How unfair it is that the baby boomers got such a good deal on buying houses and super pensions. No. Hang on a minute. Not everyone bought a house - we still had council houses then. Till Mrs Thatcher let people buy them at a 70% discount and then they stopped bulding new council houses, so now we're extra homes short.
The male baby boomers might have bought a house and had a super pension but the women didn't get super pensions if they got one at all. And as for a woman getting a mortgage - not on her own - she had to have a man as guarantor. And to get a mortgage - okay yes houses cost less, but you couldn't get a 100% mortgage and you had to have a deposit. Until the mid 1990s, the deposit was calculated mainly on the man's salary - something like 3 times his annual salary and one and a half of hers. Hence late husband and I got a £25,000 mortgage. Work out what we were earning. On top of which, remember that the interest rate was 16% so we didn't start paying back anything other than interest for years.
And a pension, for a woman - not often. Baby boomer women who did work were often in lower paid jobs and hence with lower pensions, and they stopped full time work in their twenties, worked part time from their late thirties and got even smaller pensions. Some part-timers, like university lecturers were not allowed to contribute to a pension so I asked a specialist in pension provision from my bank to sort out a pension for me. But I was not encouraged by the question, "why do you want a pension when you've got a husband?"So give over with the jealousy.
