Yo. Middle class, British millennial (born 1990) living in notoriously expensive London here. Let’s get real.
Numbers in the articleI’ll start with these numbers, dividing the total by 52 to get a weekly amount.
£115 for a couple on a night out? I mean, define “night out”, but this isn’t insanely high spending. You go out to a bar and get a few cocktails and some snacks to share, then get an Uber home. Four cocktails @ £10 each = £40, £15 share of snacks, £10 Uber == £120 for two people.
£50 on takeaways? I did raise my eyebrows a little at this one, but it’s easily done. You can get a Chinese, Indian or pizza for two for £15, but you have to be paying attention. £25 on a takeaway happens very easily, so that’s two takeaways for two a week.
Save £50 by bringing lunch rather than buying? Go to Pret and get a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a drink and you’re looking at £6. Two people, that’s £12 a day for a total of £60 a week. I’m not convinced you could make a similarly nice packed lunch for two for £10 a week, but £20 a week would certainly be realistic, so you could indeed save £40 a week on lunches (£2080 a year).
We don’t exactly go nuts on holiday, but £700 seems on the tight end. We holiday in the UK or reasonably close by in Europe and budget £1000 for a week for the two of us.
£16/week on lottery tickets? That’s fucking ridiculous and totally made up. Ignore.
£154 on an annual phone upgrade? I’m still using a paid-for iPhone 4S, but that seems plausible.
So the only number which is totally pulled out of the estate agents’ arses is the lottery tickets. All the other weekly totals seem to be derived from a normal, non-baller middle class young professional lifestyle.
And the quote from Charlotte Windsor? That’s just bait to make you angry. Or she’s been baited and made angry by some righteous estate agent telling her first that she must buy a home ASAP or she has failed at life (buying a home is really not an aspiration for many in my generation) and then telling her she is literally never allowed to do any of the things that she enjoys ever for decades until she has paid off her exorbitantly-priced house just before she dies. And she’s 22. Many many people are idiots at 22 and go on to be perfectly functional adults (and maybe even buy homes!). Odds on she’s only been working for a year and *if* she aspires to buy a home, imagines doing it sometime between 30 and 35. So why should she be interested in their no-fun-ever* five year plan?
*Though admittedly they haven’t dared to suggest giving up takeaway coffee…
What middle-class professional millennials actually doSo let’s think about the actual real lives of millennials I know (many of whom are doctors, lawyers, bankers, consultants…). Clearly, the estate agents have done their research by saying “How much would you spend on a big night out?”, taken the answer, and multiplied it by 52. They have not taken actual spending data and seen how much millennials spend on nights out in a year.
Nights out: No one I know goes on a big night out to a proper bar every week. Maybe every month for the spendy ones? If people do go out every week it’ll be something like having a couple of beers (average price £4.20) in a pub. I went through a period of going to the pub once a week after a class I took. I had a single Diet Coke every time. I was not the only one. And millennials are very clued-in at looking places up before they go and using online vouchers and what have you. I’m going to a chain restaurant tonight and automatically googled “Pizza Express discount voucher” so we’re getting 25% off. That’s just what you do. And a huge number of middle class professional millennials live in flatshares with roommates who don’t share their entire friendship group, so they cannot just invite people over instead. If they want to see their friends, they have to do it outside their home. Our “going out” spending has gone way down now we actually have our own little house to entertain in.
Takeaways: Lots of people buy prepared food. I don’t know many people who could say they genuinely cook 100% from scratch every night. We don’t. But there is a whole spectrum here, not “full-on scratch roast dinner” at one end and “most expensive takeaway available” at the other. What I think is much more normal is buying semi-prepared foods (like jars of pasta sauce, ready-made pastry, pre-mixed curry pastes, or those packets of meat or fish that come with a little tub of sauce all ready) or, in a crisis, buying ready meals from the supermarket. I can get a perfectly decent ready meal for two from Tesco for £4. I can’t eat onion or garlic (and need to limit lactose) so that’s hard for me to do in practice, but we buy ready-made pesto, ready-made tortellini, fancy sourdough bread, those little plastic tubs of deli things like roasted peppers in oil or feta and olives… Sure, we could make these things ourselves but, as they say, ain’t nobody got time fo dat shit when Tesco will do it for me for only slightly more than the cost of the ingredients. So it’s much more realistic to imagine busy professional millennials assembling meals from semi-prepared ingredients and having the odd panic microwaved lasagne.
Packed lunches: Tough one. I would say most millennials I know buy their lunch a LOT. There is a LOT of scope for saving here. But think about the trade-off they’re making – you can buy a sandwich, crisps and drink from a supermarket for £3. £15/week. What’s the other option? Spend all of Sunday roasting vegetables and slicing chicken to make lunches for the week; panic and make a peanut butter sandwich every morning; buy semi-prepared ingredients that constitute a lunch on their own (like bread and hummus – but that’s about as much as a meal deal and much more boring than a different sandwich every day)? Food has cultural value in Britain now. We care about food. We learn about nutrition. We value good food. ‘Proper’ food is both a necessity and a luxury to middle-class millennials. I think they are conscious of that. So yes, lunches is somewhere that millennials should pull their socks up and sort their life out, but the value of the lunch in the eye of the beholder is not just something to fill them up until the end of the day.
Annual holidays: You know why we think it’s normal to go on holiday every year? Because OUR PARENTS taught us that it is. When I was growing up, every year we went either to a cottage in the countryside or to a European city…and sometimes both! AND we went to visit my grandparents in Devon. AND other family in other parts of the country. So in a good year we might go away four times. And now suddenly you’re telling me that what ‘just happened’ to me and all my friends is massively abnormal? It’s a weird thing to process, especially when holidays are so cheap these days with EasyJet and AirBNB. And, as you’ll know from these boards, travel is valued these days as being an essential cultural and personal experience. And…maybe millennials value it more than buying a home!
Lottery tickets: As discussed, totally ridiculous. Absolute max that I could ever imagine anyone doing is playing the National Lottery once a week for £2. But even then, I seriously doubt that professional millennials do this. It’s people like my dad (spoiler: not a millennial) who are spending a lot of money on the lottery.
Phone upgrades: Yes, millennials do this more than they need to. But the phone isn’t just a phone. You do seriously miss out if you don’t have a smartphone. In my opinion, millennials are more likely to have a creaky old laptop and the absolute tip top newest smartphone – it’s just you only ever see the smartphone (which is part of the point).
And what millennials sayFull comments from millennials in the original article:
Charlotte Windsor, 22, sales worker from Walthamstow. Currently rents with friends paying £625 per month, bills included, to live in Zone 3.
She said: “I think it’s ridiculous. Even if I did give up all of these things, it would still take 94 years to save that up. I pay £625 all inclusive and with the sort of job I’m in it is just ludicrous to expect us to save that amount. Just cutting these things out would save money, but does that mean we aren’t allowed to have a life while we save up for a home? I don’t see any other generations having to have done that. Maybe you could have fewer takeaways, but cutting it all out is going to be a depressing life.
“You have to make some sacrifices, but why should we be deprived of all luxuries? It feels like they are trying to curate who can live in London. You have to be rich enough.”
Lauren Whelan, 20, sales assistant. Lives with her mother at home in east London.
She said: “I think it’s a joke with the prices in London. I would like to get out of London so I can live a bit more. What’s the point of having a house and nothing to put in it?”
Annabelle Gater, 21, works in performing arts and lives in Walthamstow.
She said: “I rent with two others in a flat that costs £1,600 per month. Where I come from, near Manchester, it costs £500 for the same thing. I don’t think people should have to give up their social lives to afford a house. I want to be able to have a family in my own home and not to be renting for my whole life.”
Note that they all live in London, where house prices are genuinely jaw-droppingly high, and they’re all the youngest possible working millennials in low-paying jobs (and possible know each other? Look at jobs and locations).
Charlotte… Yes, it would take 94 years, but that’s because you are working a starter job in London. Your income will go up and you could always move out of London. I know that seems unfair because maybe you grew up here, but that’s the way it is. You’re right, though, that it’s not all or nothing – fewer takeaways, not none, and some sacrifices but not giving up everything. I hope you manage to action that. Also, you didn’t see your parents doing that because by the time they had done it they were old and had already bought the house.
Lauren… You’re absolutely right. It sucks to grow up in London and have to decide between being house poor forever or moving away from family.
Annabelle… Have you considered moving back to Manchester? Or not working in performing arts? People don’t have to give up their entire social lives to afford a house elsewhere in the country.
ConjectureI am pregnant now and have had a few conversations with my parents about our family life when I and my younger brother were babies and toddlers. It goes something like (not all real examples):
Mum: Do you remember in the old house how we had to keep all your brother’s things in our bedroom because we didn’t have a room to put him in?
Me: No, I was three.
Dad: Do you remember how we could only afford to buy you four babygros so we had to wash them all every single day?
Me: No, I was a literal baby.
Mum: Do you remember how you used to ask if you could go and play in the garden like the characters in your book and we had to say no because we couldn’t afford a garden?
Me: No, I was three.
Dad: Do you remember how we used to have beans on toast every night because we were saving up to buy our current house?
Me: No, I wasn’t eating solids then.
My parents moved into their fancy-ass house (that they live in now) when I was four and a half. They were about 40. But I literally do not remember the 20 years of saving up to get to that point because I was either not alive or a baby. Is it the case that middle class millennials think luxuries are normal because their parents had them late enough in life that the real ‘young professional saving up’ hardship was over by the time they started forming long-term memories? I have no personal experience of the generation before me sacrificing to buy a house because they waited to have children until they were basically there. So a big house and lots of holidays is all I have ever remembered.
