networkn:

 

Sure, when you slant the discussion like that it seems pretty much seems impossible, but there are other factors to take into account too. I would suggest there are plenty of things in a household these days you wouldn't have found in a potential home buyer from 20 years ago. Big screen TV's, multiple personal electronic devices, many costing hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of dollars, Netflix subscriptions, Sky, all sorts of things. Sure there might be some who don't have many or any of those things, but I'd suggest consumerism today isn't even on the same planetary league as what my wife parents went through to be able to afford their first home. 

 

Not sure I'd agree that people save harder now than they did when a single income serviced a mortgage. 

 

I guess the problem is at some point you run up against objective reality. I wish starter houses didn't require making 30 year gambles with hundreds of thousands of dollars of deposit at stake, but they do. 

Just like no matter what people want to say about modern consumer spending, there is no getting away from the objective reality that houses now cost much more relative to incomes than they used to. It's a fact. We're so far beyond what Demographia considers 'severely unaffordable' that I'm not even sure what the correct label here is. 

I'm not saying it was easy for people to do it before. I'm saying that it is empirically proven to be harder now. And frankly, experiences of decades ago aren't relevant. Food, fuel etc are all over the place. There were literally millions fewer people in NZ when the 1973 Oil Shock hit. You get the idea. 

With any luck, we'll get some headroom with a portion of large mortgages being inflated away, but that's contingent on Kiwi wages keeping up with inflation like they did for previous generations when interest rates rocketed. That might prove to be a heroic assumption given that Kiwi businesses had a hard time keeping up with bog standard 2% p.a inflation in the good times, and you're generally expected to switch jobs to get a better rate in many industries.

Apparently remote working is allowing a generation of mobile Kiwis to work into other timezones and to be paid market rates from other more competitive markets. That's a great outcome for them, but kind of telling that it's so preferable to working for local companies.