Would you sacrifice that new pair of shoes, your morning flat white, those weekday evenings at the pub and a Sunday night curry for some savings?
New research from Barclays claims that people aged between 20 and 37, on average, spend £3,312.72 a year on takeaways, eating out, daily treats, socialising and buying new clothes, and that they could save cash by cutting back.
The bank says young people could make “swaprifices” to save, and suggests people replace every fifth takeaway, shop-bought coffee and night out with free alternatives or having a night in. Barclays reckons you could save £662.54 a year by doing this – putting that cash towards bigger goals, such as paying for a holiday to New York, for a Glastonbury ticket, or even buying a house.
“Be patient,” the bank says. “Saving for your goals can be a slow process, particularly if you are aiming for something like your first home. However, lots of little changes will add up over time and make a big difference to helping you get there.”
Let’s say you wanted to use that money to save for a house deposit. Exactly how patient would you have to be?
According to the Office for National Statistics, home ownership is starting later in life. In 1997, you could reasonably expect to own a home by the age of 26. The average age of first-time homeowners is now 34. The latest official figures show the average property in the UK is valued at £225,621.
Let’s imagine you wanted to buy an average priced property with a regular mortgage (assuming you earned enough to qualify in the first place). Most will require you to stump up a 10% deposit, which in this case would be £22,560.
If you started saving completely from scratch – and took Barclays’ advice on board by putting aside £662 a year – then the good news is you could eventually save enough to stump up a 10% deposit.
The bad news is that you’d need 34 years to do it. By that calculation, a 37-year-old from the Barclays’ study would be 71 by the time they could save enough deposit to buy an average priced property, and a 20-year-old from the study would be 54 – that’s assuming house prices stayed exactly the same for the next three decades.
Commenting on the research, the Resolution Foundation think tank told HuffPost UK: “The amount of time required to save for a deposit for a typical first-time property has spiralled from three years in the early 1990s to around 19 years today. The idea that cutting back on lattes could reverse this trend is obviously nonsense, and an odd one coming from a mortgage lender.
“Instead, policy makers should be looking to tackle the huge financial strain that our broken housing market is placing on young people today. We also need to address the sharp post-crisis income squeeze that has hit millennials harder than any other age group – and means that they are spending 15% less than older age groups on non-housing items.”
There are other ways to get on the property chain, of course. The Help to Buy government scheme lets you buy your first property with a 5% deposit, which would halve the saving time.
And some banks have even offered deposit-free mortgages, with one major catch – you’ll need to have rich parents to qualify.