From The Daily Mail:
Approximately three quarters (75 per cent) of parents originally planned to retire before they reached 65, but 40 per cent have accepted the fact they will not stop work before the 'official' retirement age. Almost eight in 10 (79 per cent) of parents claimed their ability to save for their retirement had been affected by unplanned financial support needed by their offspring - with a third (32 per cent) suggesting it had been significant...
The article skirts around the fact that "financial support" means "helping children scrape together a deposit to buy an overpriced home", possibly by taking out a further mortgage on the parents' house. So the parents' paper capital gain is more than offset by the additional financial burden on their children, which they pass back to their parents etc until the whole family sinks in a mire of debt. Which puts paid to the idea that 'my home is my pension'.
To sum up, it's all well and good being a NIMBY and not letting houses being built for other people's children, but you must remember that somewhere else, some other bunch of NIMBYs is preventing houses being built for your children.
Via HPC.
Game Over
10 minutes ago
9 comments:
Helping children with a mortgage might be one reason for it. Helping them with university fees is probably a pretty significant one too. As far as I'm concerned with my kids, I'll help them as much as I can with uni but when it comes to buying a house they're on their own!
AC, that £10,000 or whatever debt that you run up as student (should you be too lazy to work while studying) is easily paid off - and if it isn't, then you shouldn't be studying.
That pales into insignificance against the extra £100,000 debt you have to take on - whether you have been lucky enough to study or not - to buy a half-way liveable house.
Reap what you sow...
RR, nicely put :)
£10,000 if not working? What are you smoking, Mark?
Try three times that - the tuition fees alone are £10,000 for a three year course, before you even start on living costs.
Where I live, the cheapest perfectly good, livable houses cost around £90,000 which means a 10% deposit is £9,000.
AC, that's a topsy turvy world you live in.
The houses always get built, just not in my back yard.
Recently I've been told that councilors in a several authorities have been intimidated into approving planning applications against the wishes of their constituents by more senior members. This appears common and I'm not hunting for the data. I'm being approached directly by scared politicians.
The developers are now so powerful they basically command the planning authority via threats of expensive appeals. Proof of this is abundant, in fact.
The latest is that members are now deferring to "the best lawyers" to make planning decisions for fear of the more expensive developer lawyers. The planing authorities are no longer in control of what goes on.
The NIMBY's really do not have a say in it that matters. They may be able to do enough to get the peasants on the poor side of town to take the development but this power too is falling away lately.
AC you are not really helping your kids with uni fees. You are helping their Vice Chancellors receive higher salaries. And this is because so much of the uni's income is derived from rental value of all their major assets. VC's are really land portfolio managers.
http://gco2e.blogspot.com/2010/03/salaries-soar-for-heads-of-british.html
Also I hope you are not sending your kids to learn economics. Going to Uni means they will un-learn everything their nurturing and intuition tells them is so true.
RS, see subsequent post.
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