Hands up please

Although I am awaiting a cheque from the Premium Bonds this month

(£25)

Yes, let's hear for those 'lucky' pensioners, from humble backgrounds, the first in their family to go to university/have a career/save for their old age
Anya - presumably the same ones who are helping their children, if they have them, through their education and possibly on to the housing ladder if they can and/or with child care to enable them to work.

Remember, most more expensive houses will probably be owned jointly. So that would only be twenty five hundred thou each. There's a difference between being a half (shared) millionaire and having it all to yourself.

I'm not sharing my £25 win [selfish]

Statistics are strange and can be twisted to suit any agenda.
House prices in the South East are through the roof, and if you add in all your furniture, cars, jewellery, gadgets, and modest nest egg, then I can see it reaching a million or nearly so in a lot of cases. Not a mill in ready cash though is it?

No-one will want my furniture though, even though I like it.

No, I still can't do the maths

maggie and Anya no, I didn't have the loving and stable background either, quite the opposite but somehow DH and I still made it work and got on with the life we had been given. We have done our best to make life better for our children and grandchildren and not gone through life bemoaning how hard it has been for us. Givers not takers.

I'm firmly of the belief Nonnie that 'whether you think you can or think you can't - you're right!' In the words of Henry Ford.

I always thought that to be a millionaire you needed an INCOME of £1m a year, not just assets worth a million.

I love the idea of Charleygirl's cat paying fees - that must bump up your income a bit, Charleygirl?!!

Also the fact that Pompa includes his ukelele amongst his assets!

Regrettably I am not a millionaire as Lord and Lady NotTooOld spent what should have been my inherited wealth on cigarettes and whisky.

Seriously, it is bl**dy annoying that rags such as the DM don't appear to take into account how hard most of us baby boomers have worked to achieve our current status, whatever it is.

I received a letter from the premium bond people with a cheque for £50 this very morning so I am going to take my time deciding. I do not intend rushing into anything
H and I are another couple not blessed by well off parents,quite the opposite, but we (H mostly) worked so hard to get a professional qualification and build a better life for us. We lived within our means always and we have helped our family. Now our D is a single mum we help out financially so that our GC can enjoy something approaching the standard of life they had before. I am not feeling smug here it is something we feel strongly about and as we don't go out now we are happy to do it now when they need it than when we are dead. Off the point really, just an observation that it has been hard worked for.

Well, no half a million pound houses here, noone has nowt. But we do have a good neighbourhood, caring people. I have a lovely home, big garden, nicely decorated with love in every brick. I wouldn't like a big house, my parents had them and they seemed cold to me, I like smaller, snuggly houses. But each to their own.

NTO, you may be surprised how much my ukuleles cost me (as would MrsP )

If you live in the south of England and started on the housing ladder in the 1960s/70s it is not difficult to find you are now living in a house valued at £1 million or more. Our current house is now worth more than 4 times what it was cost when we bought it 20 years ago

Many elderly 'millionnaires' are capital rich and cash poor. There are a lot of them in Oxfordshire, where I live, and in London and other parts of the south east. I have several friends there who bought modest houses in unfashionable areas of London 20 or 30 years ago and are now living in desirable parts of London in houses worth well over £1 million. All without ever moving house.

Many, if not most, elderly millionnaires are accidental millionaires with all their wealth coming from the increase in value of their houses. They have just been fortunate to have bought homes in areas where prices have increased way beyond average. They have not spent their lives living in luxury and privilege , they have held very ordinary jobs and have lived all their lives on modest salaries. I have visited occupiers of very valuable houses to help them complete Pension Credit forms because their pension income was so meagre

Not wishing to be unkind but honestly, if you're sitting in a house worth a million is it fair to claim pension credit rather than sell up and buy something smaller, leaving you with cash to supplement your pension.
Houses in the south east may be worth 4 times what their owners paid 20 years ago but that isn't the case is so many other areas. Property prices are either static or decreasing in many areas, with buy to let taking over as few younger couple's are earning enough to get mortgages.
Talk about a divided society.

Iam64 I often went to help people who were in situations that could be resolved if they would behave as other people could see would clearly be in their best interest. But none of us are entirely rational in all our decisions.

I visited many people (not in expensive homes) who had nest eggs set aside for a rainy day, who were, metaphorically, standing outside in a deluge but refusing to touch these nest eggs inc case a greater need came along late .rMany older people in valuable homes are frail and not well and do not have the energy, mental or physical to cope with the whole process of moving, especially if they do not have close family support. Moving could kill them.

It evens out because Inheritance tax has to be paid on the house after they die. People like this do not have Inheritance tax avoidance arrangements.

I have won £75 two weeks running on my PBs! But........that still leaves quite a way off the £million of assets! Hey ho - every little helps!

My SIL has a couple of buy-to-let properties and they are his pension fund. It is also a help to the young couples who rent them who could not afford a mortgage. He charges a fair rent and is a good landlord, so in a sense these young couples are able to live in a house they could not afford themselves, and they seem very happy about this.

House prices round here are much lower than in many other areas, so I would guess that few of my friends are sitting on £1million in assets. Though maybe a couple of them who came from London and Home Counties might have benefited from the lower prices here and made a profit on the move.

Of course most of us worked hard for what we have - we certainly did. But times are difficult. We bought our first home before we got married, and we could afford it without too much difficulty. Our daughter and her husband, who live in Buckinghamshire, have good, well paid jobs, but can't afford to buy a property. Instead, they pay what seems to me like an crazy amount to rent. Yes, well educated, with good degrees, but not able to start paying into pensions until recently. In spite of their own 'hard work', I doubt that they'll ever be as well off as we are!

Having wealth doesn't bring happiness or take away loneliness

The only place that luck comes before work is in the dictionary.

I have friends, now retired, who have had good employment and salaries with modest pensions. they bought their house more than 30 years ago in West London which is now very fashionable. It was run down and they have over the years done it up and it's fabulous.

Along the years they have bought small houses to do up and rent out in order to boost their income. This way they have helped their children, educated them privately, had a good life with lots of travel and are very careful with their money in order to do that. I take my hat off to them and begrudge them nothing. It has all come from their own hard work.

The family home is now worth millions because of the astronomic rise in house prices in that area. But why on earth should they sell and downsize from what is the beloved family home. they can afford to run it, but I am not sure they could if the Masion Tax came in which for people like this I regard as grossly unfair. Of course it is too big for them now but they regularly have their grandchildren and her father to stay, so why shouldn't they reap the benefits of years of hard work and careful money management.

I SO dislike this current mood of envy.

Luckygirl My SIL has a couple of buy-to-let properties and they are his pension fund. It is also a help to the young couples who rent them who could not afford a mortgage.
How does that work, if you don't mind my asking?
The 'helping young people' bit, I mean.
Isn't the rise in house prices at least partly due to the number of people investing in buy-to-let, making houses unaffordable for young first time buyers?

We have been married 47 years and have always saved hard and lived frugally. we both worked full time and put off having our children for 9 years, which made me an old first time mother at 28!. We live in a poor area but in the south east, our 3bed property has increased in value and we have been trying to downsize , but with the moving/legal/tax costs and high prices its virtually impossible to find something suitable which will give us some equity. We, like many others, are property rich/ cash poor. With only our govt pension coming in a further mortgage is out of the question. Its all on paper and our children will benefit when the time comes. In the meantime we do the best we can and enjoy retirement, still being careful. On the other hand I do have a multi millionaire friend (husband did well) who live a very extravagent lifestyle yet when we visited a NT property recently refused to pay the extra £1 entry fee, and when it was explained that they can claim tax rebate from the government, to my astonishment my friend said she was not a tax payer. Well there you go!! While the rest of us pay tax, she doesnt?. What do they say about tax havens, sunny places : shady people?

Certainly round here it is, janea. I live in a street now full of rented properties occupied by young couples and families who would once have owned them and had their first step on the housing ladder. When one of the few remaining elderly residents dies or goes into a home, we just wait to see which of the buy-to-letters adds their house to the portfolio.

Wealth and income are different and I suspect that house prices have inflated the wealth figures. It is all part of the 'intergenerational divide' narrative which is being used to draw a wedge between the old and the young and should be resisted as firmly as possible.

One consequence of calling asset rich/income poor people 'rich' is to be enable government to find mechanisms like mansion and asset taxes to slowly withdraw the equity from the assets themselves. For example, when the LibDems were proposing a mansion tax they were offering the completely false sweetener that the tax would only be taken, if income were insufficient to pay it, when the houseowner died - at which point the heirs would find all of the equity already hoovered out of the property when their relatives passed away.

In actual fact, most pensioners are poor and the average figures of pension income are vastly inflated by including the incomes of those at the very top of the band. Not many people know that the average 'gold plated public sector pension' is actually £5000, not the huge sums that many imagine.

These figures and the narrative of 'pampered pensioners' itself are very dangerous; they cause division and resentment and should be roundly resisted whenever they arise. They can be countered by citing the immense amount third agers are putting into the economy by helping their children and grandchildren both financially and with time and family support which would otherwise have to be picked up by the state.

I have a small pension and I support many people with my time and efforts. If I billed this work it would be worth thousands a year. I'd better appreciate a thank you from a grateful country than an attempt to label me 'rich' and steal what little I have.

Have to agree with you lily flower. I have noticed with concern that recently parts of the press appear to be encouraging resentment and driving a wedge between different generations . As you rightly say, if everything we older generation do were not done with love and for free we could greatly increase our incomes. As well as caring for my mother until she died 3 years ago, we regularly care for 2 grandchildren which probably saves thousands in nursery fees each year, and when out and about we see many other grandparents doing similar. Much voluntary work is done by older people. We were frugal ,going without so much ,in order to pay our way, which the younger generation seem generally Incapable of, times change of course but we must not forget that it was hard for us with no help at all from our parents and interest rates of up to 17 per cent on our mortgages.

I'm pretty sure one of my friends is a millionaire. When they married in the seventies they bought a run down house on a big plot of land. They worked hard to do it up, and then turned the land into a beautiful garden. Now the area is one of the most sought of in the country. Houses regularly sell there for over a million. My friend lives a modest life because all her wealth is in her house and she doesn't want to sell it.