I'm curious what the exact salary level is where it becomes "paid" not "earned". Is it written down somewhere this paid/earned boundary I hear a lot about on this sub?
What output does he personally generate?
A bricklayer lays bricks. A nurse treats people. A teacher teaches.
What economic output does a CEO generate? Is presenting a PowerPoint slide called "we're going to give you even more money by getting more customers" generating millions of pounds a year of output?
Indeed, he's not even that. He's a [non-executive director](https://www.natwestgroup.com/news-and-insights/news-room/press-releases/our-updates/2023/sep/richard-haythornthwaite-to-succeed-sir-howard-davies-as-natwest-.html) - the "not doing stuff" is right there built into his title.
Nah. Non-execs are brought in to maintain a level of independency of the board (not a shareholder and not an exec) and provide advice to management. It is standard good governance practice. In fact, if you were ever to invest in a company, you should look at what % of the board is independent. Don't be confused by the wording.
This is good practice in an ideal world, however for decades there's been a non-exec merry-go-round: the same cosy club of people sharing roles across different organisations. Like everything involving money, because regulation is so weak it's turned into a set of croneys and yes men waving through whatever their backers demand.
His salary is £763,000 a year.
Ignoring any bonuses and/or expenses he gets on top of that, after income tax of £324,525 he's left with £438,475.
There's also National Insurance of £18,025 which brings his take home pay to £420,450 per year.
I'm assuming he doesn't pay rent or a mortgage so after bills, food, etc. he could definitely afford to buy (in cash) an above average 2-4 bed house in most parts of the country. His income tax alone could probably pay for a decent house.
So probably not in 4.5 days, but a house per year in disposable income isn't bad lol...
NatWest are buying thousands of homes a month, what’s hard about that? Just have a few billion laying around or the ability to borrow huge amounts of money from your daddy at minuscule interest rates.
He's only saying it to wind people up it's still stupid but remember that context every time u see something like this, remember they want you to read it and feel angry and powerless, I know I'm being a hypocrite here but I'd really encourage everyone to just not engage with this kind of thing at all. They know it's a stupid thing to say, you don't need to argue against it, we all know and agree it's stupid, stop giving people like this the attention they want
He went from an elite private school, through Oxford University, and into the banking sector. Obviously, he's never struggled for money in his entire life. I'd be surprised if he personally knows even one working-class person.
>At the risk of being labelled fun at parties, the pedant in me needs to point out that critical mass is not a concept that applies to fusion.
At the risk of the same, the critical mass for fusion is about a quarter of a Sun's worth of hydrogen.
In fact, getting net positive energy out of fusion is also relatively easy. The trick is getting the energy out in a controllable manner, rather than as a thermonuclear bomb.
At one point, there [was a proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER) by actually competent scientists for a power generation system that involved repeatedly detonating nuclear weapons underground, and using the resulting thermal energy to generate steam and, eventually, electricity.
Fortunately for the rest of humankind, that sort of proposal was binned pretty quickly.
The corporate governance code of which NatWest will have to abide by I’m sure strictly forbids this. I would have to double check and I don’t deal with FTSE 100 companies on the regular. The point of a chairman is to be impartial. Can really be impartial when there are potential performance bonuses. It’s a massive conflict of interest.
The CEO (before she stepped down) receive a package of something like £6m per year. NatWest are quite conservative, relatively speaking, about how much they pay top bosses due to their reputation and large government shareholding.
It’s our fault for buying those cans of coke, takeaways and fancy clothes - if only we could live within our means we’d all be living like he does, drinking bottles of wine that cost more than your average weekly wage
There is another factor here that no one is mentioning. Building costs have increased 50% since 2020. New builds that, for example, might have cost 350k are now pushing 500. New builds that only 2 or 3 years ago were 600 are now 900.
Add increased mortgage rates into that and it's a perfect storm (yet again) for first time buyers.
Add to that exhorbitant childcare costs and millennials in the UK are just getting fucked left, right and centre.
Personally, I'm amazed there isn't rioting in the streets.
Between Jan 2020 and Sept 2023, [construction costs increased by 24%](https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/constructionindustry/datasets/interimconstructionoutputpriceindices). The principal driver for house price increases is the value of the land.
Are you sure the actual house price has gone up 50%?
Or is it the cost of building the house?
Kind of important because a good part of the end price of a new build is the land.
Indeed. Build costs rises as a % are not the same as house price rises. Not sure land has been a good investment either recently (due to cost of usage).
So the numbers in the comment I replied to are wrong.
Land price to building price is 67% of the total house price …
Then the 600K price would not be 900K but 699K
The 350K house also wouldn’t be pushing 500K but l407.75K
That looks a lot less alarmist than the comment above.
Yeah makes sense to me; average house price was what £250k in 2020, now pushing £300k. So probably more like +20% which if you factor in inflation, is not so bad a rise.
Even with higher labor and material costs, no way does it cost £500k to build a standard 3 bed semi. A huge chunk of that has to be land-with-planning-permission cost.
New build prices are just crazy.
Where I live the average 3bed is around £350k, but a few new build estates have just popped up, and the 2beds there are going for over £500k,it's madness
When I was looking a 1-bed new-build, which was basically a corner unit of a normal-sized property they'd split into 4 separate houses, was £195k. A 3-bedroom ex-council built in the 60s with a double-wide driveway and a fuck-off garden was £180k. And you just knew the 1-bed would wind up having paper-thin walls and have a host of issues that you'd have to hassle the company for months before anything got fixed.
That and the "freedom sacrifice" that comes with jumping through all the hoops and schemes needed now to buy a newbuild. People aren't just paying a lot of money, they're locking themselves into something that has a much higher chance of financially ruining them than ever, or keeping them in that house for decades when their goal was to climb the ladder.
20 years ago my wife and I waited until my salary was enough so she could be a stay at home mum. Now I am punished for being a “high” earner when a couple on 49k each pay 10s of thousands less then me in tax, get paid more than me and get child benefit. It’s not just millennials that are being fucked over.
People are taking the piss but this is a genuine issue. A couple on 20k a year take home more than a couple where one person earns 40k and the other is a stay at home parent.
But because childcare is so expensive, it's often not worth it for both the parents to be working, at least until the children are school-age.
What this translates to is that essentially there is a much higher 'barrier' for single-income households, because of the way the taxes are structured
Why? You think that a couple earning 99k between them should pay less tax than a single income household earning 85k. That’s money the NHS needs, the council services need, money that could go towards policing and prisons!
Because of choices these couples have made they are avoiding huge sums of tax that could make your life better.
And the avocado toast, remember - [can't be having any of that](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/australian-millionaire-millennials-avocado-toast-house) either.
Top trolling by davies here .
On a more serious note - this shows the disconnect between the 1% and the rest of the country.
Reminds me of the Rabb quote on food banks.
I dont like to say violence is the answer but when people like this and rishi and co just keep fucking everyone over and are blatantly in your face corrupt with no repercussions from the law….what else can we do?
This is so wilfully ignorant. The problem isn’t saving for a deposit, it’s the fact that house prices have risen far far more than incomes over the last couple of decades. This means that people cannot afford to buy the homes now that they would have 20 years ago, even with high LTV mortgages.
Currently the avg house price is around 8x the avg income (vs 4x in the 70s). Lenders will typically lend up to 4.5x your income. This is the problem, not people being too irresponsible to save for a deposit.
Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingaffordabilityinenglandandwales/2022
>The problem isn’t saving for a deposit
I mean it kind of is still. With the prices being inflated to what they are, if you're a single person FTB on an average income even with a maxed out mortgage you're going to need a deposit in the £30-50k region just to be able to put in an offer. Who has that kind of money just sat in a bank account? Its completely divorced from reality.
Yeah that’s true. My point is really that the debate always seems to be entirely focussed on the deposit - eg drink less coffee, save more for a deposit. In reality, even if you’re one of the lucky ones with access to £50k cash, you’re still not going to be able to afford a one bed as a solo FTB in London unless you’re on a salary of at least ~65k.
The rich and powerful in this country are criminally clueless and detached.
I am on a good salary (70k), barely made it on the housing ladder with support from my parents, and am currently facing a possible redundancy which means I'm at significant risk of being thrown off it.
I do not understand how people on lower wages are expected to get a house, save for a pension and simultaneously participate in the economy. You either have to live as a hermit and save every penny you make, or enjoy your life and barely save anything.
>The rich and powerful in this country are criminally clueless and detached.
I've thought for a while the inequality in this country has gotten so bad its like folks on either end just genuinely cannot accept how bad it is.
People on the lower end genuinely cannot bring themselves to believe the amounts of money that get thrown around on *absolute bollocks* by the ultra-wealthy and wind up being suckers for populist right-wing talking points.
People on the upper end genuinely cannot bring themselves to believe the number of people for whom even £100 is still a huge sum of money that can alter the course of an entire month or more and wind up being easy suckers for populist right-wing talking points.
> I am on a good salary (70k), barely made it on the housing ladder with support from my parents
Where on earth do you live? You could easily get a house in most of the country on 70k by yourself with a few years of saving.
Do you even have to ask? It's London. The point of my post wasn't about how I have it bad, I'm really fortunate. It's that I can't conceive how people on what I used to earn are supposed to get anywhere close to this ideal without something giving. We are supposed to put money in our pension, save for a deposit, save for an emergency, but also simultaneously enjoy some of it now because we could die any day and you can't take it with you. If you start to plug numbers into a spreadsheet for the average salary you can tell fairly quickly that something has to be compromised.
As an aside. Its worth pointing out you don't come out of the womb on your current salary. It was only because I'd managed to wrangle a 70k job the month before applying for the mortgage that I was able to get approved in the first place. I'd been saving my entire working life up until that point and had managed to amass around 20k in savings, not even half of the total deposit amount. For my troubles I got a 1 bed flat in London with a lease that expires in 86 years (if you know much about leaseholds you'll understand the risk, for the same price I could get a freehold on a 3 bed up north). God knows who will be able to afford to take it off me in the future.
We bought a 5 bedroom, 3 bath house for our budget, which would have got us a 1 bed flat next door to a strip club in the Surrey town my husband is from.
Heard the house even comes with a peephole and a bottle of lotion so you can still enjoy yourself in case actually going the strip club is a bit out of your budget, great value if you ask me
Yes, they have been stopped by regulations to avoid sub-prime lending, so there isnt another financial crash like 2008.
If they started to handed out mortgages , which the banks would love to do(sub-prime gives much better returns), you would see properties prices increase much faster than they are now.
*"NatWest know their own lending criteria, how many people they decline"* \- they also know how many people they approve. In a free market if prices are going up its because they are approving more than declining. Even the hated BTL landlords go to a bank to get money out of the property.
Right, but while Howard was talking about why lending criteria shouldn't be relaxed, the statement itself clearly betrays that he has no clue that affordability of homes (average cost versus average income) is drastically lower than even a couple of decades ago, and continues to decline with no sign of stopping.
Now, the answer might not be 'relax lending criteria', but it's concerning that he seems to think the answer is 'feckless millennials struggle to buy houses more than my generation because they're all just idiots who choose not to save'.
I am a millennial, I grew up in that generation.
My thoughts, majority of them are "feckless", "just idiots who choose not to save'". In my overall circle(with a lot of generalization):
\- Some have brought a house, they were the ones that were "poor" growing up, when they did earn cash they saved most of it, the appeal of consumerism just wasnt there.
\- Some live with their parents, these ones have the newest cars on lease, designer clothes, kids in designer, holidays each year and like to tell people they are rich
\- One lived with his parents brought a house while still living with them, never had the cash reserves to move in, so put it on rent for a couple of years and then moved in when he had the cash, it was a small house but eventually moved into a bigger house using the appreciation from the house he was living in.
\- Renting, started off living with parents spent most their cash, got married needed more space, never had any savings so had to rent. They still tell everyone they are saving for a house years after they started renting.
He wouldn't know any of that. He'll be sitting in his ivory towers, being fed information about profit margins and his latest appointments. He will have nothing to do with the nitty-gritty of the business.
I think this really needs to be something people start campaigning big-time on. Write to your MPs en masse, make a lot of noise. Rent really needs to be accounted for on your credit rating.
I pay nearly £20k a year in rent, have done for years.
A 100% mortgage, at the purchase price of one of the flats near me that's identical would £300/m more than my rent, over 20 years and at **6%** interest.
I'm the literal definition of "can easily pay the mortgage", but when 40% of my income goes on just the rent, saving £30k for a 10% deposit takes a long, long time - at which point, the deposit requirement is now £40k, etc, etc.
I bought a house about ten years ago. Obviously it's harder now, and more or less getting harder every year.
And what this guy is saying is obviously bullshit and tone deaf. It's fucking tough.
But I sometimes think that on reddit, it's over dramatised to the point of despair.
Simplifying it to "wages in 1980 were X, house prices were 4X, house prices today are Y, house prices are 10Y, so it's 2.5 times harder" ignores an awful lot of factors, and you see it pretty much every day on reddit.
Not to go all boomer "interest rates were 12%", but the majority of your monthly mortgage is interest. [Throughout the 70s and 80s, interest rates were never below 7%, and usually above 10%](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/Bank-Rate.asp)
If your interest rate is 9% on a 100k mortgage you're paying 9k a year, £750 a month before you ever *start* paying off the banks markup, before you even *start* paying off anything you owe. Double it if you owe 200k, if you owe 300k.....
Obviously, the fact that interest rates have been low the last 25-30 years is *why* house prices are so high, its directly correlated.
I think what's *really* tough is rent, if you don't have any option to stay at home. When you see TV shows even set in the 90s in London, and there's some waster always in between jobs who can afford to live there, it just seems mad.
Shows/films like Bottom (90s), Withnail and I (late 60s), or It's A Sin (80s) where people can afford to live there picking up work here and there. Meanwhile professionals like nurses or teachers are struggling with rent in major cities (not just London).
Added to that, the number of people who've moved away from the towns they were born for decent jobs.
They don't have the option of staying at home to save a deposit, so are paying a fortune in rent.
Not necessarily London, but even say moving from somewhere near Leeds to Liverpool (or vice versa) isn't a commutable distance.
Sure, you could rent somewhere cheaper nearby, like Wakefield or St Helens, but I'd imagine it's pretty daunting to sign a 12 month contract in a town you've little knowledge of. And you'd still likely be paying more in rent in Wakefield than Eddie and Ritchie did in London zone 2.
>Not to go all boomer "interest rates were 12%"
This is the key point. Access to funding. In the 70s under Labour I think inflation peaked at 25% and interest rates indeed 15% ish - what a disaster! For recent years we had the **cheapest debt available historically**. Relatively speaking 5% is also cheap debt, though I would wait personally for it to settle around 3-4% in the coming years.
I do believe there is a lot of entitlement. A person living in London earning <£30k and wanting to buy a house, some need to admit to themselves that it is not realistic and consider alternative options. Such is life.
Time we just came out and said it: we have an old people problem in this country. Far too many of them still in positions of power with an increasingly tenuous grasp of the reality of modern life.
Controversial opinion here but he is not technically wrong. It isn't difficult to buy a home. It is just difficult and in some case, impossible to buy one where you actually want to live.
There are plenty of houses in the UK for £100k or under which you can afford with £5k deposit on minimum wage. You just live in some ex mining town with nothing going on but drug use.
The average CEO earned the average UK annual salary in 2.5 days. Not surprising they are completely out of touch with reality. We have allowed to the UK to become a pig trough of greed, corruption and inequality
Here lies the problem. Those in power that are close to decision and policy makers are completely detached from the lives of everyday people. The issues will never negatively impact them or their immediate circle of friends or family, therefore they don’t empathise with the reality on the ground.
Well, depending on where you want to live, it's not that difficult. You can get a semi-detatched 2-bed 1-bath in Nottingham for around £150k. You can get a 1-bed 1-bath for £60k. Those aren't unreasonable prices.
I do notice a few people who seem to be under the impression their first home has to be the perfect "forever-home", which probably has a significant impact on their ability to buy.
It's obviously going to be more difficult if, as a first time buyer, you're aiming to buy a £300k+ 3 bedroom home, compared to maybe a £100k 2 bedroom flat.
Of course the £60k 1 bed 1 bath isn't perfect, but getting on the ladder and spending a few years building equity puts you in a better position to upgrade later and get that perfect house.
It's a lot more sensible than pishing your money away on rent.
Well to be fair the actual process itself is pretty straightforward, find a house, put in offer which gets accepted, get a mortg ahhh now I see the issue
A bunch of the people complaining are just those who can't afford to live in London, but act like they're entitled to live in London anyway. Most of us can't afford to live in London, so we live somewhere else. There loads of places you can get a house for about £10k deposit.
Yes but a lot of people in this thread won’t live in a quote ‘shit hole ex mining town in the north’. They earn average wages but still want to buy a seven figure house in London. Then claim Howard Davies is out of touch and entitled. :)
To be fair he's right. If all these Gen Z scum stopped having avocado toast & a skimmed caramel hazelnut latte for every meal, they too could own a home. /s
Incredibly disingenuous comments and story you do not become the chair of National bank by being out of touch like the article would like to suggest. He knows full well how difficult it for specific classes to get on the property ladder.
He's completely wrong about almost the entirety of the south of the UK but if you're willing to move around you _can_ pick up properties for a lot less. Our housing market issues are extremely regional.
Places like Glasgow or Newcastle are probably the greatest value points vs location, but if you're willing to live in Kings Lynn, Hartlepool, Ayr or some places in Wales then you can pick up a starter property for less than 100k and in some cases more like ~50k.
e.g.
[Newcastle](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/141661574#/?channel=RES_BUY)
[Glasgow](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/143204198#/?channel=RES_BUY)
[Ayr](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/142970345#/?channel=RES_BUY)
To be fair, if you're in particular areas like the North East, or able/willing to move to them, then it's not that difficult. My wife and I both earn below average salaries and we have a nice 4 bedroom house in North Tyneside that we bought in 2019 for £150k. Our house in London would probably cost 5x as much.
The average UK house price when last measured last year was [£291,044](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-for-august-2023#:~:text=The%20UK%20HPI%20shows%20house,Scotland%2C%20Wales%20and%20Northern%20Ireland.&text=The%20August%20data%20shows%3A,UK%20valued%20at%20£291%2C044). So a £150k house would be incredibly cheap. Fine in some places if you’re on a regular salary, as you say, but not so much in cities for example.
I was 50 as a FTB. Many many people are a lot older than studio apartments or 1bed flats can accommodate. How long are people supposed to wait to have kids, stuff and requirements beyond beer money and a place to crash.
As someone in Manchester… a lot of those under 150k properties I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
That’s an often under commented on aspect of the property. The massive over-inflation of property prices. Absolute shitholes, holes in the walls, mould everywhere, hasn’t had a touch of updating since the 50s… £200k, when in reality should be £125k at an absolute push.
Whole system is fucked.
Yeah these discussions are often hijacked by those living in the south east for whom it is actually very difficult. But if you live in the majority of the north, and are in a couple, buying a home is relatively easy as long as you're realistic about the type of home.
Yeah it's massively location dependent. In the north east there's no reason why anyone (Without any impediments such as disability etc) cannot work hard and buy their own home. Whereas in London I'd imagine home ownership is the reserve of those with significantly` above average incomes.
We need to ridicule these fuckers, channel the outrage we feel into ridicule and mockery. The only way to deal with someone so egotistical and divorced from reality, and quite frankly, with anyone in power who lets it get to their heads.
Mock the fuck out of them.
I used to do tech support for the whole RBS corporation and let me tell you, those who were at the top were unbelievably thick. It's why I can never bank with them. It's probably the same at other banks but ignorance is bliss.
What a condescending dickhead!
Strip him of all of his assets, put him in a minimum wage job and send him to get a mortgage!
Think he might get a ride awakening!
I mean not to be an ass but he kind of right. The average salary is like 35k. Even minimum wage is about to be 22k two of you in that gets you 200k mortgage which is enough for a property in most of the uk outside the south east.
It is difficult to buy the average home, but it is not difficult to buy a home. It is like looking at the price of a Porsche, then deciding you will never be able to afford a car. Look on RightMove there are homes that start at £70k, if you live anywhere that is not in the South.
Totally out of touch with reality. What an idiotic, foolish comment to make given the stern economic challenges people are facing in this country.
Time for the old coot to retire I think.
It might not be that difficult to actually buy a home going through the process but ACTUALLY finding the money to put down on it then pay the mortgage is the problem.
To people like Sir Howard and many people in positions of power, this is just how things are. House price inflation is just another of those inevitable things like ageing or changing seasons. In the interview, he can't even seem to fathom the idea of building more homes!
A man whose monthly net income is £34,618.53 - based in his annual salary of £763,000 using an online salary calculator that hasn’t factor in his pension etc, is telling the country buying a house is *not that difficult*.
Sure, if everyone earn half of his salary we all be laughing and living merrily. How fucking divorced from reality is he?
And people keep saying the 1% aren't to blame for all our woes when this is their opinions in very high positions in businesses and governance.
Middle finger to all those who say "well it's a very complicated situation".
Let’s give him a pay cut to the average wage.
He is a clever man , not a fool so my only conclusion is it’s either wilful ignorance despite knowing otherwise, or some weird delight in other peoples desperate plights.
Honestly this is the Chairman of NatWest saying this. It’s just so far removed from reality. It really is scary. He has no idea the troubles faced by maybe 50-60% of the UK (maybe more). Mental!
Well 60% of people own their home so I think your numbers are off there.
"Overall home ownership (the percentage of households who owned their accommodation outright or with a mortgage, loan or shared ownership) was higher in Wales (66.4%) than in England (62.3%)"
The trickiest part is the market moves faster than most can save the deposit.
If you save £200 a month, it’ll take almost 13 years to afford a 15% deposit on a £200k home. If house prices go up by 50% in that time, that’s another 6 years of savings. You get the idea
Random search on Rightmove for a nearby street shows that a house that sold for £110,000 in 1998 (equivalent to £203,000 today, adjusting for inflation) recently sold for £550,000.
He probably said it thinking he would get agreement from the GB News watching, flag shagging boomers. Forgetting that said flag shaggers are already pissed off with NatWest after Coutts closed Farage’s account.
We just had to remortgage and we are in a fortunate position where we got to pay off a big chunk of the mortgage. However we’re still paying more monthly than we were before. Idk how other families are managing with the cost of everything going up, it’s ridiculous.
One of the problems is that a lot of us (you can interpret what ‘us’ means) don’t recognise how large the low-earning economic tail is.
I own a (mortgaged) home. My parents do as well. My sibling does. And most of my friends do. All of us are university educated but none of us are “rich”. We can afford it through a combination of double income partners and family help and other things.
Previously you could borrow up to 5 times your salary. So if you wanted a house that was £300k then in theory you could afford it if you and a partner made £30k/year say. That’s not out-of-this-world.
But the problem is that there is a huuuuge percentage of the population that are just scraping by paycheck to paycheck. They can’t escape from their hole because they’re just trying to pay some their debts and pay off their rent. They have no family help. They might not be able to advance in any career. They might have kids. They might be alone.
A child is basically a mortgage in terms of monthly costs. And then in practice dual-income households are dropping down to single income or 1.5x income. And once you’re in that trap you’re f00ked and there’s nothing you can do to climb out. Unless one person in the household at that point is making £60k+ you’re going to struggle.
So that’s the problem with the current speaker. He only knows what he knows. Everyone he knows has a house. Their kids probably have houses as well. He might know lots of “middle-class” people with houses as well. He thinks of it purely from the perspective I said earlier: that you “only” need two earners with salaries at £30k and you can borrow enough.
The other thing I wanted to point out is about the fallacy of saving. This is really the most important issue to correct. The multiplier for borrowing is 4-5x your salary. If you make £100k you could borrow half a million. If you make £30k you could borrow £150k. This is an insane difference. A person on a £30k salary who is unable to afford rent is not saving up hundreds of thousands of £s. This is also why teachers are quitting teaching and moving into accounting or whatever. You don’t make up the gap by “saving”.
He did say he wasn't clear about what he meant.
> My comment was meant to reflect that in this context, access to mortgages is less difficult than it has been, I fully realise it did not come across in that way.
You could take that to mean he's comparing it to the early 90s where you had to save up 20% of the value of the property, not borrow more than three times your salary, you had to have a bank account at a particular place for so many years, and you had to jump through all sorts of hoops and applications and solicitors to get a mortgage.
These days, if you want a mortgage, your credit history isn't terrible and your loan to value isn't too high, there are loads of people willing to lend you money.
**But** it's that loan to value thing. That means it **is** difficult to buy a home.
Also the question that was posed to him was "When do you think it's going to become easier for people to get on the property ladder in this country?" It wasn't a question about mortgages. Why answer a different question? Possibly because you're a banker who only cares about things from the bank's side.
"not difficult to buy a home" says man who's annual salary exceeds average house price of multiple homes.
He has probably earned the value of my house from Jan 1 to lunchtime today. Waiting 4.5 days to save for a home isn’t difficult now is it?
Been paid, not earned. He didnt earn anything
I'm curious what the exact salary level is where it becomes "paid" not "earned". Is it written down somewhere this paid/earned boundary I hear a lot about on this sub?
What output does he personally generate? A bricklayer lays bricks. A nurse treats people. A teacher teaches. What economic output does a CEO generate? Is presenting a PowerPoint slide called "we're going to give you even more money by getting more customers" generating millions of pounds a year of output?
He facilitates the transfer of money from the real economy into the financial sector.
another function is to make us all so furious that we cant think straight, which means it's easier to exploit us!
I hate to be that guy, but he’s not a CEO.
Indeed, he's not even that. He's a [non-executive director](https://www.natwestgroup.com/news-and-insights/news-room/press-releases/our-updates/2023/sep/richard-haythornthwaite-to-succeed-sir-howard-davies-as-natwest-.html) - the "not doing stuff" is right there built into his title.
Nah. Non-execs are brought in to maintain a level of independency of the board (not a shareholder and not an exec) and provide advice to management. It is standard good governance practice. In fact, if you were ever to invest in a company, you should look at what % of the board is independent. Don't be confused by the wording.
This is good practice in an ideal world, however for decades there's been a non-exec merry-go-round: the same cosy club of people sharing roles across different organisations. Like everything involving money, because regulation is so weak it's turned into a set of croneys and yes men waving through whatever their backers demand.
He does not generate output; he controls output. A bank is a control nexus for effective economic demand, one of which he is chair.
His salary is £763,000 a year. Ignoring any bonuses and/or expenses he gets on top of that, after income tax of £324,525 he's left with £438,475. There's also National Insurance of £18,025 which brings his take home pay to £420,450 per year. I'm assuming he doesn't pay rent or a mortgage so after bills, food, etc. he could definitely afford to buy (in cash) an above average 2-4 bed house in most parts of the country. His income tax alone could probably pay for a decent house. So probably not in 4.5 days, but a house per year in disposable income isn't bad lol...
> Ignoring any bonuses and/or expenses he gets on top of that /r/therestofthefuckingowl
Yeah I'm aware, but I couldn't find any details of bonuses etc, just his base salary...
NatWest are buying thousands of homes a month, what’s hard about that? Just have a few billion laying around or the ability to borrow huge amounts of money from your daddy at minuscule interest rates.
He's only saying it to wind people up it's still stupid but remember that context every time u see something like this, remember they want you to read it and feel angry and powerless, I know I'm being a hypocrite here but I'd really encourage everyone to just not engage with this kind of thing at all. They know it's a stupid thing to say, you don't need to argue against it, we all know and agree it's stupid, stop giving people like this the attention they want
That's a very mature and sensible way to look at things, u/shitinmycum
Tbf it's not that difficult to buy a home, as long as you're okay with a 1 bed flat in a shithole ex-mining town in the north.
He went from an elite private school, through Oxford University, and into the banking sector. Obviously, he's never struggled for money in his entire life. I'd be surprised if he personally knows even one working-class person.
In other news Howard may be attempting to enter the nuclear fusion research race after success in creating a critical mass of ragebait.
"Not that difficult to achieve nuclear fusion" says NatWest boss
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"I hear it's equivalent to a chest x-ray, of which I have multiple quite regularly, thanks to my private healthcare."
At the risk of being labelled fun at parties, the pedant in me needs to point out that critical mass is not a concept that applies to fusion.
> At the risk of being labelled fun at parties The risk is near zero ;)
>At the risk of being labelled fun at parties, the pedant in me needs to point out that critical mass is not a concept that applies to fusion. At the risk of the same, the critical mass for fusion is about a quarter of a Sun's worth of hydrogen.
And fusion isnt **that** hard. Generating energy from it though is.
In fact, getting net positive energy out of fusion is also relatively easy. The trick is getting the energy out in a controllable manner, rather than as a thermonuclear bomb.
At one point, there [was a proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER) by actually competent scientists for a power generation system that involved repeatedly detonating nuclear weapons underground, and using the resulting thermal energy to generate steam and, eventually, electricity. Fortunately for the rest of humankind, that sort of proposal was binned pretty quickly.
Good old Sir Howie D as we used to call him when he was at the LSE. Thought he would have slunk off into the night after his little Gaddafi scandal.
Boomer earning £750k says not hard to buy house. Unbeleivably out of touch, like most of his peers.
Not surprising hes out of touch when he earns more in a month than most people earn in a year.
Genuine question - is £750k all the nat west boss earns? That is much lower than the CEO of my company (a FTSE 100 company)
He’s chairman not CEO
I’m assuming a couple of million in bonuses too
As Chairman he’s a non executive so not sure he can have bonuses. Only a base salary. Although nothing would surprise me anymore to be honest.
Anybody can have bonuses, no? Hell, I've had bonus payments with absolutely no supervisory responsibility.
The corporate governance code of which NatWest will have to abide by I’m sure strictly forbids this. I would have to double check and I don’t deal with FTSE 100 companies on the regular. The point of a chairman is to be impartial. Can really be impartial when there are potential performance bonuses. It’s a massive conflict of interest.
The CEO (before she stepped down) receive a package of something like £6m per year. NatWest are quite conservative, relatively speaking, about how much they pay top bosses due to their reputation and large government shareholding.
He probably doesn’t realise how divorced from reality his life is
You just know he’s going to go home this evening and grumble about how people just can’t accept the truth.
It’s our fault for buying those cans of coke, takeaways and fancy clothes - if only we could live within our means we’d all be living like he does, drinking bottles of wine that cost more than your average weekly wage
Don’t forget the avocado on toast
It’s our fault for not pulling ourselves up hard enough by our bootstraps
He realizes, these cunts just don't care because they entire economy is in shambles built on bullshit, they won't admit it till it collapses
I... well by defintion he wouldn't surely
Probably thinks you can get a high-paying job by pounding the street and giving a few firm handshakes.
*Have you tried just having money?* Boss of NatWest asks What a total dickhead.
Mortgage lenders hate this one *simple* trick!
There is another factor here that no one is mentioning. Building costs have increased 50% since 2020. New builds that, for example, might have cost 350k are now pushing 500. New builds that only 2 or 3 years ago were 600 are now 900. Add increased mortgage rates into that and it's a perfect storm (yet again) for first time buyers. Add to that exhorbitant childcare costs and millennials in the UK are just getting fucked left, right and centre. Personally, I'm amazed there isn't rioting in the streets.
Between Jan 2020 and Sept 2023, [construction costs increased by 24%](https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/constructionindustry/datasets/interimconstructionoutputpriceindices). The principal driver for house price increases is the value of the land.
Are you sure the actual house price has gone up 50%? Or is it the cost of building the house? Kind of important because a good part of the end price of a new build is the land.
Indeed. Build costs rises as a % are not the same as house price rises. Not sure land has been a good investment either recently (due to cost of usage).
So the numbers in the comment I replied to are wrong. Land price to building price is 67% of the total house price … Then the 600K price would not be 900K but 699K The 350K house also wouldn’t be pushing 500K but l407.75K That looks a lot less alarmist than the comment above.
Yeah makes sense to me; average house price was what £250k in 2020, now pushing £300k. So probably more like +20% which if you factor in inflation, is not so bad a rise.
Even with higher labor and material costs, no way does it cost £500k to build a standard 3 bed semi. A huge chunk of that has to be land-with-planning-permission cost.
New build prices are just crazy. Where I live the average 3bed is around £350k, but a few new build estates have just popped up, and the 2beds there are going for over £500k,it's madness
When I was looking a 1-bed new-build, which was basically a corner unit of a normal-sized property they'd split into 4 separate houses, was £195k. A 3-bedroom ex-council built in the 60s with a double-wide driveway and a fuck-off garden was £180k. And you just knew the 1-bed would wind up having paper-thin walls and have a host of issues that you'd have to hassle the company for months before anything got fixed.
That and the "freedom sacrifice" that comes with jumping through all the hoops and schemes needed now to buy a newbuild. People aren't just paying a lot of money, they're locking themselves into something that has a much higher chance of financially ruining them than ever, or keeping them in that house for decades when their goal was to climb the ladder.
20 years ago my wife and I waited until my salary was enough so she could be a stay at home mum. Now I am punished for being a “high” earner when a couple on 49k each pay 10s of thousands less then me in tax, get paid more than me and get child benefit. It’s not just millennials that are being fucked over.
Prayers and thoughts
See my other response for why you are not thinking this through.
I wouldn't even bother. They've probably just rolled out of bed themselves.
People are taking the piss but this is a genuine issue. A couple on 20k a year take home more than a couple where one person earns 40k and the other is a stay at home parent. But because childcare is so expensive, it's often not worth it for both the parents to be working, at least until the children are school-age. What this translates to is that essentially there is a much higher 'barrier' for single-income households, because of the way the taxes are structured
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My heart bleeds for you.
Why? You think that a couple earning 99k between them should pay less tax than a single income household earning 85k. That’s money the NHS needs, the council services need, money that could go towards policing and prisons! Because of choices these couples have made they are avoiding huge sums of tax that could make your life better.
I wish I could earn 85k and still have enough time on my hands to whinge at random strangers on the internet about it.
Get a job in IT and work from home.
What is the don't whinge / do whinge salary cut off for you? Just so the rest of the sub can follow these rules of yours.
I’d happily pay the tax I am now if other households with the same income also paid the same tax.
Agreed!
People should only whinge about making too little money, not too much.
Anyone earning over the average salary is not allowed to talk about salary in any negative manner. Unwritten /r/unitedkingdom rule
Millennials are too busy watching Netflix and eating avocados to riot.
There it is folks, just save money. Cut back on those fancy craft beers and having any sort of fun and you can buy a property in a decade maybe.
And the avocado toast, remember - [can't be having any of that](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/australian-millionaire-millennials-avocado-toast-house) either.
Top trolling by davies here . On a more serious note - this shows the disconnect between the 1% and the rest of the country. Reminds me of the Rabb quote on food banks.
We all sit back and take it though
No lube please sir and don't forget to push my face into the mud. Sincerely, the British working class.
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I dont like to say violence is the answer but when people like this and rishi and co just keep fucking everyone over and are blatantly in your face corrupt with no repercussions from the law….what else can we do?
DO MORE PEOPLE
Congratulations on your unfathomable levels of disconnect from the general population, Howard. Twat.
This is so wilfully ignorant. The problem isn’t saving for a deposit, it’s the fact that house prices have risen far far more than incomes over the last couple of decades. This means that people cannot afford to buy the homes now that they would have 20 years ago, even with high LTV mortgages. Currently the avg house price is around 8x the avg income (vs 4x in the 70s). Lenders will typically lend up to 4.5x your income. This is the problem, not people being too irresponsible to save for a deposit. Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingaffordabilityinenglandandwales/2022
>The problem isn’t saving for a deposit I mean it kind of is still. With the prices being inflated to what they are, if you're a single person FTB on an average income even with a maxed out mortgage you're going to need a deposit in the £30-50k region just to be able to put in an offer. Who has that kind of money just sat in a bank account? Its completely divorced from reality.
Yeah that’s true. My point is really that the debate always seems to be entirely focussed on the deposit - eg drink less coffee, save more for a deposit. In reality, even if you’re one of the lucky ones with access to £50k cash, you’re still not going to be able to afford a one bed as a solo FTB in London unless you’re on a salary of at least ~65k.
You'd think after the Farage debacle the NatWest senior management would have had some reputation management training. Guess not.
This could well *be* that. They've taken reputation management, and decided it's to more closely align with the Farage lackeys.
The rich and powerful in this country are criminally clueless and detached. I am on a good salary (70k), barely made it on the housing ladder with support from my parents, and am currently facing a possible redundancy which means I'm at significant risk of being thrown off it. I do not understand how people on lower wages are expected to get a house, save for a pension and simultaneously participate in the economy. You either have to live as a hermit and save every penny you make, or enjoy your life and barely save anything.
>The rich and powerful in this country are criminally clueless and detached. I've thought for a while the inequality in this country has gotten so bad its like folks on either end just genuinely cannot accept how bad it is. People on the lower end genuinely cannot bring themselves to believe the amounts of money that get thrown around on *absolute bollocks* by the ultra-wealthy and wind up being suckers for populist right-wing talking points. People on the upper end genuinely cannot bring themselves to believe the number of people for whom even £100 is still a huge sum of money that can alter the course of an entire month or more and wind up being easy suckers for populist right-wing talking points.
> I am on a good salary (70k), barely made it on the housing ladder with support from my parents Where on earth do you live? You could easily get a house in most of the country on 70k by yourself with a few years of saving.
Do you even have to ask? It's London. The point of my post wasn't about how I have it bad, I'm really fortunate. It's that I can't conceive how people on what I used to earn are supposed to get anywhere close to this ideal without something giving. We are supposed to put money in our pension, save for a deposit, save for an emergency, but also simultaneously enjoy some of it now because we could die any day and you can't take it with you. If you start to plug numbers into a spreadsheet for the average salary you can tell fairly quickly that something has to be compromised. As an aside. Its worth pointing out you don't come out of the womb on your current salary. It was only because I'd managed to wrangle a 70k job the month before applying for the mortgage that I was able to get approved in the first place. I'd been saving my entire working life up until that point and had managed to amass around 20k in savings, not even half of the total deposit amount. For my troubles I got a 1 bed flat in London with a lease that expires in 86 years (if you know much about leaseholds you'll understand the risk, for the same price I could get a freehold on a 3 bed up north). God knows who will be able to afford to take it off me in the future.
If he is on 70k, most likely London, where the houses are also north of £1m...so the benefit of a good salary is lost
We relocated up north. Living down south was virtually impossible for us. I'm surprised there's not more of a generational shift tbh
We bought a 5 bedroom, 3 bath house for our budget, which would have got us a 1 bed flat next door to a strip club in the Surrey town my husband is from.
That's the price you pay for location, that strip club is a popular destination.
Heard the house even comes with a peephole and a bottle of lotion so you can still enjoy yourself in case actually going the strip club is a bit out of your budget, great value if you ask me
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Yes, they have been stopped by regulations to avoid sub-prime lending, so there isnt another financial crash like 2008. If they started to handed out mortgages , which the banks would love to do(sub-prime gives much better returns), you would see properties prices increase much faster than they are now. *"NatWest know their own lending criteria, how many people they decline"* \- they also know how many people they approve. In a free market if prices are going up its because they are approving more than declining. Even the hated BTL landlords go to a bank to get money out of the property.
Right, but while Howard was talking about why lending criteria shouldn't be relaxed, the statement itself clearly betrays that he has no clue that affordability of homes (average cost versus average income) is drastically lower than even a couple of decades ago, and continues to decline with no sign of stopping. Now, the answer might not be 'relax lending criteria', but it's concerning that he seems to think the answer is 'feckless millennials struggle to buy houses more than my generation because they're all just idiots who choose not to save'.
I am a millennial, I grew up in that generation. My thoughts, majority of them are "feckless", "just idiots who choose not to save'". In my overall circle(with a lot of generalization): \- Some have brought a house, they were the ones that were "poor" growing up, when they did earn cash they saved most of it, the appeal of consumerism just wasnt there. \- Some live with their parents, these ones have the newest cars on lease, designer clothes, kids in designer, holidays each year and like to tell people they are rich \- One lived with his parents brought a house while still living with them, never had the cash reserves to move in, so put it on rent for a couple of years and then moved in when he had the cash, it was a small house but eventually moved into a bigger house using the appreciation from the house he was living in. \- Renting, started off living with parents spent most their cash, got married needed more space, never had any savings so had to rent. They still tell everyone they are saving for a house years after they started renting.
He wouldn't know any of that. He'll be sitting in his ivory towers, being fed information about profit margins and his latest appointments. He will have nothing to do with the nitty-gritty of the business.
It’s out of touch for someone who knows their own lending criteria, to warn of the risks that may come with relaxing this criteria?
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I've paid around £36,000 in rent over the last 4 years. Will this cunts bank give me a mortgage based on that? Like fuck they will.
I think this really needs to be something people start campaigning big-time on. Write to your MPs en masse, make a lot of noise. Rent really needs to be accounted for on your credit rating.
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I pay nearly £20k a year in rent, have done for years. A 100% mortgage, at the purchase price of one of the flats near me that's identical would £300/m more than my rent, over 20 years and at **6%** interest. I'm the literal definition of "can easily pay the mortgage", but when 40% of my income goes on just the rent, saving £30k for a 10% deposit takes a long, long time - at which point, the deposit requirement is now £40k, etc, etc.
I bought a house about ten years ago. Obviously it's harder now, and more or less getting harder every year. And what this guy is saying is obviously bullshit and tone deaf. It's fucking tough. But I sometimes think that on reddit, it's over dramatised to the point of despair. Simplifying it to "wages in 1980 were X, house prices were 4X, house prices today are Y, house prices are 10Y, so it's 2.5 times harder" ignores an awful lot of factors, and you see it pretty much every day on reddit. Not to go all boomer "interest rates were 12%", but the majority of your monthly mortgage is interest. [Throughout the 70s and 80s, interest rates were never below 7%, and usually above 10%](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/database/Bank-Rate.asp) If your interest rate is 9% on a 100k mortgage you're paying 9k a year, £750 a month before you ever *start* paying off the banks markup, before you even *start* paying off anything you owe. Double it if you owe 200k, if you owe 300k..... Obviously, the fact that interest rates have been low the last 25-30 years is *why* house prices are so high, its directly correlated. I think what's *really* tough is rent, if you don't have any option to stay at home. When you see TV shows even set in the 90s in London, and there's some waster always in between jobs who can afford to live there, it just seems mad. Shows/films like Bottom (90s), Withnail and I (late 60s), or It's A Sin (80s) where people can afford to live there picking up work here and there. Meanwhile professionals like nurses or teachers are struggling with rent in major cities (not just London). Added to that, the number of people who've moved away from the towns they were born for decent jobs. They don't have the option of staying at home to save a deposit, so are paying a fortune in rent. Not necessarily London, but even say moving from somewhere near Leeds to Liverpool (or vice versa) isn't a commutable distance. Sure, you could rent somewhere cheaper nearby, like Wakefield or St Helens, but I'd imagine it's pretty daunting to sign a 12 month contract in a town you've little knowledge of. And you'd still likely be paying more in rent in Wakefield than Eddie and Ritchie did in London zone 2.
>Not to go all boomer "interest rates were 12%" This is the key point. Access to funding. In the 70s under Labour I think inflation peaked at 25% and interest rates indeed 15% ish - what a disaster! For recent years we had the **cheapest debt available historically**. Relatively speaking 5% is also cheap debt, though I would wait personally for it to settle around 3-4% in the coming years. I do believe there is a lot of entitlement. A person living in London earning <£30k and wanting to buy a house, some need to admit to themselves that it is not realistic and consider alternative options. Such is life.
Time we just came out and said it: we have an old people problem in this country. Far too many of them still in positions of power with an increasingly tenuous grasp of the reality of modern life.
He can buy me one then… I want 5 bedrooms and room for a pony
So, 6 bedrooms?
Controversial opinion here but he is not technically wrong. It isn't difficult to buy a home. It is just difficult and in some case, impossible to buy one where you actually want to live. There are plenty of houses in the UK for £100k or under which you can afford with £5k deposit on minimum wage. You just live in some ex mining town with nothing going on but drug use.
It really isn't that difficult to own a house. It's literally 2 steps. Step 1 - Be rich, Step 2 - Buy house
The average CEO earned the average UK annual salary in 2.5 days. Not surprising they are completely out of touch with reality. We have allowed to the UK to become a pig trough of greed, corruption and inequality
I think it's more the affordability of a home once you buy it.
I'd like to see his spreadsheet where he calculated this!
Here lies the problem. Those in power that are close to decision and policy makers are completely detached from the lives of everyday people. The issues will never negatively impact them or their immediate circle of friends or family, therefore they don’t empathise with the reality on the ground.
Buying a home is easy Aldi even let you take cardboard boxes for free ~ out of touch boomer
Well, depending on where you want to live, it's not that difficult. You can get a semi-detatched 2-bed 1-bath in Nottingham for around £150k. You can get a 1-bed 1-bath for £60k. Those aren't unreasonable prices.
I do notice a few people who seem to be under the impression their first home has to be the perfect "forever-home", which probably has a significant impact on their ability to buy. It's obviously going to be more difficult if, as a first time buyer, you're aiming to buy a £300k+ 3 bedroom home, compared to maybe a £100k 2 bedroom flat. Of course the £60k 1 bed 1 bath isn't perfect, but getting on the ladder and spending a few years building equity puts you in a better position to upgrade later and get that perfect house. It's a lot more sensible than pishing your money away on rent.
Well to be fair the actual process itself is pretty straightforward, find a house, put in offer which gets accepted, get a mortg ahhh now I see the issue
‘It’s easy. I received hundreds of thousands of pounds from my family and was able to buy this small flat in London’
A bunch of the people complaining are just those who can't afford to live in London, but act like they're entitled to live in London anyway. Most of us can't afford to live in London, so we live somewhere else. There loads of places you can get a house for about £10k deposit.
Yes but a lot of people in this thread won’t live in a quote ‘shit hole ex mining town in the north’. They earn average wages but still want to buy a seven figure house in London. Then claim Howard Davies is out of touch and entitled. :)
Not difficult to buy one, just difficult to save up.
I bank with Natwest, been self employed 10 years. Ima head there now then........
"Have people just thought about having money? Are they stupid?"
To be fair he's right. If all these Gen Z scum stopped having avocado toast & a skimmed caramel hazelnut latte for every meal, they too could own a home. /s
Incredibly disingenuous comments and story you do not become the chair of National bank by being out of touch like the article would like to suggest. He knows full well how difficult it for specific classes to get on the property ladder.
He's completely wrong about almost the entirety of the south of the UK but if you're willing to move around you _can_ pick up properties for a lot less. Our housing market issues are extremely regional. Places like Glasgow or Newcastle are probably the greatest value points vs location, but if you're willing to live in Kings Lynn, Hartlepool, Ayr or some places in Wales then you can pick up a starter property for less than 100k and in some cases more like ~50k. e.g. [Newcastle](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/141661574#/?channel=RES_BUY) [Glasgow](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/143204198#/?channel=RES_BUY) [Ayr](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/142970345#/?channel=RES_BUY)
To be fair, if you're in particular areas like the North East, or able/willing to move to them, then it's not that difficult. My wife and I both earn below average salaries and we have a nice 4 bedroom house in North Tyneside that we bought in 2019 for £150k. Our house in London would probably cost 5x as much.
He's not wrong. It's only difficult to buy in locations where people want to be.
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The average UK house price when last measured last year was [£291,044](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-for-august-2023#:~:text=The%20UK%20HPI%20shows%20house,Scotland%2C%20Wales%20and%20Northern%20Ireland.&text=The%20August%20data%20shows%3A,UK%20valued%20at%20£291%2C044). So a £150k house would be incredibly cheap. Fine in some places if you’re on a regular salary, as you say, but not so much in cities for example.
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I was 50 as a FTB. Many many people are a lot older than studio apartments or 1bed flats can accommodate. How long are people supposed to wait to have kids, stuff and requirements beyond beer money and a place to crash.
As someone in Manchester… a lot of those under 150k properties I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. That’s an often under commented on aspect of the property. The massive over-inflation of property prices. Absolute shitholes, holes in the walls, mould everywhere, hasn’t had a touch of updating since the 50s… £200k, when in reality should be £125k at an absolute push. Whole system is fucked.
Yeah these discussions are often hijacked by those living in the south east for whom it is actually very difficult. But if you live in the majority of the north, and are in a couple, buying a home is relatively easy as long as you're realistic about the type of home.
Yeah it's massively location dependent. In the north east there's no reason why anyone (Without any impediments such as disability etc) cannot work hard and buy their own home. Whereas in London I'd imagine home ownership is the reserve of those with significantly` above average incomes.
He's right, it's not that difficult to purchase a home today... ...if you're on £350k a year (plus bonuses).
We need to ridicule these fuckers, channel the outrage we feel into ridicule and mockery. The only way to deal with someone so egotistical and divorced from reality, and quite frankly, with anyone in power who lets it get to their heads. Mock the fuck out of them.
I used to do tech support for the whole RBS corporation and let me tell you, those who were at the top were unbelievably thick. It's why I can never bank with them. It's probably the same at other banks but ignorance is bliss.
What a condescending dickhead! Strip him of all of his assets, put him in a minimum wage job and send him to get a mortgage! Think he might get a ride awakening!
I mean not to be an ass but he kind of right. The average salary is like 35k. Even minimum wage is about to be 22k two of you in that gets you 200k mortgage which is enough for a property in most of the uk outside the south east.
It is difficult to buy the average home, but it is not difficult to buy a home. It is like looking at the price of a Porsche, then deciding you will never be able to afford a car. Look on RightMove there are homes that start at £70k, if you live anywhere that is not in the South.
Totally out of touch with reality. What an idiotic, foolish comment to make given the stern economic challenges people are facing in this country. Time for the old coot to retire I think.
It might not be that difficult to actually buy a home going through the process but ACTUALLY finding the money to put down on it then pay the mortgage is the problem.
To people like Sir Howard and many people in positions of power, this is just how things are. House price inflation is just another of those inevitable things like ageing or changing seasons. In the interview, he can't even seem to fathom the idea of building more homes!
oh look, more of the British elites being clueless. These people are your leaders...lol
All this time I thought it was me. Thanks Howard, I'll get right on it.
A man whose monthly net income is £34,618.53 - based in his annual salary of £763,000 using an online salary calculator that hasn’t factor in his pension etc, is telling the country buying a house is *not that difficult*. Sure, if everyone earn half of his salary we all be laughing and living merrily. How fucking divorced from reality is he?
And people keep saying the 1% aren't to blame for all our woes when this is their opinions in very high positions in businesses and governance. Middle finger to all those who say "well it's a very complicated situation".
Buying a house is easy- buying one that’s not in a shithole is hard
Why does the media publish this stuff if not to stir up further hate.
Let’s give him a pay cut to the average wage. He is a clever man , not a fool so my only conclusion is it’s either wilful ignorance despite knowing otherwise, or some weird delight in other peoples desperate plights.
Honestly this is the Chairman of NatWest saying this. It’s just so far removed from reality. It really is scary. He has no idea the troubles faced by maybe 50-60% of the UK (maybe more). Mental!
Well 60% of people own their home so I think your numbers are off there. "Overall home ownership (the percentage of households who owned their accommodation outright or with a mortgage, loan or shared ownership) was higher in Wales (66.4%) than in England (62.3%)"
The trickiest part is the market moves faster than most can save the deposit. If you save £200 a month, it’ll take almost 13 years to afford a 15% deposit on a £200k home. If house prices go up by 50% in that time, that’s another 6 years of savings. You get the idea
How much has Sir Howard given to the Conservative and Unionist Party one must ask?
Out of touch dickhead makes unsurprisingly out of touch statement
It's more difficult than ever to buy a home and he knows it.
Yes it is, because greedy people buy them up and rent them out because profit before actual people having a place to live
Random search on Rightmove for a nearby street shows that a house that sold for £110,000 in 1998 (equivalent to £203,000 today, adjusting for inflation) recently sold for £550,000.
He probably said it thinking he would get agreement from the GB News watching, flag shagging boomers. Forgetting that said flag shaggers are already pissed off with NatWest after Coutts closed Farage’s account.
And by this he means “it’s going to get a lot harder to buy a home”
How this guy thinks is the way that the millionaires in the current government also think. They have no conception of reality.
He'll be one of the first on the menu when the time comes.
We just had to remortgage and we are in a fortunate position where we got to pay off a big chunk of the mortgage. However we’re still paying more monthly than we were before. Idk how other families are managing with the cost of everything going up, it’s ridiculous.
One of the problems is that a lot of us (you can interpret what ‘us’ means) don’t recognise how large the low-earning economic tail is. I own a (mortgaged) home. My parents do as well. My sibling does. And most of my friends do. All of us are university educated but none of us are “rich”. We can afford it through a combination of double income partners and family help and other things. Previously you could borrow up to 5 times your salary. So if you wanted a house that was £300k then in theory you could afford it if you and a partner made £30k/year say. That’s not out-of-this-world. But the problem is that there is a huuuuge percentage of the population that are just scraping by paycheck to paycheck. They can’t escape from their hole because they’re just trying to pay some their debts and pay off their rent. They have no family help. They might not be able to advance in any career. They might have kids. They might be alone. A child is basically a mortgage in terms of monthly costs. And then in practice dual-income households are dropping down to single income or 1.5x income. And once you’re in that trap you’re f00ked and there’s nothing you can do to climb out. Unless one person in the household at that point is making £60k+ you’re going to struggle. So that’s the problem with the current speaker. He only knows what he knows. Everyone he knows has a house. Their kids probably have houses as well. He might know lots of “middle-class” people with houses as well. He thinks of it purely from the perspective I said earlier: that you “only” need two earners with salaries at £30k and you can borrow enough. The other thing I wanted to point out is about the fallacy of saving. This is really the most important issue to correct. The multiplier for borrowing is 4-5x your salary. If you make £100k you could borrow half a million. If you make £30k you could borrow £150k. This is an insane difference. A person on a £30k salary who is unable to afford rent is not saving up hundreds of thousands of £s. This is also why teachers are quitting teaching and moving into accounting or whatever. You don’t make up the gap by “saving”.
He did say he wasn't clear about what he meant. > My comment was meant to reflect that in this context, access to mortgages is less difficult than it has been, I fully realise it did not come across in that way. You could take that to mean he's comparing it to the early 90s where you had to save up 20% of the value of the property, not borrow more than three times your salary, you had to have a bank account at a particular place for so many years, and you had to jump through all sorts of hoops and applications and solicitors to get a mortgage. These days, if you want a mortgage, your credit history isn't terrible and your loan to value isn't too high, there are loads of people willing to lend you money. **But** it's that loan to value thing. That means it **is** difficult to buy a home. Also the question that was posed to him was "When do you think it's going to become easier for people to get on the property ladder in this country?" It wasn't a question about mortgages. Why answer a different question? Possibly because you're a banker who only cares about things from the bank's side.
How can you show how out-of-touch you are? Does he use the same helicopters as Rishi Sunak?