I bought a flat. Apparently that means I’m a drug dealer.
I'm not. Sorry to disappoint.
On Boxing Day 2023, an article I wrote about how I bought my flat with no help was published in The Times. Here it is, if you want to read it, but if you don’t, here’s a quick breakdown: I come from a working class background. I moved to London 10 years ago and through a combination of cheap rent, a frugal lifestyle, a decent salary and 7ish years of saving, I bought a flat with no financial help for £205,000 in 2021. That’s it, that’s the story. Except a few thousand people on Twitter (sorry, I refuse to call it X) decided there must be more to it.
Admittedly I’m late to my own drama here because I deactivated Twitter months ago and only became aware of all this yesterday because someone told me about it.
A guy called Dan kicked it all off, having not properly read the article and jumped to an incorrect conclusion (which, to be fair to him, he did later concede). I couldn’t resist looking at the tweets, because curiosity got the better of me, and mostly they were very funny. I’ve always staunchly believed that if you write something and put it in the public domain, people have every right to hate it or call it into question, and that belief stands. That doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts that I want to share, so I’m going to go through, point-by-point, some of the criticisms.
It’s impossible for me to have saved £20,000 in a year: This was Dan’s original gripe. I didn’t save £20,000 in a year, nor could I have done. I saved it over about 7 years, which, if you do the maths, means I saved about £238 per month. That’s…really not outrageous. As I said, Dan realised his error later.
I must have been dealing drugs on the side: I mean… I know I’m not, nor have I ever been a drug dealer, but how does one actually prove that to the strident online opinion-havers? You’re just going to have to take my word for this one. Besides, if I was dealing drugs, I’d hope it would net me more than an extra £238 a month, to be honest!
I cut my own hair and get my clothes out of Guy Fieri’s bin: OK, this one’s actually very funny, well done. And the hair? Guilty as charged.
My name is Thea de Gallier, therefore I must be posh, and/or lying: Interesting theory. I can only assume that to some, one thing worse than a woman on a decent salary buying a flat with no help is a woman on a decent salary with a fancy-sounding foreign name buying a flat with no help. Last time I checked, someone’s ethnic background wasn’t a class indicator. My name is what it is because of my Swiss-French-Algerian background on my dad’s side of the family, and honestly, knock yourself out googling ‘de Gallier’ and hoping to out my secret aristocratic connection, because you’ve got more chance of finding me dealing drugs to a unicorn at the end of the rainbow. This is just xenophobia, lads.
My parents are actually rich: Sorry, wrong again! My dad left school at 14 with no qualifications and worked for most of my life in low-paid maintenance jobs. My mum grew up on a council estate and was a teaching assistant. I’ve never known them to have a household income exceeding around £25,000-ish.
I’m a ‘Thatcherite’ with ‘moral failure’ who got paid £1000 for the article: This one’s from journalist Rhiannon Lucy Coslett. Firstly, I got paid £350. Secondly, I can’t stand Thatcher. (I actually sent Rhiannon an admittedly snarky private message about this, and her comeback was that I must be drunk, embarrassed and unhappy in my career choices which is an interesting take for someone who sees fit to publicly cast aspersions about the personal values of people they’ve never met, but it takes all sorts, I guess!) For the record: I lean heavily towards socialism. In my utopia, there’s no housing market at all, because all homes are social housing administered at county level and funded through 100% inheritance tax. No, I’m not joking – that would be my ideal, but I’d settle for a cap being imposed on house price rises. Neither of those things are likely to ever happen, but I would in a heartbeat vote for policies that would lose my home value and disadvantage me as a homeowner, if they’d benefit people with less than me. Despite the silly standfirst (which I didn’t write) saying I bought a home ‘to show it can be done’, that was, if you read the article, not actually the reason. Shocking, I know, that my motivation for buying a flat was actually to provide myself with some stability and security because I have no family money to fall back on, and not just to stick it to the povvos.
I’m smug: OK, you can have this one, I am, sometimes.
I earn £45,000, therefore I am actually rich: When I bought my flat, this was my salary, but I didn’t start off in London earning this. In fact, my salary when I first moved to London was a princely £13,000 (yes, seriously), so I didn’t save anything while I was in that job – I was unsurprisingly permanently in my overdraft. As I said in the article, I purposely chose to live in house shares costing £650 or less, which was very possible and quite easy between 2014-2019, especially if you’re not fussy about where you live (and I wasn’t). I went from the £13,000 joke of a job to one paying £21,000, then I freelanced for a few years and earned between £25,000-£28,000. Freelancing is weird because some months I’d earn £500 and others I’d have loads of payments come in at once and put away a few grand, so when that happened, I’d stuff as much as I could into savings. Then I went full-time again, earning £35,000, before leaving that role for the £45,000 job. And before anyone cries nepotism: I applied the normal way through the online careers portal. There was no back-door recruitment or sucking off the boss.
The matter of who is rich, though, is complex, and is worth addressing. The average salary in the UK in 2023 was just over £34,000, so when I did start earning £45,000 I was a fair bit above that. The IFS income distribution calculator is a really useful tool to see how your income compares to the rest of the population, and it tells me that as a single person with no dependents earning £45,000, as I was at the time, I had a higher income than 90% of the population. This is in part because I lived alone, and the calculations go by household size as well as income. So, per the IFS, I am indeed rich. I absolutely recognise that it’s a very good salary, and more than a lot of people will ever earn – like I said, it’s almost double the household income we had when I was a child, and if you’d have asked me when I was working in retail in my 20s whether I ever thought I’d earn that much, it would have been absolutely unimaginable to me. So yes, I do recognise my privilege and luck here, and the frankly criminal reality that to even stand a chance of affording a 34 square metre flat in what many would consider an undesirable area of London, you need to be earning significantly above average to begin with.
How many articles do you ever read, though, that even tell you flats costing £205,000 or thereabouts even exist in London? Personally, all I ever read about London housing is that you need a 6-figure deposit and loads of money from your parents, which I definitely didn’t have, and that there’s nothing available under half a million. Yes, you could get a house for less than that in the Midlands blah blah, but plenty of people like me actually want to stay in London, and would choose the tiny flat over the house because we like our lives in the city. So I figured that there must be more people like me out there, on a decent but not banking-level salary, assuming they’ll never be able to buy in London, and I wanted to let them know it can be done.
Secondly, I get absolutely sick of hearing people, in the media and in real life, who earn significantly more than £45,000, complaining they can’t afford to buy or even save. Those are the people I most wanted to read my article. Do I think it’ll help people in jobs with a salary ceiling well below £45,000? No, probably not. Can I see why it would piss those people off? Yes, absolutely. I’ve been one of them – I spent years working in retail before my career took off, but just because I managed to get where I am, I don’t think that means everyone else can do the same. I recognise that I still have privileges despite coming from a working class background – white privilege, accent privilege, the privilege of having parents who supported me emotionally to chase my dreams and live life as I see fit, even if they couldn’t do that financially.
But yes, I am proud of myself, and I’m not ashamed of that. If you want to call that bragging, fine. I hate capitalism as much as the next person, and accessing secure housing should be a given, not an achievement. But when you’re bombarded with news about how the bank of mum and dad are propping up the UK’s mortgage sector, it does feel good to know that I’ve done it in spite of a system rigged against people who come from a background like mine. Me not buying a flat on a point of principle wouldn’t have ended capitalism and made housing affordable for everyone less fortunate than me, would it? But hey, at least it gave some people on the internet something to moan about.
Thanks Mike! Yes, it’s all a storm in a teacup really but such is the Internet. Hope all’s good with you
Highly entertaining... and also highly revealing about the present state of the British journalism industry. Well done buying the house, I hope you are loving it.