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.
