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?

Here we go again...it was so easy to buy a house for those in their 50s rubbish!

I fall under the category and bought in 2001. I had to have a letter from my employer but also had to share my bank statements, so it would have been very stupid of my boss to inflate my income! Of course this didn't happen!

I earned £21k and my OH, £20k. BOTH working full-time with a one year old. Oh yes, I had to go back to work when they were 4 months old, and that's because we'd save for a year because otherwise, I would have had to go back when they were 6, weeks old.

We just, and really just about met affordability on a £104k property. Our mortgage was just under £800 a month and we both paid over £350 in our occupational pension.

I think we only started to be able to claim some help with childcare the year after or 2003. I had to commute over 3 hours a day and my OH 3 hours to earn our salaries, but live somewhere we could afford. We only one tiny car that was more than 10 years old. No luxuries at all, holiday was going to my parents. The first proper holiday was 10 years later.

Now you tell me how many young people would agree to this lifestyle nowadays? Working FT with a child under one? 2 and 3 hours commuting a day? No gym, phone, weekend breaks, take aways, holidays?

You really need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and wanting your cake and eat it. If you want a property like we did, you are absolutely able to make the same sacrifices and chose a life that is much more hard work than enjoyment!

Well you seem confused as the 90s are the past

@Passaggressfedup easier doesn’t actually mean easy, maybe that is what confused you.

And why are you claiming no one inflated their income?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3222053.stm

@KeepPumpingpointless as people will just deny. It’s so odd.

Take aways really? Seriously give it a rest

@Passaggressfedupmore mothers work ft now vs the past too.

People didn't borrow money to buy cars in the 1980s???

That isn't true at all.

I’m late 50s and I bought my first house in my 30s, as did most of my friends. We had to provide bank statements to prove income to get mortgages.

I’m sick of this bullshit narrative that anyone born before about 1990 had an easy life, massive salaries and houses for just a few quid. It’s absolute rubbish. There was a massive property crash in the 90s, people ended up in negative equity, interest rates were over 10%, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes.

It wasn’t much fun.

Can't believe the utter moronic belief that we are all going out buying kebabs and that's why we can't get approved for a house.

I think we’re broadly in agreement on the distinction between individual experiences and the wider housing market. Someone can benefit personally from a particular lending arrangement while the broader system creates serious problems around affordability, household debt and financial stability. I also think there’s something rather troubling about the extent to which access to something as fundamental as housing has become dependent on people’s ability to take on increasingly substantial amounts of debt.

Where I’d be more cautious is assuming that the current situation must inevitably unravel in a particular way. But I do agree that being able to afford the monthly repayments at a given moment isn’t necessarily the same as being financially secure over the lifetime of a mortgage.

It’s an interesting discussion and considerably broader than the anecdote that prompted my original post!

Why is having a mobile now seen as a moral failing? In the past 95% had landlines, were landlines seen as a barrier to buying a house?!

People want to pretend that their house value is "normal", a function of "supply and demand", it isn"t though it is a function of far too much cheap mortgage debt for too long, 2007 isn"t the dark ages, there are hundreds of media articles about Liar Loans and websites with thread after thread warning of a massive financial bust coming well before 2007, the evidence is all there and here we are again, but this time they can"t drop rates and people are SO much more indebted than they were in previous crashes!

If you want a property like we did, you are absolutely able to make the same sacrifices

No matter how many sacrifices you make someone earning £30,000 a year isn't going to be able to have a property when prices are ten times that salary.

@SparklingGlitteryWine I have no idea why this nonsense that previous generations never spent their money on frivolous things has come from. It’s crap, people are takeaways in the past, people holidayed, people had cars, people went to pubs. Christ even during the flipping was lipstick sales went up!

Yes we broadly agree, I would just say look at sales volumes, especially new-builds and mortgage approvals to see how quickly it is unravelling.

I am homeless living in temporary accommodation with my children and am on the bones of my arse. I work full time and did everything in my power to avoid this situation to no avail. That is why my blood boils at the takeaway/gym/netflix comments. I can't afford any of those and I work my backside off. It's not only patronising and wildly offensive it's very wrong.

My first car loan was in 1988. Very little in terms of car leasing then for personal use? I got a car loan for a second hand car as well I can remember them requiring proof so I didn’t bog off to Mexico backpacking with the bank’s money.
To be fair I didn’t have to pay Uni fees, went to Uni in the next city along, and left with zero debt.
Then there were the famous home improvement loans.

@SparklingGlitteryWine it all adds up. Try it. Don’t buy any takeaways, meals out, fancy coffees, nails, hair , handbags, unnecessary clothes for a month, and see how much you save.

You miss the point - quite spectacularly - about lifestyles. No one is suggesting that cutting out Netflix is the answer. Considering where money is spent unnecessarily is the key. Even one coffee once a month is unnecessary spending. Buy what you need, not what you want. Cut your hair every 10 weeks instead of every 6. Buy clothes and jewellery in charity shops/car boots/Vinted/eBay. Turn the heating down. Walk to the local shop. You don't need Prime, Netflix and Disney - one of these would give you more viewing than anyone has time for. You don't need to uber relatively short distances in the daytime - walk. You don't need a takeaway at the weekend or a beauty box delivered to your door. A gym membership isn't needed - you can exercise at home or go running, cycling etc. And you certainly don't need lip fillers and top of the range make up. There is a ton of second hand furniture out there so why buy new a sofa on credit? And who needs both Spotify and Amazon music? And of course, we work hard and sometimes we want a bit of a splurge - nothing wrong with that - but does it need a brand new dress, an uber there and back, a beauty appointment and bottomless cocktails?

I am not suggesting the current housing and economic situations are not challenging and for many, impossible to overcome. But my observation is many young people could make better use of the money they have and who knows where that could lead? Pretending it's just about cancelling Netflix misses the very real difference in lifestyle between today's 20 something and those of us who were 20 in the 90s. Because there is a difference.

And plenty of us weren't handed anything, have worked hard, had big mortgages, paid for all our childcare, faced redundancy multiple times and seen multiple financial crisis over the years. It's not been a bed of roses.

Was the guy"s name Eric by any chance?

It isn't a belief.

It's just people not wanting to take any action that might lower the values of their own properties, action like...building houses.

So they come up with this utter nonsense.

As someone pointed out, "easier" doesn't mean "easy" so we still worked hard in the eighties and nineties to buy our homes.

But myself and partner needed no parental help to buy a home whereas my daughter absolutely won't be able to buy a property without our assistance.

This smells like nonsense.

I'm in my 50s and not only have I never heard of such a thing happening but I've bought and sold properties so know for a fact you need to show months of payslips/bank statements etc to get a mortgage. A letter from your boss in no way, shape or form would suffice as a substitute.

Yes, I fully agree, but that doesn"t change the fact that house prices got to where they got due to cheap mortgage debt and will correct due to more expensive mortgage debt, all a young person needs to do now is stay at home and watch the property bubble pop.

The big difference between the 1990s and now is that mortgages were capped at 2.5 x income rather than the 4 x you get now. The main difference why people could buy places then as opposed to now is price. I bought in the early 90s; a large two bed conversion with a shared garden in London Zone two. It cost me £64k.