Pensions and Pensioners

The current situation isn't a temporary economic situation caused by high interest rates, it's permanent! IE, young people will permanently never be able to afford a house because the mathematics are worsening. The only hope for these people is to continue working and move up the career ladder but most will never ever achieve this. There is a difference between difficult and impossible.

I said this in the other thread, my dad was a welder his entire life from 18. He bought his first house at 23, he didn't have to move up rungs of a career ladder nor did he need to eat beans whilst saving for 10 years. My mum worked 15hrs per week and she otherwise stayed at home to look after us. This kind of story is complete fantasy today.

Do you think any of the below is normal? The last column of the table is important and illustrates precisely the financial difficulties that young people face. And yes, the full intention of my posts is to illustrate that quite clearly older people deflect because they do not give a shit and often it's because they stand to benefit.


generation-rent-graphs-01.jpg


YearAv. Property PriceAv. SalaryProperty value to Income Ratio
199688,000£ 24,709.00 3.55
199795,000£ 26,100.00 3.63
1998106,000£ 27,278.00 3.90
1999122,000£ 27,913.00 4.36
2000143,000£ 29,623.00 4.82
2001157,000£ 30,341.00 5.17
2002180,000£ 32,733.00 5.51
2003215,000£ 33,635.00 6.39
2004237,000£ 34,037.00 6.96
2005244,000£ 35,461.00 6.87
2006257,000£ 36,621.00 7.01
2007278,000£ 37,397.00 7.44
2008285,000£ 38,670.00 7.37
2009274,000£ 36,420.00 7.52
2010309,000£ 37,689.00 8.21
2011301,000£ 36,240.00 8.32
2012303,000£ 35,421.00 8.56
2013305,000£ 34,735.00 8.78
2014330,000£ 36,153.00 9.13
2015356,000£ 36,875.00 9.66
2016375,000£ 38,078.00 9.84
2017379,000£ 37,956.00 9.99
2018382,000£ 37,330.00 10.23
2019381,000£ 37,724.00 10.09
2020404,000£ 39,218.00 10.31
2021426,000£ 38,994.00 10.91
Old people don’t give a shit about younger people. Grow the fuck up you moron
 
£426000 is nowhere near the average property price which is actually £292000 in England.

If you want to know the actual values try using the nationwide house price index.
I did think that was suspect but then they also got the average salary wrong, it's £33,000pa. So around 9x salary. Can you remember the days when banks refused to lend to people who wanted to mortgage beyond 4.5x salary?

They now get around this by increasing the term so today 40 year mortgages aren't unheard of which essentially imprisons people into a life of paying interest. Imagine if interest rates go up by even 0.25% with this arrangement? This is all to sustain high housing prices by artificially inflating demand versus demand/price based supply.

Basically my point is that this housing market cannot sustain these levels of greed, ignorance and stupidity. It will collapse and eventually we're all going down with it. That includes pensioners.
 
I did think that was suspect but then they also got the average salary wrong, it's £33,000pa. So around 9x salary. Can you remember the days when banks refused to lend to people who wanted to mortgage beyond 4.5x salary?

They now get around this by increasing the term so today 40 year mortgages aren't unheard of which essentially imprisons people into a life of paying interest. Imagine if interest rates go up too? This is just completely wrong.

Basically my point is that this housing market cannot sustain these levels of greed, ignorance and stupidity. It will collapse and eventually we're all going down with it. It's a ticking timebomb.
That's even incorrect, the average salary in the UK is £39039 for full time employees. Please note you need to compare apples with apples. The figure of £33k is the median salary and including all part-time workers.

As regards it being a ticking timebomb, that timebomb has been created due to speculation by property investment companies buying up housing stock whilst the government turns a blind eye, meanwhile they have built less affordable houses each year and when they do they soon get snapped up by very wealth private landlords.

All together now "we all live in a Robbie Fowler house".
 
Thats even incorrect, the average salary in the UK is £39039 for full time employees. Please note you need to compare apples with apples. The figure of £33k is the median salary and including all part-time workers.

As regards it being a ticking timebomb, that timebomb has been created by speculation by property investment companies buying up housing stock whilst the government turns a blind eye, meanwhile they have built less afford houses each year and when they do they soon get snapped up by very wealth private landlords.

All together now "we all live in a Robbie Fowler house".
How many young first time buyers though are likely to be on £39k? I'd say few and the average wage for the 22-29 group is much less than that. This is however the prime time to save for a deposit and it isn't like people in this group get cheaper rent rates or anything else. They still have to pay bills and live whilst apparently saving huge sums.

This is why careers are so important now but I don't believe they were that important for today's older generation because housing costs were much lower. 50 years ago you just simply got a job, any job, you worked hard and you got something in return, that's now nearly impossible.

I just draw back to the picture I shared earlier. 20% of Millenials now own a home before 30 whereas 50% of boomers owned a home before 30. The trend change in terms of finances is just plain as day. You can then draw many other comparisons such as how many kids are people having, it all comes down to the decreasing affordability of everything.

I don't want to upset people by saying that they didn't have it difficult. It's just that today's difficult is a different kind of difficult to anything that came before and it's something that is not recognised in any shape or form in politics.
 
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How many young first time buyers though are likely to be on £39k? I'd say few and the average wage for the 22-29 group is much less than that. This is however the prime time to save for a deposit and it isn't like people in this group get cheaper rent rates or anything else. They still have to pay bills and live whilst apparently saving huge sums.

This is why careers are so important now but I don't believe they were that important for today's older generation because housing costs were much lower. 50 years ago you just simply got a job, any job, you worked hard and you got something in return, that's now nearly impossible.

I just draw back to the picture I shared earlier. 20% of Millenials now own a home before 30 whereas 50% of boomers owned a home before 30. The trend change in terms of finances is just plain as day. You can then draw many other comparisons such as how many kids are people having, it all comes down to the decreasing affordability of everything.

I don't want to upset people by saying that they didn't have it difficult. It's just that today's difficult is a different kind of difficult to anything that came before and it's something that is not recognised in any shape or form in politics.
So are you going to apologise for saying they didn’t have it hard or care about the younger generations, because you have said both of them ridiculous things?
 
The current situation isn't a temporary economic situation caused by high interest rates, it's permanent! IE, young people will permanently never be able to afford a house because the mathematics are worsening. The only hope for these people is to continue working and move up the career ladder but most will never ever achieve this. There is a difference between difficult and impossible.

I said this in the other thread, my dad was a welder his entire life from 18. He bought his first house at 23, he didn't have to move up rungs of a career ladder nor did he need to eat beans whilst saving for 10 years. My mum worked 15hrs per week and she otherwise stayed at home to look after us. This kind of story is complete fantasy today.

Do you think any of the below is normal? The last column of the table is important and illustrates precisely the financial difficulties that young people face. And yes, the full intention of my posts is to illustrate that quite clearly older people deflect because they do not give a shit and often it's because they stand to benefit.


generation-rent-graphs-01.jpg


YearAv. Property PriceAv. SalaryProperty value to Income Ratio
199688,000£ 24,709.00 3.55
199795,000£ 26,100.00 3.63
1998106,000£ 27,278.00 3.90
1999122,000£ 27,913.00 4.36
2000143,000£ 29,623.00 4.82
2001157,000£ 30,341.00 5.17
2002180,000£ 32,733.00 5.51
2003215,000£ 33,635.00 6.39
2004237,000£ 34,037.00 6.96
2005244,000£ 35,461.00 6.87
2006257,000£ 36,621.00 7.01
2007278,000£ 37,397.00 7.44
2008285,000£ 38,670.00 7.37
2009274,000£ 36,420.00 7.52
2010309,000£ 37,689.00 8.21
2011301,000£ 36,240.00 8.32
2012303,000£ 35,421.00 8.56
2013305,000£ 34,735.00 8.78
2014330,000£ 36,153.00 9.13
2015356,000£ 36,875.00 9.66
2016375,000£ 38,078.00 9.84
2017379,000£ 37,956.00 9.99
2018382,000£ 37,330.00 10.23
2019381,000£ 37,724.00 10.09
2020404,000£ 39,218.00 10.31
2021426,000£ 38,994.00 10.91
You're choosing home ownership as THE key benchmark to measure prosperity/financial wellbeing. Although bad for many, the Thatcher years were good for me - so Im glad you've so firmly bought into her vision of aspiration to home ownership/personal assets - rather than the socialist vision of state housing for all. House ownership is not a "right" nor is it actually a necessity (lots of Countries have large populations of renters) and it is cyclical - I have lost money on houses - that was common in the early 90's.
You could run a similar bar charts on
- Exotic or long haul or frequent travel & "gap years"
- Expensive personal gadgets, phones
- Costly Gym memberships
- Designer clothes & luxury goods
- Leisure time & activities/hobbies
- Personal grooming, Hairdressing and Nails
- Plastic surgery tweaks and expensive diets
- Expensive foodstuffs/takeaways - not cooked from scratch
- Ridiculously priced dogs
In every one of these of these aspects (some not entirely serious) your generational bar charts would run in the opposite direction !!!
Even Thatcher might agree not everything revolves around house ownership. Instead of obsessing about the past, you might want to focus on your present and your future. Life's not that bad - you can't have everything, things change, every generation has different life challenges.
 
It isn't the fault of pensioners no but their opinions are completely skewed by their experience of what is tough when actually they had it far easier than they think. Pensioners always quote the interest rates in the 1980's but they forget what they were earning in relation to the price of housing.

They'll say interest rates in their day were 15% but you just cannot translate that into today. Even a 1% rise in interest rates today would result in an apocalypse. This is why the BoE struggles to tackle the cost of living, interest rates are no longer a mechanism to control anything because the housing market would collapse.

At my last remortgage my mortage went up from £830pm to £1100pm and that was with what a 0.5% rate rise? This is after 8 years of paying off the capital of the mortgage, you'd expect a mortgage to get cheaper over time and not more expensive! Even a 2% rate rise would put me and my family on the streets.

Did pensioners ever have to worry about any of this? Did they balls, they just worked and rode the housing wave and now some are sat on capital assets worth 1500% of what they originally paid. Around 1/4 to 1/3 of pensioners are now asset millionaires and many of these are the ones telling young people to simply give up their Starbucks and work harder....

By the pensioner logic if salaries had tracked housing costs then the average salary today should be at least £85,000 a year but guess what it's not even half that. Young people today can therefore skip eating, skip living and work every single hour under the sun for a decade and they'll still not be able to afford a house.
You think we had it easy? I could write a book on the struggles a lot of us encountered, being brought up in the 60’s/70’s to starting work at 16, struggling to buy a house, no cars, no holidays, no designer clothes, no heating, tin baths, outside bogs for a lot of my generation, believe me it was not easy.
 
You're choosing home ownership as THE key benchmark to measure prosperity/financial wellbeing. Although bad for many, the Thatcher years were good for me - so Im glad you've so firmly bought into her vision of aspiration to home ownership/personal assets - rather than the socialist vision of state housing for all. House ownership is not a "right" nor is it actually a necessity (lots of Countries have large populations of renters) and it is cyclical - I have lost money on houses - that was common in the early 90's.
You could run a similar bar charts on
- Exotic or long haul or frequent travel & "gap years"
- Expensive personal gadgets, phones
- Costly Gym memberships
- Designer clothes & luxury goods
- Leisure time & activities/hobbies
- Personal grooming, Hairdressing and Nails
- Plastic surgery tweaks and expensive diets
- Expensive foodstuffs/takeaways - not cooked from scratch
- Ridiculously priced dogs
In every one of these of these aspects (some not entirely serious) your generational bar charts would run in the opposite direction !!!
Even Thatcher might agree not everything revolves around house ownership. Instead of obsessing about the past, you might want to focus on your present and your future. Life's not that bad - you can't have everything, things change, every generation has different life challenges.
It's not that house ownership is a right but it should be at least attainable via a clear path of work but it is becoming less and less attainable. I don't think this is hard to prove and I've given plenty of evidence which nobody actually really wants to engage with.

And yes house ownership is THE key benchmark to measure wellbeing because a house is not an asset to be bought and sold, it is a home, a basic need for life. 99% of the time people rent because they cannot afford the deposit needed to buy and the deposit needed is directly related to the price of the house... which are priced too high.

Nowadays home ownership for under 40's actually often depends upon whether the parents are rich, IE, the parents are able to gift a deposit (or via inheritance) because their children can't afford it.

I bet many have helped their kids on here so you know the score. I have a savings fund for my daughter because I just know that she will never be able to buy herself... But then I'd happily take a 20% loss in the housing market or take 20% out of my house for her to get there. I'd take that because I have a home and that's what matters. This is not the mentality of most and it's a greed that drives the housing market forwards.

I'm not saying the older generation had it easy but cut the younger generation some slack because it's a different kind of difficult. It's the kind of difficult where you are city in Division 2 and you are told to work hard and one day you will win the Champions League.... Quite clearly sometimes you need some help!
 
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Pensioners pay a lot of income tax.
Most other benefits are seemingly not taxable.
This is 100% wrong. At present the SP is not taxable as it is below the threshold. It will be from next year, which IS wrong and Reeves needs to bite the bullet and increase the threshold to keep it above the SP.
 
This is 100% wrong. At present the SP is not taxable as it is below the threshold. It will be from next year, which IS wrong and Reeves needs to bite the bullet and increase the threshold to keep it above the SP.
Pensioners use up most of their allowances on SP.
However other Personal Pensions have been taken out for some time by pensioners.
All of this income is taxable.
Approx a tenth of all income tax is found by taxing pensioners.
 
Yes in the private sector. Gordon Brown started the demise of defined benefit schemes with his tax raid on invested growth of the schemes, other factors were the straw that broke the camels back. However there is little doubt Brown fucked DB schemes
Nope, all he did was extend what Norman Lamont started in 1994.
 
You think we had it easy? I could write a book on the struggles a lot of us encountered, being brought up in the 60’s/70’s to starting work at 16, struggling to buy a house, no cars, no holidays, no designer clothes, no heating, tin baths, outside bogs for a lot of my generation, believe me it was not easy.
You had a tin bath ! Luxury. We had to wait for it to rain !!
 
Pensioners use up most of their allowances on SP.
However other Personal Pensions have been taken out for some time by pensioners.
All of this income is taxable.
Approx a tenth of all income tax is found by taxing pensioners.
Correct. And any personal pension was granted tax relief at source so liable for tax on it's way out.
 
It's not that house ownership is a right but it should be at least attainable via a clear path of work but it is becoming less and less attainable. I don't think this is hard to prove and I've given plenty of evidence which nobody actually really wants to engage with.

And yes house ownership is THE key benchmark to measure wellbeing because a house is not an asset to be bought and sold, it is a home, a basic need for life. 99% of the time people rent because they cannot afford the deposit needed to buy and the deposit needed is directly related to the price of the house... which are priced too high.

Nowadays home ownership for under 40's actually often depends upon whether the parents are rich, IE, the parents are able to gift a deposit (or via inheritance) because their children can't afford it.

I bet many have helped their kids on here so you know the score. I have a savings fund for my daughter because I just know that she will never be able to buy herself... But then I'd happily take a 20% loss in the housing market or take 20% out of my house for her to get there. I'd take that because I have a home and that's what matters. This is not the mentality of most and it's a greed that drives the housing market forwards.

I'm not saying the older generation had it easy but cut the younger generation some slack because it's a different kind of difficult. It's the kind of difficult where you are city in Division 2 and you are told to work hard and one day you will win the Champions League.... Quite clearly sometimes you need some help!
Can you cite anywhere where pensioners haven’t been cutting youngsters some slack as you seem to be fixated on that.
 
Correct. And any personal pension was granted tax relief at source so liable for tax on it's way out.
My main point is that this taxation is in the main collected from non SP sources so pensioners contribute income tax like other workers.
The non taxed money has been invested and generated income for the taxman today rather than when originally invested.
 

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