Confused.com has revealed that the continued property crisis, coupled with a rise in the number of singles in the UK, is resulting in the creation of alternative ‘family’ units and giving birth to the MOSH.

This type of MOSHing does not include head-banging to metal music; it’s all about embracing the ‘Multiple Occupant Shared Home’ and challenging the traditional household structure.

Confused.com has worked with futurologists at Future Poll, the research division of The Future Laboratory, on the new study into the friendship and finances of single people in the UK, which explores the growing trend for best mates to create alternative ‘family’ units.

The Confused.com research found that 57% of singles have a friend they trust enough to buy a house with.

Furthermore, 59% of singles would consider protecting their friendships with life insuranceif they bought a house together.

Single-person households are projected to increase by 163,000 per year – from 6.8m in 2006 to 10.9m in 2031 – and singleton households could outnumber any other kind of household by 2031, according to the Government Office for Science. This shift in behaviour among young people will mean MOSHing is tipped to become mainstream over the next decade. The Confused.com report predicts that MOSHing will become a lifestyle of choice for men and the younger generation of singles, and so it will be vital to protect these co-dependent lifestyles with some form of insurance.

Men are already MOSHing more than women. Twice as many single men (10%) have bought a house with a friend compared to just 5% of single women surveyed. Some 44% of men would be comfortable owning a property with a friend, compared with 38% of women. Young people are native MOSHers, according to the Confused.com research. More than six in 10 (64%) single 18–24-year-olds have friends they trust enough to buy a house with, compared with around half (47%) of those over 55.

Young MOSHers also have more friends they would trust enough to buy a house with: 18–24-year-old singles have 36%, while those over 55 have just 21%.

Social networking is accelerating friendship and young people are connecting to more people and sharing things in a way that would be impossible in their busy offline lives. Their constant connection to their friends online means that they increasingly want to make these online communities concrete.

Mike Hoban, Chief Marketing Officer at Confused.com explains how this will impact insurers: “Insurance companies are increasingly using social media to communicate with young audiences and the next stage is to recognise, and respond to, the real-life social networks which are structuring the new ‘urban families’ as friends set up home together, supporting one another both financially and emotionally. As our report demonstrates, friendships are increasingly important to independent single people in the UK and a financial industry that caters for single people and couples alike is one that is prepared for the future of personal finance.”

The report, entitled ‘Friendships, Finance and the Future: The Rise of Singledom in the UK’, can be downloaded here:
www.confused.com/life-insurance/articles/~/media/docs/friendships-finance-and-the-future.pdf.

Via EPR Network
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