Next month, I move into my fourth flatshare in seven years. It’s not what I pictured when I imagined life at 30 (four days left of my twenties, please send reassuring tales of thriving and getting increasingly flirty), but what’s the alternative? Leave my job and friends in London just to get on the property ladder? Give up my ClassPass subscription and up sticks to beyond the M25 just so I can afford a place of my own? No thanks.
Apparently this makes me a Guppie, a new breed of young professional on an above-average salary (£33,000 for those in full-time work) who have ‘Given Up On Property’ – a stark contrast, of course, to the so-called Yuppies of the Eighties and Nineties who had little issue making it onto that first rung of the ladder. According to the new study by property firm Zoopla, just 22.5 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds own their own homes, with more than a third of under-40s earning over £60,000-a-year saying they’ve given up on affording to buy in the next decade.
I’ll admit I might not fit the borrowing-from-family-to-pay-my-bills part of the Guppie definition. Buying a house did make it onto the 40-before-40 bucket list a friend I found ourselves drafting on a beach in Ibiza this month (turns out it features rather less skinny-dipping and skydiving feature than the 30-before-30 edition). But I’m certainly a capital Guppie: I’ve Given Up On Property in London.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I love London. I love the parks and the people and the possibilities. But ever since pints hit the £8 mark, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll live out the rest of my London days as a renter and save that hard-earned deposit money for the day I call quits on the Northern Line for a leafier chapter living by the sea (or at least a small-to-medium patch of grass where my bike won’t get stolen every five seconds).
Call me careless or short-sighted, but until that day I’d rather say yes to all those dinners and theatre trips that make up life in the capital, and stay living in a part of it I actually like, even if it means not being able to post that smug key-holding selfie outside my own front door.
Speaking of dinners and theatre trips, the study also found that one in ten Guppies have given up dating in order to afford a home – quite the opposite to the conversations I’ve been having in the pub. Jokes about Hinge being a better investment than an ISA have long been exchanged among my friendship circles. Why? Teaming up feels like the only way to afford to buy now, unless you work in the City or fall on the right sight of our country’s increasing inheritocracy. No wonder savvy Gen-Zers are saving for a deposit with friends just to call themselves a home-owner.
Friends reading this, don’t panic: I’m not going to start asking about your salary expectations next time we go for an £8 pint. I gave up on joining forces with my 25-year-old sister a long time ago, probably after we’d read too many horror stories of siblings at war and one wanting out. Nope, my first home by the sea is calling, even if it isn’t until 2034. Until then, call me wasteful or unaspirational. I’m a Guppie and proud.
