An article dated 19 May 2015 shows the average house price here in N. Ireland is £145,000, for a semi in our local area it is around £120,00.
Still below the values pre the 2007 recession.

My son bought his house before meeting his long term girlfriend who has now lived with him for 3 years. They cannot get joint names onto the property and officially share a mortgage because he is £30,000 in negative equity. He would need £30k as a deposit for them to take out a new joint mortgage.

Google tells me the average UK price is £273,000
with £284,00 being the average in England.

What we need to compare is the average price of a starter home, the overall average price is weighted by the higher end of the market, which is not for many first time buyers.

Just Googled the average first time house = £160k

Our first house was £2,500 at a time when DH was earning £950 a year as a new graduate. Two and a half.

What does a new graduate get these days?

Our first house was £3450, I was earning £16/week (£832/yr) just over 4x salary, plus I had a 94 mile round trip to work every day (thank goodness petrol was cheap then). We did struggle for a couple of years until I found a job locally.

Were Mrs P's earnings counted for a mortgage?

I can't remember now, but because we moved so far, she had to give her job up. We saved for 3 years to get a deposit, hardly went out during that period. Our first house was a wreck, it had been empty for 3 years, needed loads of work.

Average graduate salary is £18-£24k, so with a starter home averaging £160k between 7 and 9 times their salary. Far worse than your 4x pompa
and your 2and halfx Elegran. That's always supposing they can get a job of course. There are affordable houses in the country but they tend to be in areas of high unemployment. My sons are earning enough to buy a house up here unfortunately they are working in London where they couldn't afford a garage!

We were unable to buy a house in Enfield, where we worked as we would have needed 8x our salary, that was why we had to move so far away to what was at that time a very cheap area. Only one of our friends stayed in the area, and that was because they had an inheritance.

We went to see DS today, because he was having a bit of a crisis. He loves his course, but said that after two years he realises that he is never going to make a living by composing. We asked what he wanted to do, and he is going to start again, with computer sciences. We asked him how he intended to fund it, as his student loan will come to an end, he said that he is going to keep pestering PC world to give him a job, as well as doing OTC, and he is going to save every penny he can. I thought it was very adult of him, I was quite impressed. I have always encouraged him to follow his dream because I know how damning my parents were of my own aspirations, but I am so pleased that he figured it out for himself.

Even so, on the way home we passed a static caravan being carted off to its new site, and were wondering if we should be trying to buy the land at the bottom of the garden to put one on, in case either of the DCs need it.

Let's say my house is worth £300,000. And that I have mortgage payments of £500, that will be paid off in 15 years when DBH retires. Our house would be ours.

Rents around here are at least £1000 per month and more. How on earth do people afford them on a pension? If we sold our mythical house, we would only have a roof over our heads for less than three years. Even if rents halved, on one couple's basic pension they would struggle to pay £500 per month. DD and SiL rent, and I really worry in case one of them becomes ill and they can't afford their rent. Yet their landlords can recoup the cost of the house in three years. Six in Cambridge, where DS rents, as even small houses there cost £600,000. However - there are five of them squished into his house. There are some very greedy landlords out there. Personally I would rather buy than rent any day, if at all possible.

I think I misheard average house price as being £180,000 instead of £280,000. Either that, or I heard that a first time house was £180,000.
Sorry folks.

My son rents with his partner and 2 stepsons I hate him doing that, I is lovley house but 1,200 month before c tax 175 and all normal bills don't think they will ever be able to save.

Boys father pays small amount so guess my son does the rest and his partner had family allowance stopped due to our sons salary see s so wrong as they. It his children and she works full time but has debts from her. Marriage break up. They work so hard and nothing show for it.

Yes, trisher houses now cost two lots of income. When mortgages were only taken out on the assumption of one income, a young couple didn't even think of bidding for anything above what they knew they could borrow, and there were no takers for anything with a price above that. Then the amount a couple could borrow was about doubled with the wife's income included, so with more buyers able to pay more, sellers could ask more. Supply and demand.

When women started going out to work in large numbers, I did wonder whether the extra incomes would make prices of things go up[demand and supply of money and all that]. Seems to have turned out it was largely houses.

Women have been going out to work in large numbers for at least 50 years - did you really wonder about incomes and prices when you were a toddler?

Thanks Riverwalk - I was too cross about that remark to post myself

And longer! My mother and both my grandmother's worked all their lives except for a few years break when they had their children. Usually part-time low paid jobs, but this idea that married women didn't work is a myth perpetuated by the middle classes, working class women often did. It was the only way they could make ends meet.

Yep trisher - both my grans worked throughout their lives. They were born in the late 1800's, they worked in the mills as did all their sisters and friends from the neighbourhood.

janerowena This must be a worrying time for you, but I hope our experience will give you heart.
IMO our son's uni course gave him very limited work options, but it was his choice. He achieved a reasonable 2/1. He wanted to work as web designer, so returned home to work self employed, he did not get enough work to make a living. Some 6 months later he says he is moving into a shared flat in Nottingham with some of his Uni friends. He started temping, doing anything the agency sent him to, he was rarely out of work and earned enough to pay his rent and live comfortably. The temping soon lead to full time job in marketing for a toy company. From that point on he never looked back. He did go back to temping for a while when he decided to move north to live with his GF (now his wife). Again he earned enough temping to live (he was now living in an area of low employment). Eventualy he found a permanent job in marketing with a software company. He is now Marketing Director of that company. All this happened over 5 years. So his rather woolly degree paid off in the end.

His wife's degree was even more specific, there were really only two companies in the UK she could work for. She got a part time job as receptionist in one of them and worked her way up over 3 years, she is now Director of News for BBC Look North.

So, worry not, your son WILL succeed, perhaps even as a composer if he loves it, he just needs a bit of luck and a lot of perseverance. Having a second string to his bow will be no bad thing.

I don't think living in their home town is a common option for graduates, they have to move where the work is. Both ours are 130/190 miles away.

Thanks pompa. I do feel rather sad about him giving it up, and he can't even transfer his points, but as he says, he has already had a few commissions so can do it as a hobby.

My son amended his degree course mid second year because of difficulties with his dyslexia. It meant an extra year. Got a first and was actually 1st in his year of 42 students.. And then did a PhD which was quite specific and limited his opportunities. He worked in India in a university for a time while seeking what he really wanted and after one false start has now been well employed for many years. Again not at home, he is abroad.

When he changed his course and then again when he had the false start in a job that wasn't working out I was so worried for his future.

Sometimes we need to accept that they will find their true path.

The 1950's way of life lasted a lot longer than that in my area. I thought about these things from a teenager onwards.

Janerowena obviously I don't know all your son's circumstances but it does seem a great pity that he is giving up the course that he loves, at this late stage, to embark on something completely different.

Finances aside - would it not be better for him to finish this degree then re-assess?

Lots of people have degrees that are not entirely vocational.

I have two friends whose son & daughter respectively are graduates of the Guildhall School of Music; neither is a world-famous opera singer (yet!) but are earning a good living.

I agree wholeheartedly with Riverwalk. My son did a computer science degree, works in software development and is bored rigid. My friend's daughter did a degree in languages and now works in IT; she is also bored rigid. It does seem a pity for your son to give up something he loves at this stage. Very few people seem to go into a profession that is based on their degree subject these days, and there is time enough to reconsider options after graduating. I may be old fashioned but I still subscribe to the view that education is never wasted and a degree has value beyond its subject matter - even in these very expensive times.