This is the kind of article that really has me spitting feathers

[emkana]

how awful not to be able to afford school fees and foreign holidays

"Let's assume the middle class family has a combined income of £100000" - who are these people?

grrr

caligula

we can't afford the kind of price you say that a table cost in ikea - we're having to use a picnic table that belongs in a garden that was on loan from an aunty.

tinkerbellie - dp has mentioned a few times that to get on ladder we would have to buy his dad's council house and do that up. but my prob is that his dad wanted to pass it on to us and then to dd. i wouldn't then feel comfortable if we had to sell it for a bigger one. i have been living in flats for 13 years and i've had enough of them. now i have a dd, i need a garden for loads of reasons - somewhere safe for her to play and run around in, to grow my own veg then i would know exactly what went into them, and somewhere nice to sit on sunny evenings.

Oh these were just the poncey ones - they have much cheaper ones as well.

But I was struck by how much cheaper household furniture and furnishings are relative to income

Typically Londoncentric article, not even going to bother reading it fully. Maybe if greedy mares like her hadn't pushed the property prices to stupid levels her £100,000 would go further.

I mean really, does she not realise there are many, many families who are living on less, in some cases 1/2 of the "average" wage of £25,000?

Twunt.

House prices, house prices. It explains an awful lot.

As a nation, we are currently pouring all our wealth into housing. Planning restraints and a demographic shift are pushing prices into realms never seen before. It isn't money for nothing - it is paid for in the increased mortgage/rent payments of virtually everyone under 30, and anyone else who trades up significantly.

Yes, the middle classes are noticing it. People lower down the income scale than 100k per annum(all 99% of us) are just totally unable to cope at all. They have fallen off the scale altogether, unless they can get cheap council housing.

The disease hit London first and has been like this for some time, but it is reaching even the most deprived corners of the UK in relative terms.

On the bright side, if you have a small mortgage, other things have never been so cheap. Food is much cheaper in comparison to everything else. Goods, clothes are all almost the same actual prices as they were 30 years ago - much less in real terms.

The answer for is to stop buying into the property madness. Buy/rent the smallest, cheapest, grottiest thing you can get your hands on and enjoy some disposable income. IMHO.

fransmom, we got a table and 4 chairs in IKEA for £85. Works just fine and looks really nice too.

Typical wage in West Lothian £12-16,000.

Typical house price in West Lothian £130-210,000 depending on location for a 2-3 bedroom ordinary house. Flats now start at about £120,000 for a small 2 bed.

This country is a joke.

£100,000, FFS.

we jsu haven't got that kind of money at he mo. would need to save and we need new fridge first - ours should've been retired 4yrs ago

I hear ya, Two!

The rents here are sky high as a result.

Even ex-council flats in some of the worst, and I mean BAD, areas are up for offers over £100,000.

One beds here over the £100,000 mark.

Wages still in the toilet.

Yep, you never needed to borrow 10 times your income to buy a house

Didn't they used to calculate that a fifth of your income (one income) should go on housing costs (either rent or mortgage)? Whereas now it's more like half of two incomes? (Or some such mad figures I remember reading somewhere, but can't remember the exact percentages)

o.m.g. perish the thought that the riff raff nouveau riche should be able to afford the Bullingdon Club. and since when is private school the yardstick of being middle class? perish the thought that those of us who choose to send our kids to state school should consider ourselves middle class. In fact, thinking about it, it would seem that not only do you have to want to privately educate your kids to be middle class, it would seem you have to know what the bloody Bullingdon Club is. what a gob-smacking awful piece of up your own arsedness and snobbery.

and /thud at the article. there is a sort of good point in there, but it's completely ruined by the self-pity. ecotourism and shared pool in Sicily isn't 99% of people's version of slumming it!

so ladies, do we all feel so sorry for her that we should dash out and buy copies of "Notting Hell" so she doesn't need to look for out of date food in Waitrose

LOL at the Sicialian shared pool.

Surely there's a touch of irony there? [hopeful]

The first house we bought in London in 1983 cost £40k. They now sell for £250k I think on the same road. In 1983 my salary was about £7k when we bought the house. Salaries in that job are now £30k. My husband's teacher's salary was £7,500. So we borrowed about 3 x our joint salary to buy the house. Today assuming his teacher's salary for that job would also be £30k 3 x the joint wage would be £180k. So they'd have a £70k shortfall. However I think interest rates now may be half what they were then so in fact it may be cheaper to borrow that bigger amount. Interesting sums.

But also MIRAS existed in the eighties didn't it? At one point, it was 30% of a mortgage, so it subsidised a mortgage to quite a hefty extent. It was gradually phased out (when I bought in the early nineties, it was 10%), so that people got used to their mortgage payment being higher very gradually, over the course of three years or so, iirc.

Hey, Xenia, tell me where in London you can now buy a house for 250k? It must be pretty shabby, no?

Well I'm afraid I skimmed the article but just couldn't be bothered to read her whinging in detail. Our income is less than a quarter of hers, poor love.

You can still get places for a quarter of a million or under in South East London (places like Lewisham, New Cross etc.)

But they're either small or in the very scary parts.

ch, not everyone can afford to live in Notting Hill. I can't. This is the street where we bought our first terraced house in London. 3 beds. We converted the loft to a storage room ourselves and I even grew some sweet corn in the garden.

£230k or so. 2006 ; zone 5. Perfectly nice little house.
\link{http://www.nethouseprices.com/index.php?con=sold_prices_street&cCode=EW&postcode=HA20QU}

I agree with Aloha.

Thinking about my grandparents - they would have described themselves as quite comfortably off. Grandad was an accountant and Gran a SAHM, and they had just one child. They were respectable "pillar-of-the-community" types - Grandad was president of the local golf club, all that sort of thing.

But Gran made most of my mum's clothes, including her school uniforms. Holidays meant visiting rellies. Looking at the photos, you can see that my Mum had about 3 toys which she played with for several years. They didn't eat out. To the end of her days, if given a present, my Gran would carefully take the sticky tape off wrapping paper, fold it and put it away for another time.

And obviously they had no TV, no sound system, no washing machine, no convenience food, no computer.

I can't help thinking that our idea of basic expenses - what we regard as "normal living" has changed beyond recognition.

Sorry Xenia, my attempt at wit very late at night. Poor in retrospect.

I was intrigued by your example, because it is a commonplace misconception that it has always been hard to buy a property, and that things are not much worse now than they have ever been.

See this link for more details on average house prices and income multiples.

Are houses more unaffordable than they used to be?

I would dispute the figures in your example. A few small refinements show just how much things have changed for a first time buyer.

At the time you bought, your house cost 2.76 times your joint incomes. I am guessing because it was 1983, that you must have been in your early twenties at the time. This would mean you were in pretty much your first jobs. A teacher's starting salary in Harrow would be about 21k. Let's assume two teachers bought their first place on a combined income of 42k, at the income ratio that you needed - 2.76. This would give them 116k to buy a house. That in fact leaves them 134k short - the shortfall is bigger than they can technically borrow. For this they wouldn't even get a flat in Harrow.

I think the point is that house prices going up actually profit very few people. Most people live in their houses and that is pretty much the end of it. As a nation we are pouring ever increasing amounts of our wages into spiralling prices, and you have to ask why? It is almost completely unproductive.

It prevents us from investing money into things that could actually make a difference to people's lives. It squeezes incomes at all levels, which is one thing if you are Rachel Johnson bemoaning the cost of private schools. It is another if you are someone working on the minimum wage.

I realise that this article sounds like entitlement. However, if it is so hard to achieve a 'middle class' lifestyle, ho hard is it to achieve your 'working class' lifestyle of 30 years ago? Well, it is harder as well, pushing many families into dependency on benefits/credits of various kinds.

So the questions we need to ask ourselves as a nation is "Why have we got ourselves into this situation?" and "At what point did we decide that people's aspirations to live as they would like become irrelevant?"

Why shouldn't someone on a 100k salary have a decent life? I would aspire to one if I earned that much. This isn't entitlement. In a country where the overall wealth is increasing all the time, where economic growth has been high for a decade, it's a desire on the part of the citizens of this country to see some return for the increasing treadmill that is, in part, destroying family life.

CH, my husband was 28 and head of department in a private school so he wasn't first job. A lot of his colleagues who were single couldn't afford to buy anything and most teachers in that school had a school flat provided in order to be able to get any teachers down to London at all as property was so expensive. Also I was in a better job than teaching. I suppose my point is that people get this set idea that they will live in London within 2 miles of XYZ and don't realise most people compromise over areas and commute in. It's how it's always been.

Also interest rates used for some periods to be hugely higher than they are now, sometimes almost double so now you can borrow twiec as much for the same price. Although obviously it would be ridiculous for me to say house prices have not in general gone up faster than wages in many jobs. I certainly agree with that but looking at the struggle my father had in 1961 to afford a house and then us in 1983 it doesn't feel hugely different. We certainly needed two salaries then as most people do now.

Agree with your earlier post cloudhopper. In general people buying houses are better off in a low price high interest rate environment I think. (unless you have MEWd to the hilt) people need to stop seeing their house as a cashpoint. Incidentally Xenia starting consultant salary in NHS about 70k.

Just to make you all feel good. The average debt per household in the UK is £50K excluding mortgage.
So if youve not got this then youre positvely loaded.