One surefire way of getting the back up of someone who rents is saying that renting is like "dead money".
First of all, this isn't strictly true - renting can buy you a lot more freedom than owning .
Secondly, people rent because they simply cannot cobble together a deposit without any assistance.
Saving this sort of money takes time and the irony is, in the time it takes to save, the average tenant will have had to have shelled out the equivalent of a (large) deposit in rent.
On average it takes eight and a half years to get on the property ladder and, in this time, renters will hand over £63,225 to their landlords.
This amounts to a quarter of the value of average home in the UK, which stands at £229,000.
The survey was carried out by Keepmoat Homes, with CEO Tim Beale revealing that of the 2,000 people the company studied, more than half said they felt as if they'd never own their own home.
Those surveyed spent five years saving before putting down an average deposit of £24,033 on their property – which is more than 80 per cent of the average adult's salary.
To give you a further idea of how difficult it is to save for a house deposit, the survey also revealed that 40 per cent had to lean on parents for financial support for their deposit and 20 per cent relied on inheritance.
