70k as a single income won't get you a flat in London in any reasonable time and you'll most certainly be renting forever on that kind if money in London. Even if its triple the average UK wage.
Location means everything.
Doesn't excuse them, but I can understand how they say such things.
In the UK the median pre-tax income is £22,400 with £72,000 putting you in the 95th percentile [1]; £70,000 is in the middle of the pay scale for a salaried GP/family doctor [2]; and MPs receive a base salary of £74,000 [3] (plus a bunch of extra income through a variety of opaque means)
I think you would look pretty out of touch, from the perspective of someone earning £22,400 if you claimed earning £70,000 didn't make you rich.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... [2] https://www.bma.org.uk/advice/employment/pay/general-practit... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_Members_of_the_Uni...
"Houseold" accounts for children, single income families, and ignore benefits and unemployment. Last but not least, it's scaled for the UK, not London.
If you are a male in your 20-40, living in London, being the source of income for your household. 70k couldn't be further from rich.
The mortgage on that will be using up around half of your income. That's insane.
£70k post-tax is around £48k so £4k/month so the mortgage will take around 30% of your take-home pay which is a fairly standard ratio.
However what mortgage lenders do is "stress test" at 5%-6.5% that means they evaluate if you'd be able to afford to pay the mortgage + cover your essential costs (food, energy, etc.) if rates rose to those levels.
It's essentially a worse-case assumption to ensure you wouldn't be bankrupt if that happened, not whether you'd be comfortably off at that level.
If interest rates were to rise in 5-10 years time don't forget you could also remortgage to a longer time period to significantly reduce monthly payments if you needed to.
Rates aren't going to jump overnight; if they rise it'll likely be a long slow-rise by which point you should have already paid down a meaningful percentage of your mortgage.
Considering that looking at similar 3 bedrooms to those suggested for purchase gives rates of around £1350 / month. Even putting aside another 1/3 of your income (high) still leaves you looking at 5+ years to save a deposit.
60k/(48k*1/3) = 3.75 years
And that's assuming you start from zero savings.
The median cost of a room in a flatshare in Zone 1/2 is just under £700 month, that's £8.4k/year. Let's assume other costs of living to be £10k/year that gives us a total of £18.4k/year.
Let's say you want to save £40k over 4 years, so 10k/year, that would require a take-home salary of £28.4k/year which implies a pre-tax salary of 37k.
37k should be comfortably achievable for a software developer 1-2 years out of uni.
But if you rent in the suburbs you can get a similar discount on rental as you get on purchases.
(Although the 3-bed was just an example obviously you can get a 1-bed for a cheaper price as well)
And you still have to add the expenses on top. Food, transport, council taxes, utilities.