I live in the East Midlands in the UK. You can grab a reasonable first house here for less than £150k quite easily. So you'll need a 5% deposit, £7,500 for one of those. One person on an average salary for the area would be able to afford a mortgage for a house like this on their own. But Nick has a girlfriend, who can hopefully work, so should be able to afford it easily.
But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.
And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
Start pressing buttons and you'll see even more weird claims that most sane Brits won't recognise. This is a weird website that probably shouldn't be given much time.
Many people want to live in close proximity to their family. There are good reasons for this (you have a support network).
I want to move back closer to my family as they are getting older. I would like to move back so I can spend more time with my father as he is retiring this year. To afford a flat in Dorset it is 30,000 deposit. A deposits on a house would be about somewhere between £30,000-£100,000.
These aren't mansions BTW. These are normal 2-3 bed houses.
> But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
My two bed flat (that I got cheap) is £110,000 and I am in the North-West. I've not seen any houses up here that were worth buying less than £200,000.
You typically need a 15% deposit on a flat. I managed to go with some rando building society and get 10%.
Any houses that are £150,000 are always in horrible parts of town or they are complete dumps and need complete renovation.
If you are on a minimum wage (I spent 8 years on it) it is difficult to save money and when something like the boiler goes you are screwed.
> But half of people earn less than the mean salary though.
That's incorrect. Half of people earn less than the median salary. Depending on where you live, it could be that a lot more than half earn less than the mean salary.
>And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.
LISAs are a trap if you want to buy in the South. You can only use it if the value of the property is £450k or less. The limit hasn't been raised since 2017 despite crazy house price inflation. So many people got completely fucked by this; they have their money locked up in the LISA, can't buy a house near London with it, and can't transfer it to something else without a huge penalty.
More broadly, "the govt pays the rest" is part of the problem. All this help-to-buy stuff amounts to demand subsidies that just push prices higher and higher.
> LISAs are a trap if you want to buy in the South. You can only use it if the value of the property is £450k or less
In London it limits you. Outside of London, including most of the South, where the vast majority of British people live, most first houses cost less than £450k.
The limit should have been raised though yes. Or perhaps it should be set by region, I don't know. Hopefully it will be updated at some point.
This is true. You don’t need a £100K deposit unless you want to live in a £1M house, which is not necessary in the UK. If you want to buy a big apartment in central London or a four bed house near London, sure. But most people would consider that a luxury and not a necessity to raise a family.
My father just sold his house down south. It was a 4 bedroom house. I think he got somewhere between £500-700k for it. £1M for a house isn't that crazy in the South-West.
Sounds more like you live in a better area then he does. And by better I mean with less issues, not richer necessarily.
While I admit that I don't live in the UK, I suspect it's similar to my experience from over the sea in Hamburg. I've recently moved there into a district with >50% migrants for roughly 3 yrs - not really expecting anything as I was still positive about everything.
Finding apartment listings in the online portals explicitly saying they will only allow Muslims was surprising to me, but I ignored it thinking, whatever.
Well, after moving into another apartment in the same area was an eye opener for me.
Really, I'm frankly surprised there are people still in denial how bad it's gotten. Well, not really surprised. I mean I was one of them in 2021.
I know right. Folks don't understand that people who come to our countries are also workers whose countries have been destroyed by OUR elites. A bit of solidarity would be healthy, useful and anchored in reality.
Whenever anyone on earth does something bad, it's basically Nick's fault. Nobody except Nick has agency or responsibility. They're all victims, except Nick.
I don't Agree. I got a few giggles out of it. Especially the emails from "Linda", as I literally get those types of emails.
I think generally it was reasonably well done as a novelty joke website that is obviously trying to make a political point. That in itself makes it reasonably interesting IMO.
There is an option to that question where it has a relatively positive outcome and you have lunch with her and presumable are on better terms afterwards. Which tells me that the author isn't dog whistling at all and it is more a lampooning the weird cringe stuff that you are expected to take part in one of these large corps.
In fact something like this sounds like it comes straight out of office space.
I volunteered at a school. Rather than celebrating Christmas or Halloween, they had to celebrate Diwali because Christmas/Halloween might be too offensive or not inclusive enough. The country has gone mad.
3. Why should anyone care? Did anyone stop you from celebrating Christmas with your friends and family?
P.s. according to your post history you have based anti capitalist positioning on the pointlessness of most white collar labor, what happened to make you participate on the wrong side in a meaningless culture war that's just a distraction from the reduction in material conditions of the working class?
Well of course you don’t believe me, it goes against your narrative. But I’m sure someone living in Taiwan knows better than someone British currently in the UK.
Also that is quite an overreach on basic observations that are generally agreed upon and weren't anti-capitalist.
In the west there are not enough young people to support the elderly, and immigration of young people can help to address this problem to the benefit of everyone.
I see this argument fairly often, but rarely do I see the premises questioned. Why do the elderly need to be supported? Wealth is concentrated in their hands (especially in the UK), while younger generations are struggling to be able to afford housing let alone build wealth. Perhaps society should focus less on supporting the generations who have already accumulated wealth and instead focus on supporting the generations who are starting families.
They need someone to literally care for them. In Germany for example, there are far too few people working in elderly care, and it’s a huge problem if we don’t want them to die of starvation, malnutrition or falling down the stairs with nobody to find them there.
Even wealth can’t magically summon the humans necessary to do that kind of work, robots are no solution for the foreseeable future and I don’t think starting a family is easy if you have to take care of your parents and/or grandparents.
There are far too few people working in elderly care because it pays peanuts. It pays peanuts because immigration increases the supply of workers. With a limited supply of workers and increased demand as more people get older, those jobs would pay well and natives would want to do them. It’s basic economy. It works well in countries that are not a free for all regarding immigration.
The elderly don’t pay much tax, and they are very expensive to the state. Younger migrants contribute more taxes to fund healthcare and social services and pensions used by the elderly.
But yes, I agree, we need to tilt the scales back towards the young.
Plus there are enough people to care of old people. It’s just that immigrants cause such downward pressure on salaries that elder care is not a viable job sector for most.
Do migrants do jobs that native-born citizens would not under any circumstances do, or do they do jobs that native-born citizens would not do for the low wages that migrants are willing to accept?
We’re talking about minimum wage jobs, so the low wages are capped at the bottom for everyone anyway. And yes, there’s absolutely "native born" workers that will and do work for minimum wage already.
Regarding the taxation argument. That may have been true in the past (it doesn't account that many of these people stay and then will need to supported when they become elderly) but under the "Boris Wave" immigration boom that is no longer the case.
It doesn't address the other problems such as social cohesion.
>Plus they often do jobs that many people wouldn't otherwise
because the wages are low, why are the wages low? because these jobs have access to an unlimited amount of strikebreakers/migrants willing to do them for those low wages, so the wage stays suppressed and low, instead of allowing market mechanics to bring those wages up
It's "viral" marketing for progress-party.uk, if you play to the end there is a link to a Google doc to register your interest.
The veiled racism and bigotry in the "sim" is cheap. The current housing situation may be made worse by migration, but the majority of it is legal so hardly the migrants fault if we are inviting them.
So blame the government (predominantly Conservative over the last 20 years) and all the NIMBYs and hypocrites that stop anything changing in this glorious country.
The British people, of course, includes those British Nationals with English as a first language, who served in the British armed forces in World War Two.
The UK government, needing workers to help fill post-war labour shortages and rebuild the economy, invited many British people to come to the metropole.
Like all those dark skinned folk of the Windrush generation, and a good number of people who came across to the UK from India and Pakistan.
In more recent, pre-Brexit, years that invitation to fill a labour vacuum went out to fellow EU member states.
Ethnic Brits are the people whose majority of ancestors two centuries ago were living on the British Isles.
But I was talking about Brits in a wider sense -- the people with British passports and voting rights at the time when those mass migration laws were passed. Which happened against their consent.
Worse, in my first scenario, I started a £4,500 but then "girlfriend" ask to move together, so apparently Nick was living solo
And once they moved together, the rent moved to £5,500
> A 50,000 home new town in Kent is blocked because they found nests full of agitated Chupacabras following the government's 'reintroduction' of the cryptid to British arable land. Your deposit requirement increases by £5000.
I feel like it's more particular than 30 year old. Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England. A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK."
This isn't a criticism just an interesting case of unconscious bias at play and how we tend to universalise our experiences.
>Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England.
This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic. Je suis Nicolas (30 ans) aussi. And his counterpart Nicola (30 ans) has similar problems herself.
>A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK."
By the 2021 census population pyramid, about 12,000 / 1.9M = 0.63% of the population are 30 year old women in Northern Ireland, and about 0.58% of the Northern Ireland population is black. Maybe 5% of women are lesbian? Derry's population is 85,000. So 85k * 0.63% * 0.58% * 5% = 0.15 of a person.
>This isn't a criticism
You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias" (and various -isms by insinuation).
> This is in fact an extremely large, dare I say representative, demographic.
It might well be. I didn't suggest otherwise.
> You are in fact criticising it by accusing the author of "unconscious bias"
No, I'm not, that's why I took the time to explicitly say so. I made no "accusation," you've just taken it that way. We all have unconscious biases and we all act them out in various ways. I made absolutely no value judgement and I think I'm a healthy society we should be able to talk about these things without everything having to be taken as an accusation.
> population pyramid
I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
No, I don't buy this "I'm just making a neutral observation" schtick for one second. When people say "unconscious bias", they believe that the "bias" is harmful. If they didn't, why would it be so important to talk about? You are actually making a value judgement here, you just won't say so explicitly.
>I intentionally used an atypical demographic reality to demonstrate my point: that person is just as much "a 30 year old in the UK" as Nicolas. There are obviously many millions of other people who are not like Nicolas and it's reasonable that a conversation includes an eye to the diversity of experience around us for a host of different reasons.
The housing market in SE England sucks if you're young and work for a living; doesn't matter if gay or straight, man or woman, black or white. At any rate, I reject the notion that we can't talk about problems unless literally every last little niche demographic is affected. Not everything is about everyone. Someone must speak for Nick (30 ans).
> No, I don't buy this "I'm just making a neutral observation" schtick
You're welcome believe what you like but I'm not sure why I should engage with you if you refuse to believe what I assert about my own position and if you insist on re-framing my words with an accusatory tone that wasn't there.
I believe unconscious biases can and do have harmful effects yes. But everyone has them and it's common to let them influence our work. There's no shame in it and I certainly didn't make any value judgement against the author of this piece.
> The housing market in SE England sucks if you're young and work for a living; doesn't matter if gay or straight, man or woman
Similarly, I haven't made any statement remotely to the contrary. This is a strawman.
> I reject the notion that we can't talk about problems unless literally every last little niche demographic is affected.
And once again: this is not a notion that could be reasonably construed from what I said above.
I hope you feel better after getting your emotions out but I would encourage you to re-read this thread tomorrow and ask yourself how much you were projecting and perceived qualm onto me.
The Nick meme is a great way of encapsulating how utterly sick of the UK young professionals are at this point.
There is no way to win. I know many young people who are very comfortably in the top 5% of earners in the UK, paying tens of thousands of pounds of income tax per year, and are still locked into paying massive amounts of rent, because it's near-impossible to actually own a house here at this point. So quite honestly, what is the point any more? It's really no wonder UK productivity is dropping.
It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here.
Meanwhile pensioners sit comfortably in four-bed houses in London suburbs with triple lock pensions guaranteed by the government.
It's not a new thing. I'm genX and I lived in rental until my 40s. Was in a 1 bed flat with my wife and son until he was 4. Eventually managed to buy a small place, but even then I was lucky.
I reject this generational war thing though. British state pensions are the worst in Europe. The triple lock doesn't make pensioners rich; it just keeps them from sliding into abject poverty.
> It's really hard to describe how bad the general vibe is here.
Eh, think that depends upon your social circles, sure it's not perfect but the vibes just fine from my perspective. There seems to be a massive swelling of online opinion that everything's terrible and everyone's deeply unmotivated which certainly doesn't match lived reality for me
As someone sympathetic to this, throwing in the culture war stuff (make jokes about LGBT etc) is a massive own goal and makes it so easy for people to discredit. This could have far more cross-party support but it's just going to amuse the people who already agreed with it and make everyone else think it's the alt-right letting the mask slip..
Where is 100k for a house deposit coming from?! Don't most people start with a way smaller deposit? Like 5% is common these days. Yes you'll pay an enormous amount of interest. You pay rent to the owning class one way or another.
Probably to demonstrate that to ever actually be financially secure you should be paying off a significant part of your mortgage and not wage slave until retirement to only own 80% of the property due to inflation and rising costs.
If you're buying into the 5% you're probably so fiscally irresponsible that nothing good will come off it. The new builds aren't all magically appreciating in value by 20% every year. And if they did the better house you'd want to move into has almost certainly gone up by 30% or more.
Not really. It's secured against the house so worst case is the lender repossesses. Either way, unless you have money you will be paying rent to the people who do, either via rent or interest payments. Yeah, I don't like it either, but that's the game.
The OP makes it seem like renting and saving huge piles of cash is the only way. It's not. You can buy and save into your house instead. As long as interest plus maintenance etc is the same as what you would have paid in rent, you'll probably end up better off if house ownership is your goal.
C'mon... 3 years have passed and only two job offers applied for? What is Nic's degree in? Babylonian history? When I was in this position I applied to 20 ads per month. In addition to applying I had alerts on my phone, if a job ad dropped that matched my cv well I'd call the recruiter within 5 minutes of posting. I scored two great jobs this way. But this was in IT... I hear every other industry is much, much harder
But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.
I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.
And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.