If you rent your home and aspire to one day own a property – a millennial can dream, right? – you'll know how frustrating it is having to listen to money-saving tips from older homeowners (the most vocal of whom always seem to be the wealthiest; funny that).
When a multimillionaire luxury property developer suggested affording a home was as simple as forgoing avocado toast and fancy coffee, the internet rightly scoffed over its almond milk macchiato – but this hasn't stopped others from offering up their two cents.
According to a London estate agency, if young people simply stop buying sandwiches for lunch, upgrading their phones and going out one night a week, they'll be able to hop onto the property ladder with the help of a cheeky few thousand pounds from their parents, reported the Evening Standard.
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Research by agents Strutt & Parker names six so-called "luxuries" that we should get used to living without if we ever want to reach this milestone of adulthood, which our parents considered a basic rite of passage. Not only is it patronising to be told how to spend our hard-earned cash, the advice places the onus on us to solve a structural problem with the housing market that's way beyond our control: a chronic housing shortage in the capital that has forced up prices.
By their calculations, giving up a night of partying each week would save more than £6,000 a year – which assumes young people spend £115 on any given night out (something I, personally, can't recall ever having done in my life). Cutting out takeaways would apparently save £2,640 annually, but it's hard to believe the average millennial is spending £47 every single week on Domino's.
Bringing a packed lunch to work rather than buying a pre-made salad or sandwich (that old cliché) would save £2,576, while cutting out an annual foreign city break – not even a biannual break, but a few days of sightseeing that we might look forward to all year – would save a further £700.
Giving up a yearly mobile phone upgrade could save us £154, the agency also suggests and, weirdly, it also cites the Lottery as an unnecessary millennial spending habit, claiming it costs us £832 a year. I can't remember the last time I heard someone under the age of 60 even utter the L word – let alone tell me they'd bought a ticket.
Strutt & Parker describes these changes – which would effectively render our lives joyless – as "relatively small", and claims it would allow us to save the £64,000 we need for an average London deposit within five years. Oh, but only after help from our parents, who the agency assumes would be able to casually ping £29,400 into our bank account. Yes, really.
The research obviously begs the question: Why the heck should we have to make these sacrifices when previous generations didn't need to do the same to get onto the property ladder? It's the responsibility of politicians and others in power to solve the housing crisis, not young people – many of whom are already in precarious employment and aren't eligible for the Living Wage – enjoying the odd Pret sandwich or night out with friends to make their lives more bearable.
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