In my latest
blog I ask the question about attitudes to owning your own home for people starting out and do we as a society have a different want and need than in the past to having a nice house to live in ?
From affordability to practicality reasons i'm interested to know people's opinion on this matter.
Many of our ancestors were married with kids and buying a home by aged 20. For most, the home was small, and the furniture was borrowed or second hand. There was either no car or one car. Yes, many women were housewives and didn't work.
My observation is that younger people seem to be less in a hurry to buy than we (50 year olds) or our parents or their parents were.
This may be linked to such things as the later age of people getting married and having kids? I was one of those people - married at 30 and first child at 40, but I bought my first PPoR at 25, so I don't really know...
On this forum there also seems to be a lot of younger ones who whinge about how unaffordable housing is, but I don't think this is necessarily the view of all younguns, as only a handful would ever bother coming on here, or even know about it.
So, I reckon this site is for the enlightened minority (talking about the younger generation) I suspect, and naturally by virtue of that they are looking at housing with an investor's mindset as well as with their heart.
I think most of the whinging comes from what their expectations are for a first home - the expectations are much higher than what my parents and grandparents' were, and previous generations didn't look at housing with their calculator in their hand to establish the value of a house in terms of "times income".
They (the older generations) simply saw it, liked it and bought it if they could afford it.