Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
I always feel slightly embarrassed by the tales of people who started with nowt and, by sheer bloody graft they now own hundreds of properties, have millions invested blah blah blah.The problem with housing type threads on PFM is that nobody ever really acknowledges that much of the PFM demographic is broadly the lottery ticket winning generations (boomers and first half of gen x) and we all lived through the most beneficial demographic and financial changes. It's all about how hard everyone worked and how brilliantly they managed to invest in the most sustained major asset class growth period in history just by getting somewhere to live.
I did pretty much everything I could to **** up the advantages of being born at the right time (1967) and still ended up ok. Mid-60s is in fact the sweet spot as it means both me and my parents had an order of magnitude advantage over people born after about 1980. We also got to live though the peak carbon burning years and now can avoid paying for it as we pass it on to our children.
This is fascinating on how demographics have changed and effected both wealth and earnings. Also interesting that someone like Willets who was in government as recently as 2014 but would probably now be viewed as come kind of communist and sent to the back benches.
This is partly because, as you say, my generation was extremely fortunate compared to both my parents’ generation and my children’s generation. It’s also partly because I didn’t bother with the sheer hard graft bit, and have got where I am through dumb luck and a couple of sensible decisions in my 20s (buy a flat in a nice area, start paying into a pension scheme as early as possible).