The generation poorer than their parents

First_Time_Buyer_Guru

Road Hog has summed up beautifully why pouring over newspaper articles regarding house prices and the like can be a little dangerous if not taken with a pinch of salt.

Flashy headlines sell newspapers!

fc123

ukcarper wrote: »

I'd like to add

In terms of wages the first house I bought would cost about 40% more now but the mortgage rate was twice what it is now. You had to save a deposit and with the tighter lending restrictions it was just as hard to get the mortgage you required. So I don’t think it was as easy as Graham imagines.

There is so much fixation on the ticket price of houses (in each decade).......previous generations (including Geneers Eau de Boomers) had just as much difficulty/struggle back then as now but for all the different reasons that have been posted.

DervProf wrote: »

Some people will say they aren't bothered by other's success, just to cover up their jealousy. I used to be slightly jealous of those who had better cars, computers, houses etc. .

I used to be more jealous when I was younger.......maybe jealous is too strong a word....more envious. Then I felt bad for feeling it (having been brought up on 'Thou Shalt not Covet...'' ) so it was a double whammy of guilt and envy which then just makes you miserable.
Pointless feeling that I got rid of in my late 30's.

zagubov wrote: »

Car technology hasn't peaked - if they'd improved the way planes have they'd be technological marvels- instead we had 100 years of market fashion-driven changes with slight burst of progress when governments insisted that standards improve. When the mini Metro came out 30 years ago with its 50+ mpg fuel efficiency it took decades for other cars to even try to catch up and we know perfectly well that loads of modern cars don't come close. In some countries (e.g UK and America) governments got rid of efficient public transport systems like tram networks so that less efficient modes like cars have less competition.

Our houses didn't peak- they're not of European quality as they got hijacked as dual-role objects; a shelter for a buyer to live inside, and a resale investment/savings vehicle for worried citizens in a country where we don't trust the government to run a bath let alone a pension scheme that'll keep us secure in old age.

There's no quadruple glazing like in some Scandinavian countries and there's not enough room to swing a cat in a typical room. In some areas we just subdivide existing buildings instead of building accommodation suited as proper dwellings for modern household sizes. We all see houses everywhere with "garages" that wouldn't hold a post-war bubble-car let alone anything modern - they're just built-in sheds for storing old tins of pains now.

DervProf, if you haven't already done so you might want to have a glance at Danny Dorling's So You Think You know Britain - I think it covers a few of the points you've made from #2 onwards.

That's a really good post...hadn't considered some of those things before.
**************
I would prefer to live now than in Medieval times as I would have probably been a peasant and died of plague before the age of 25.

bodmil

ILW wrote: »

How many of the current "younger generation" would want to live a basic 70s lifestyle?

Many of us are living the equivalent by staying at home for years.

twirlypinky

I think part of the problem is the constant apparent need/requirement for bigger and better houses, to the extent that families become back to front in their houses. My Grandad rattles around in his big five bedroomed house, that was once full and is now empty. My parents struggled to afford a four bedroomed house when the had four children living at home (who have pretty much all moved out now) and are now filling it with agas, expensive gadgets, a fancy pants conservatory and now a pool.

My sister and her husband are living in a tiny one bedroomed flat while they're both still at uni. Their job prospects aren't looking good, and they both have massive loans.

I'm living in a tiny one bedroomed house with my husband, despite having moved out at 18. i bought a house with my ex, made a bit of money on it. By the time i moved out of the house and it was sold, it'd lost every penny of equity (2008).

My husband and i are desperate to move, but his house has also fallen in value and has lost his entire deposit. At the ages of 29 and 37 we've having to start the whole saving for a deposit process all over again.

We do not have fancy cars (a fiesta and a Ka, not new). We do not have a fancy lifestyle, I don't even own an ipod, and i saved up to buy him his first one for Christmas last year. If we eat out we only do it with a voucher. We're desperate to start a family, but can't until we move because we don't ahve that elusive deposit yet, and even if we did we don't know that we'd manage to sell our house.

Okay, so maybe things are easier now than they were then, but it doesn't feel like it to me. To me it feels wrong that in this apparently better world i'm 29 and can't afford children, yet my mother had had four by now this age and my nan had had her two.

I think we've reached a stage in this country that we've not been in before. When the people that are elderly now were young, far fewer people owned their own homes. This is a kind of first that we're reaching. Old people are in massive houses they've worked hard to buy, and don't want to downsize. And would we want them to? If they tried to all downsize they'd be buying the houses that the first time buyers desperately need.

I don't have a solution for this problem, i just think it's getting worse.

The other thing i notice is the change in generations spending. I'm 29, my parents are in their fifties, and my grandparents if they were all still with us, would be in their late seventies and eighties. That grandparent generation are still thrifty. My grandad, despite living in a massive house, hates waste. He only heats the three rooms he uses and is careful with what he spends his money on. He has said to me several times that he wants something to leave behind, which is sweet really.

My parents and their generation on the other hand don't seem to feel this need. I'm not one of those "don't spend my inheritance" types, at the end of the day they've earnt it it's their money. But it's not all is it? My parents inherited thousands and thousands from the thrifty grandparnets that have passed on. They're spunking all of it. It seems to me that my parents and their friends are the ones with the beemers and the three foreign holidays a year and the massive tellies, and the big houses. My friends and i are the ones watching all this happen, while trying to save every penny.

No one has mentioned the cost of child care either. I've got a friend who is going to work three days a week to earn twenty pounds, because she pays the rest out on childcare. Yet when she was a baby her nan looked after her. I see this over and over again...

Just interesting i think.

Graham_Devon

ILW wrote: »

Only compared t the last few years. Most things are much cheaper than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

I actually had a think about this....and while you may well be correct (I'm not sure, looking at some of the figures I have seen), there are items that are classed as what I'd call "near essential" today, that come out of monthly budgets, that didn't used to be needed.

By those items, I mean landlines, internet and mobile phones.

It's ok saying you don't need them, but life IS harder now than it was if you don't have them, and no one is including them in living costs for comparions, just simply ignoring them, or berating people for having them.

Why? Libraries have closed, meaning access to informaiton without the internet is harder. Telehone boxes and public pay phones are dissapearing, meaning being without mobiles is harder than it used to be. Landlines....well you need one for the internet.

So theres 3 extra costs which are all, in my view, pretty much needed if you want to live a normal run of the mill life today. It would certainly be harder without.

I think people are looking past this and just looking at a bag of sugar and comparing the cost. What we need to also do, is compare living standards and requirements.

I'd guess there are more monthly outgoings now than there was when a bag of sugar was 10p cheaper in relative terms.

Another comparison is childcare. I'm putting my son through it now, and some of the "baby boomer" generation I work with were simply aghast to how much it costs. "We had a free playgroup in our day where you could leave them for the morning". Mum stated she just had something going with a friend who ran a nursery from home for silly money....which you can't do now.

People say "fuel cost x amount at the height of the oil crisis in 1970" but totally ignore the change in culture and the explosion of commuting thats required to get to your jobs these days...

So many things have changed, while so many of these things are simply ignored in the comparisons.

zagubov

twirlypinky wrote: »

We do not have fancy cars (a fiesta and a Ka, not new). We do not have a fancy lifestyle, I don't even own an ipod, and i saved up to buy him his first one for Christmas last year. If we eat out we only do it with a voucher. We're desperate to start a family, but can't until we move because we don't ahve that elusive deposit yet, and even if we did we don't know that we'd manage to sell our house.

Okay, so maybe things are easier now than they were then, but it doesn't feel like it to me. To me it feels wrong that in this apparently better world i'm 29 and can't afford children, yet my mother had had four by now this age and my nan had had her two.

I think we've reached a stage in this country that we've not been in before. When the people that are elderly now were young, far fewer people owned their own homes. This is a kind of first that we're reaching. Old people are in massive houses they've worked hard to buy, and don't want to downsize. And would we want them to? If they tried to all downsize they'd be buying the houses that the first time buyers desperately need.

I don't have a solution for this problem, i just think it's getting worse.

No one has mentioned the cost of child care either. I've got a friend who is going to work three days a week to earn twenty pounds, because she pays the rest out on childcare. Yet when she was a baby her nan looked after her. I see this over and over again...

Just interesting i think.

Well said, and the effect of this on the population's worth thinking about.
Older people are often rattling around in "big" houses with too many rooms. They rarely downsize.

Even starter homes are unaffordable, and renting doesn't always allow would-be buyers to save deposits fast enough.

It used to be people were born in the country and died in the city, meaning it was easier to raise and house growing families in the country and the children would seek work in the city, having smaller families as the housing pressure takes its toll. It's why urbanisation helps limit population growth.

In a way, the cities hinterland fed a labour supply into the cities. Now though there's no large families in the country- its rich retirees retiring from the rat race and having no kids. People in the cities aren't having big families as there's no room to house them.

It's the most badly-distributed housing stock a country could have, and you've got to wonder how the country can sustain itself like this.

I think Alvin was spot on to do a programme on this topic. I'm worried its taken so long to happen.

ukcarper

twirlypinky wrote: »

I think part of the problem is the constant apparent need/requirement for bigger and better houses, to the extent that families become back to front in their houses. My Grandad rattles around in his big five bedroomed house, that was once full and is now empty. My parents struggled to afford a four bedroomed house when the had four children living at home (who have pretty much all moved out now) and are now filling it with agas, expensive gadgets, a fancy pants conservatory and now a pool.

My sister and her husband are living in a tiny one bedroomed flat while they're both still at uni. Their job prospects aren't looking good, and they both have massive loans.

I'm living in a tiny one bedroomed house with my husband, despite having moved out at 18. i bought a house with my ex, made a bit of money on it. By the time i moved out of the house and it was sold, it'd lost every penny of equity (2008).

My husband and i are desperate to move, but his house has also fallen in value and has lost his entire deposit. At the ages of 29 and 37 we've having to start the whole saving for a deposit process all over again.

We do not have fancy cars (a fiesta and a Ka, not new). We do not have a fancy lifestyle, I don't even own an ipod, and i saved up to buy him his first one for Christmas last year. If we eat out we only do it with a voucher. We're desperate to start a family, but can't until we move because we don't ahve that elusive deposit yet, and even if we did we don't know that we'd manage to sell our house.

Okay, so maybe things are easier now than they were then, but it doesn't feel like it to me. To me it feels wrong that in this apparently better world i'm 29 and can't afford children, yet my mother had had four by now this age and my nan had had her two.

I think we've reached a stage in this country that we've not been in before. When the people that are elderly now were young, far fewer people owned their own homes. This is a kind of first that we're reaching. Old people are in massive houses they've worked hard to buy, and don't want to downsize. And would we want them to? If they tried to all downsize they'd be buying the houses that the first time buyers desperately need.

I don't have a solution for this problem, i just think it's getting worse.

The other thing i notice is the change in generations spending. I'm 29, my parents are in their fifties, and my grandparents if they were all still with us, would be in their late seventies and eighties. That grandparent generation are still thrifty. My grandad, despite living in a massive house, hates waste. He only heats the three rooms he uses and is careful with what he spends his money on. He has said to me several times that he wants something to leave behind, which is sweet really.

My parents and their generation on the other hand don't seem to feel this need. I'm not one of those "don't spend my inheritance" types, at the end of the day they've earnt it it's their money. But it's not all is it? My parents inherited thousands and thousands from the thrifty grandparnets that have passed on. They're spunking all of it. It seems to me that my parents and their friends are the ones with the beemers and the three foreign holidays a year and the massive tellies, and the big houses. My friends and i are the ones watching all this happen, while trying to save every penny.

No one has mentioned the cost of child care either. I've got a friend who is going to work three days a week to earn twenty pounds, because she pays the rest out on childcare. Yet when she was a baby her nan looked after her. I see this over and over again...

Just interesting i think.

I think that this site must be populated by rich people I’m a boomer and I have reasonable house that is to big for my needs, but I own no other property, drive around in a 7 year old car and cannot afford to go abroad on holidays 2 or 3 times a year. Of the school friends I keep in contact with only one has a detached house and that is in Norfolk where they are relatively cheap, 2 live in ex council houses and 1 lives in social housing. We are all normal working class people who have worked hard all our life.

ukcarper

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I actually had a think about this....and while you may well be correct (I'm not sure, looking at some of the figures I have seen), there are items that are classed as what I'd call "near essential" today, that come out of monthly budgets, that didn't used to be needed.

By those items, I mean landlines, internet and mobile phones.

It's ok saying you don't need them, but life IS harder now than it was if you don't have them, and no one is including them in living costs for comparions, just simply ignoring them, or berating people for having them.

Why? Libraries have closed, meaning access to informaiton without the internet is harder. Telehone boxes and public pay phones are dissapearing, meaning being without mobiles is harder than it used to be. Landlines....well you need one for the internet.

So theres 3 extra costs which are all, in my view, pretty much needed if you want to live a normal run of the mill life today. It would certainly be harder without.

I think people are looking past this and just looking at a bag of sugar and comparing the cost. What we need to also do, is compare living standards and requirements.

I'd guess there are more monthly outgoings now than there was when a bag of sugar was 10p cheaper in relative terms.

Another comparison is childcare. I'm putting my son through it now, and some of the "baby boomer" generation I work with were simply aghast to how much it costs. "We had a free playgroup in our day where you could leave them for the morning". Mum stated she just had something going with a friend who ran a nursery from home for silly money....which you can't do now.

People say "fuel cost x amount at the height of the oil crisis in 1970" but totally ignore the change in culture and the explosion of commuting thats required to get to your jobs these days...

So many things have changed, while so many of these things are simply ignored in the comparisons.

I had to move and commute 20 miles to be able to buy a house in 1972.

wotsthat

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I actually had a think about this....and while you may well be correct (I'm not sure, looking at some of the figures I have seen), there are items that are classed as what I'd call "near essential" today, that come out of monthly budgets, that didn't used to be needed.

By those items, I mean landlines, internet and mobile phones.

It's ok saying you don't need them, but life IS harder now than it was if you don't have them, and no one is including them in living costs for comparions, just simply ignoring them, or berating people for having them.

You can get all these for less than £20/ month. There were landlines in the 1970's run by the nationalised GPO where you paid through the nose for the service. Much cheaper today.

wotsthat

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Another comparison is childcare. I'm putting my son through it now, and some of the "baby boomer" generation I work with were simply aghast to how much it costs./QUOTE]

I know from experience that childcare is stupidly expensive.

The question you have to ask yourself is "is it worth it". You've answered this question with a yes.

It's worth it because it's an investment in your families present and future finances. By spending this money the main child carer, usually the woman, is staying in the world or work and is still in line for bonuses, pay rises and promotions.

These opportunities were certainly not available to women in the same way in the 1970's.

When my wife went back to work after children we didn't have any family that could help out in any significant way so the kids went to full-time nursery. Financially we were only just up on the deal but if my wife didn't work she would have missed some of the opportunities that came along.

You don't get that time back but, financially, having this option has certainly paid off over the longer term (and my kids are still only teenagers)