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Too Poor To Start A Family: Will ‘Generation Pause’ Ever Grow Up?


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HOLA441

20 and 30 something don't have the economic cushion enjoyed by previous generations? Funny, I don't recall having much of an economic cushion when we had our kids in our 20's unless an economic cushion was represented by the uncerntainty of whether the mortgage payment would double over the next 12 months and we would become homeless (no SMI, tax credits or HB for our generation). I guess the difference was that our generation weren't constrained by being brainwashed by 21st century entitlement culture that decrees that 20/30 somethings deserve to have it all before they start a family.

Edited by campervanman
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HOLA442
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HOLA443

20 and 30 something don't have the economic cushion enjoyed by previous generations? Funny, I don't recall having much of an economic cushion when we had our kids in our 20's unless an economic cushion was represented by the uncerntainty of whether the mortgage payment would double over the next 12 months and we would become homeless (no SMI, tax credits or HB for our generation). I guess the difference was that our generation weren't constrained by being brainwashed by 21st century entitlement culture that decrees that 20/30 somethings deserve to have it all before they start a family.

Even by your trolling standards that is utter garbage.

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HOLA444

20 and 30 something don't have the economic cushion enjoyed by previous generations? Funny, I don't recall having much of an economic cushion when we had our kids in our 20's unless an economic cushion was represented by the uncerntainty of whether the mortgage payment would double over the next 12 months and we would become homeless (no SMI, tax credits or HB for our generation). I guess the difference was that our generation weren't constrained by being brainwashed by 21st century entitlement culture that decrees that 20/30 somethings deserve to have it all before they start a family.

I know you are likely trolling but do you seriously believe that this generation are "entitled"

My parents, all my other relatives and all their friends who are now in their 60s had VASTLY better housing situations at comparative ages to us.

At 24 my parents got married and moved into a 3 bed semi. By 30 they owned a 4 bed detached house and by then my mum had stopped working so they only had 1 teachers salary to live on.

At 30 my wife and I were both working full time (as we had been since graduation, earning a much higher income than my parents ever did) and could only afford a terraced house in a not very nice part of town.

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HOLA445

20 and 30 something don't have the economic cushion enjoyed by previous generations? Funny, I don't recall having much of an economic cushion when we had our kids in our 20's unless an economic cushion was represented by the uncerntainty of whether the mortgage payment would double over the next 12 months and we would become homeless (no SMI, tax credits or HB for our generation). I guess the difference was that our generation weren't constrained by being brainwashed by 21st century entitlement culture that decrees that 20/30 somethings deserve to have it all before they start a family.

You could have got a free council house with a life time tenancy knowing full well you could hve bought it for a fraction of its market worth ... in Southern England go for around 200K, thats not a bad cushion.

And the 20/30s something dont seem entitled to me, only thing theyre entitled to is a life times worht of debt that was spent by previous generations, and a huge tax bill to fund the current crony capitalists.

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HOLA446

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency) so we stayed in our private rented place until Mr Barrat offered us a shoebox for £500 down and 4x income mortgage with repayments that doubled in 12 months and took half take home pay. Of course 10 years later it had all worked out but we didn't know that at the time and had we been 25 in 2014 we would probably wanted a new car, foreign holidays and most of the stuff in every years Next catalogue instead of a pushbike, a week in Margate and the second markdowns in C and A's sales before we would have considered having kids.

Edited by campervanman
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HOLA447

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency) so we stayed in our private rented place until Mr Barrat offered us a shoebox for £500 down and 4x income mortgage with repayments that doubled in 12 months and took half take home pay. Of course 10 years later it had all worked out but we didn't know that at the time and had we been 25 in 2014 we would probably wanted a new car, foreign holidays and most of the stuff in every years Next catalogue instead of a pushbike, a week in Margate and the second markdowns in C and A's sales before we would have considered having kids.

Whether or not people want more material things, the fact of the matter is that it used to be possible for most hard working people to buy a family home on one wage and now it is not. It is not even possible for many with two incomes. Home ownership is literally out of reach for millions of respectable trades and professions.

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HOLA448

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency) so we stayed in our private rented place until Mr Barrat offered us a shoebox for £500 down and 4x income mortgage with repayments that doubled in 12 months and took half take home pay. Of course 10 years later it had all worked out but we didn't know that at the time and had we been 25 in 2014 we would probably wanted a new car, foreign holidays and most of the stuff in every years Next catalogue before we would have considered having kids.

This is like listening to a stuck record. What people expect to have changes over time. In 1984 someone would have had things that someone in 1964 wouldn't, and chances the hard of thinking from 1964 would go around saying "we never had x,y,z we had to make do with p,q,r" (and those from 1984 would despair), in turn those from 1964 would have those from 1944 say to them "we never had p,q,r we had to make do with j,k,l" blah blah blah... It's like a not very funny version of the Monty Python Yorkshiremen sketch

The key fact is that prices / value for money of pretty much everything other than housing has gotten better and better for decades.

I remember in 1990 (I think) getting my first Saturday job and hunting through every store in town looking for the cheapest pair of grey trousers I could find (my old school ones wouldn't fit), the cheapest pair I could find were £10 I think. Now, 25 years later those £10 trousers ought to cost around £20, I saw some in ASDA the other day for £8. I'd be a fool if I said "Saturday workers today aren't saving their money and are spendthrifts if they have two pairs of work trousers, they'll never be able to afford anything" because their two pairs of trousers were actually cheaper than my one pair - 100% more trousers for 20% less money.

Very few people will buy new cars, you'll probably find a quite lot of them that do bought a house at the right time and MEW'd. Also a car is a necessity nowadays, at 18 I didn't have a car but public transport was pretty good so I didn't get one till my mid-20. But bus service after bus service has been cut and if I was 18 again doing the same jobs public transport would be a non-starter.

Foreign holidays, well I only had one foreign holiday as a child, do I begrudge those in their 20's who take them? NO because a foreign holiday if you're smart can be had for next to nothing. Ryanair and easyjet offer low price flights, budget hotel chains offer low cost accommodation and because of the internet they are all easily found.

I recall my grandparents buying a small 2-bed house in the 1980s (what you'd probably call a starter home now), I think it cost £20,000, allowing for inflation it should cost around £75,000 today. A practically identical house on their road sold for £180,000 two years ago. A £500 iPad is trivial when the price of a house is £100,000+ more than it should be.

I'm not in my 20's by the way, I just recognise how my generation (Gen X) and the generations before have sold those in their 20/30's down the river (and into mortgage slavery).

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HOLA449

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency)

So there was no council housing where you lived, but you were offered social housing?????????

Id be willing to bet you were never more then a few miles from a council house, and in the 70s/80s and even most of the 90s they were far easier to get than today.

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HOLA4410

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency) so we stayed in our private rented place until Mr Barrat offered us a shoebox for £500 down and 4x income mortgage with repayments that doubled in 12 months and took half take home pay. Of course 10 years later it had all worked out but we didn't know that at the time and had we been 25 in 2014 we would probably wanted a new car, foreign holidays and most of the stuff in every years Next catalogue instead of a pushbike, a week in Margate and the second markdowns in C and A's sales before we would have considered having kids.

So you had the option of social housing, only needed a 4x income mortgage for a small house and only had to spend 50% of income on housing?

Well sure, why would the average 20-something Londoner complain just because they currently have no access to social housing whatsoever, need 15x income mortgages for a small flat and spend in excess of 50% of their income on rents (in fact, in excess of 70% in a fair number of boroughs)? How dare they complain when you had it so much easier, because you found that comparatively easy life hard at the time so that must mean that the harder life they have to lead now is... Oh. Wait. How hard does that imply it must be for them again? And btw they mainly can't afford to run cars let alone buy new ones, take holidays (foreign or otherwise, holidaying in Britain is currently a sign of wealth given the relative costs), or buy new clothes somewhere other than Primark, but don't let that put a dampner on your rampant inter-generational bigotry...

Not trying to imply it's easy outside of London btw, I'm just more familiar with what's going on here.

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HOLA4411

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency) so we stayed in our private rented place until Mr Barrat offered us a shoebox for £500 down and 4x income mortgage with repayments that doubled in 12 months and took half take home pay. Of course 10 years later it had all worked out but we didn't know that at the time and had we been 25 in 2014 we would probably wanted a new car, foreign holidays and most of the stuff in every years Next catalogue instead of a pushbike, a week in Margate and the second markdowns in C and A's sales before we would have considered having kids.

Priceless today.

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HOLA4412

So there was no council housing where you lived, but you were offered social housing?????????

Id be willing to bet you were never more then a few miles from a council house, and in the 70s/80s and even most of the 90s they were far easier to get than today.

The era of council houses ended a lot earlier than that. Unless perhaps you had a vast score in "social need" points.

They were certainly never an option for me in the 1980s. They weren't automatic even if you had kids, though I know (now, not then) one family my age who got one by virtue of having a disabled kid.

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HOLA4413

This is like listening to a stuck record. What people expect to have changes over time. In 1984 someone would have had things that someone in 1964 wouldn't, and chances the hard of thinking from 1964 would go around saying "we never had x,y,z

+1 We are supposed to be progressing our economy and going forward as a society over time, going backwards like the past 15 to 30 years is not acceptable.
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HOLA4414

No free council houses where we lived. We were offered social housing but could see where that would lead ( a lifetime of dependency) so we stayed in our private rented place until Mr Barrat offered us a shoebox for £500 down and 4x income mortgage with repayments that doubled in 12 months and took half take home pay. Of course 10 years later it had all worked out but we didn't know that at the time and had we been 25 in 2014 we would probably wanted a new car, foreign holidays and most of the stuff in every years Next catalogue instead of a pushbike, a week in Margate and the second markdowns in C and A's sales before we would have considered having kids.

The generation before you walked everywhere, had no holidays, and darned their clothes when they started to fall apart. Why didn't you do that? Or were you too "good" to make do like that?

Seems like you felt entitled alright - entitled to the goods and services common to that time.

Just like young people today should be entitled to the goods and services common to this day and age. That includes consumer goods, cheap holidays, and yes houses.

Or are you so arrogant as to believe to these should be only the preserve of boomers like yourself?

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HOLA4415
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HOLA4416

+1 We are supposed to be progressing our economy and going forward as a society over time, going backwards like the past 15 to 30 years is not acceptable.

We haven't been going backwards for the past 15 to 30 years, we've been changing for the worse. Superficially some parts look like backwards. In some areas going backwards would be an improvement - I'd desperately love things to slow down and get rather less hectic and rushed. Throw in some of the new stuff we've come up with since then and then you've got an improvement.
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HOLA4417

I guess I'm a boomer (born 1970) - I think I got a far better deal than those 20 years my junior are getting:

1. My parents could afford a 3 bed house on my Dads salary so my Mum was pretty much a constant figure in mine and my brothers early life.

2. I got a good state education and a free place at a decent university, with a grant for the majority of my living expenses.

3. I was able to buy my first house (a one bed flat in London) for about 3.5x my salary at the age of 26.

All the above from a lower middle class background. I doubt that any of this is available to someone from a similar socio-economic background to me born in 1990 - and I think that's a sign that things have got worse.

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HOLA4418

I know plenty in their 20's on low incomes with kids - a small herd of them in some cases! Their lifestyle is actually BETTER with one of them working a 35 hour week and the other doing 0-16 hours (depending on circumstances), and bringin up some kids - they get decent benefits as a family, and their lifestyle is comparatively better than couples on low incomes who both work full time with no children. They were usually raised in council houses themselves, so there is far less of the 'must buy house before marriage or kids' drummed into their psyche.

The ticking timebomb they have to look forward to is shit pensions, no security of tenure, and gradual benefit withdrawal as the kids enter adulthood, whereas in the past, a council house was yours for life or RTB'd cheap and you worked for one employer most of your life and got a better pension deal. On the standard of today, they are living the same standard of living as their parents did in terms of housing (not yours, subsidised) but with bigger flatscreen TVs on Sky and holidays in Benidorm cheaper than Bognor Regis.

If you are mid-30's now an grew up in a middle class home - well, your parents probably had a mortgage on a 3 bed semi and were supporting 2 young kids on one income by 30, which is completely impossible for most people in most of the country today - so you can't live up to your parents - either chose a different path or feel a failure, some choice.

This all may sound cynical but MOST of us don't stray far from our parents path in terms of professions and income percentiles - much less so Generations Y/Z than the boomers did in partcular, as social mobility has been steadily declining.

Edited by disenfranchised
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HOLA4419

Obviously societies and people should move forward both in terms of what they are able to have in material terms and what they are able to have socially. The fact that both of these factors have not kept up with expectations for at least the past 30 years without the need to fund them through debt, HPI and selling off national assets is IMO intrinsically linked to what has been happening to the share of national income. Long after the boomers are no more the consequences of an increasing share of national income finishing up in the hands of the 1% will continue to be felt by todays and tomorrows young unless enough people wake up to what is really going on.

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HOLA4420

Interesting thread.

http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/latest-news/top-stories/walking-the-streets-of-1970s-yorkshire-1-6880214

In the Yorkshire post today "Walking the streets of 1970s Yorkshire" - so it was better then than today?

1239149810.jpg

FASCINATING images of Leeds form part of a new exhibition showing the harsh reality of life on the back streets of the North at the turn of the 1970s.

Previously-unseen pictures taken by acclaimed photographer Nick Hedges between 1968 and 1972 have gone on display at London’s Science Museum.

They were commissioned by the Shelter charity in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of people living in poor housing conditions. However their use has been restricted until now to protect the privacy of Nick’s subjects.

Inspiration for the title of the exhibition, Make Life Worth Living, came from an end-of-terrace painted advert for Beecham’s Pills that features in one of the Leeds pictures. The photo dates from the summer of 1970 and although its exact location is unknown, it is believed to be of a street in either Armley or Holbeck.

Other photos in the exhibition were taken in cities such as Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. One of the Sheffield pictures shows a family of five living in a decaying terraced house with no gas, no electricity, no hot water and no bathroom.

Nick believes his work for Shelter carries an important message for 21st century Britain, despite being more than 40 years old. He said: “Although these photographs have become historical documents, they serve to remind us that secure and adequate housing is the basis of a civilised urban society.

“The failure of successive governments to provide for it is a sad mark of society’s inaction. The photographs should allow us to celebrate progress, yet all they can do is haunt us with a sense of failure.”

The exhibition runs at the Science Museum until January 18 next year. It is taking place in the attraction’s Media Space, a joint venture between the London museum and Bradford’s National Media Museum. Nick donated around 1,000 prints from his work with Shelter to the National Media Museum back in 1983.

For further information on the exhibition, visit: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/makelifeworthliving

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HOLA4421

Interesting thread.

http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/latest-news/top-stories/walking-the-streets-of-1970s-yorkshire-1-6880214

In the Yorkshire post today "Walking the streets of 1970s Yorkshire" - so it was better then than today?

1239149810.jpg

FASCINATING images of Leeds form part of a new exhibition showing the harsh reality of life on the back streets of the North at the turn of the 1970s.

Previously-unseen pictures taken by acclaimed photographer Nick Hedges between 1968 and 1972 have gone on display at Londons Science Museum.

They were commissioned by the Shelter charity in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of people living in poor housing conditions. However their use has been restricted until now to protect the privacy of Nicks subjects.

Inspiration for the title of the exhibition, Make Life Worth Living, came from an end-of-terrace painted advert for Beechams Pills that features in one of the Leeds pictures. The photo dates from the summer of 1970 and although its exact location is unknown, it is believed to be of a street in either Armley or Holbeck.

Other photos in the exhibition were taken in cities such as Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. One of the Sheffield pictures shows a family of five living in a decaying terraced house with no gas, no electricity, no hot water and no bathroom.

Nick believes his work for Shelter carries an important message for 21st century Britain, despite being more than 40 years old. He said: Although these photographs have become historical documents, they serve to remind us that secure and adequate housing is the basis of a civilised urban society.

The failure of successive governments to provide for it is a sad mark of societys inaction. The photographs should allow us to celebrate progress, yet all they can do is haunt us with a sense of failure.

The exhibition runs at the Science Museum until January 18 next year. It is taking place in the attractions Media Space, a joint venture between the London museum and Bradfords National Media Museum. Nick donated around 1,000 prints from his work with Shelter to the National Media Museum back in 1983.

For further information on the exhibition, visit: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/makelifeworthliving

Cue the usual suspects telling us about their grandparents growing up in families of 8 in a 2 up 2 down terrace and how the yoof don't know their born.
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HOLA4422

All this suggests to me is that today's generation hasn't yet grasped the fact that they are considerably poorer than their parents.

They still think they can have a similar, or even higher standard of living than their parents, because that has been the norm for the last couple of generations.

They have not yet realised that the only way to afford a family in modern Britain is to live as their grandparents, or even great grandparents did - in multi-generational housing or very small accommodation, living frugally and scrimping/saving.

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HOLA4423

Cue the usual suspects telling us about their grandparents growing up in families of 8 in a 2 up 2 down terrace and how the yoof don't know their born.

Yes, sorry about that (Olde Guto's fault though - post 34). And a bit sneaky of me having to trawl through ... today's local paper to find it!

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HOLA4424

It's the comparison with non-utopian, sensible alternatives that should rankle the youth, not that they are better off than people in the 1920's.

I increasingly think we get the rulers we deserve though. If we're all short-termist, selfish, unreflective voters then don't be surprised when the people we elect have to pander to this. Then civilisation collapses and we realise we should have had a bit less fun

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HOLA4425

I guess I'm a boomer (born 1970) - I think I got a far better deal than those 20 years my junior are getting:

1. My parents could afford a 3 bed house on my Dads salary so my Mum was pretty much a constant figure in mine and my brothers early life.

2. I got a good state education and a free place at a decent university, with a grant for the majority of my living expenses.

3. I was able to buy my first house (a one bed flat in London) for about 3.5x my salary at the age of 26.

All the above from a lower middle class background. I doubt that any of this is available to someone from a similar socio-economic background to me born in 1990 - and I think that's a sign that things have got worse.

I think that you are a few years to young to be described as a boomer, but it shows how things have just gone down progressively since that generation. Those born 10 years before you would have been better off still, but prior to that we had quite a few decades of constant improvement in living standards.

As you say, those born in 1990 would be much worse off than you, and those born in 2000 are much worse off again. Those born in 1990 are now getting to the age where (traditionally) they would be starting to have kids of their own, and where are they going to be left given that all of the money remains with their grandparents and great-grandparents generation?

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