I have worked for over 20 years, often til 11pm each night and I've saved like mad. I haven't spent the money on planet destroying aeroplanes to go on exotic holidays. I haven't spent it on drugs or excessive amounts of booze and I haven't spent it on clothes and hairdos or cosmetic treatments. I have - like everyone else - done what I chose with it which is to buy a second home. It's not even a holiday home but in rough part of London and the reason is it happens to be near where my husband works, so that as well as paying excessive taxes on his income, he can have a life in the evenings instead of sitting on trains and buses for another 3 hours just to get home to go to bed and get up again for it to all start again. We also like doing places up but it's hardly an industry - more a ten year plan to help offset our miserable private pensions that were missold to us all those years ago.
The fact is that someone was more than happy to sell us their home for top whack - just as all the homeowners in Cornwall and Devon are happy to get the highest prices for their's. I don't see much charity with them offering knockdown prices to their neighbour's children! This is an easy target and indeed, the politics of envy. It isn't thought through and if we give up our jobs, sell our two homes and go live in one in the country, retiring and living on the income (as we could!) then that's two lots of 40% tax not going to the government, and all the money we put into local shops, tradesmen, local rates gone too. There must be such a small percentage of people lucky enough to be in the position to have more than one home, but we're not all fat lazy millionaires doing it to spite everyone else. Honest!
