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?

I had Sky and foreign holidays 30 years ago. I also had a 4bed house which I got with my ex using a 5k loan as a deposit.

I bought my first home with a cash back mortgage. I used my student loans as the 5% deposit, then got it back as soon as I completed on the house and used it to pay for my wedding.

We bought a flat in SE London then, being honest about our £55,000 combined salaries. The £25k his family lent us towards the £220,000 property meant we had no problems getting a mortgage.
Banks didn't accept letters from bosses, only bank statements. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

@gibletsarerank what are you talking about or do you even know

Well, I move in ‘ordinary’ circles. The little people like me usually weren’t fortunate enough to have bosses prepared to involve themselves in fraud for us.

I’m actually mainly jealous of older generations for being able to buy houses for so much less.

My next door neighbour is 15-20 years older than me, but bought their house for around a quarter of what I paid. Wages have not quadrupled in that period!

I can only imagine that you lived in a very cheap area, because that absolutely read not my own experience of those times.

Which is the problem with Mumsnet a lot of the time. People assume that their experience was everyone else's. Regional housing costs cover an incredibly large range, and with that, a huge range of lifestyles on the same salary.

I had a 60% mortgage on an average do-er upper (and had 2 children) in 1996 SW England. We didn’t have any of those things and could not have afforded car or holidays; nor did we have any form of childcare subsidy. My salary was equivalent to average male earnings.
We weren’t regarded as particularly poor or unusual by any of my colleagues or acquaintances.

Edited brackets in the wrong place.

My parents had a car each since marriage, with us kids being given cheap cars to learn on and keep from aged 17. My dad was also very fond of avocados.
He wouldn't pay for Sky though because school fees 😬

There’s a certain irony in accusing me of being hellbent on arguing while continuing to engage in precisely the same discussion yourself.

You’re entitled to your perspective on jealousy. What you’re not entitled to do is present your assumptions about my circumstances, productivity, motivations and prospects of homeownership as though they’re established facts.

You’ve now decided that I don’t own a property, that I’m failing to take productive steps towards doing so, that I’m seeking validation and that my own behaviour is somehow preventing me from becoming a homeowner. All of this based on a light-hearted AIBU about an interesting conversation at a spa.

I’m also rather intrigued by the suggestion that responding to comments on a discussion forum constitutes an unproductive use of time, given that you’re doing exactly the same thing.

I haven’t been trying to change your perspective. I’ve been challenging the increasingly personal conclusions you’ve drawn about someone you know absolutely nothing about. Those are two different things.

Perhaps the advice about moving on and using one’s time more productively is something worth applying a little closer to home.

True @Crikeyalmighty if you were self-employed or whatever this could happen and to some extent if you know the ropes still could.

I’m pretty confident I could inflate what I could borrow today if I wanted to, however, whereas I may have when young and daft, I’m slightly less daft now so I wouldn’t.

Another thing I remember @HonestTealPoster the absolute dread of interest rates going up because my mortgage payment (on a relatively small loan) was enormous - and while the price you agreed at the time of purchase was smaller, the total repaid after 25 years would be much higher due to the high interest and high monthly payments … at the time a lot of people only managed because a popular benefit then was a cheap mortgage ‘match’ from their employers.

I think I had to have an interest only (endowment) mortgage and the trouble is if you have to end it early you still owe the same capital sum and the endowment hasn’t matured. I’ve never gone anything but repayment since.

Well I'm guessing that if he lied about his salary that he actually borrowed based on that salary. Otherwise, why would he have gained any advantage from lying about it? No, I don't know exactly how much he borrowed, true, but given that the interest rates were high for most of the time that YOU said he bought, I would have thought he'd probably have high repayments. Maybe not, maybe he only borrowed a tiny amount against his fake salary and all was great, who knows.

You keep saying 'I never actually said that' but you did say you were jealous of people in their early 50s because it was easier for them to get on the property ladder because lending practices were so lax and people could just get their bosses to lie about their salaries. People have pointed out that this isn't/wasn't true and you keep saying that they are inventing facts.

The example of the man in the sauna is not typical of our generation. What was typical was a house I bought for £90, that is now valued at £550 - that's ridiculous. My earning potential has not seen the same steep rise. I also don't completely disagree with @AMillionTomorrows in that so many things are a subscription now. We pay so much more monthly to have the same things that we simply paid for once and then owned back in the day. Cost of living today is very, very different to how it was back in the day.

Yes, they did. And not only were there lots of repossessions, the house price crash meant that the homes repossessed were worth a lot less than the outstanding mortgage, so lenders lost out. I'm sure that that's one of the reasons why lending criteria tightened up so much; banks were happy to lend shedloads when they were making money, not so much when they were losing it.

The house I bought for £24k in 1982 was valued at £87.5k later in the 80s (approx '87-88). When I sold it in 1993, because I was relocating, I got £49k for it and I was lucky to get that. Some of my friends were in negative equity for the rest of the century.

The 90s, those were the days, the car loan was more than the mortgage. I used to smoke 20 a day as well.

My mortgage advisor tweaked our wages and the transaction so we didn't need a deposit (( building society had a deal on where people taking out mortgages got their deposit back )) this was back in 2001 and saved us and our dc from a lifetime of poverty.......we've never earned particularly well but low cost housing shielded the blow.

I feel so sorry for young people in my position today, life is so much harder and keeps them tracked into an endless cycle of shit housing and poverty.

I don’t think it would work now in the way it did then.

Houses were so much cheaper then. And the ratio of house price to salary was less. I bought later than that and even though people were getting 4x salary, it wasn’t that common.

at that time people were paying off mortgages in 25 years. Now most first time buyers I know in London are committing to 30 and 40 year terms.

If an employer inflated your wage today, you wouldn’t be able to pay a bigger mortgage. Lending criteria is pretty much maxed out I think.

he was also lucky- if interest rates had gone sky high he would have been fucked.

and this 20 year period of low interest rates that is just ending.

it’s not something I’d risk doing today.

I ate out, bought coffee and certainly went on holiday 30 years ago! I also had a mobile phone I think or was about to have one. My dad had a car phone much earlier. In fact I genuinely used to eat quite a lot of avocado toast from the bougie cafe near my office although that was more like 20 years ago I think when I had a job in the city. Late 90s were not the middle ages.

I also bought a flat for 100k ish that I sold later for 300k setting me up financially for life. Young people today have no chance of a similar story regardless of whether they manage to be more frugal than I was in my 20s.

I agree that one man’s experience offers a limited perspective but I haven’t suggested otherwise.

What I found enviable was that he was apparently able to access homeownership through an arrangement that would be considerably more difficult to get away with today. That doesn’t mean I endorse the dishonesty involved or believe everyone who obtained a mortgage through questionable means ultimately benefited.

You’re also assuming that his monthly repayments were extortionate and that he struggled financially, neither of which he indicated during our conversation. It’s entirely possible that he managed his repayments perfectly comfortably. We simply don’t know.

And I haven’t suggested that his experience was representative of the entirety of Gen X. I shared a specific anecdote and reflected on one aspect of how access to homeownership has changed.

I don’t think recognising an advantage enjoyed by one individual requires me to make sweeping judgements about an entire generation.

This is absolute nonsense. I'm sure some instances of mortgage fraud went on, but you had to supply bank statements, payslips, work references and other proof of income.

Yes property prices have gone adrift from salaries (largely because salaries have stagnated and are now extremely low) and inner London did used to be far more affordable for middle-class workers (I lived in Zone 1 on a marketing assistant's salary in the 90s) but most properties were still very unaffordable. When people talk about £50k houses - they need to mention that £9k was a typical annual salary.

He's talking utter drivel. I am nearly 50.
Even to get a rented shared flat in London in the early noughties we had to prove our income by showing the lettings agency physical payslips.

Not true. In the 80s I was aged 16 when the decade started and 26 when it ended. There was no shortage of what would be termed discretionary extra spending going on. Student grants were generous and nights out frequent. Then, after finishing university I remember restaurant meals and takeaways, not delivered of course - you did have to go and collect. Much simpler and less choice - chinese or indian, burgers or fish and chips. We weren't all staying at home being frugal. When we bought flat in 1987 we were shocked at rising prices, but cutting out takeaway food wouldn't have gone far towards mortgage.

What’s the point in being jealous? I remember a story that my family used to tell me - a family friend was self employed and was paid mostly in cash, he got a dodgy man to fake a play slip for him to buy a house!! This was in the 80s, you would never get away with that now!!

Late 80s, the property market collapsed. In the mid-90s, there were mortgage advisers who would tell you what you earned. IE The mortgage divided by 4 or whatever.

Absolutely.