How times have changed....

dopester

1echidna wrote: »

I can remember being terribly resentful of the difficulty us youngsters had in buying a home and how much less the older generation had to pay (didn't quite realise the effect of inflation and how it would benefit me in the long run). We paid 20k in 1980 and have just sold (touchwood as contracts have not yet been exchanged) for 290k. Not quite a doubling in price every seven years but not far short.

Many of you have experienced the inflationary long-wave. Including cold-war inflation, with military spending / investment at high levels.

We've entered the deflationary long-wave now, and some houses will give up all the inflationary gains of the last 50 years as the old paradigm ends. STR if you have any sense.

The Persistence of Inflation Since World War II.

The remarkable feature of the postwar world has been the magnitude and persistence of inflation. All previous inflations in American history were wiped away with amazing regularity in deflations.

Many people will tell you that this means deflation is a thing of the past, as extinct as Herbert Hoover's high collar or his wife's corset. To us, the expectation of perpetual inflation is only slightly less credible than perpetual motion. But ours is an old-fashioned view, influenced by the old-fashioned hunch that "what goes up must come down." In a world of leveraged buyouts and multi-trillion dollar debts, this view has taken on the character of contrary thinking.

Here are the facts. The trend in inflation has been up since the bottom of the last depression, a long time by the scale of a human life. Taking an even longer view, prices have been rising for five hundred years, over the whole period of of Western predominance in the world, but never have risen in quite the way they have in the past seventy years.

Amy systematic explanation of the inflation cycle must include some account of the role of war. Inflation is the monetary footprint of war.

MyLastFiver

Back in 1999 I was living in London, fresh out of uni and on a wage of £16000. I almost bought a 1-bed flat in Sydenham for £48000. HSBC approved the mortgage and everything but I chickened out because it meant I would be tied down to a job I hated. Now I haven't looked at house prices in SE London lately but I bet you can't get a flat for less than £150000.

I could have bought the flat and subsequently made a killing but, being young and stupid, I would have p1ssed it all away anyway, and probably would have topped myself having to commute into the West End every day to suck up to rich people for £16k a year.

diable

I bought my first house in London Shepherds Bush for £48k 4 bed 2 receps lovely garden back in 1986 my Mum paid £5k for her 20 years earlier lol

diable

MyLastFiver wrote: »

Back in 1999 I was living in London, fresh out of uni and on a wage of £16000. I almost bought a 1-bed flat in Sydenham for £48000. HSBC approved the mortgage and everything but I chickened out because it meant I would be tied down to a job I hated. Now I haven't looked at house prices in SE London lately but I bet you can't get a flat for less than £150000.

I could have bought the flat and subsequently made a killing but, being young and stupid, I would have p1ssed it all away anyway, and probably would have topped myself having to commute into the West End every day to suck up to rich people for £16k a year.

Are you still on £16k a year though?

harryhound

dopester wrote: »

Many of you have experienced the inflationary long-wave. Including cold-war inflation, with military spending / investment at high levels.

We've entered the deflationary long-wave now, and some houses will give up all the inflationary gains of the last 50 years as the old paradigm ends. STR if you have any sense.

Fiat currency was not available in "the good old days".
An economy based on gold or silver is not so prone to "quantitive easing".

The Southern States did not manage to create an inflation proof currency based on cotton:D

Davesnave

dopester wrote: »

Many of you have experienced the inflationary long-wave. Including cold-war inflation, with military spending / investment at high levels.

We've entered the deflationary long-wave now, and some houses will give up all the inflationary gains of the last 50 years as the old paradigm ends. STR if you have any sense.

STR can make sense just for the short term. For the longer term, the attractiveness of STR surely depends where you are in another cycle: the human biological one!;)

wymondham

i8change wrote: »

A few years back I read an Estate agents article in a newspaper that said house prices roughly double every 7 years.

..... few peoples wages do I would suspect (especially in these times!!), hence the probable reason why it just gets harder..?

torontoboy45

£37k for a 3bd det. garage double d/way in '94. extended/improved cost another £30k. mortgage near completion. what a clever little torontoboy I am.......not. but how useful to have bought at a time when the banks and the market only shafted people gently.
time rolled by and I concentrated on the mortgage and blithely ignored the market.
but then daughter grew up and decided in favour of her own pad.
it was only at this point that I started to pay attention; 'bloody hell, how much?!?'.
decided to re-educate myself by scouring the financial and discussion sites (such as this) and focus on the more erudite comments.
and it's paid off!
daughter persuaded to hold back (from jan 08) and watched a 20%ish fall.

more falls to come, and no mistake.

lostinrates

My parents bought in 79, for I think£30k (but my mind might be playing games with me there) a delapidated but mortgageable five/six bed vitorian semi in west London. My fathers wage was not exciting: he was not a City banker or the like, but worked, in the public sector. They sold in the 80s for a lot more than double the price, lucky them!

Said house is now either four or six flats, one came on the market in the last couple of years, at peak really, and DH's higher than average salary (comparable job/slary a lot nicer than my dad's) would not have been sufficient to by the flat in that house.

SingleSue

My parents bought their 3 bedroom semi in 1969 for 3.5k, at peak similar ones were being sold for over 200k.

I bought a 1 bed rabbit hutch of a house in 1990 for 41k, after dropping down to around 24k in the last recession, they were going for 110k+ at peak (Apr 2008 here) although most the price increases were from 1998 onwards.