Now even City lawyers can’t afford to get onto the London property ladder

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By Legal Cheek Reporter on

A training contract is not always enough to get you a mortgage

With first-time buyers of London homes now needing to fork out an average of £100,445 just to cover their deposit, even baggers of the most high-paying graduate jobs are struggling to get on the capital’s property ladder.

Go back a few years, and City law training contracts — with their generous pay and promise of future job security — used to be a fast-track route to home ownership in your 20s. But a London property boom that has seen new build one-beds in previously cheaper central areas such as Haggerston and Dalston on the market for as much as £750,000 means that a nice gaff without a long commute is now out of reach for many junior corporate solicitors.

Frustration has been bubbling over on social media, with millennials working in the City increasingly going public with their feelings on the matter. This tweet, by a London-based trainee solicitor, has been doing the rounds this week on social media.

In a series of later tweets, which have since been protected, the trainee went on to resist the claims often thrown around about millennials being entitled and lazy. She believes that younger people, burdened with tuition fee debt and an impossible housing market, are being forced to be even more hard-working than their older peers. Yet they still get labelled as the ‘snowflake generation’?!

The trainee doesn’t come from a wealthy background. With the profession’s increasing focus on social mobility and diversity, we’re sure there are hundreds of trainees and newly-qualified lawyers in her shoes.

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