To keep our council property when we can technically buy?

What if you split up - why aren't you married?

Are you in the tenancy agreement? Because if not and you split up, it will be you looking elsewhere for somewhere to live.

OP you are very naive. Investigate Right to Buy and purchase the house. You are entitled to and would be mad to move. Ignore the naysayers on here.

Social housing. So the rent they pay goes back into the social housing system.

When you say below market rate, do you mean the private rental rate, where rent paid is lost to the system ?

Not that this applies here of course, because they are not talking about going into private rental.

Yes, I know. I should have used.a sarcastic smiley.

Even if house prices go up 1.5% annually for the next five years, a house that's currently £160,000 will be £172,000. A 20% deposit still clocks in at £35,000 for that.

Realistically I question whether you'd be able to save for that if you don't think you could afford a mortgage now. Biting the bullet and buying the house now puts the money into the house rather than burning up in rent or annual house prices increases.

If you already are expecting your husbands career to be better in five years, being extra tight now might not be as bad as you think. If you have that prospect the worry about the risk of the cycle of debt is reduced because you ultimately will have an extra strategy. Remember you can remortgage in a couple of years if it's too much - but you will have bought the house (and therefore aren't going to get caught out on rising house prices).

If you have a mortgage and did get into financial difficulties, you talk to the bank at the first opportunity - it's generally not worth them kicking you out and repossessing. They'd be more likely to let you switch to interest only for a bit - you have age on your side in this respect.

However you do it, the first few years are the worse on a mortgage. Personally I'd get the house before the kids even if you are trying to conceive now, because having kids also affects how much the bank will lend you too and you need to factor this into your plans too. Even if it you pretty much drop a sprog immediately after that (get that mortgage in principle!). I get you want to move quick on the baby, but it does have implications you might not have considered too in terms of borrowing.

I'm very risk adverse when it comes to mortgages / savings. Believe me, I get it. But equally in hindsight we were probably over cautious and made the exact mistake of waiting longer than we perhaps should - which cost us a lot in the long run. If you want to buy you almost have to take that leap of faith at some point because it doesn't ever get easier - there's always some other financial barrier or concern.

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Thankfully, not everyone has morals in the gutter like you do.

Honestly, if you do this, you really to sit down with a spread sheet and work this out properly. ATM you are pulling numbers out your head without really understanding them.

You say you'll struggle with the mortgage payments. If you want a 20% you need to be thinking about that mortgage figure of £675 a month - less your rent - that's £195.

If your theoretical £160k house rises in price by 3% per year for five years a 20% deposit is going to be around £37k for that same house. Meanwhile that £195 per month for 5 year clocks in at £11700. Otherwise you are going to be looking at smaller properties / worse area than you can afford now.

So you are going to need to be saving quite a bit more than that amount which you say you can't afford to do. Even accounting for career promotions and a big pay rise that goes with that, you need to be aware of how difficult it is going to be to hit that 20% deposit target.

Seriously, get Google spreadsheet and use formulas to number crunch on this and work out just what you need to be doing to get to where you want to be in five years. This is a skill everyone should learn if they can't do it already.

Compound interest is an absolute bitch to understand - but you need to for savings and mortgages.

There's an enormous amount of misinformation and misinformation on this thread about both mortgages and council housing.

Ironically the problem is the cost of emergency housing - if councils were allowed to borrow and build more houses they would quickly massively reduce this bill. Its financially madness to not allow councils to do this more (there's a cap that prevents them doing this). It would recoup it's costs relatively quickly. It's a good example of piss poor government management over real life issues.

It's not scrounger who are the biggest problem. It's inept politicians and local government.

I lived in a council which had more foresight over this and built a lot more council properties during the last forty years. It has one of the lowest waiting lists for properties now - the trouble is that they are under pressure from neighbouring councils to take on people because they fucked up the same long term planning. This council had a single local councillor who was a geography nerd and was really into demographics for a long time and he did a lot to push the issue for many years. That's all it took - one person who actually fucking understood the actual problem and planned for it.

Your lives will be upended by a young family. Crack on renting and look again at buying in a few years.

I agree that sinking all your savings into a mortgage at a time when you are planning to have children (expensive) may not be wise. You (or your partner, not sure if you are officially added to the tenancy) are in a fortunate position of having stable tenancy in a property big enough for the family you are planning.

I can understand some envy from those in a less fortunate position to you.

I can't understand the critical comments from those who may see themselves in a more fortunate position (homeowners? Higher earners?) who think you are sponging off the state.
You are paying income tax and your rent is going directly to the council. If your rent was going to a private landlord instead that would not be better. And if you ended up in a position of having to claim HB/UC housing element in the future to pay a private landlord because your earnings dropped/childcare costs were high and you couldn't afford the private rent then the state would certainly not be better off.

Of course it would be better if there were affordable secure tenancies - council or HA for all that needed them. But it's not your fault that there aren't.

OP Financially it seems to make sense to stay, but have a good think about this in terms of compound interest etc plus rising house prices. The maths don't necessarily support the theory of staying put.

If you leave it five years the same property could have risen a good amount in value, whilst your wages are likely to shrink in real time because of the economic conditions currently. You are also reducing the maximum number of years you can mortgage for and effectively likely to increase the monthly payments you would have to make.

The first thing - you can't assume that interest rates will get better. The last 15 years has seen unusually low rates. It's thought that 4% is more normal.

Second thing - you can't assume house prices will stay the same. The increase in prices ATM is about 1.5 - 3% annually but a few years ago it was skyrocketing at more like a 9% increase. I don't think it's likely to get that high again, but you need to assume that a 3% increase per year isn't unlikely. It may be that prices do the opposite but you have to bet on this as a basic scenario.

Based on a 160k property with a 10 deposit repaid over 30 years at 4% you are looking monthly repayments of roughly £675
In five years time if house prices go up 3% annually, that same house is going to cost more like £185483.

So your deposit would need to be about £2500 more. Worse still the amount you'd have to borrow would be more and your monthly repayments more like £775 - that £110 a month more.

We are in a period of wage stagnation so the chances of your wages rising to match these numbers aren't great.

So add up the costs of repayments and interest over just twelve years - it's about £15000 extra if you wait 5 years.

In total after adding together the cost of the house and your repayment, after 12 years you'd be out of pocket £40k if you wait five years. Of course your mortgage is actually 30 years long... That makes about £65k extra over the course of the mortgage extra that you'd have to pay. Suddenly waiting five years to move doesn't look so great after all.

Here's another way of putting it though. Every month you pay into the mortgage the more you save in equity. If you pay rent it's dead money. How long is it going to take you to save the equivalent in buying a house? And of course your house may have gone up in value too. Your house is an asset you can pass to your kids. Not only this but when you finish the mortgage term you don't have to worry about rent anymore. Just maintaining your property (which isn't always cheap admittedly).

Now my amounts here are firmly fag packet rough calculations for illustrative purposes only. But they highlight how mortgages work. They are really badly understood. You obviously can remortgage and yes those interest rates may get more or less favourable.

Of course it depends on what you can actually afford each month - that's a completely different consideration - that's hard when the kids are small and it may be that you value the quality of life more than the money and think it's worth waiting for that reason.

My point is, council housing looks like a better option short term. But long term, it's generally not.

I wouldn't be betting on pensions in 30 years time paying the council house rent either.

Whatever you do it's ultimately a gamble - no one can really predict what the market is going to do - but at least understand how the gamble you are making works before you make that decision.

It does feel unfair when council properties are not becoming available for others in need as people are just never leaving them and passing them on to family members

I would stay put for now if buying is going to drain your savings to £0. You need savings as a homeowner - what if the boiler goes? Electrics etc? You don't want to get into debt sorting repairs and stuff. Id wait until you've got more of a buffer. See how things are when your children are looking to start school maybe?

Same. I would stay too on that income. He doesn’t earn very highly and I can see you might struggle to buy, at least for the short term.

And where on earth do you live where 3 beds are £160,000? I don’t live in or near London but that wouldn’t even buy you a one bed flat here.

DH and I both work full time, have always worked hard, always paid taxes etc etc - I would love to work less days to spend time with my children but we need to pay our mortgage.

Social housing shouldn’t exist to allow people to work less out of lifestyle choice. It’s function is to provide housing for those who can’t afford to buy or rent on the open market.

It is irrelevant what other people choose to do, your own social conscience should be telling you to make this property available for someone who genuinely needs it.

Yanbu. Taxpayers are not subsidising your family, the ignorant idiots on this thread who think council tenants are subsidised just prefer to keep uninformed in order to better serve their petty hatreds but there is nothing wrong with being a council tenant. It's true there's a shortage of council properties but that's not your fault. You are entirely entitled to stay there and reasonable to do so. It's tory party policies over the last 50 years that have decimated the social housing stock and caused the housing crisis, it's certainly not ordinary people like you OP that should pay the price for that. Council rents are lower than private rents because they don't exploit people to profiteer from them like private landlords do. That's not a subsidy. We would be a better healthier and safer nation if all tenancies were like that.

It doesn't matter what the incomes are, she needs to be on the rent book but it's not mean tested