Comment by srgvd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srgvd | Hacker News Reader

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Single earner with 2 kids living in London on top-1 percentile income here. 60% of that monthly income is going towards rent, taxes and utilities for a terrace in Zone 4, plus nursery charges for our toddler. My wife can't find a job here, as she's an ex-journalist, and not a native speaker. No tax allowances (due to £100k+/y income) and no recurse to public funds (I'm on Visa, and not an EU citizen) doesn't help either. Apparently, I supposed to be rich enough for London to be taxable on 50% of my income (effective tax rate: 41%).

Thought of buying a 2bd flat recently, but it'll take us two years of struggling for every extra penny to just get a mortgage for a very moderate £250k place.

Income means nothing in this city. Either you got your housing issue settled 15 years ago using 'right to buy' or some other form of government housing subsidies, or you somehow generate wealth on a side (obviously, not through the salary, as even £200k/y doesn't seems to be close enough), or you are going to rent until you loose your source of income (i.e. due to old age) - and then you'd probably die on a street.

An economy of landlords drawing the money from their own kids. In a few decades all that accumulated wealth will be probably burned away on anti-cancer treatments, and then heavily taxed and rented younger generation will just quit on trying to build a welfare state, throwing their lives away only to provide a comfort living for older people. Hope our grand-kids will be at least able to start from blank.

I'm on the same boat. When people know my salary they think I'm rich, but the truth is that I can't save much more than I did when I was living in Holland making ~40% less.

Now I have a baby and the wife can't really have a career because a nursery would cost more than she can reasonably expect to make as a designer at this stage.

The 200k/year requirement feeds into the incomes discussion in other ways. Take today's scandal of Malcolm Rifkind, complaining that £67k is "not enough to live on".

Rifkind earns £67,000 as an MP, a further £14,876 as chair of the ISC and received £270,868 in directorships and consultancies between January 2014 and January 2015. (Guardian)

Rifkind's party instituted the "bedroom tax", taking ~£25/week off many people who were living on benefits and who have now been pushed below the breadline, resulting in a number of suicides and deaths of disabled people due to malnutrition.

One one level, MPs are perhaps not paid enough to not need outside payment. On another, we're constantly told that "austerity" is so necessary that we must withdraw the tiny amount of money that is keeping many people alive.

Single yearner

With great typo comes great wisdom.

I'd say it might be a Freudian slip (but there's no sex involved) ... a subconscious thought?

Thanks for pointing that out. Not good enough with the language to appreciate the pun.

Or, ya know, do what everyone else does and commute in?

I understand that is a possible option, but isn't the whole point of this that it's not feasible to live in the city? Being forced further out to commute is kind of the point.

It is feasible to live in the city, there are rents from £70 to £50,000 per week. It is an expensive city, there is a shortage of housing and the options may not suit your aspirations or expectations, but they do exist.

Zone 4, two hours a day commuting already.

Sure. I used to commute from Zone 2 to Zone 2, and it took over an hour. Had I instead moved out of the city, and commuted in from Reading, it would have been 45 minutes. Don't assume that commuting in from outside of London will take longer than commuting across London.

I'm next to straight underground line going right to my office.

'Just go to Reading' was exactly my point. In order to save enough for a basic housing in London, my quality of life have to drop significantly for years to come. Yet I'm considered to be 'rich' by HMRC. (Practically, this'd mean switching schools for one of my children, and waiting forever for free timeslots in nearby nurseries for another - while saving maybe extra £5-6k/y in rent, which is peanuts when counting towards possible mortgage).

Avg. house prices in my current ward are ~$750-900k for a 3bd terrace. That's ten years of my net income - and you don't have to work for that! Just sell a house you bought 15 years ago for a fraction of this cost - and here you go. Sure, you'd have to rent - just as I do. Yet, all those people are not considered to be wealthy (and they aren't, with many of them struggling with today's job market), and not taxed on the wealth they hold.

So, for me - it's all about taxation and government imposed incentives. If they want to put a leash on a younger britons generation and then pass it to Chinese landlords - they're on the right track.

Changing taxation alone can drastically shift the power balance between landlords and tenants to ease underlying supply-demand issue.

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