Shared suffering in house prices

The young and the old both think they had it worse when buying a house, says Merryn Somerset Webb. But shared misery is coming.

A few days ago, someone clearing out their house for sale passed me a copy of their mortgage deed. They had borrowed £35,000 on a repayment basis from the now-defunct Northern Rock in 1990, at an "initial" interest rate of 14.75%. I thought that might interest people. So I tweeted a picture of the document. All hell broke loose. Older readers clocked the rate and started to remember the hell of having to pay it.

They told of working two jobs; living on foraged foods ("blackberries, windfall apples and chips", said one woman); never taking a holiday; and forsaking all luxuries just to keep a roof over their heads ("no going out for meals, drinks or treats"). One reader came out in a "cold sweat" just thinking about how his rate peaked at 17%. Others relived the nightmare of failed endowment funds and having to come up with vast amounts of extra capital to pay off mortgages at the end of terms. The young today, they said, have no idea how good they have it.

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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.