By Pip Williams
I’m a Millennial, and your out of touch saving plans don’t reflect my lifestyle
Millennials – defined as the generation born between about 1980 and 2000 – are pretty much all adults now. When this September rolls around, the cohort of students hitting British universities will include students born in this millennium. Why is it, then, that adults from the generations before us still feel the need to patronise us with instructions on how to live our lives.
Earlier this week, London newspaper Evening Standard ran a video summarising how an estate agent named Strutt and Parker thinks millennials should change their lifestyle in order to save for a housing deposit. The “luxuries” we should all apparently be eschewing include:
- A night out once a week, valued at £6000 per annum
- Takeaways, valued at £2640 per annum
- Phone upgrades, valued at £154 per annum
- Lottery tickets, valued at £832 per annum
- Ready-made salads and sandwiches, valued at £2576 per annum
- Foreign city breaks, valued at £700 per annum
Vice did a pretty good breakdown of how ridiculous these costs are, but as a 23-year-old student living just outside London, I’d like to give you a rundown of how they compare to my life.
I’m a middle class student who does receive regular financial help from my parents alongside my maintenance loan, so in theory I should be one of the most comfortably off in my bracket. Let me tell you, my life doesn’t come anywhere close to Strutt and Parker’s figures. (For clarity, I’m excluding rent and regular utility payments from my budget calculations.)
Let’s start with that night once a week, apparently valued at £115.38 each time. First up, that alone costs more than my weekly budget. Secondly, I’ll add that I probably go on big nights out in London once a term, because of the cost of drinks. Thirdly, I’ll add that a big night out probably comes in at around a third of that cost for me – say £10 on travel and £30 maximum on club entries and drinks. If I got home and found myself over £100 out of pocket, I’d be furious and distraught. Anyone imagining that I’m doing that once a month, let alone once a week, must be sorely mistaken!
Now onto those pesky takeaways. £50.77 a week, is it? Coming in at over half my weekly budget, this figure feels similarly out of touch. My local takeaway’s minimum delivery is £16, and I usually struggle to make it up to that even ordering for myself and a housemate. Assuming that we split that cost between two of us, that’s £8 each. How often do we do that? Maybe once a month. We’re spending in a year what Strutt and Parker reckons we spend in 2 weeks.
I don’t have much to say about phone upgrades. I upgrade every 2 years and I’m on a fixed tariff contract so the price doesn’t change. Cutting out the upgrades would make my contract a little cheaper, sure, but it would also mean my phone would be pretty obsolete within a couple of years. Considering I’m in a long-distance relationship and don’t live near many of my friends, I’m labeling that one a necessary expense (for myself, at any rate).
To me, the estimated lottery ticket spending is the most absurd figure. I’m apparently meant to be spending 2 months-worth of my yearly budget on lottery tickets!? I don’t know anyone under the age of 60 who buys lottery tickets, let alone spends SIXTEEN BRITISH POUNDS A WEEK ON THEM.
Hang in there, we’re almost done. Just two more ridiculous claims to debunk. Apparently millenials are spending £49.36 a WEEK on ready-made sandwiches and salads. In my uni café, sandwiches cost about £2.50. Assuming I was buying lunch there every weekday, I’d be spending £12.50 a week. Even if I decided to splash out and go elsewhere for a bougie lil Pret flatbread every day, that would still only cost about £25 a week. As Joel Golby points out in the Vice piece, “the ingredients for sandwiches are not, despite your calculations, free, and once you’ve actually spent money on, say, bread and ham and cheese, you’re not actually vastly up on money you would have spent on just buying one at a shop anyway.
He makes a fair point. I usually do make my sandwiches at home, and I spend about £5 a week on the ingredients I need to do so. Subtract that cost from the £12.50 I could be spending on sandwiches in uni, and I’m saving a princely £7.50 a week. That does add up, I suppose, to £390 a year, but it’s still a far cry from Strutt and Parker’s calculation of £2576.
Onto the final point: foreign city breaks. This is something I do do when I have the time and money (so once a year, if I’m lucky). In the past two years, I have been to Budapest for four days and Berlin for six days. All expenses included – flights, accommodation, food, and spending money – Budapest cost me under £200. Berlin was more expensive, and I had a lot of financially-associated regrets as a result, but it was still under £400 in total. In two years, I still spent less than half of what Strutt and Parker would have expected me to. Holidays may be a luxury, but they’re something we all need from time to time, and cutting them out can have an extremely detrimental effect on our mental health. As Golby says, “I might have a house by the end of it, but I’ll also have a death wish.”
So, there we go. In overview, Strutt and Parker reckon their tips will save you £12902 a year. To put that in context, that’s almost double the disposable cash I have in that period. This is cash I need to feed myself, to buy clothes, to travel to see my girlfriend and my family, to buy cat litter.
The people telling millennials how to save are so devastatingly out of touch with the realities of our lives that their tips are utterly obsolete. There’s a reason we don’t have £100k for a housing deposit, and let me tell you, it’s not an £832 lottery ticket habit.
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