Poor value standard of living in London

[frakl]

Dh and I are lucky to earn well. We earn about 50k a year. We are fortunate to earn that and to not worry much about money or the like.

We have to be close to the office as work very long hours.

We are increasingly fed up with London and realising it isn’t worth it. We work 12 hour days in high stress office jobs and all we can afford is a 1 bed flat and modest savings. We live relatively well day to day, holidays, nice food.

But on 50k a year that I worked so hard to get to, I thought I’d be living a much better life than I am

£50k each or between you?
£50k joint is not that much more than NMW and less than London Living wage?

Each!

OP this is Property/DIY. Not AIBU or Chat.
What is your question exactly?
It looks like you 'each' earn 50K which even in London will get you a 2 bed provided that you're prepared to commute and scrimp to save up for a deposit. It's not hard to see where all your money's going with holidays and expensive food? I'm guessing you don't have children.

'Modest savings' in MN-land means several thousand. like the poster who said she needed 100K to feel comfortable 😂

Having said that 50K each doesn't go as far in London as it 'would' elsewhere. I couldn't hack it but also CBA earn that much so I left. I'll never earn as much as my London pals but have a nice house 30 min drive away from the city centre. Bus, train, tram, so I'm happy.

Can you get jobs outside of London that pay the same, or nearly as much? DH and I looked into moving to London as we love it, but decided against it as it just wasn't worth the cost. We now live up north where we feel well off on our income, whereas in London we would have struggled. So I do sympathise.

Are your earnings likely to go up?

If not then 12 hr days for £50k in London isn’t worth it IMO and I’d look to move somewhere less expensive- assuming your jobs are availability elsewhere.

However if you’re on £50k but on a pathway to six figure in future that’s a rather different situation. Your mention of 12 hr days in high stress office jobs makes me think you may well be in this type of job. Your choice then whether you want to stick it out for the future earnings or choose a lower paid lower stress life elsewhere.

Assuming a small deposit you could access 475k or thereabouts for a mortgage. That’s more than enough to buy a 3 bed house in the suburbs. Sure, if you want to live in Chelsea then you’ll be in a garage. Rent wise similar story. Where you living that a 1 bed flat eats so much money?

As for have to be close to the office, really? Plenty of places where a train is a 20 mins journey and I’ve always lived out of central despite having a very busy job with long hours.

Do you even live in London? 450k gets you a one bed maybe two if you re looking further away. After that it’s not London, just a mid size town with an overpriced underperforming train line couple of miles away. I exclude grotty area since OP is probably not fancingy a walk back to a dodgy area at 10pm every day back from work.

OP how old are you?

That seems like low earnings to me for 12 hour days in London. An experienced chippie or good independent courier is often more toward 60k, some even 70k.
As another poster pointed out though - if you are early on in a career that will pay well in the future it's par for the course.
Save as hard as you can for now, there is a good chance that prices of London property will moderate over the next year or so. If you choose not to stay in London, this will give you a better LTV for wherever you move to outside.
It can undoubtedly be worth slogging it out in London when you are young - but it really depends on the future roles and industry you are in ?

I don’t know why you’ve come at them with this attitude, you can absolutely get a house for 475k in stretches of SE London. If you or OP find the idea of living there monstrous and would rather leave, that’s fine, but London isn’t compromised solely of people who feel that way and it’s not absurd to point out these places exist.

Certainly do. Go on Rightmove and put in London as area, min 3 beds and max 475k. 1,032 results from all corners. You aren’t going to be living in zone 1 for that money but perfectly doable further out.

Your work sounds stressful and tiring, so I sympathise. But, on that salary, if you cut out the nice food and holidays, surely you could afford a bigger flat?

I feel for you OP. Those are decent salaries above the London average. It’s always housing costs. London prices bear little relation to worker affordability as so much of the stock is investment/owned abroad/Airbnb/etc.
Interesting that young people are increasingly rejecting London for Manchester and other cities. I live in London and manage by being old so bought decades ago but my three children will have to leave. ☹️

The point of OP is that London is unaffordable even to hard working people without family money or equity built in the earlier part of the century. To say 500k is more than enough to afford a 3 bed is not reflective of the local market, sure someone will post a right move link but guaranteed it ll be miles away from what feels like London or be in a particularly depressing area. As someone mentioned, 50k in London is borderline living wage unfortunately.

This is the Property board, so people are naturally going to suggest solutions to OP’s issue of only being able to afford a one-bed. This is going to involve doing what plenty of people on here have done and moving to a less-yummy area of London where you can afford to rent/buy a bigger property, or leaving entirely. Those are your realistic options, OP. Or you can continue on as you are for a few years and try and up your salary.

edit: you may also decide your quality of life is more enhanced by being central than it would be by having more space elsewhere, but something will realistically have to give somewhere, whether that’s location or property size.

If you just want to commiserate (understandable!), I’d flag that in the post because this is a more problem-solutions orientated board than eg AIBU or Chat.

500k is more than enough to buy a house in London. Are you one of these well if it isn’t Knightsbridge or Sloane Square then it’s full of commoners types? I’m not talking about living out in the sticks either - zone 4, possibly 3 if you get a flat rather than house. What does feels like London mean? Wandsworth as an example doesn’t perhaps feel like London - green parks, leafy streets etc, but would you say that’s a nasty place to live?

I used to live in Putney - one of the more affluent areas of London. Never had so many problems. Motorbike stolen twice, car vandalised, mugged one night (and I’m a big bloke), riot outside the house when a party got out of hand. Ditto when I lived in Battersea - Clapham riots up the end of my road and drug dealing on the corner.

What areas are you defining as ‘real London’ @Coffeecreme12 ? OP isn’t going to be able to get a house in Chelsea no, and nor should they expect to be able to. That’s the point of starting modest and working your way up.

You are mixing a lot of different things here but in short no, you can’t have a 3 bed house in Wandsworth sub-500k. Might get an ex council flat that has been butchered to fit a 3rd bedroom. Obviously not referring to Chelsea or other well know prime area, more familiar with north of the river but even zone 5 such as Barnet will not get you « plenty » of 1200-1500sqf houses for 500k. And there is no way up, the ladder is long gone, prices are mostly on a permanently high plateau

Well aware you can’t get a house in Wandsworth for 500k. If you’re admitting now that you can get a house in Barnet say, why the previous statement you made that you can’t get anything more than a one bed flat anywhere that is real London? If you’re willing to go two bed house then there really is plenty of choice. The underlying point is that a coupe with 100k a year combined wage can certainly buy, and buy pretty well in London. They will need to compromise with location and size, but to say that there is no hope of anything but the dregs of the property market is nonsense. If the OP feels that they can’t possibly be more than a ten minute walk from work in central London, then yes, they’ll be in a studio flat with the toilet in the kitchen for that money. Think what most people however on this thread are saying is that there are plenty of places with fast train links into central that they can go. My ‘less desirable’ area in zone 5 is 15 mins to Victoria, 15 to London Bridge and 10 to Clapham junction. It’s also really not as bad as people like to make out!

Is 50k a lot in London? London is expensive and the housing is even more, I don't imagine 100k between the 2 of you could go that far with a mortgage involved.

50k each ok for London. It’s certainly enough to have a life and buy a modest place to live. You’re just not buying anything on zone 1 as the OP seems to want to do.

Your title of this post is not very clear!

Sounds like both are on graduate jobs, in this case just give it a few years before buying something decent. A couple in London would need at least 150k combined to be able to save for a house deposit in zone 1-3.

We managed a small 2 bed flat in zone 3 for around 400k in 2019 on 75k combined though admittedly did live with family and were quite lean spending wise. now on £120k combined and trying to buy a bigger flat in the same area!

honestly in london what matters more is family help. Most of us have family help (rent free living in my case), which is how we managed to buy a modest two bed flat in zone 3 nw london on £75k combined in our 20s. We had a 15% deposit. earn a lot more now but that was when we first bought our FTB flat.

Thats the thing, in london, so many of us have that in addition to access to the same jobs. increasingly the people who pay rent are either immigrants (who are prepared to rough it out or also have help from back home) or from middle class families where they can expect some sort of gifted deposit in the future. Or they are not planning to stay long term. I mean, I am an immigrant but honestly if DH wasn't a born and bred Londoner with access to rent free living at home, I doubt I would have stayed in London (even though I love London!)

Fellow Londoner on 45k with DH who earns £75k. We own a 2 bed flat in zone 3 nw london (which we bought in our 20s due to living with his mother and getting married in our early 20s and pooling our salaries from day 1). Our only comfort is that DH (who is a fourth generation Londoner) bought a London flat at the same time as his mum and we can probably afford to buy her modest 2 bed + box room terraced house i.e. (600k) with the equity in our flat plus borrowing (though we would rather go for a bigger flat in a better area).

The thing about London is that it is an inheritocracy and you are competing with global money. This means your 50k salary isn't high, neither is my DH's 75k salary. DH is looking to increase his salary to 110k, that isn't high either. PAYE income cannot compete with genuine wealth which London has oodles of, unless you are in the 200k to 300k bracket.

I know 3 people whose parents bought houses for them outright and those are the ones who decided to tell me. It would take you years to even earn what they were given tax free.

What can also bring you some comfort is that it would take time but this problem is bigger than London. it may take years but it would spread. 1 in 5 family homes in the USA are bought by funds, its a matter of time this happens in the UK too. Once global money goes into the provinces, it would be the same story but without the job opportunities of London.

DH and I have learnt to accept being poorer while trying our best to maximize our income so that we don't get poorer every year. i think inequality affects everyone ultimately but at the very least in London, we are at the eye of the storm and we are able to see things more clearly so we fight harder to maintain our income. We know now that £120k is a low income so we are fighting to increase our income to £160k income and ultimately my aim is that by 2030 our existing mortgage would be the same as our household income i.e 200k (excluding any additional borrowing we may do for our next flat- would cap it at 3 times household income). if I wasn't in London, I may not realize that I am income/wealth challenged!

I think £50k each is pretty good, considering you both are in the 20% tax bracket so walk away with much more together, and keep about £25k tax free too (personal allowance). It really depends on where you live - inner or outer London. I think no matter what salary people are on, you should be saving what you can . That's just life.