Post by r00lish67 on Feb 29, 2020 16:39:38 GMT
My parents were not well off - my Dad was a teacher and my Mum part time teacher and then Oxfam volunteer. We never had anything new, always charity shop and whatever was being sold off at the supermarket. At a point in the 1970s my parents bought a fairly large house in Surrey on a big mortgage, and all the spare money went on paying that.
When my parents were old, they sold the house which they then owned outright. Bought for 76k, sold 800k. I asked my Dad what he thought about that. "It has made a mockery of my working life. I used to walk to save the bus fare" he said. Now I am inheriting this money, and I don't know how to spend it. I own practically nothing that was bought new, all from charity shops and Ebay. I like mending things. My car was 4k with heavy front end crash damage which I repaired. I could buy a flash car and big house but I'd feel like a tit, wouldn't suit my punk rock image at all. I don't have any children, so it's all going to charity causes and to buy land to return to nature. P2p is just a light hearted gamble to increase the pot.
No disrespect to you/your parents though, it's just the symptom of a really crappy situation for the UK in this regard at the moment though. Now to buy a house in the SE requires either family fortunes or 2 people in really good jobs working flat out for the privilege of a gargantuan mortgage against a shoebox.
Thankfully having the little sprites was/is the last thing I'm interested in doing, but I do feel sorry for people in their 20's now who would ideally like to have room to have a couple of kids and can't even realistically buy a little flat sometimes.
edit: my personal tale of parental financial fortune is my Dad, who retired at 53 with a public sector index-linked final salary pension of I think something like 70% of his highest salary.
I think he was in the last couple of years of such a generous scheme.
I don't know exactly how much it is, but capitalised into the lump sum my generation would need to amass to convert into a similar index-linked annuity with spouse benefits in event of death, it would be probably comfortably towards £2m. And that's all automatically gifted at a pretty early retirement, with no conscious effort on his part of saving/investing for it.
Again, not his problem, blame the game not the player - but what people in their 20's/30's are meant to do, god knows.
Sorry, gone a bit Guardian here. I don't count myself in the 'hard done by' lot btw, I've just kind of sidestepped the whole show by becoming an international gypsy.