I used to pay half a month’s teaching salary to fly home from Madrid on an ancient Spantax or Aviaco plane, press one 100 peseta coin after the next into a phone booth in Plaza del Callao for a few seconds homesickness-filled chat with my mum, and return to a cucaracha-infested apartment with no air conditioning amid the city’s blasting 40c heat. I’d thank the lord for Cucal (to kill the cockroaches) and for the VIPS cafe (the only joint nearby with aircon). How easy it would be to join the chorus of old gits and say, hey you young people with your iPhones and cheap Ryanair weekends, you think you have it bad? We had it a lot worse.

Except we didn’t, really.

Last week, exactly 30 years after I left university and began working in Madrid as a Tefl teacher, I was back, sipping a cafe con leche while reading a report on how today’s 20- to 30-year-olds are far worse off than those born in the 1960s (such as me).

Elsewhere on the site, we highlight personal stories that talk of the truth of these findings. Young adults are, incontrovertibly, in more debt, paying more of their income in rents, less able to save, and virtually disqualified from home ownership. Since the industrial revolution, each generation of British workers has been better off than the one before, gradually (if fitfully) enjoying better housing, consumer goods and pensions. Today’s generation is the first to see its standard of living go into reverse. iPhones are hardly compensation.

But back to Madrid. Tefl is still a rite of passage for many UK graduates, with Spain and Japan the biggest destinations. Are today’s generation of teachers worse off or better off than in my day?

In the mid-1980s I took home, after tax, 90,000 pesetas a month, which was worth around £470 in those pre-euro days. Inflation calculators tell me £470 in 1986 money is equal to around £1,300 a month today. But my rent (in a four-bed flat share) was just 15,000 pesetas, or more like £220 today. That left me with rather a lot to spend on going out. I recall barely ever cooking; eating out in restaurants after a teaching day ending at 9pm was the norm. I took taxis home every night and, lazily, grabbed one to work too.

I called schools in Madrid and asked to speak to teachers about their take-home pay today. One told me the typical figure for a newly arrived teacher was €800-€1,200 a month. Some schools pay more, the British Council in particular. But even if today’s fresh-faced university graduate is earning €1,200, that’s quite a cut from the €1,480 equivalent I was on. Thankfully rents in Madrid are nowhere near as mad as in London. One teacher told me his share in a two-bed flat near the Retiro, a central and upmarket location, was €425 a month. But if that leaves around €800 for spending, it suggests TEFL teachers are 10%-20% worse off today than 30 years ago (but please still go: Madrid is easily Europe’s most exciting city).

When they return to Britain, they face the near impossible task of buying a home without help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. I have earned more from my move up the property ladder than all the money I have earned at the Guardian in the past 17 years. This exponential increase in property values relative to incomes, particularly in parts of the south-east, will not be seen again, for a generation at least. Why aren’t the younger generation rebelling? Maybe they simply can’t afford to.