Kirstie Allsopp: How many months you would have to go without Netflix to afford a house deposit in Sheffield

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp caused uproar when she suggested young people could afford to own a home if they made more sacrifices – like spending less time at the gym, or cancelling their Netflix subscription.

But exactly how many months of Netflix would you have to sacrifice in order to save enough money to put down a deposit in Sheffield?

The answer, as you’ve probably guessed, is a lot. According to Sheffield Moneyman, the average deposit for a first time buyer in Sheffield is £29,300, considerably more than a Netflix subscription.

The cheapest subscription option for UK Netflix users is £5.99 a month, that gets you access to all Netflix shows, but you can only watch on one device at a time. Surely this is the option that money-savvy savers, following Allsopp’s advice on sacrifice, are most likely to opt for.

If you were to cancel a subscription to this plan and save the £5.99 every month, it would take 4,891 months, or 407 years to save up enough money for a deposit. By which point of course, you will be dead, and the deposit will have likely increased with inflation anyway.

Even if you are on the more expensive Netflix subscriptions of £9.99 or £13.99 a month, it would still take 244 years and 174 years respectively just to afford the deposit.

But maybe young Sheffielders need to sacrifice that little bit more, and lower their expectations a little. According to Purplebricks, a property in one of the cheapest Sheffield postcodes, S43 can be snapped up for £90,000.

MORE PROPERY: Sheffield house prices rise more than Yorkshire average

So, let’s say you need a 10 per cent deposit of £9,000, you currently have the most expensive Netflix subscription, and hell, you’re even an Amazon Prime subscriber too at £7.99 a month.

Cancelling both of these subscriptions and putting the £21.98 aside every month, it would still take more than 34 years to save enough for a deposit on one of the cheapest properties in Sheffield.

So maybe Netflix isn’t the problem after all. It could be that house prices in Sheffield, and nationally are rising faster than wages.