Average income

[hercules]

Does anyone know what the average gross income is per person and per household?

According to the National Earnings Survey the median salary for a man is £29k & for a woman £22K. (We are WELL under that, but "wealthy parents" when it comes to student support- grrr)

This house price thing had me thinking. When we bought our first house in 1983 it cost £20K & we earned just over £3k each. (Deposit was £2k- bank didn't want to lend us the money but we'd joined a scheme where they guaranteed to lend you 10 times what you'd saved so they didn't have a choice.)

Is there that much difference in what a first time buyer couple would have to borrow now, proportionally? (The whole of DHs wages went on the mortgage & I paid everything else).

We are above average but cant afford to buy other than shared ownership, have debts, cant afford a holiday this year and have no savings.

Staggered that pockets of Salford could be in the Top 50 list even accounting for Salford Quays

The earnings:borrowing ratio on mortgages has gone from something like 2.8 average to 3.4 ... so people are borrrowing more... whether they "have" to borrow more... well, why else would schemes exist to let people borrow up to 10x income? (if you belong to specified professions). Madness.

We have small mortgage 40k income no debts and lots of equity 100k worth STILL cannot afford anything slightly larger (ie same size house with a garden )here in GU51/Gu52 area
It is sick!
In Lincoln DH will earn the same plus expenses we can afford easily 4 bed detached executive home
No contest

we cant afford to buy a property on our own, so dp's dad is acting as a guarantor for us to enable us to buy a house this year, if we didnt have him, god knows what we would do, and my dp earns a fairly reasonable wage, but house prices are now just ridiculous.

Ooh, do I see a house price discussion?! It is bloody mad. Completely. We could just about afford to buy on 4 x main salary (mine if I sell to highest bidder) and with dp contributing by doing all the childcare x 2 kids (so counting his childcare contrib as at LEAST £14k gross and that's just what it would cost us in childcare etc) but, get this, it would cost us loads more to buy than to carry on renting. Well, f* that! We won't do it I don't think. And I would earn well above the 'average' woman's salary mentioned.

Its all quite outrageous. We bought this place (an ex-council maisonette in a "trendy" borough of London!) 8 years ago. It is now worth 4 or 5 times what we paid for it, no way could we afford it. The rest of my family live in the midlands, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, they all have houses with gardens, garages...if we could or wanted to move up there we could afford so much. But having said that thats only because we got on the housing ladder when we did. If we were just starting out now we'd struggle in most places.

I read somewhere that a good indicator of an overheated market was to ask yourself could you buy your own house. If the answer is no, the market's mad.

Fio2....Stoke on Trent comes bottom in most...except the ones you DON'T want to come top in.......weren't we 2nd fattest city? and No1 worst place to live?

......and my neighbour has her 35 yearold son and his girlfriend living with her whilst they save for their own property. I was hoping mine would be long gone by then!!

CD - I do have time to get a better paid job, but dp is 46 now and i know he'll never get any further qualifications now, he can't be arsed.

I think the whole situation is ridiculous.
My brother still lives at homw ith my dad, who wants to move to france. My brother (a postman) was going to buy the house off my dad, until they had it valued, and realised that my brother would be now where near a mortgage of that size.

Rent prices are stupid too. If we rented a typical 3 bed family home around here, it would leave us with virtually nothing left after bills too.

We bought our house about 18 months ago and we reckon we would be pushing it a bit to be able to afford it now with the rise in the market etc.

I can beat you Kiwisbird... we expect to have a £220,000 deposit (inheritance, all the equity in the house) and are struggling to find something we like at the low borrowing we'd like (we are very reluctant to go just a nudge over the £250k mark due to the stamp duty penalty, partly because we can't borrow enough to go much over £250k). How can we have such a massive deposit and still find most anything we like is beyond our budget? This is crazy!
There's a lot of chatter at one of the personal finance sites about the forces driving the continued house price boom.

LOl Luckymum I dont think it is the worst place to live though but most probably the poorest

House prices round here have gone up about 20% since we bought 6 years ago - a huge rise for remote rural scotalnd. It has gone up so much because people have been buying second homes which they live in for all of about a month a year and they lie empty the rest of the time. They only pay half council tax even though the same services still have to be provided (and we have the lowest council tax in Scotland) and local shops and even schools are closing down as there arent enough people to keep them going. And mow local people (generally with low incomes) can't afford to buy houses locally.
Arrrgh!