Hands up please

Thank goodness I'm not a millionaire - we are likely to eventually inherit MIL' s small 2-uo 2-down house in Rochdale, worth about 100K and about £20K worth of savings - I inherited £10K from my mum, which I used to pay off OH's credit card and buy him a new computer - the rest I've invested in a P2P Loan company which is a much better return than any other form of investment. Apart from that, I have about £1200 in savings. But I have a miniscule wok pension and my OAP, OH has ESA and DLA and they've currently stopped my DLA, which was a godsend, allowing me a little independence, whereas I can barely afford to leave the house pending my tribunal appeal for PIP. i grew up with the "if you can't afford, you don't buy" attitude. I occasionally use my credit card but only when I know I can pay it off within a month or two, but have always been a saver rather than a spender and like to feel that I can afford my needs without struggling. Where I live I would be surprised if anyone I knew had more than a third of a million!

Around here, a not at all special family house can easily cost £1M (yes, it's quite mad) so if you had paid your mortgage off that would make you a paper 'millionaire'.
In practice you could still have a relatively low income so it doesn't mean much. And even if you were to downsize, you'd have to move to a much cheaper area to make it anything like worth while.
'Millionaire' doesn't mean anything like what it used to mean a few decades ago. At least not in London and much of the SE.

I bought my 4 bed roomed house for £45000 in 1978. It's in n Somerset and has lovely views over the Bristol Channel to Wales. No mortgage and I've a bit of an idea of what it's worth and it makes it gulp,

Makes me gulp. The house just looks smug!

a smug house, whatever next?

You can all say what you like, but it won't change the fact that at 11%, there's over a million pensioner households worth more than £1 million. It's not just about benefiting from the property boom, it's also about the kind of pension schemes they were in e.g. Final Salary schemes - which also came with good lump sum payments.

It's not about begrudging anybody the money though, it's about recognising not all pensioners are in the same financial situation, so they shouldn't continue to exclude them from the brunt of the government's austerity measures.

If 11% of pensioner households are worth more than £1 million, at the other end of the scale a higher percentage of 12% are worth less than £40k.

So that means the majority - 77% - are somewhere in between.

Another fact you can't get away from is that in 2010, for the first time, the average pensioner household income became higher than the average working household income - and that's after housing costs are taken into account. So it's not just about the value of your property.

So you have paid off your Mortgage , have the OAP , but need to pay the gas bill ? will the gas company take a few bricks or slates in lieu . Now the house needs repairs , take a window to the DIY store to pay for bricks and slates ?............ The idea that your house is part of your income is despicable

aggie I don't think anyone is saying your house value is part of your income, just part of your overall worth.

Janea - I don't think that applies round there. Prices are pretty low and the tenants that he has could not even afford the deposit for one of those. Young couples are desperate to find somewhere to rent from a fair and decent landlord. The arrangement is a happy and amicable one. Honest decent landlord who charges a sensible rent and plays fair with them. They are very happy.

pompa - ukuleles?? Hahahaha!

Luckygirl that may be so in the particular case where a young couple cannot save up enough for the deposit on a mortgage.

But speaking generally, a young couple will have to save more for a deposit, and then pay more for a mortgage, because house prices have been inflated at least in part because of buy-to-let investors.
Even in areas where property prices are low, they will still be higher than if buy-to let investors weren't on the scene.

aggie, that is why so many people choose to downsize or to move to a cheaper area to release capital. Some people who own mansions in the West country or Lincs have sold very ordinary homes in London and made ££££

Yes indeed and forced house prices out of the range of people whose families have lived there for generations

Downsizing can be expensive though. Have you seen the prices of all these new retirement complexes springing up everywhere?

I've just been looking this up and found out the following:
"The ONS calculates households’ total wealth by adding up the value of the property, household goods such as jewellery, financial assets and pension pot."
So the million figure includes your private pension pot too (which I guess makes sense, but I never consider it as a lump sum as it's what we live on year to year).

annifranc when people trot out homilies like "the only place where luck comes before hard work is in the dictionary" I wonder if they have stopped to think for a moment.
When Zac Goldsmith mayoral candidate for London happened to be born into the family of a hugely successful millionaire, was that anything to do with Zac's hard work? Lucky old Zac has a trust fund so he's never had to work particularly hard to stay rich. We still live in a country where the vast majority of the very rich have had a lucky start in life.
Lower down the wealth ladder, those that happen to inherit a family home from parents or grandparents who just happen to live in the South East will also have a bit of luck that they have not had to personally work for.
Property prices in other parts of he country are not buoyant. i know of a bungalow recently sold in the West Midlands. It was bought in 2007, it dipped in value 2009/10 and has slowly struggled back to near the original purchase price.
Many people in the now-retired generation have had the luck to live through a period of relative stability and growth since WW2 and their assets are, on paper, substantial because property values have increased far faster than average incomes. When my grandfather left the army after the war and returned to his humble clerk's job in the electricity board he was able to afford a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed house. This despite a non-working wife and a family.
The term "millionaire" was coined when a million was a serious amount of money. It's not any more - could be just a public sector worker with a house in the right place.

A two-bedroomed bungalow here in our part of the West Midlands, on a busy road, has just sold for £500,000+ Jess and our house which we bought, again in the West Midlands, has increased in value by £100,000+ in eight years.

It's this ridiculous rise in house prices that is responsible for reports like this, while at the same time making it very hard for young people to get on the property ladder. And this is resulting is resentment as our age group is being seen as a 'never had it so good' generation.

There is a certain amount of truth in this as, when we tried to buy our first house they wouldn't take my income into account ('you might leave work and start a family' I was told) and this did help hold house prices down.

But against that, we never had they sense of entitlement to all kinds of extras today's young people see as essential. We did without expensive holidays, only ate out as a rare treat, were happy(ish) to accept relatives cast off furniture and generally made do.

Though we did have the opportunity of careers and good work pensions.

anya I have to smile at your reference to cast off furniture.
Our first house was entirely furnished with furniture donated by relatives and friends' parents.
Then we moved to Hongkong where the furniture was standard issue supplied by MrA's employer.
We bought our first piece of furniture in 1985 when we had been married for 15 years.
It was a kitchen table from Ikea and 31 years later I'm sitting at it about to have my breakfast

Must be a much posher part of the West Midlands Anya with far higher house prices. The nice bungalow I have in mind went for less than half. I'm talking half way between Wolverhampton and Walsall. Other relatives live in affluent Solihull and that has a housing market much more like the SE I suspect.

Main reason for rise in house prices is supply and demand - far too little building for the last 10 years. More of us are living longer than our parents. More of us are getting divorced as well. And in the SE the booming economy relies on immigration to fill the job vacancies - and they need somewhere to live.

The coalition sat on their bottoms and did little to boost building. Osborne would rather talk about HS2 than invest in social housing. Small rise recently due to his subsidy for house builders aka building "affordable" homes under Help to Buy. But if he had invested in social housing back in 2010 it would have boosted the economy and young people would not be in quite such a bad position.

Here's an interesting article about London's housing problem, from the FT.

www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8ef50668-63b3-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz45PO5RK3U

I do certainly feel for young people who are priced out of home ownership. Although they have managed to buy, neither of my daughters and their partners, despite degrees and good jobs, could begin to afford the house we bought when we were considerably younger than all of them.
Everybody I know who has been lucky enough to inherit money has passed most or all of it straight on to their children, to help them with frightening housing costs (at least here in the SE).
I do get a bit fed up with hearing about 'greedy boomers'. Anyone would think we specifically voted for rocketing house prices. And we don't all go on non stop cruises and buy fancy cars, sticking two fingers up to children struggling with big mortgages and childcare costs. My kitchen is over 30 years old and my very ordinary car is well past its youth, but they still function fine, and I had no hesitation in passing a recent legacy directly to my daughters. I just feel so sorry for the many who can never expect any such help.

I for one would be very happy for house prices to come down considerably. I positively hate the attitude that rocketing house prices are a good thing. Not to mention the idea that my generation are constantly crowing smugly about how much our houses are worth, and telling younger people it's all their own faults because they spend money on iPads.

Thee insanity of the housing prices is shown by the current value of the first two homes my parents owned. The first home they owned, a three bedroomed Victorian semi in south London is now worth over £900,000. After the war we moved to Carlisle and my parents sold the London house and bought a similar one there. This house is currently worth about £120,000

If Cameron can declare his income so can I! My income is my state pension with a bit of SERPS and amounts to £165 a week. I own a house worth perhaps £90,000. My most valuable possession when new was my sofa which is not even comfortable!

A few months ago I was very fortunate to have found a small job for a few hours a week in a family business with flexible hours, which keeps my head above water, and keeps the car on the road. So far I have still not earned enough to pay income tax.

In Solihull you can buy a 4 bedroomed house for £450,000 in London that would be the price of an average flat!

After the war house prices reflected the current situation of man working, wife staying at home looking after the children. Now they also reflect the current situation, 2 people with incomes and children looked after by someone else.

'Gold plated pensions', yes I think the public sector do have them, they are inflation linked which applies to very few outside the public sector.

Someone suggested that a person living in an expensive house and claiming support from the state should sell up and use the capital but is this any different from those living in social housing and claiming support? Why should they be protected from moving when they have spare rooms but not those who privately own? For anyone who has always lived in the same place the pressures must be the same except that it would be a lot more stressful to sell and buy than to simply move. We have moved away from that sort of security but I keep hearing it is hard to do.

Remembering what happened soon after we married, when the house prices serged, just as they did in 2002. I can well believe there are many who are exceptionally well off.
Especially if you remained in commuting distance to London. Along with two salaries, once the kids were at school and a lot of a wealthy inheritance, so i am sure a lot will have more than one house, which two people close to the family experienced, so are now travelling around the globe non stop.