Budget

RickyB2000

Hold on a sec. On other threads where I have dared to suggest housing may be the problem I am shot down. It was much harder for those over 40s to buy a house in their day, I am told. It is much easier today. Young people (and people on benefits) don't have a house / can't afford their rent / have a poor pension because they buy iPhones and go on holidays and all that other stuff. If they just learnt to save a bit more, tighten their belts they would have it easy.

Reminds me of the 'when I was a lad we were so poor....' Sketch. Though maybe it goes - when I was a lad we were so poor we only had a 2 bed flat in zone 1 in London

robin61

RickyB2000 wrote: »

Hold on a sec. On other threads where I have dared to suggest housing may be the problem I am shot down. It was much harder for those over 40s to buy a house in their day, I am told. It is much easier today. Young people (and people on benefits) don't have a house / can't afford their rent / have a poor pension because they buy iPhones and go on holidays and all that other stuff. If they just learnt to save a bit more, tighten their belts they would have it easy

Reminds me of the 'when I was a lad we were so poor....' Sketch. Though maybe it goes - when I was a lad we were so poor we only had a 2 bed flat in zone 1 in London

Well personally I wouldn' t want to swap places with the younger generation from that perspective in spite of higher interest rates in the past.
A big part of what enables me to look forward to a decent and hopefully early retirement is the fact that the mortgage is paid off. If I had a big mortgage or rent to pay I am sure that would not be the case. It is difficult to get anywhere to rent around here for less than £900 a month and anything semi decent is more like £1500.00 that would be a huge chunk out of my pension.

Snakey

It's nonsense to make it into a generational thing. Plenty of people over 40 couldn't afford to buy. Some never did buy, and will rent all their lives - they're in the same position as somebody under 40 who will be renting all their lives. Some only managed to save more recently and bought at recent house prices - they're in the same position as somebody under 40 who has only recently bought.

Except, of course, the older people in those two situations are not quite in the same position because they have fewer working years ahead of them in which to pay off a mortgage.

Any proposals for sorting out the housing market that require us all to assume that all over-40's are sitting pretty while all under-40's are completely stuffed, are patently stupid because life just isn't that conveniently tidy. It's like pretending we all have generous final salary pensions or something.

If what you mean is something like "people who bought before 2000" and "people who did not", then say that. Age, or generation labels, are a lazy shorthand that detract from your argument.

Snakey

robin61 wrote: »

Interesting article here about the LISA.
http://money.aol.co.uk/2016/03/18/steve-webb-lifetime-isa-means-working-until-you-drop/

Some good points made.

He's basically saying "this free cheese sandwich offered by the government is a lousy deal for anybody who already gets a free three-course cooked meal in their work's canteen" - and presenting this as if he's found some major flaw in the entire system and it's all one big con. As if anybody getting free hot meals would turn them down in favour of a sandwich without realising that it wasn't as good (apart from in certain specific situations when it might be more suitable, such as if you're planning a picnic).

I don't think there was ever any suggestion from George Osborne or anybody else, that everybody under 40 should stop paying into their workplace pension and start paying into a LISA, or that doing so will make them better off. My impression was that LISAs are being squarely marketed as an alternative to a standard ISA for anybody who would otherwise be using a standard ISA to save for a first home or for their retirement. Did I miss a speech or a press release?

RickyB2000

Snakey wrote: »

It's nonsense to make it into a generational thing. Plenty of people over 40 couldn't afford to buy. Some never did buy, and will rent all their lives - they're in the same position as somebody under 40 who will be renting all their lives. Some only managed to save more recently and bought at recent house prices - they're in the same position as somebody under 40 who has only recently bought.

Except, of course, the older people in those two situations are not quite in the same position because they have fewer working years ahead of them in which to pay off a mortgage.

Any proposals for sorting out the housing market that require us all to assume that all over-40's are sitting pretty while all under-40's are completely stuffed, are patently stupid because life just isn't that conveniently tidy. It's like pretending we all have generous final salary pensions or something.

If what you mean is something like "people who bought before 2000" and "people who did not", then say that. Age, or generation labels, are a lazy shorthand that detract from your argument.

Housing has always been a problem and property has always been a key divider into the haves and have not. I don't disagree. I just take exception to the 'it is so easy today, kids just need to stop buying iPhones' argument that I keep hearing on threads. It is and has always been hard!

Though, I would say by using a specific date you actually are making it a generational thing. Anyone under the age of what, 33, has never had the opportunity to buy before 2000. So by definition this whole 'generation' is completely excluded. Anyone over this age had the opportunity, whether they took it or not is a different matter, but they had the opportunity. Having the opportunity and not taking it (for whatever reason) is arguably very different to not having the opportunity at all.

Snakey

That works both ways, though. It's easy for late-Generation-Y to blame not buying a house (or not having a good job, not having any savings, not going to university, not being in settled relationships, being in debt etc) on "the economy" or "the baby boomers" or "the government" or whatever. A handy scapegoat that - while it's undoubtedly true for many - allows a person to conveniently disregard the fact that they themselves might not have been able to achieve or sustain that particular thing anyway.

No such hiding place for the "failures" of my generation!

I agree that in the context of wanting to buy a £200k house on a joint salary of £35k, buying a smartphone is neither here nor there. You do have to be careful, though, not to buy in to the "everything's rubbish so I might as well not bother" rhetoric. There was a pretty big recession in the early 1990's, just as my lot were all reaching adulthood and looking for our first jobs. Plenty of people fell by the wayside during those few years and never got back to where they'd have been had they been born a few years earlier or later. Some of these people were unlucky, but there were also many who seized on "there are no decent jobs, what's the point?" as justification to not save, not study, not work, only to find themselves with a mountain to climb a few years later when things picked back up again.

It's interesting, too, to look at all the sweeping statements out there about how anybody over 40 has no excuse other than their own inadequacy for not owning property, that make absolutely no mention of that recession (or the property crash that accompanied it, which burned a lot of people and meant that buying came with the real risk that you'd be stuck in an unsuitable starter home for years due to negative equity) or dismiss it as not having been a big deal. We don't know what's on the horizon - the next generation might well look at the current one in the same way!

RickyB2000

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying it was easier in the past. Just responding to the fact that it is difficult not to end up talking in terms of generations, even when trying not to. My parents certainly didn't have it easy, during the 90s recession. They will probably struggle a bit in retirement. I am sure they probably looked at their parents generation in the same way (and vice versa).

Owning property has never really been easy. If it was, everyone would be in huge 6 bed mansions. I do wonder if a lot of this is actually fairly wealthy people of today (e.g. Professionals) comparing themselves to the fairly wealthy people of yesterday. Rather than less wealthy people of today comparing themselves with less wealthy people of yersterday etc

Snakey

Yeah, not wanting to get all Guardian but it's the middle class kids who are struggling to reconcile themselves to the reality that they can't have what their middle class parents had. The rich kids are still fine, and the working class kids would never have expected big houses and flash careers anyway. But the middle-class kids were often the first in the family to go to university, and this was generally seen as a passport to a better life than the parents had - and expectations were set accordingly.

Today's late-twenties/thirty-somethings are the kids of the tail end of the Boomers - the last generation where you could have one working parent in an unimpressive office job and still be in a three-bed detached before thirty. I (daughter of the earliest Boomers) felt it very unfair that I could only afford an ex-council semi despite both of us working, so how much worse must it feel for Millennials who are in two-bed terraces or flats?

It's going to take some getting used to, but it's not going to go away any time soon. The blessing of the human race is its ability to adapt to change, and anyone who can't get over having been denied the 1970's traditional nuclear family suburban bliss and jobs for life, and roll up their sleeves and make the best of what's in front of them, is in for a miserable time - smartphone or not. What the answer is, though, I don't know. More building? More social housing?

RickyB2000

To bring it back on the topic of the budget, one thing I have noticed is how complex it appears to be. There are allowances coming out of the woodwork for everything. It is going to take for ever to sort out finances. Maybe a boon to accountants? What do we have now

Personal allowance
Capital gains tax allowance
Dividend allowance
Savings allowance
Online selling allowance
Renting a Room allowance
Seperate rent something allowance
Annual Pension allowance
Lifetime pension allowance
ISA allowance

Then there are a multitude of ISAs

Cash
Stocks
Help to buy
Lifetime ISA
Financial ISA

It starts to get to the point where there is so many confusing and different products that I would rather just spend my money than try and navigate it all

Rich2808

I think we are all in agreement here - essentially.

I just hate these age related handouts - bar obviously state pensions.

Plenty of people over 40 don't own - two of the five main party London mayoral candidates are in their forties and rent. Yet the two leading candidates own homes worth millions. It may be via choice or circumstance or relationship break ups or who knows.

You might think the government might wish to give them access to the starter home scheme or the LISA - as if they remain renting into retirement they are going to cost the state shedloads in housing benefit.

But then we clearly lack the Chancellor's judgement!!!!!