London Millennials Need to Give Up Restaurants for Five Years If They Want to Buy a Home

By Nicole Dieker November 15, 2017

Photo credit: Paul Joseph, CC BY 2.0.

Today in “not this again,” we go to the Evening Standard:

Millennial couples priced off the London housing ladder could save enough for a deposit in five years by giving up six “luxuries” ranging from phone upgrades to overseas mini-breaks, it was claimed today.

New analysis suggests that potential homeowners from “generation rent” could accumulate the £64,000 they need for an average London deposit — after help from parents — within half a decade by making “relatively small changes” to their lifestyles.

The six luxuries are:

Giving up a night out once a week (this suggests that many people are going out several times per week, which… has not been my experience)
Giving up restaurants/takeaways
Packing lunch instead of buying it (that’s the same thing as giving up restaurants, really these first three tips could all be combined into one)
Giving up an “annual foreign-city break”
Giving up the lottery
Giving up mobile phone upgrades

So. If you give up your weekly night out—which UK Estate Agent company Strutt & Parker claims costs £115 ($150) per night—plus nearly all restaurant food/work lunches/takeaways, plus vacations, plus the lottery, plus phone upgrades, you can save enough for a down payment in five years.

If you have help from your parents.

Strutt & Parker explain that if you are “lucky enough to have family that can help,” they should be able to contribute £29,400. Add that to the £64,000 you’ve saved by cooking all meals at home and praying that your four-year-old phone will hang on for another year, and you’ll have the £94,000 ($123,840) required for a down payment in 2017.

Never mind that it’ll be 2022 by then, and the housing market might have gone up.

And never mind that there are plenty of young people who are already skipping nights out or foreign-city breaks or lottery tickets. They’ll just have to cut back some other way.

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