Redistributing wealth between the generations

timharford.com/2018/04/midlifecrisis
Aaagh! Try this link instead.

Not sure what his point is. The young are (all?) fitter, happier, more optimistic, have more sex so they don’t need money? People in their forties and fifties (all?) have had their dreams dashed and appreciate/need money most so they should have more? The aged have (all?) benefitted from house price inflation, so don’t need money?

A serious issue, but is this a serious article?

It makes me so cross when I hear how ‘lucky’ I am to have a house and am able to earn enough to not have to go on benefits. We have worked so hard for everything we have. Time for the ACs to stop complaining and save some money.

I have an example: a friends AS and his wife are living with them to save money for a deposit for a house.
When I enquired how it was going, she said that they had been with her now for 4 years but were still short of the (enormous) deposit they needed to buy a brand new ( large) house and everything that needed to go into it.
At the time of speaking to her the couple were on holiday in The Maldives, they still had evenings out at restaurants and with their friends, they both had expensive cars......... and this was classed as ‘saving for a house’ . Give me strength.

Saving for a deposit on a house for us in the large 50s/ early 60s was not having a holiday, not even a car but a motorbike and making clothes last for ever.
We had one night out a week with friends doing the same which was 2 hours in a local pub just meeting up and exchanging news.
How times change, I wouldn't want to do I again.

I dare say many of us continued to go without holidays when we had a house so that we could buy much needed items or make improvements! I would hazard a guess that many of us also started without things such as a washing machine and possibly a fridge. We also bought ‘raw’ ingredients rather than prepared meals we just popped in the oven.
Expectations were less then.

The young people I know who are 'hard up' have gym memberships, regular nights out, drive and go on holiday. (And think nothing of regularly buying coffee at £3 a paper cup!)

I know this isn't the case for all young people but we were POOR as young people starting out in the 70s. We budgeted all the time to make money go round, had second hand furniture and were (in our case) forced to take on crippling endowment mortgages. We ran one old car and rarely had holidays. Times were hard. yes, property prices may have gone up but we still needed a roof over our head.

I know so many pensioners who are still supporting their adult children and providing lots of free child care for their grandchildren.

I suspect many people over 60 did not have parents they could rely on for money, nor did they see their parents as baby minders.

Right now we are having a bit of a dilemma. One AC and her partner seem to think our time isn't precious. They asked us a while ago to have GD on Saturday while they went to the gym with friends to play squash. Afterwards they wanted to 'chill out' with said friends and have a pub lunch. They have already taken bags of washing and ironing around to his mothers so they get a laundry service at the weekend too. They come and collect GD at 6.30pm. We have both said we feel mean taking a stand because we love little GD but we can see this becoming a regular thing, their Saturday off.

They are 'so tired' after working all week, you see. This is the third week running we have been asked to take over while they 'chill'.

Really, some young people have no bloody idea what it is to become working parents and live in the real world. I am sure there are many of us on GN who could tell a tale about the exhaustion we felt as young working parents, the economies we had to make, the things we went without, with none of the child-care the perks available today. (I know my friends daughter REALLY does have it hard, and has little disposable income, but surprisingly she doesn't expect her parents to carry her load at the weekend.)

It's like a parallel universe!

I think the three stages could be termed:
Optimism
Realism
Stoicism

I am hoping that my wealth will be redistributed but not just yet!

Jalima

Married the day after my 17th birthday and a month after his with a baby on the way we had NO money! We lived in a grotty flat with a shared bathroom. We had no tv, no phone, a car that died the week the baby was born and certainly no holidays apart from one my in-laws took us on when my son was 2 on a houseboat. We worked - hard - we eventually had a house thanks to a £200 deposit from my in-laws which enabled us to get a 2 up 2 down. It was 7 years before we were able to get another car and regularly had to dig down the sofa to find 10p to put in the gas meter to cook the dinner and by pay day each week could only afford egg and chips. We had odd food handouts from both sets of parents when things got very difficult. Did we think we were hard done by? Of course not - most couples we knew back then were in the same boat. All we have now has been achieved by sheer hard work, forgoing holidays and years of scrimping and saving especially in the early and later years of being self employed. My own AC have done the same - they have had some help from us but in the main have got where they are through their own determination - eating tinned peas and instant gravy in the case of my younger son when he left home who didn't tell us at the time how hard up he was! Our parents lives were even harder. It is so frustrating that (some) of the young of today feel the world owes them a living but of course they could never know what life was like for the generations which have gone before.

I try to avoid the conversations about the older generation being lucky because.....they are usually inaccurate in the least and very offensive.Like most others in their 60's we worked our socks off ,no maternity leave for me I left hospital with baby on the Thursay and was back at my desk with her in tow on the Friday .No holidays for years ,my OH worked 14 or 16 hours a day to build our business and our first flat might only have cost £14k but it took us 8 years in a council house to afford the deposit and still no holiday ,no expensive nights out etc etc etc .I'm sure many of the young moaners should give our lifestyle a try and see how cushy it really was .

I don't think the article was meant to be at all serious...

But.

House prices in relation to salary were much cheaper in our day. It was a hill to climb, not a mountain.

From the Office of National Statistics (ONS)

On average, working people could expect to pay around 7.6 times their annual earnings on purchasing a home in England and Wales in 2016, up from 3.6 times earnings in 1997.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingaffordabilityinenglandandwales/1997to2016

I seem to recall we reckoned on about 3x salary in the 70s.

I'm sure many of the young moaners should give our lifestyle a try and see how cushy it really was
Quite.

Add to that redundancy, high interest rates when we had a mortgage and no savings.

Interest rates were as high as 17% when we had a mortgage

Well maizie our annual wage in 1970 was £860.00, houses were far more than 3 times that amount. And we had a child too. Still not sure how we managed but as others have said we didn’t have a fridge, washing machine, TV or a car and we didn’t have parents who were in a position to help us apart from the occasional Sunday Roast. Living 13 floors up in a Tower Block was the incentive to save.

Whenever anyone tells me that I've "been lucky"; I always respond with "Yes, I was. And the harder I worked, the luckier I became".

www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-2462753/How-items-cost-risen-line-house-prices.html

I would have been very happy with an Average wage in 1971, and we never found an average price house either.

That’s the problem with averages.

What’s worrying is the many of the younger generation believe all this guff. Add in that we are allegedly the reason the NHS is clogged up and there’s a bad feeling towards our generation on many fronts.

I too could add to the discussion, back at work 6 weeks after birth, my wage (even as a professional) not taken into consideration when applying for mortgage, juggling children, career, house, cheap camping holidays (if any) make do and mend, only very basic household gadgets, saving and scrimping, hand me downs, the list goes on. There’s no way we could have survived on one wage so this idea that is bandied around that this is something new is so wrong.

If ever, just once, my own ‘children’ ever express such rubbish, then I’ll be looking at equity release and blowing the lot on my own holiday in the Maldives!

House prices in relation to salary were much cheaper in our day. but interest rates weren't! We were paying as big a proportion of our salary in monthly mortgage payments as they pay today.

House prices rise to meet the maximum amount that there are still people able to pay. If they are priced too high either they do not sell and the price has to fall or, in the case of new houses, builders stop building, until they can sell at a price that gives them an adequate return.

We were in better financial position than several posters on this thread but when we bought our house, the only carpet was in the living room and we had deckchairs rather than LR furniture. Other furniture was begged, borrowed, although probably not stolen.

This article (and many like it ) has probably achieved what it set out to do .
Can’t believe some of the posts ...

“Young people go to the gym” “young people have holidays “ etc. So much bitterness .

Many young people will NEVER get on the housing ladder !

Not bitter at all, I have 2 daughters, we help both, but our youngest will probably never own a home of her own, she struggles just as we did.
But appointing blame to the different age groups won’t solve the problem.

Although we helped our children out in minor ways as they were entering adulthood, that’s been it...and they’ve both managed to save, purchase their own homes, getting onto the property ladder...and still have had extraordinarily good lifestyles. If they can do it, a lot of others can. I believe many just wait for their misguided parents to dig into their pockets. It shouldn’t be happening.

Why is everyone so bitter about the younger generation? I have three grown up kids who do not have expensive holidays, own cars or are in any way extravagent. I would do anything possible to help them get on the housing ladder without a sniff of resentment. What's wrong with you all? If your kids are bad with money then maybe you should look at how you brought them up!

Our children lived with us until they could afford to rent their own place without relying on housing benefit. Our son bounced back twice but we charged him rent just to keep him in the real world.

We raised our children not to depend on the state for their housing so they studied, worked, saved and chose their lifelong partners well to buy their own homes; except for our son.

He married and bought a lovely four bedroomed bungalow in Texas, but they sold it and moved to rent in Muswell Hill. They now say they no longer want to buy their home and would rather rent so they can readily move to live wherever their careers take them.

All three of our children know that we would try to help them financially if they asked but their pride makes them study and work instead of asking.