Homeowners aged 60 and over are sitting on a record £2.95 trillion worth of property, with 98 per cent of this mortgage-free, according to an analysis that lays bare the extent of the UK’s generational housing divide.
The calculations, by the estate agency Savills, showed £2.89 trillion of mortgage-free property being held by over-60s who were residential homeowners and only £60 billion worth of mortgages, 2 per cent of the total value of their homes.
The under-45s had £1.56 trillion in property of which 47 per cent, or £734 billion, was held in mortgages.
The indebtedness increased sharply the younger the homeowner became: the under-35s had £600 billion worth of property, with a total of £300 billion of mortgages outstanding.
Younger folk have mortgages, older folk don’t.
And?
They might just as well get excited by the “news” that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning. When I was in my 20s I had a flat with a substantial mortgage… Which followed me “up” the property ladder before I paid the final instalment sometime in my 50s… I’m now in my 70s – so what gives??
It’s always that other people have more with these collectivists and we need to think about taking what they’ve paid for off them. I’d take free health care (A&E and communicables excepted) off everyone. No-one including the elderly has paid for it yet and it’ll help sort out the generational divide.
“All your house are belong to us.”
The Times and the Terriblegraph are both Establishment lickspittles and both have been running articles about the wealth ‘hoarded’ by the olds, so we can expect further financial attacks on the retired. Not the sort of attacks which will bother the genuinely wealthy of course….
“There’s money there. Time to nationalize.”
They don’t mention there will be the biggest transfer of wealth from one generation to the next over the next 10 – 20 years. No lives forever and you can’t take it with you, so unless you leave it to Battersea dogs home or somesuch, the offspring are in for a bit of a windfall aren’t they.
I know the daughter of a woman who passed away last year. She’s been on bennies for most of her life but is set to get the proceeds of mums house, around £195,000. “It’s so unfair”…………
I finished paying the mortgage at 50.
I spend the money saved on coke n’ hookers.
I think you have to be pretty daft not to agree that the housing market – from which I have been an enormous beneficiary – is poisonous to our society.
What we need is a world in which one working father in an average job can put a roof over the heads of his wife and children, and food on the table.
What we have is a world in which feckless layabouts have children with or by other feckless layabouts and get housing (until it’s taken off them and given them to the boat people), and the kind of people we want to have kids might just scrape one out in the wife’s early 40s.
I appreciate that there are many and varied issues here, and that somehow reverting to the old days isn’t going to happen even if we wanted to, but the decision to allow a wife’s income to be taken into account with a mortgage is probably the original sin.
1. Remove all illegal immigrants.
2. Cut all Benefits.
3. Build more houses.
4. Bring back MIRAS.
That would be a start.
If it makes any youngsters feel better, the downside is a dodgy prostate and having to attend the funerals of some fine people.
But yes, the house is lovely, thanks.
Oh, and fuck you, mate.
But the young people (males anyway) will get the dodgy prostates and the funerals as well. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to expect broadly comparable opportunities to those their parents and grandparents had given that it’s the parents’ and grandparents’ generations which have fucked with the market to remove those opportunities essentially to their own benefit.
@Interested
That sort of world isn’t going to appear without a Great Reset.
The kind that the elites seem to want.
I suspect it isn’t going to turn out how they expect…
@Addolff I suspect there will also be a bit of wealth concentration resulting from the transfer. Below replacement rate numbers of kids combined with divorced 2 house parents means lottery wins for a significant number of people.
OT: Tim, are you affected by the current free trial of Net Zero in Spain & Portugal?
The sensible habits that got me into comfortablish retirement are trying to prevent my spending all the money on pleasure and excess. In other and entirely unconnected news, gen Z regards gym membership and iphones and subscription to Disney, Netflix et al as essential.
Interested:
“But the young people (males anyway) will get the dodgy prostates…”.
BIGOT!
Adolff – a lot of that wealth with just go straight back to the government which in the first place engineered the artificial boomer wealth, via care fees.
I love the wording there
Homeowners aged 60 and over are sitting on… property
I think they’re mostly living in it.
Silver foxes have paid up mortgages. What do older women offer? Trips to see her grandchildren.
Til she moves where they live.
BTW, my accounting friends told me to never pay off the mortgage. It’s a financial blunder to do so.
“mortgage-free”
I’m immediately suspicious whenever I see “free” appended to something like this. It’s usually an attempt to twist language, like “car-free”, which means forcing people to give them up and use shoddy public transport.
‘mortgage-free’, you mean like asylum seeker?
If it’s better to have a mortgage than not have one, then that implies that anyone without a mortgage should obtain one, because it will make them better off.
Can’t see it myself.
@Interested
I agree although not sure about MIRAS
Just stop paying people to come here and things will be better.
I’m 72, but I identify as 22. Deal with it, bigots!
OT: Tim, are you affected by the current free trial of Net Zero in Spain & Portugal?
It seems to be Iberia-wide, so I’d bet Tim and BiS are both affected. Luckily the site is hosted elsewhere 🙂 If they really need to do a black start of the grid (as seems to be the case) it could well be days before more remote areas get electricity back – less for the big cities.
Sadly I don’t think the current Iberian fun & games will kick a dent in Mad Ed’s devout faith in sun & wind. It might give National Grid the heebie-jeebies though and concentrate some minds there.
The report will be interesting if they dare to publish it.
No doubt it will all be the fault of climate change.
“Homeowners aged 60 and over are sitting on a record £2.95 trillion worth of property”
No they are not. Thats the market value of the c. 4% of houses that are sold each year extrapolated to the other 96%. Which you can’t do because if everyone tried to sell their house at the same time the market price would be a fraction of what it is today. Just like fractional reserve banking, the housing market relies on the fact only a small proportion want to cash out at any given time. So pretending that the ‘value of all houses is X’ is as daft as thinking that everyone could take their cash out of all their bank at the same time.
Jim
Of course you are right. In practice.
Now let’s see (as the French say) if it works in theory.
Big bank A:
Capitalised by shareholders’ funds, gilts, etc.
Mini Bank B:
Capitalised by crypto and gold.
Run on Bank A.
Where do the. people who have got out in time put their money?
One of the joys of power cuts is that you cannot respond to internet commentary…….no computers, see?
What was interesting to watch was how mobile phone internet died – slowly. Took a few hours. I guess as batteries(?) in the towers exhausted themselves?
In US system all mortgage interest paid is a tax deduction. Changes the benefits…..
“What was interesting to watch was how mobile phone internet died – slowly. Took a few hours. I guess as batteries(?) in the towers exhausted themselves?”
Yes, you typically keep 4-8 hours battery (sometimes diesel genset) capacity at each site (more at core sites and DCs where you have both). But 12-24 hrs without electricity and everything is down (unless you can get lots of diesel out)
(You’d also need to bring a lot of extra gensets out, but nobody keeps enough gensets (or people to operate them) around to sustain an entire network)
Most cell sites will be battery backup. Diesel gen-sets are expensive to maintain, need to be run once a month, refuelled, serviced, etc. Most diesel now has biodiesel in which goes off after a few months… they’re a right pain for emergency use. Batteries are mostly self-monitoring and will usually just need to be switched out every few years.
Most cell sites have some battery, but it’s only to smooth over grid blips and other disruptions, not to cope with extended power outages. Do not expect mobile service in a power cut.
Likewise, the old copper phone lines (which were not grid powered) are being replaced with Internet ones, so the fixed lines go out too.
Have enough water and cash, and hold out somewhere for a day. After that, good luck.
S.M.Stirling has written an excellent set of yarns on the premise that electricity (and guns) just stop working, permanently. “Dies the Fire” IIRC.
“Likewise, the old copper phone lines (which were not grid powered) are being replaced with Internet ones, so the fixed lines go out too.”
That’s not correct. Copper lines were also grid powered (from the local exchange, just as fibre is). The difference was/is that you did not need any powered equipment on the receiving end so if your local power went down your in-home electricity would be out but your phone would still work (either because the power was down in your home but not at the local exchange or because the local exchange had back-up batteries for 8 hours or so)
@Emil
Not so. The local exchange had huge battery farms providing +48V to all the equipment , and could run for hours/days without interruption. They also had diesel generators. All the kit, including computerised exchanges (System X & System Y for the wrinklies) could run off the +48V.
Mobile phone systems still have the 48V batteries and diesel generators for the central sites, but the 10,000+ cell sites (per network) have minimal power-out capability.
Have enough water and cash, and hold out somewhere for a day.
Was discussing that yesterday. My amiga was pleased because we do have a lot of cash. Several thousand. And we were able to stock up on essentials, just in case, whereas people rely on plastic or fone aps were stuffed. But I was thinking; how long would cash have any value? I wouldn’t put it much past the end of the week. Cash only has value when there’s something to buy & the assurance you can continue buying it. I think we’d be back to barter very quickly. Why my biggest purchase was cigarettes. We have enough now to last 3 months
@BiS
Exactly, my comment was for 1 day only. After that, Europeans must rely upon luck and invisibility. Texans have a few better options.
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon, where Alice is boasting about her survival cache, and that Dilbert has none. Dilbert comments that he knows her address, so has no need to cache his own.
Tim the Coder
1) Copper was still grid powered with battery and gensets as back-up (like I said). And they had/have more back-up than mobile as the sites are/were fewer and larger so easier to afford / manage more back-up.
Typical standard for batteries would be 8 hours or so if I remember correctly (vs. ~4 hours for a normal mobile site). After that you can do gen sets. I don’t know how many local exchanges (in whatever country) had diesel gensets on site but I really doubt that all of them would as it’s just too expensive. (BT/Openreach uses/used 5600 sites to operate their copper network with >90% of users connected to about 2k IIRC).
If you have a local breakdown affecting maybe 10 sites then you can easily bring mobile diesel gensets, if you have a national-wide one like in Spain there is just no way you can manage that so you are essentially relying on batteries. (Which again will not last “days”).
So overall, somewhat more protection than the mobile network today (mobile of course also only works if you can charge your devices )
2) fibre networks can work equally well as copper with a power breakdown as you will still have battery and gen set at the local exchange. (Actually they can work better as you need fewer sites.) But the end-user can’t use them if they can’t power their CPE (same as a mobile phone)
Home users (at least the prepared ones) will have a solar generator (Anker, Bluetti, EcoFlow, etc) plus a generator (Honda) to provide power. They’ll also have a few weeks supply of long life or freeze dried food and an alternative source of water.
I’ll admit that having lights on when everyone else is dark is going to put you in the spotlight for some looting, so consideration would need to be given as to how to dissuade those that would do you harm.
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon, where Alice is boasting about her survival cache, and that Dilbert has none. Dilbert comments that he knows her address, so has no need to cache his own.
I seem to recall that one, but presumably most US survival caches include a firearm or three?
The point of the cartoon (which I avoided spoiling 🙂 ) was that Alice was a dedicated non-gun person, and had already said of course she wasn’t armed…
>Tim Worstall
April 29, 2025 at 4:34 am
In US system all mortgage interest paid is a tax deduction. Changes the benefits…..
This is effectively untrue.
For the vast majority of us, our interest isn’t high enough to get any actual tax reduction. Its really something that only benefits the rich who can buy really expensive houses but not so rich they don’t need a loan.
Thanks TtC 🙂