300k to survive... typical Sunday Times Article

[Judy1234]

Sunday Times article... the writer says because of house price and school fees rises to afford what his parents could afford you now when in your 20s have to make stark choices - City well paid job, City partner, IB etc - fine you can emulate that life. Other jobs, GP etc, not fine. I'm not sure there really is that change. I think it was always so - the child who became a teacher, actor, vicar would always have been different in terms of income and life from those who went into the City.

"My father, a respected country-based architect, somehow managed to put his four sons through private education. One is now a partner in a venture capital firm; another is co-founder of Lombok, a furniture retailer with a turnover of about £15m a year; another is a highly skilled Shropshire-based cabinet maker; and as for myself, the oldest son, ?wordsmith? seems best to describe the translating, writing and language teaching that have occupied me in Paris, Rome and London over the past decade or so.

Of these four brothers, all of equal talent but of quite different character, two are or soon will be rich or very rich. The other two are penniless.

As an unmarried and badly paid knowledge worker, I live in a rented room in Hammersmith and have no hope of ever buying a home anywhere. Indeed, when I return to the agreeable parts of central London that I know so well from earlier periods of my life, I realise that I am looking at the attractive stucco houses in just the same way that a tramp looks through a restaurant window at a group of people enjoying a carefree meal. I am effectively an exile in the city where I was born. "
women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article1719509.ece

I think he expected to just wake up one day with his very own, full paid-for house. He is a very odd man indeed.

Nobody in my family owned their own house until the 1980s. And £17K may not sound much today, but it was an absolutely fortune in the sixties. A life-changing pools win. Just as £1.5million is today.

It's the sort of thing though papers like that like to print. Lots of people like to think things are worse than they used to be so they justify their own "failures". It's not true. In many ways things are easier and in fact a lot of the City jobs you earn more now in real terms than ever before was possible. he just didn't choose a job like that. I suppose the divide between the super rich and the normal middle class is may be higher but that's only an issue if you have jealously problems.

(won't try links now - I follow exactly what it says to the right and it never works)

So we should (in your view xenia), aspire to be rich and be jealous if we arn't?

what if you don't aspire in the first place. Your view on hippies for instance or socialists who enter into the system to enable them to be happy on their terms.

And what does he mean by saying he's a "knowledge worker"? London is a very difficult place to buy now even in cheap areas, but the areas he mentions have been pricy for some time. It's like whose swathes of London don't even exist for him.

Except at the very top journalism is really badly paid and quite insecure, a big reason why we see so many news pieces on property being "unaffordable".
It's a supply & demand thing. Lots of people want to be "creative" types, and this drives down money hard.
If anything it's getting worse, with courses like Media "Studies".
I am entertained however that the journo sees herself as a "knowledge worker". Most journos aren't. The economics of the game mean they write about anything that they can sell, hence the really shallow reporting in many areas. Fierce competition means that most journos aren't stupid, but low word rates don't allow them to take the time to really understand stuff. The cult of celebrity makes it worse.
Often you will see the same BBC hack reporting on elections in Pakistan, then Holland. Reckon he speaks either language ? How does he understand their political dynamics ? My favourite was a little while back when it was feared the far right might have big success in Holland. The BBC were covering this live . Sort of. Even though this was a scheduled event, they had no one available who could speak Dutch, and just had minor celebrity newsreaders saying basically "the results are coming in, something is happening, when we find out what we'll tell you".

The home-owning thing is interesting. My parents still live in the house they bought in 1970 for £9,000 which was the maximum they could borrow on my dad's salary - my parents' families weren't in a position to help out. Most of their friends lived in much nicer, bigger houses in better areas, because they had families with at least some money to help them buy houses. This enabled them to buy leasehold properties, which were not necessarily more expensive, but which at the time you couldn't get a mortgage to buy - you had to be able to buy them outright, so you had to have access to some capital.

Well, obviously Sebastian has a very different idea of surviving than most. As for his choice of career, maybe careers advice is an optional extra at Eton.

I didn't say anyone should be jealous. People at all income levels are content with what they have to differing degrees. It's an internal issue - either your glass is half empty or half full wherever and however you live.

He could turn it round and say I am going work I love and living in Hammersmith which is a great area for the things I want to do. (A lot of people can't afford to rent there). I am fit and have a job but then no one would havebought his article I suppose.

He's harking back to halcyon days that didn't exist. Even back in the 1800s I am not sure there were large numbers of well off people who lived easy lives. A lot of money was made through mills etc then - we had social mobility through industry even if those who didn't earn money but had it looked down on those who worked to earn it by running their mill or mine.

House prices have gone bonkers of course. I was interested and bored with work so found out average wage in 1966 was about £1196.00 (for a man) and the average house cost around 4x that at £5K. Nowadays the average wage is £23,244 and the average house price in UK at the end of last year was £2001.00, which is nearly nine times the average income. But of course nowadays there are more two earner couples earning similar wages (in 1966 women earned half as much as men) which changes everything.

But even in 1966 that £17K rectory was 14 times the average wage - hardly the snip he implies. 14x the average wage now is £325, 416, which only buys a flat round my way, but would buy this in Scotland

Or this in norfolk

Swoon! at the latter.

more people can afford to buy their homes than at any period in history. The change that some get very uptight about is that it's different "upwardly mobile" people who do it now.

Ultimately prices simply can't go above what people can (or will) pay. I'm old enough to recall the 1970s when a lot of "old money" got trashed because the chinless wonders couldn't grasp the fact that big old houses weren't very attractive to the market, and so they asked for too high a price for too long.

Of course within that is are "key workers", or to put it in more honest terms "people shafted by the government". It's perfectly possible to have nurses living near hospitals, all you have to do is pay them the local cost of living.
Of course there are lots of pseudo-amateur sports people, opera singers, etc that the government is quite happy to pay serious money for instead.
The government hugely subsidised Wembley, for the use of hugely deserving poor people like umm err Chelsea, Man Utd and Bon Jovi. For that money you could have bought any number of key workers good houses.

it's interesting what Aloha said about average house being 4x average male income back in 1966 compared to nrly 9x now. That's key, isn't it?

I know huge change over the past 4 decades - dual income families, relatively low interest rates etc has enabled buyers to make a larger stretch but the difference in affordablity is v stark.

I think I'll move to Norfolk.

In 1966 not in a million years did most people think they could buy a house. My father only could in his 30s because he became an NHS consultant. Although why didn't more of them do it if they could afford it? May be that just wasn't our culture or expectation then.

well,I think it was part of the culture of the middle classes, well and truly. When I think of my parents/their friends they all bought around that time, wouldn't have dreamt of renting long-term.

I agree though that house-buying has now become the aspiration of all, post-Thatcher.

Yes, well, back then, too, you could actually count on being able to stay in your rented accommodation for longer than 6 months.

With short-assured tenancies, however, this isn't the case.

You can be turfed out.

Often.

Many times.

So people turn to buying as a means to be able to stay in one place longer, too.

The bit that really got up my nose was when he blames his "misfortune" on globalisation - yes some "Johnny Foreigners" has had the cheek to do quite well for themselves rather than remain as colonial underdogs and have usurped his god-given right to a life of ease and plenty despite being a talentless little prat. My heart bleeds for him.

By the way, the likes of him are the reason why my DD is going to state school even if I win the lottery

Foreigners are an interesting factor to bring into this thread.
Germans are on average richer, but less likely to own their homes, Japan has "multi-generation" morgages, such is the huge price of their homes.

I can't see much correlation either way between the richness of a country and home ownership, though of course countries where the state can confiscate property tend to be a lot poorer.

England, if it were a separate country would be right up there with the micro-city states in terms of population density, and is unusual to have such a large % of it's population in one conurbation. China and India may have more people, but are much more thinly populated, and more evenly. Over 1/5th of us live within the distribution area for London's "local" evening newspaper, and in long range commuters etc and about 25% of us are "Londoners" to some extent.
Due to the collapse of manufacturing, the London conurbation generates far and away the biggest slice of wealth. It's also the case that many highly profitable relatively small businesses like hedge funds are run from buildings that in many other countries especially France or America would be "zoned" out. Thus making them even more expensive.
Thus the "desirable" bits of London are the top of a very big mountain.
There are no villains here.
Although house prices have gone up ahead of average earnings, they haven't gone up hugely faster. What the media luvvies are simply loathe to admit is in the last 25 years Britain has moved from being a relatively poor country to a relatively rich one.
People forget how bad the alternation of Labour and Tory socialism was. In another thread, some dimwit asked how I got burned as a child during miners strikes. They simply could understand why we didn't have central heating in our council house. In a way, that's a good thing, there notion that the old unions were a force for good does no harm, they probably think that George bush is good because he's nice to his dear old mum as well.
We've done well for ourselves, house prices are a symptom of success, not failure.
Thus the desirable bits of Lon

Some people like do go abroad to get what they want. He could go to somewhere like Namibia and farm or something and live the life he thinks he's entitled to reasonably easily.