I remember it well, it was unheard of at the time for someone to be a house-husband so the pubs were full all day long... You can probably date the start of the recent decline of the pubs to the lack of long-term unemployed.

When you say "we" are you saying that both of you were working and it required both wages to secure/repay the mortgage?
Pain is relative isn't it?

This site will be on the leaving cert some day.

However I hope by that stage I will have gained control and destroyed that institution of stoopdity in the new dawn that will be Pinnopolis the land of the reasonably well informed. Tax incentives for coffee tables and watercoolers!

Yes, both of us were working to buy a house. But whether there was one income or two is irrelevant if most of it was going on the mortgage.
I know very well that many people are feeling the pain of having bought. What I said was that they thought it would be painless - or more precisely were led to believe that it would be.

Not so. Where there's one income there's a cushion against adverse events - the ability of the other partner to return to work. Where you are depending on two incomes then there's no such cushion and an increased risk of one partner losing their job.

I would look at that the other way.
Where there are two incomes there's a cushion against adverse events, if one person loses their job, there's still another salary coming until more work can be found.

If there is only one person working and they lose their job, there's no cushion, just two people desperately seeking employment.

The ideal is to have two people working, but only need one salary.

Interesting. It's just that back in the eighties, one salary should have been enough to get yourself a house. Did you mortgage yourself to the hilt and therfore that is why you ran in to problems?

However when there's two salaries the odds of "adverse events" i.e. one of the earners losing their job happening are higher. This is why the bank gives one multiple of primary salary and a different multiple of the secondary salary.

People lose their jobs outside of recessions and all sorts of bad things happen which prevent them from working. When property is so expensive you need two salaries to finance it that's a red alert that there's a serious problem but in Ireland it's business as usual.

No, the mortgage was fine until interest rates shot up. If I remember correctly they went to around 15%. I suppose the point I really want to make is that it's wrong to tell people who are struggling now because they bought at the wrong time that they will be struggling for 35 years (or whatever term). Things change and it's often only when you look back that you see just how much they can change.

Yes, I am aware of where interest rates got to. What I am pointing out is that the two salary mortgage was not required back then.Was this your first house? Whereabouts was this house?What multiple of slary was used? If you don't mind divulging that. I think my point is being missed, maybe I'm not expressing it well enough.My basic point is that if you are saying it was as tough back then as it is now,then I beg to differ. There is no comparison in my opinion.
Thanks

That's your opinion. But the fact is, for a short while a considerable amount of my income went on my mortgage. We had 1 full-time and 1 part-time income. We possibly paid more than we could really afford, but in my opinion most people buying a home usually go a bit further than they can really afford.

The point I'm making is that people told us we were crazy and that we were tying ourselves to a lifetime of debt, yet we had our mortgage paid off in 10 years or so. Perhaps people paying big mortgages today will have a lifetime of heavy debt, but I doubt it.

From my own experience of buying in the UK in 1989 (just before Peak bubble ) I (single at the time) was streached to the limit for several years! Then interest rates dropped & inflation eroded the value ot the debt until by about the turn of the century, the mortgage dropped from being about 50% to less than 10% of take home pay.

How much did your take-home pay increase in that time?

Mine went up about 8 -fold, which, even allowing for increasing competence, is a lot...

In that timescale, about 3 1/2 times, part rise for increasing competence but mostly with inflation.

Just looking at the principal towns in West Cork - - Bandon, Kinsale, Clonakilty, Dunmanway, Skibbereen and Bantry - - it was a big deal to have even one significant factory from the 1960's to the 1980's.

If that factory closed, it wasn't a sunny scenario.

Allman's Distillary closed in Bandon in 1925, because of US prohibition. Apart from a Beamish bottling plant, a Murphy's stout depot and milling operations, it took until 1966 for Sunbeam Wolsey to open a textile plant, in the town of about 4,000 people then.

Bantry had prospered for a period in the 1960's during the building of the Gulf Oil terminal at Whiddy Island but the place stagnated from the 70's.

Kinsale discovered tourism and the value of good restaurants and Clon -- God help us -- had little to offer.