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?

Posts like this are so embarrassing because it's essentially the poster admitting they can't do basic maths. It's like when small children think their 10p will buy them anything and when they're told it's not enough, they toddle off and come back with another 2p - total lack of understanding of the value of money Vs what things actually cost. (And I say that all as a homeowner in my 30s on a middling income - I'm not one of the Gen Zs being told to cut down on avo toast myself.)

To be fair to @AMillionTomorrows I bought my first flat in 1987 but I did it by having no phone, no car, no nights out, no holidays etc. I literally didn't spend anything I didn't need to for three years and I lived in a dump bedsit, shared bathroom, no heating, single glazing, in a horrible area, the absolute cheapest I could find. Three years with my teeth gritted. I read a lot of books in bed by myself to keep warm 😁 It wasn't easy.

When I moved in to my flat, I had no furniture other than a lilo, my duvet & pillows and my student pots & pans. No fridge, no washing machine, no heating. But I was in and it was mine. Then gradually made things better.

The price/wage ratio is ridiculous now. I have a ds who will need some help despite being well qualified and sensible with money.

That's exactly how I was able to buy a house in 1982, when I was 27.

I got 100% mortgage of £24k on a salary of £5.2k because my boss was prepared to say I was earning significantly more. It was years before I was able to meet the repayments without having a second job and a lodger.

I still find it incredible that a decent car would now cost as much as that house. I looked on Zoopla a little while ago, and the house I bought for £24k is now worth £375k.

Absolutely this. And back then screen addiction wasn’t a thing because to get on line you needed a desktop computer.

Mortgage ratios were much much stingier in those days. I think it was 3 income 1 plus 1 income 2.

With our first house we had a combined income of just under £50k and we had to borrow from the Nationwide as they were the only ones that would lend us the £117k we needed. I’ve just typed similar incomes into a mortgage calculator now and they will lend £275k.

So honest people could borrow less. Dishonest people could borrow more.

We bought our first flat in the late 1970s and moved again in about 1981 and 1992 and never had our salaries inflated or heard of anyone else who did. The amount you could borrow was very strictly controlled. We got a 100% mortgsge for our first flat and were considered fortunate because the local authority gave us a mortgage and took part of my salary into account when we weren’t married. When we moved in 1981 we had just exchanged contracts when the interest rate went up to 18%. It didn’t stay thst high for very long but was around 15% for most of the time we lived in that house. While house prices were very much lower, people nowadays see to forget just how high mortgage repayments were with the sky high interest rates, and how much less people earned at thst time. When we moved in the 1980s we were both earning good salaries for the time but between 60-70% of our combined net income went on mortgage repayments. We didn’t have a holiday for years, didnt go out much, and couldn’t afford new cars or clothes. Most of our friends were in the same position, but we were all happy to make sacrifices to be able to buy our own homes.

The houses where I live in have gone up in value around 750% in 30 years. I have been on one foreign holiday in 5 years. I rarely buy coffee out. Even if I did none of the things you suggest, it would barely make a dent on the huge mortgage I have for my tiny house.

Anyway op, I've never heard of what you're talking about. I think he was exaggerating or making it up.

I think this was called as Self Certified mortgage? Where you could state whatever you were earning with less strict requirements for evidence. I bought my first house in 2005 and know several people who did this around this time, usually because they were self employed or their businesses were new and didn't have enough years accounts. I think they were subsequently banned as they played a part in the 2008 financial crash.

I got 100% mortgage of £24k on a salary of £5.2k because my boss was prepared to say I was earning significantly more.

Isn’t that basically fraud?

She won't be living like people did 30 years ago because none of those things are going to replicate the much more favourable wider economic environment, notwithstanding that as a pp pointed out you've not described how people were living in the mid 90s anyway. Which is the point.

Thirty years ago many British people had cars, foreign holidays and the internet! Some even had mobile phones…

That’s actually fraud… I doubt this was widespread practice

we bought our first home in 1983 and the deposit we put down would have paid for the house outright twenty years earlier. Electrical goods were expensive back then a washing machine and tv were £300 each , the equivalent of a months wages back then . A lot of people still rented TVs as they were expensive. I think the difficulty today is that it’s harder for couples to get a full time permanent work contract that is needed to buy a home .

It was. They happened in the early noughties when house prices were going up ridiculously fast. (One year my house earned more than me!)

The attitude of the banks was basically “if you want to lie knock yourself out. Your house will be worth twice what you paid for it so if you don’t pay your mortgage we will take it, sell it and get all our money back.”

Worked brilliantly until 2008 when there was a combination of people losing jobs and house prices falling.

I've no idea!

I worked for a house building company who also had a chain of estate agencies, and it was all arranged by the company's mortgage fixer.

inane response. The only reason we didn't spend money on mobile phones etc 30 years ago was because it didn't exist. If it had, we would have bought them!!

30 years ago I loved avocados and coffee out. Still do...

that was 12 years before I bought. I think they tightened up a lot on the interim due to high number of repossessions because of the number of ppl who couldn't in fact afford the mortgages they'd been given .

Property was just cheaper then and there was a very very different lifestyle with money than there is now.

I’d heard of self-certification mortgages but didn’t realise quite how widespread they were. It’s interesting hearing from people who actually bought properties using them. I can certainly understand why the rules were tightened but the contrast with what prospective buyers have to go through today is quite something!

I personally think he’s talking crap.

dh and I are both in our 50s (just) and applied for our mortgage In the year 2000 and we had to provide 6 months of payslips to prove our earnings for our mortgage, not a letter from our employer.

This is a great post, but they will never believe you on here.

ETA this was my experience too. We both worked as well. Not just my partner.

I voted YABU because only an extremely tiny minority of people would have been able to do that. I was a teacher and like any other public sector worker it wouldn't have happened.

He's probably making it up. And if he isn't he's likely the only person ever to do that. Houses were more affordable relative to salary then.

Not for people on low income - and I was a civil servant!

Never mind the cost of living and rates of income to qualify for a house millions added to the old days aye.