[cloutchaser]

It's an example ffs. If that's your criticism of what I wrote, it doesn't really make sense, everyone can personally decide how much they want to spend on avoidable luxuries.

But btw, $50 a month means $50 extra you can spend on mortgage payments, which can actually add a couple of thousand dollars to your budget potentially.

[mmarq]

Having been in that situation, with a good salary (3 times the average of the UK) and spending close to 0 in leisure, I can tell you that it’s still impossible to buy a decent house in London even if you give up on all avoidable luxuries, because you need a 160-200K£ deposit, that would require 20-30 years of savings. The average salary in London is 35K£, the average house cost 500K£ and if it doesn’t fall apart and if it’s not in the middle of nowhere, a 2-bed flat cost 600K£.

I find extremely dishonest and patronising to suggest that people can’t buy houses because they spend too much on avocados or Netflix. Even if one spent 5000£ a year on these, which is an order of magnitude too high for the average earner, it’s still going to take them 40 years of monastic life to save 200K£.

I’m out of that infernal loop only because a few years ago my salary jumped above 250K£ and I’ve made 200-300K£, after tax, in a single year when my employer did its IPO. Let’s not pretend that the average person can buy a half decent family home in a decent part of the UK just by working hard and giving up lattes.

[cloutchaser]

> If you DON'T spend $50 on lattes, then obviously you can't save that money.

I did acknowledge that if this doesn't apply to you, then it doesn't apply to you. Yes somewhere like London I imagine this might be true, although looking at the amount of people in lines in coffee shops and lunch places spending £15-20 on lunch, a lot of people it DOES apply to.

If you find it impossible, and the math doesn't work, fine. But I think a lot of people use articles like this as an excuse to never be frugal in any way.

[mmarq]

People line up for 15-20£ lunches because they have to, because they have been forced to go back to the office to make their daily sacrifice to Micronus, the petty god of middle management, and to Parasitus, the evil god of real estate.

They may live more frugal lives, and feed themselves with close to expiration Tesco sandwiches that cost 0.01£ (why, it’s left as an exercise), but it won’t help them getting out of poverty and renting (which in itself is a form of poverty in a country where tenants can and are routinely evicted for asking repairs).

So it’s not impossible to live a more frugal life and save 5£ a day, which is less than 2000£ a year, it’s pointless if the price of the average house increases by 7-8% a year. What is one doing this for? To please the editor of the Daily Telegraph who complains about millennials?

The only way out for the individual is to earn more or to enjoy a lottery-like event, such as my company going public. The collective way out will probably require political action, of what kind I don’t know nor I care. But we can’t pretend that the better educated generation in the entire history of mankind can’t buy houses because they can’t budget and spend too much on avocados and takeaways.

[zpeti]

>People line up for 15-20£ lunches because they have to, because they have been forced to go back to the office to make their daily sacrifice to Micronus, the petty god of middle management, and to Parasitus, the evil god of real estate.

How is going back to the office forcing you to buy £15 lunches? You don't have to even eat Tesco sandwiches. Believe it or not my parents made their own sandwiches at home, which probably has a cost of around £1 for a lunch. So you can save £10-14 on lunch. And they might actually be tastier, but again, needs personal input and work.

And your math is completely off again. £2000 per year is £20,000 in 10 years, plus interest you might have £25-30k. And you can save way more than £5 a day, easily if you actually - ACTUALLY - pay attention and have personal control.

That's getting close to a deposit on a house.

[mmarq]

> How is going back to the office forcing you to buy £15 lunches? You don't have to even eat Tesco sandwiches. Believe it or not my parents made their own sandwiches at home, which probably has a cost of around £1 for a lunch. So you can save £10-14 on lunch. And they might actually be tastier, but again, needs personal input and work.

You can go as far as only paying for a train ticket to get to work and rent the smallest flat in zone 4. Even assuming that you manage to survive on 40£ per day including rent (that in London buys you the lifestyle on a European agricultural worker in 1800), and that you earn an average income (35K£), you won’t save more than 1000£ per month. Which is 12K£ per year, which barely matches the average price increase of properties in London. If you earn 90K£ per annum, with this miserable lifestyle you can save 3800£ per month, which is 45K a year. So living the most miserable lifestyle possible, somebody in the 90th percentile of the income distribution, can put down a deposit to buy a 2-bed flat after 3-4 years, assuming prices stop spiralling out of control.

Considering that a millennial should live like a miserable for decades to buy a 2-bed flat that their parents could buy with a few years of savings while having normal lives, I find it extremely out of touch to claim that an entire generation (the better educated in the history of mankind, I repeat) can’t buy homes because they can’t manage their budgets.

> And your math is completely off again. £2000 per year is £20,000 in 10 years, plus interest you might have £25-30k

Which is 1/6 of the deposit you need to buy a 2-bed flat in London. So it’s 60 years for the deposit and then a 40 year mortgage. Assuming, again, that prices don’t keep doubling every 10 years.

[RugnirViking]

Unrelated to the conversation at hand but why do you write the £ symbol after the number? It's very jarring, at least to me

[mmarq]

Force of habit. I get to the same complaint from my partner. I put it where I would put the unit of measurement:

10cm 1kg 5£

[Mordisquitos]

Everyone can personally decide how much they want to spend on avoidable luxuries, of course. It just so happens that the "avoidable luxuries" that the overwhelming majority of the population can afford—the clichéd old lattes and avocado toast—are mere rounding errors when compared to the cost of housing that is keeping them from being able to own a home.