Partly, I'm sure, because of the age balance on here a lot of fur and feathers fly whenever it's suggested baby boomers had it easier, see threads passim (thanks Private Eye I've always wanted to use that!).
An article in the Telegraph (no point in linking because of the paywall) has looked at the luckiest generation when it comes to buying property. In two of three categories, house price and deposit size, baby boomers win. In the third, mortgage rates, millennials and Generation Z (born after 1997) win.
Apparently Generation X weren't very lucky at all!
Sounds correct to me. Did the article state what the mortgage rate used to be?
Said it before, but when we had mortgages, you took off two zeros off your loan, and that's what you paid per month. £30,000 mortgage costed £300 per month. It was crippling for us just for that, and it didn't include household bills, bringing up two growing children, and food. It was pre Primark and Lidl's as well. Clothing and shoes were expensive back there too.
We were on the bones of our wotsits. Mortgages were millstones.
Hi Ben, Surely this can't be accepted a "True"? The absence of "Direct Link" or "Citation" must rule it out? But even the article generalises too much as the 20% Deposit on my home back in 1975 bucks the current trend of 5% ??? One thing that has certainly changed is the aspirations & whims of current folk, few will put up with hand me down stuff to set up home? Still recall trawling the second hand furniture places for almost everything, a bit of "Make Do & Mend" got us well pleased. All pre Habitat of course! Cue Barbra Streisand - "Second hand hats, second hand clothes, that's why they call me Second-Hand Rose". TTFN MM
merseymouth wrote:20% Deposit on my home back in 1975
Buying my first house in 1978 I paid 7% deposit, pretty much all I had. Solicitor was surprised since 10% was the norm, but I pointed out that I had recently declined a 95% mortgage on a property I did not buy. At that time the mortgage rate was about 7% and it was cheaper to buy a two bed terraced house than it was to rent a one bed flat.
Still recall trawling the second hand furniture places for almost everything, a bit of "Make Do & Mend" got us well pleased.
Furniture etc came from family and friends as hand me downs. I still have some of it and have passed some on to friends who still use it 40 plus years on.
I recall the days of high interest rates, 17%. At home I ate cheap bread and eggs, I could not afford anything else. My unit of currency was the "canteen meal". A new tyre was probably 5 canteen meals, so I could do without. Pump and pedals had to be moved between machines as needed. No car, no TV. As a baby boomer I had it easy - so I am told.
I lived for a few years with a hand me down dining room table, chairs, easy chair, pots, pans, bed, etc. In fact I only got a table when someone asked for the donated dining room table back. Replaced it with another family donated table. Then my parents bought me a dining room table so the second table b could go back to them. Even now I've taken on hand me down pans.
We're buying our own stuff but if free quality pans come along we're not too proud to accept them. Well not now we've got too many to accept more but point made. People still accept hand me down stuff for their households. I'm certain I'm not alone in this.
That's actually a good point, there's a misconception that younger generations don't like hand me down stuff. Whilst clothing might not be accepted in sure a lot do accept household donations. Fashion is certainly different because of the lower cost due to the toxic fast fashion. Even within that there's a thriving vintage clothing sector.
We boomers were not so much lucky as the beneficiaries of the post-war settlement, in which there was far less exploitation of those-without by those-with. This was a consequence of the general high sacrifices made by the population as a whole (but mostly the lower orders) throughout the war, manifest as a rejection of the old hierarchies & privileges represented by Churchill and a desire for far greater fairness and equality of opportunity as represented by Attlee.
Boomers of the now-about-seventy age group suddenly stood a far better chance of surviving and thriving than we would have done if born just a few years before, courtesy of the NHS with it's start-of-life nutriments (rosehip syrup, malt extract, milk, codliver oil, orange juice) and inoculations. As we grew, we could get a decent education, all the way up to degree and beyond if the exams were passed. We got a grant to go to uni, not a huge debt. There was also a huge build of decent council housing.
We could also obtain interesting work and make a career of it. Standards of living were so low post-war that it was relatively easy to make improvements even on wages that were not huge by any means. The financial speculators and all of their parasitical suckings out of everyone were low-key before Thatcher opened that particular Pandora's box, so saving was possible, especially when consumerism was also low key so we were content to buy and have things that lasted for decades rather than months.
The property-wealth of some boomers was luck insofar as those who managed it also managed to avoid the various predations of the financiers and their ilk. Many didn't, including most who bought their council houses, who found they couldn't, after all, afford the 16% interest mortgage so that their council house eventually ended up in the property portfolio of some speculator.
These days the notions of fairness, equality of opportunity and any kind of social responsibility have been buried by neoliberalism. Despite it's many socio-economic ills, cankers, rots and decrepitude introduced on to the body politic of Britain and elsewhere, our current "government" is intent on increasing all of the neoliberal mechanisms and consequent privileges their social class enjoys at the expense of everyone else. And many a silly old boomer is voting for the rascals! Astonishing really.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
tatanab wrote:As a baby boomer I had it easy - so I am told.
Spot on. They are wrong. Looking back from now, it seems that we did ...... but we didn't in reality.
Yes, housing was cheaper to buy, but we had nothing spare after the crippling repayments. Secondhand furniture ....... we still have some in daily use nearly 50years later ..... home-made curtains, and even home-made cupboards and stuff.
The benefit was walking out of university straight into a graduate level career. In my niche degree subject you could walk out of your degree ceremony, get on a flight to southern Africa and you'd meet people at the airport looking for British trained engineers to work in their mining sector. I know someone 15 years older than me who did that. Zambian copper belt, another guy 8 to 10 years older went into a mining related job in the UK. A recent graduate I met (graduated 2 years before I started the degree course) still doing agency work in factories or offices.
Opportunities gone! Our universities had trained the African engineers who went back and became lecturers teaching local people who took over the jobs. Quite rightly imho but still killed my subject.
Hi all , Can someone please define for me "Baby Boomer", as I feel that Tatanab is too young to actually be one . As for "University"? We attended the "University of Life", otherwise known as the "School of Hard Knocks"! Went for my first job interview with my Swimming Certificates, all I left school with . TTFN MM
merseymouth wrote:Hi all , Can someone please define for me "Baby Boomer", as I feel that Tatanab is too young to actually be one . As for "University"? We attended the "University of Life", otherwise known as the "School of Hard Knocks"! Went for my first job interview with my Swimming Certificates, all I left school with . TTFN MM
I always understood the term to refer to people born of parents married in the early years after WW2. The full term is 'post-war baby boomers'.
Until Thatcher we had jobs, housing (either affordable of social, 'free university education, final salary pensions. After Thatcher, one by one these have disappeared.
On the other hand, we cut our suit according to our cloth. Holidays if affordable and then modest (no credit cards), furniture purchased over many years, second hand anything. Cars, eventually and second hand.
Isn't it the result of men coming back from war into the relieved arms of spouses resulting in a boom if babies being born in the years after the war. Compared to the low birth rate during the war it was a real boom.
Understandable reaction. You're so grateful to be alive and there is peace. A perfect time to procreate I reckon.
, Can someone please define for me "Baby Boomer", as I feel that Tatanab is too young to actually be one 
. TTFN MM