need for deposits back then.

I bought my first 3 bed home in 1987 for £17k on a 100% mortgage. I showed my rent book as proof that I could afford repayments. Bank managers had more personal flexibility in those days to approve mortgages. No doubt mortgage fraud was a thing but I doubt your acquaintance's anecdote was typical even in those days.

Interesting though that I am early fifties and I bought my first home in 2006, so some of us are part of that graph...not the ones at the minimum end necessarily.

I remember the first time buyer age increased to mid thirties when we bought and we were bang on that age group.

You’re not being unreasonable to be envious but do you vote and make other choices accordingly?
Are you sure they are telling you the truth? The bank can instantly verify your income and could do so just as easily 20/30 years ago as now. It would have been pretty clear to them that the guy was really on 15k or 20k or whatever it was. He had a boss he was on PAYE it’s taxed at source and paid into your bank account! I think getting a mortgage over 100% was only for a pretty brief time.
Now what else has happened since then is interesting, when I bought my house in late 90’s what I could borrow was assessed using debt to income ratios, so even though I could potentially have afforded larger repayments the bank wouldn’t lend me more because you were allowed 3x 1 income plus 1 x the other (I was single so I was stuck at 3 times 1 income) what really helped was that you couldn’t count rental income as income for the purposes of borrowing money. Banks were just not interested in ‘small landlords’ 1 house was all you got.
So many actions since then have been designed to inflate the market, the press tell us we are wealthy and have made it in life because house prices are high. The reality is it is a disaster for a functioning society. Think about it, bring in affordability calculations and prices go up, bring in subsidised deposits and prices go up, low deposits, no deposits and prices go up. Allow MEWing prices go up. Bring down interest rates and prices go up. The banks love it. I tell my kids you will pay the bank roughly what you borrow in profit when you buy a house so eg spend 500k and you will pay the bank 500k back that you borrowed plus another 500k in charges and interest and so on. (Obviously this depends on your term but just go with the figures for now) Borrow 1 million and the bank gets 1 million so they absolutely love it when everyone moans and complains and demands ‘help’ from the government. Every little bit of ‘help’ puts up prices. You want houses to be more affordable campaign for restricted lending, and debt to income ratios (make that income strictly verifiable and disallow rental income) and prices will come crashing down!

The exception to that in my book is stamp duty, it’s evil and needs to go.

So vote accordingly!

@MirrorClocks i only have my parents as a true comparator. My mother could be a stay at home mum, they brought a 4 bed detached house and had 5 kids.

If anyone now days wanted to buy a 4 bed detached house and have only one person working you would need to be earning £100k plus easily. While my dad earnt £25-30k

It’s not anyone’s fault personally but having some compassion and just saying “it sucks that must be hard” is all that needs to be said. Rather than you aren’t trying hard enough by not paying for Netflix at £7 a month because that £84 a year is really going to bridge that thousands of pounds

My boss was the same - he was sent a form to confirm my salary and asked me what number I wanted him to put down!

Maybe some lenders were stricter than others but I remember things being very lax in the late 80s. I think lenders got burnt when there was a rise in repossessions so they tightened up their rules re needing to see evidence.

I agree that expanding access to borrowing doesn’t necessarily make housing more affordable overall, especially if increased borrowing power simply feeds through into higher prices.

On the income verification point though, I think the historical picture is rather more complicated. Self-certification and fast-track mortgages did exist, and there were periods when lenders weren’t routinely verifying borrowers’ declared incomes. That doesn’t establish whether the man I spoke to was telling the truth, of course, but it does mean his account isn’t inherently implausible simply because he was employed through PAYE.

I also think there’s an important difference between making it easier for individuals to obtain mortgages and making housing genuinely more affordable across the population. Your comment raises some interesting questions about that.

As for voting, I certainly agree that housing policy deserves serious consideration, although I’d be reluctant to reduce such a complex issue to any single lending policy.

YABU for thinking this was common for ' older generations ' YANBU for thinking its harder now. I bought my first home in the 1990s as the council I worked for paid a removal allowance for anyone moving to their area to work for them so I got conveyancing fees reimbursed

Oh yeah self cert, fast track, borrowing over 100%, govt subsidies all existed. I do think that the time period each existed was relatively short in the grand scheme of things but they were all there. When I bought my house the lender broke their own rules and lent me more than they should on a strictly 3x income basis. BUT the sum involved is tiny now maybe 3k? I can’t remember the exact details! It was a great relief I had tried to buy before stamp duty came in the house had a terrible survey so I had to pull out and then I had to save for months and months and months because of stamp duty and prices starting to take off!

I’m shocked at the vote towards YABU… anyone buying today would be jealous of how much easier it was to get on the property ladder 30 years ago, regardless of whether this guy’s story about a letter from his boss is true or not. It simply was easier.

Salaries have stagnated, inflation, rent and property prices have skyrocketed.

It was easier 20 years ago too.

When I was in my 20's, I earned just over £3,000 pa (full time) and my boss threatened to sack me because I was pregnant.
Still jealous?

I'm 45 and I was fortunate to get on the property ladder with a 15% share of a new build shared ownership flat, on quite a modest salary. There wasn't much of a deposit from what I remember, and the interest rates were ridiculous - something like 1.5%

Totally different times!

Edited to add this was 20 odd years ago.

When I first brought, I arranged with work to let me take a day of anual leave each week for the 3 months the mortgage broker looked at bank statements for, and work that same day as overtime (so my pay appear 1/5 more). No holidays that year, but it was enough to qualify to borrow what I needed.

But are younger people doing this because there is absolutely no chance of getting on the ladder? If it was within reach, there would be a point in saving

If that's their logic then it's a good thing they don't buy, they lack a basic understanding of economics and are likely to be incapable of managing a mortgage and the finances of home ownership.

Being threatened with dismissal because of a pregnancy is appalling and I certainly wouldn’t envy that aspect of your experience. But I’m not sure why recognising that some people benefited from particular advantages in previous decades is being interpreted as envy of absolutely everything about those decades.

Different people could experience very different circumstances, even within the same generation. The existence of discrimination and hardship doesn’t negate the advantages others may have enjoyed.

My original post was about one particular aspect of accessing homeownership, not a suggestion that life was universally easier or better for everyone in the past.

Maybe people having the mindset that they need to spend £24K on a car these days is part of the problem. You can get a 'decent' car for a lot less than that.

There are pros and cons to living then and now. I wouldn't think what he told you was common practice though OP. I have never heard of that happening (I am 54). My employer would never have lied and any mortgage I have applied for has wanted, bank statements, pay slips and credit checks. I was 22 when I bought my first house and interest rates were at 10% soon after. Lots of people lost their homes or were in negative equity.

Wrong information. I have been corrected.

In the late 70’s dh and I wanted to buy our first home, a tiny 3 bed semi.
It was £8500. We earned £180 a month between us. We had saved £900 towards a deposit. Nobody would lend us the money, every bank and building society said we needed a 20% deposit. The extra £850 might as well have been a million, we just didn’t have it.
Eventually we went back to the estate agent and said we loved the house but couldn’t get a mortgage, they happened to also be agents for the Woolwich building society so they rang them up and they agreed to lend us the money. We never forgot who helped us and regardless of other deals we stayed with the Woolwich until eventually they were bought by Barclays.
So no it wasn’t easy to get a mortgage.

No it wasn’t Family Allowance was the precursor to Child Benefit.

There is a lot of confusion on this thread about what constitutes the past. To me the 90s barely qualifies.

Sorry. You are correct.