How houses kill happiness: an example

The British public's obsession with owning houses can make for a life of utter misery, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

Someone called from Newsnight yesterday. They wanted to ask about housing. Does the obsession with owning houses in the UK damage lives? Does it mean we don't diversify our investments enough or save enough into our pensions? Does it hurt the economy by damaging labour mobility? Damage entrepreneurship by putting people off risk?

I think we all know the answers to these questions (yes, yes, yes, yes) but for those in any doubt here is an article from the Daily Mail about a woman who lives in a £1m house but finds herself also "on the breadline".

She worries about money all the time and appears to be utterly miserable. But while renovating the house has "drained" her family's savings, her mortgage is only £500,000. She could sell up today, move 20 miles further out of London, buy a similar sized house and be mortgage and worry free. Hooray! Why doesn't she?

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"I love my house", she says. Case closed.

Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.