Boomers were actually the aberration to the long term population trends so it’s hard to compare them to any other generation, past or present.
“All we had to do was tighten our belts for a few months to save a deposit and we got to buy detached 4 bedroom houses with double garages in the home counties on 2.5x a single earners shop workers salary, it was easy.
If we could do it in 1971 then you can do it now. Its all your spending on PHONES, takeaway coffees, microwave meals, avocado-based nutrition choices, and *flat screeeeen teeeee veeeeeees* holding you back from buying a tiny shitbox of a house [that costs 10x a graduate income]”
Also I’d rather this isn’t the case for us , but their parents died when they were younger so inheritance was received at a younger age
Besides the main points, this article does cut to an important realisation that isn’t often mentioned though – that the older people who accuse millennials of wasting money on luxuries are by and large overestimating the prices of the things that millennials and younger are spending their money on, compared to what they may have spent when they were young. (Presumably because they don’t themselves purchase them or are assuming based on prices they remember when those things were first new)
I wonder how many judgemental older people (that is, those who *are* judgemental before anyone not alls down my throat) are actually aware that, for example, an avocado costs…about 90p. A latte even from a chain like Starbucks or Costa is no more than £3. Netflix, as the article points out – about a tenner a month, cheaper than the tv licence. An internet connection and a smartphone, probably costs pretty much what the landline phone bill would have cost 40 or 50 years ago, per month.
How many of today’s retired, when saving for a house, would have saved *so stringently* that they would forgo their landline phone for years at a time, or ever spending a third of what they make per hour on drink(s) at the pub after work, or as Allsop mentions, a ticket to the movies once a month? Because those are the direct equivalents of a smartphone bill, a latte, Netflix – and they don’t cost any more than those things did, proportionally.
>“When I bought my first property, going abroad, the easyJet, coffee, gym, Netflix lifestyle didn’t exist,”
Hahahahaha, so gyms and gym culture didn’t exist when you were younger? Really? I think not, and holidays abroad were arguably much more prevalent years ago
She’s just fucking deluded
I’m 40. Christ help my kids. I dunno know what generation i am.
Most of us will have been beaten over the head with “the value of hard work” for most of our lives; this idea that success and “hard work” are intrinsically linked, and that to be successful indicates hard work and therefore more value as a person, and to be unsuccessful indicates laziness or lack of aptitude.
In reality, success is based to a large extent on getting the breaks, and financially a lot of boomers (and to a lesser extent Generation X) got the breaks. They benefited from free tuition, better wages, defined benefit pensions, and what we’re talking about here, a more accessible housing market that boomed and made homeowners very wealthy; by the time millennials came of age, that was all gone, so while boomers got theirs, we didn’t get ours. The problem is that I think boomers absolutely buy into “the value of hard work”, so they view themselves as hardworking and therefore deserving of their success, while deriding financially squeezed millennials as lazy, feckless and undeserving.
It’s utter bollocks, someone in my close family who qualifies as a boomer by definition, always had minimum wage job and Wife part time minimum wage job due to having one child.
Somehow managed to buy and own a house, currently worth north of 250k, couple of holidays a year abroad and contribute to pensions and now sit retired saying how hard they had it..
Bruh… I’m over here with a well paid job and my wife on similar work as said example due to our childcare and we struggle to make ends meet.
Utter utter bollocks
The fact a single person can’t buy a property of any sort in most of the country should be enough proof that everything is fucked.
House prices are just batshit, we bought in 2020 and sold in 2021 – did absolutely nothing to it, the house made 20k.
It earned more money than I did, and that house now will never be worth what we paid for it, it’ll only ever be more – so somebody will need to be earning 5k a year more than we were just to buy it.
People often refuse to accept things they don’t want to accept. Can’t doesn’t come I to it.
A lot of good points being made here.
The problem ( ok, one of them) is how everything has been nailed down and amplified to make the most money. Bungalows were cheap downsizing alternatives, until someone described them as a desirable single level lifestyle and open plan as the future. A thousand pounds for a phone, who would buy that? Just get the pitch right, continual contracts and a steady drip of money is guaranteed. The broo-ha about the BBC license fee and the advertised freedom of choice TV that people pay five hundred quid a year to watch and more for live events. Even after the mortgage is paid you may need a care home that will take all your money, what savings pot can cover rising costs and a standard of living. In every way possible as you go through life they don’t just take a bit of your income anymore they get their claws in irrespective of what you do. The worst part is all the saving for mortgage and pensions that you have to do just to walk into the trap. Modern life sucks.
Allsopp is clearly wrong – it’s a well known fact that the reason young people can’t afford a home is because they keep upgrading to ever more expensive smartphones.
All jokes aside, the article makes a really good point: we (humans) tend to overestimate the impact of our actions on our results, and we assess others more stringently than us.
So, if we are a boomer with a house, it’s because we were smart and invested early, not because we were there at the right time and place.
Equally, if younger people can’t afford a place, it must be something they do – after all, *I* was able to afford a place…
And looking at what it is they do, it must be all this stuff that wasn’t around when I was young, and that therefore looks expensive.
*My* entertainment was cheap stuff like going to the cinema….
Fascinating how a simple element such as conscience (i view reality through the lens of my own experience) and the natural self agrandissement that comes with it (humans tend to think they are smarter/wiser/better than average) leads to this complete breakdown of shared experience between generations.
Older folks need to listen to their kids, and realise they’re not silly kids anymore, and might have a point.
The reality is that “the haves” don’t want to understand “the have nots” because then they would feel guilty about voting for it to continue.
It’s their brains saving them from a severe emotional conflict that we are seeing here.
I genuinely have never met anyone who has this ‘boomer mathematics’ mentality. My parents, their siblings, my in-laws, older acquaintances, all of them freely acknowledge how difficult it is to buy a house now.
Boomers have just ridden a wave of right place right time all their lives, fuck me their main helping hand was the millions of dead blokes in ww2 which caused an ongoing labour shortage and gave loads of bargaining power to workers. They’re the ultimate moochers
They’ve never HAD to engage their brains. Look how emotional they are, try having a rational debate with one of ur parents and see how long it is before they bring their feelings into it
The main points Allsopp made were to consider moving to a different area, consider living with your parents while saving for a deposit, and avoid extravagances like Starbucks every single day.
Not all of those things are possible for everyone. But if you can, there are decent starter houses to be had for less than £100k in northern cities where there are plenty of jobs. The required £10k deposit is somewhat more achievable. Living with parents for even one year could save you a significant chunk of that deposit.
A £3 coffee every working day is definitely an extravagance. Not having it would save £720 a year which is not an insignificant amount towards a £10k deposit.
The article completely ignores these points and goes with avocados. Lazy point scoring.
We really need to stop perpetrating the myth, that the older generations don’t understand the difficulty for the younger generation getting on the housing ladder.
I’m Gen X, and know of no one who hold these opinions, in my age group or older. Everyone is perfectly aware of how house prices have increased disproportionally to wages.
I bought a house in my 20s.
You know how I bought a house in my 20s? My *family died*
That is literally the only way I could ever afford a house. I’m a master’s level professional and so is my partner, collectively we earn slightly above average, we live well within our means and there is absolutely no way we could ever have saved up enough for a deposit.
The only way to buy now is through inheritance. What a shitty way to live.
None of this mentions that many young people are spending upwards of 50% of their income on rent, which goes directly to people like Allsopp.
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Archive link: https://archive.fo/SCEPL
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Boomers were actually the aberration to the long term population trends so it’s hard to compare them to any other generation, past or present.
“All we had to do was tighten our belts for a few months to save a deposit and we got to buy detached 4 bedroom houses with double garages in the home counties on 2.5x a single earners shop workers salary, it was easy.
If we could do it in 1971 then you can do it now. Its all your spending on PHONES, takeaway coffees, microwave meals, avocado-based nutrition choices, and *flat screeeeen teeeee veeeeeees* holding you back from buying a tiny shitbox of a house [that costs 10x a graduate income]”
Also I’d rather this isn’t the case for us , but their parents died when they were younger so inheritance was received at a younger age
Besides the main points, this article does cut to an important realisation that isn’t often mentioned though – that the older people who accuse millennials of wasting money on luxuries are by and large overestimating the prices of the things that millennials and younger are spending their money on, compared to what they may have spent when they were young. (Presumably because they don’t themselves purchase them or are assuming based on prices they remember when those things were first new)
I wonder how many judgemental older people (that is, those who *are* judgemental before anyone not alls down my throat) are actually aware that, for example, an avocado costs…about 90p. A latte even from a chain like Starbucks or Costa is no more than £3. Netflix, as the article points out – about a tenner a month, cheaper than the tv licence. An internet connection and a smartphone, probably costs pretty much what the landline phone bill would have cost 40 or 50 years ago, per month.
How many of today’s retired, when saving for a house, would have saved *so stringently* that they would forgo their landline phone for years at a time, or ever spending a third of what they make per hour on drink(s) at the pub after work, or as Allsop mentions, a ticket to the movies once a month? Because those are the direct equivalents of a smartphone bill, a latte, Netflix – and they don’t cost any more than those things did, proportionally.
>“When I bought my first property, going abroad, the easyJet, coffee, gym, Netflix lifestyle didn’t exist,”
Hahahahaha, so gyms and gym culture didn’t exist when you were younger? Really? I think not, and holidays abroad were arguably much more prevalent years ago
She’s just fucking deluded
I’m 40. Christ help my kids. I dunno know what generation i am.
Most of us will have been beaten over the head with “the value of hard work” for most of our lives; this idea that success and “hard work” are intrinsically linked, and that to be successful indicates hard work and therefore more value as a person, and to be unsuccessful indicates laziness or lack of aptitude.
In reality, success is based to a large extent on getting the breaks, and financially a lot of boomers (and to a lesser extent Generation X) got the breaks. They benefited from free tuition, better wages, defined benefit pensions, and what we’re talking about here, a more accessible housing market that boomed and made homeowners very wealthy; by the time millennials came of age, that was all gone, so while boomers got theirs, we didn’t get ours. The problem is that I think boomers absolutely buy into “the value of hard work”, so they view themselves as hardworking and therefore deserving of their success, while deriding financially squeezed millennials as lazy, feckless and undeserving.
It’s utter bollocks, someone in my close family who qualifies as a boomer by definition, always had minimum wage job and Wife part time minimum wage job due to having one child.
Somehow managed to buy and own a house, currently worth north of 250k, couple of holidays a year abroad and contribute to pensions and now sit retired saying how hard they had it..
Bruh… I’m over here with a well paid job and my wife on similar work as said example due to our childcare and we struggle to make ends meet.
Utter utter bollocks
The fact a single person can’t buy a property of any sort in most of the country should be enough proof that everything is fucked.
House prices are just batshit, we bought in 2020 and sold in 2021 – did absolutely nothing to it, the house made 20k.
It earned more money than I did, and that house now will never be worth what we paid for it, it’ll only ever be more – so somebody will need to be earning 5k a year more than we were just to buy it.
People often refuse to accept things they don’t want to accept. Can’t doesn’t come I to it.
A lot of good points being made here.
The problem ( ok, one of them) is how everything has been nailed down and amplified to make the most money. Bungalows were cheap downsizing alternatives, until someone described them as a desirable single level lifestyle and open plan as the future. A thousand pounds for a phone, who would buy that? Just get the pitch right, continual contracts and a steady drip of money is guaranteed. The broo-ha about the BBC license fee and the advertised freedom of choice TV that people pay five hundred quid a year to watch and more for live events. Even after the mortgage is paid you may need a care home that will take all your money, what savings pot can cover rising costs and a standard of living. In every way possible as you go through life they don’t just take a bit of your income anymore they get their claws in irrespective of what you do. The worst part is all the saving for mortgage and pensions that you have to do just to walk into the trap. Modern life sucks.
Allsopp is clearly wrong – it’s a well known fact that the reason young people can’t afford a home is because they keep upgrading to ever more expensive smartphones.
All jokes aside, the article makes a really good point: we (humans) tend to overestimate the impact of our actions on our results, and we assess others more stringently than us.
So, if we are a boomer with a house, it’s because we were smart and invested early, not because we were there at the right time and place.
Equally, if younger people can’t afford a place, it must be something they do – after all, *I* was able to afford a place…
And looking at what it is they do, it must be all this stuff that wasn’t around when I was young, and that therefore looks expensive.
*My* entertainment was cheap stuff like going to the cinema….
Fascinating how a simple element such as conscience (i view reality through the lens of my own experience) and the natural self agrandissement that comes with it (humans tend to think they are smarter/wiser/better than average) leads to this complete breakdown of shared experience between generations.
Older folks need to listen to their kids, and realise they’re not silly kids anymore, and might have a point.
The reality is that “the haves” don’t want to understand “the have nots” because then they would feel guilty about voting for it to continue.
It’s their brains saving them from a severe emotional conflict that we are seeing here.
I genuinely have never met anyone who has this ‘boomer mathematics’ mentality. My parents, their siblings, my in-laws, older acquaintances, all of them freely acknowledge how difficult it is to buy a house now.
Boomers have just ridden a wave of right place right time all their lives, fuck me their main helping hand was the millions of dead blokes in ww2 which caused an ongoing labour shortage and gave loads of bargaining power to workers. They’re the ultimate moochers
They’ve never HAD to engage their brains. Look how emotional they are, try having a rational debate with one of ur parents and see how long it is before they bring their feelings into it
The main points Allsopp made were to consider moving to a different area, consider living with your parents while saving for a deposit, and avoid extravagances like Starbucks every single day.
Not all of those things are possible for everyone. But if you can, there are decent starter houses to be had for less than £100k in northern cities where there are plenty of jobs. The required £10k deposit is somewhat more achievable. Living with parents for even one year could save you a significant chunk of that deposit.
A £3 coffee every working day is definitely an extravagance. Not having it would save £720 a year which is not an insignificant amount towards a £10k deposit.
The article completely ignores these points and goes with avocados. Lazy point scoring.
We really need to stop perpetrating the myth, that the older generations don’t understand the difficulty for the younger generation getting on the housing ladder.
I’m Gen X, and know of no one who hold these opinions, in my age group or older. Everyone is perfectly aware of how house prices have increased disproportionally to wages.
I bought a house in my 20s.
You know how I bought a house in my 20s? My *family died*
That is literally the only way I could ever afford a house. I’m a master’s level professional and so is my partner, collectively we earn slightly above average, we live well within our means and there is absolutely no way we could ever have saved up enough for a deposit.
The only way to buy now is through inheritance. What a shitty way to live.
None of this mentions that many young people are spending upwards of 50% of their income on rent, which goes directly to people like Allsopp.