Houses are affordable!

NineDeuce

capital0ne wrote: »

In 1957 the average wage was £7 10s - equates to £390 per year
The average house cost £2,000 - 5 times salary

Fast forward to now

The average wage is about £20,000 per year (starting point for a civil servant in their early 20's)
A quick search on Rightmove and you can find two bed terraced houses or similar for under £100,000 (not in London of course)

So where's the problem?

Apparently all of us oldies are now glorying in our 'cheap' houses we bought back in the day in our twenties. Well it was just as hard for us back then as it is now, so what's different?

The difference is that we had a bit of discipline, we wanted to get our own place, and we saved, we bought what we could afford and where we could afford, and we didn't look for our four bed detached forever home full of brand new furnishings.

We bought second hand and made do for the first few years.

Sadly youngsters today 'need' and iPhone X (£50/month), Netflix/Amazon Prime £100+/year), gym membership (£100+/yr), Costa coffee(£60/month), Takeaways (£100/month), new card (£199/month) plus others - this is all adding up to £5,000+/yr, which is your 5% deposit saved in one year.

It is doable - you just need to do it - get out of your parents house now and get on with your life while you know everything!:D

Your figures are so wrong that it immediately shows you how out of touch you really are. The UK average salary is £27k whereas the average house price is £220k. So almost 10 times/

Your ridiculous figures suggest that somebody living in the South of England should do a quick search in a deprived area in the North in order to sort out their living arrangements.

The difference is not discipline. The difference is irrespective of inflation, a 10% deposit on the average house is close to £25k. Did you oldies have to save up this sort of money?

Dont think so. You only have to go back to the 90s where mortgages up to 110% of the house value were offered.

Add to the fact that youngsters are paying off mortgages - just not their own but that of someone who has some capital to invest in a second home and sit back and watch money come in.

NineDeuce

capital0ne wrote: »

and the comments from the above article said:

I am a millennial home owner, but I was still very much agreeing with this article until I got to the point where the reporter says: but why SHOULD we have to make these sacrifices when the older generation didn’t have to?

Err two points:

(1) My mum bought her first flat in her 20s. She worked two jobs and ate cabbage soup and coffee for the best part of a year (no joke! She must have been fun to be around...!) to save up a deposit. She certainly didn’t have any holidays etc.

(2) Following on from that, the reporter sounds so utterly entitled that she is giving the rest of us a bad name. YES the housing market is insane. NO it’s not our fault. YES the Gov should assist. However, saying ‘why should we sacrifice the stuff we like’ is so grating. I didn’t eat out or go on holiday when I saved up for my flat. I now earn a lot more so I can afford to have nice holidays etc., but if there is a possibility of you owning a property, accept the fact that it might be a bit !!!! for a year or two - as it was for me, as it was for my mum in the 60s - and stop expecting it to land in your lap without any sacrifice.
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Olive
Totally agree👍🏼
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Well said.
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Couldn't agree more. What I would like to see is articles from people like yourself who have managed it and prove it is possible.
Something proactive and aspirational.
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100% agree. You work hard for what you want. No one is gonna give it away for free. Gobsmacked at the last paragraph of this article.
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"It's the responsibility of politicians and others in power to solve the housing crisis..." Ugh. When you write a sentence and start with, "It's the responsibility of anyone-but-yourself," you should re-evaluate you life.
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:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:beer:

The only thing I can partially agree with is that the system needs to change. More efforts should be made to allow people to get onto the housing market without having to save a huge deposit.

This is what is the main problem and what defeats the point of your original, fairly arrogant post. You have gone from silly generalisations of blaming people for having Iphones to saying that it is the system. Quite a backtrack...

You have absolutely nothing to back up the fact that all of the people are generalising about have all of the luxuries that you claim, while simultaneously, you have no evidence to back up that the notion that all of your generation were a lot harder working and were much more frugal. The simple, hard facts show that they had a system for buying housing that gave them an incomparable advantage over people today.

ukcarper

Here is graph showing houses price to earnings

getmore4less

Cakeguts wrote: »

This graph proves that it is easier to buy a house NOW than it was in the 50s, 60s 70s and 80s as a bigger percentage of the population have managed to do it.

It shows it is harder now as the numbers are declining.

It was easy when the numbers were going up.

It is not how many but how it is changing up or down

The reason there are more now IS because it was easier to buy in the 50s-90s

All those people now who think boomers had it easier need to look at this graph. The people who have had it easiest are those born after 1970. They are not boomers. The easiest age for people to buy was for those born in the 1980s who were in their 20s in the early 2000s. Also not boomers.

This graph shows changes tenure so the increase in owners is owner occupiers not landlords. So basically if you can't buy a house now you are living in an area and doing a job in that area that would never have allowed you to buy a house.

BY the 2000 the easy buy days were over.
FTB numbers started to decline in 1999 and average age started climbing.

If you remove the right to buy (which peaked in 1989) numbers from the 80s which will generally be older households getting into ownership the numbers will probably show a slow down even earlier


Three of the factors that made own ownership more possible since the war are.
Availability, more houses were getting built.
Affordability, people were begining to get better pay as more white collor worker jobs emerged and skill levels in some blue collor increased.
and probably the most significant
Borrowing more money was available to borrowers making a purchase possible.


here is a link(if it works) to CML FTB report from 2005 which covers the reasons for the FTB declines in to 2000s onward.
https://www.cml.org.uk/documents/understanding-first-time-buyers-report/pdf_pub_resreps_56.pdf.pdf

Red-Squirrel_2

Needs a source.

ukcarper

Red-Squirrel wrote: »

Needs a source.

Can’t find source nationwide graph here which mirrors original only lower.
http://blogs.thisismoney.co.uk/2009/07/house-prices-on-radio-4-moneybox-.html

Latest figures available in nationwide hpi report.

NineDeuce

ukcarper wrote: »

Here is graph showing houses price to earnings

Did you just draw that on Excel?

Average house price: -
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-for-august-2017

Perhaps you could draw another doodle showing the average UK salary to be above £40k....

#fakenews

fairy_lights

capital0ne wrote: »

Sadly youngsters today 'need' and iPhone X (£50/month), Netflix/Amazon Prime £100+/year), gym membership (£100+/yr), Costa coffee(£60/month), Takeaways (£100/month), new card (£199/month) plus others - this is all adding up to £5,000+/yr, which is your 5% deposit saved in one year.

It is doable - you just need to do it - get out of your parents house now and get on with your life while you know everything!:D

Yeah, everyone under 30 spends hundreds of pounds on coffee and phones, you've got us all sussed.
Reminds me of all those old people who complain about how they can't afford heating, when we all know they're just !!!!ing their pension money away on Worthers Originals and subscriptions to the Readers Digest.

ukcarper

NineDeuce wrote: »

Did you just draw that on Excel?

Average house price: -
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-for-august-2017

Perhaps you could draw another doodle showing the average UK salary to be above £40k....

#fakenews

I can’t vote for accuracy of that graph but the nationwide I linked to uses median full time male earnings not average earnings for all, I would guess that graph is similar. What it show is prices have gone up and down in past and although they are now at their highest they have been high in the past.

Also you did notice it ended in 2010

NineDeuce

ukcarper wrote: »

I can’t vote for accuracy of that graph but the nationwide I linked to uses median full time male earnings not average earnings for all, I would guess that graph is similar. What it show is prices have gone up and down in past and although they are now at their highest they have been high in the past.

So in other words, it's bogus, as it misses out half of the population, it uses figures which are wrong and you cant vouch for the accuracy of it.