People who've climbed up the property ladder after their first purchase, how did you do it?

[HowdyBubble]

If you were in a situation where you were sole "owner" (i.e. paying a mortgage - not paid off) of a small 3-bed terrace in a town which you bought when you were aged mid/late-20s and you've now climbed up to affording a larger house (semi-detached/detached) and/or in larger cities, how did you manage it and how old were you when you managed to climb up from your starter home?

Ideally looking for stories where someone didn't win the lottery or get a hefty inheritance to facilitate the step up lol.

Thanks

We're still in the 1st house we bought 7 years ago but want to move now. We need to spend 600 to 650 to get what we want but fees and stamp duty are such a massive barrier.

Original property gained about £60k in value over 5 years.

i think it depends when you bought the original house my exH and I got our first house in 99 over 7 years it went up by 4 times the original price. we bought at a good price and decorated it beautifully, but it was timing.
My current house i extended and have added value doing that.

We spent 7 years in our first 2 bed home which sadly due to the last financial crisis meant we were in negative equity of £20,000. I worked 13 day fortnights for over 5 years and with frugalness we paid off the negative equity and saved £40,000 as a deposit to move in 2013 to a 5 bed detached. Very very hard work but well worth it.

We bought very cheap, did the house up and moved about 5 years later.
It was a shell and we made enough for a deposit for the next, and so on.
Every time we bought a shell, lived in it, did it up, made a profit and moved on.
Only my dh on mortgage, as I was sahm.
With such a low income we did the jobs ourselves, dh learned how to do all types of maintenance and plastering, plumbing, painting, decorating, floorboards, that type of thing.

Bought one bed starter home with now dh in 2008, I was 21. Lived there until 2015 when we bought a 3 bed semi, still living here now.

Able to do it with a combination of equity of approx 30k and dh earning significantly more than he did in 2008.

Met DH and pooled our equity then moved to the suburbs

We did but it was nearly 20 years ago so no use to you. We saved, paid off as much as we could, improved the house and got better jobs.

Value of first house increased, we'd had pay rises at work, and we moved out of London and into commuter belt.

Bought our first home 3 bed semi 5 years ago aged 24 and 26. Deposit from own savings, no financial help from any family at all. Partner had worked in a job with good bonuses which enabled a decent deposit (£25k - only about £7k was my contribution). Moved 6 months ago to a 5 bed converted farm house, detached. Twice the amount as the first. First house only increased by £10k but moved at a good time, we're in the north west and had both doubled our salaries in 5 years. This will be our forever home as we've stretched ourselves as much as reasonably possible whilst maintaining ability to have some small social life.

Renovated the property we were in adding value and also waited until it gained value (9 years or so) so we had more equity to play with. Also we had pay rises and promotion that meant we were in a better position to move.

This is very approximate:

Age 27
Bought tiny 2 bed terrace £180k
Salary 45k. Mortgage £155k

Age 31
Sold tiny 2 bed terrace £215k
Bought 3 bed semi £270k
Salary 50k. Mortgage £150k

Age 40
Sold 3 bed semi £445k
Bought 4 bed detached £720k
Salary 85k Mortgage £380k

Essentially we spent a lot doing up house 1 so only broke even when we sold it. However we didn't to much to house 2 at all, so made money on increasing house prices on that. Obviously salary increased over the years too.

Then when we sold house 2 we only had 12 years left on the mortgage. To buy house 3 we doubled our monthly repayments and extended the mortgage to 30 years. A huge commitment but we will be staying in house 3 until we downsize after retirement hopefully.

I brought a 2 bed terrace on my own. It increased massively in value.
DH bought a 3 bed terrace on his own. It increased in value.
We sold both, and bought a 4 bed detached together. It is worth (until prices fall from Covid) about the same as it cost 12 years ago.
We live somewhere CHEAP.

DH (now, was DP then) and I bought a little 2 bed flat in 2003, 125k. Sold in 2006 for £140k. Bought a house for 175k, used equity from flat as deposit and got bigger mortgage as both had better paid jobs. Sold for 315k in 2018 and bought 4 bed house for 360k - equity as large deposit and upped mortgage. We bought well each time i think - first place ex council on estate that people turned noses up. Next property needed a little doing to it. Our house now is weird and we love it but I can see why lots wouldn’t. It was an absolute steal. Lots “wrong” that we don’t care about.
Combination of being able to afford a place when prices weren’t crazy and we got 98% mortgage, and compromising a little on size, condition etc. We could only move in 2018 because I went back to work full time and we could afford bigger mortgage. We make sacrifices. But I’m so glad we did especially now during lockdown, I love having my weird house to stay home in 🙂

The value of my homes all increased. For example, the flat I bought in 1979 in London for £17,000, increased in value over 3 times to enable me to buy my next home. My salary hadn’t increased at the same rate. The same flat recently sold for £1.2 million!

Overpaid mortgage as much as we could. Got higher paid jobs.

Career development / payrises.

Bought house at 27. Bought a bigger house at 35. Overpaid on the mortgage a bit each month for a few years. The mortgage repayments went down but we kept our monthly payments the same. Eventually got to the point where we could but a bigger house and the repayments would be the same as the monthly payment we had been making.

House went up nearly £100k in 8 years.

Also redecorated the house landscaped the garden so it went for more than similar houses on our road.

I bought a two bed flat in London in my mid-twenties. Parents loaned me the deposit, and they got back the same percentage of the final sale price (made a nice profit). One parent took out the mortgage with me but I paid it, had a lodger for the first 3 years, then DP moved in. Ended up staying nearly 10 years due to life and the property market but it had almost doubled in price by then due to being an up and coming area (ie quite rough when I first moved there).

Next step was our current home - a 3 bed semi outside London, which DP and I bought together.

So for me I initially got help to get on the ladder but then stayed in the property longer than planned and was lucky with the market. And the first property was a big stretch which required some sacrifices such as having a lodger.

We bought houses that needed doing up, and did the work ourselves fitting it around work and small DC. Nothing skilled, and it took ages, I wouldn't want to do it again. We bought in the best possible area we could afford, as these prices hold better in a slow market. When we needed more space we moved to a slightly less desirable location which meant we could minimise the increase in mortgage.

This all took place over thirty five years though. And in the middle of this we got caught by the endowment mortgage crash so we also had to put money aside to pay off the deficit.

Bought our first house in 2010 for 190k (3/4 bed semi) and sold it 6 years later for 238 plus we had overpaid so we had around 60k equity plus we had 40k in savings. We bought our next house (in the next street) for 400k. We had to literally spend every penny we had because we could only get a mortgage for 290 so had to use every penny of our buffer/rainy day fund to put down 110k.
We did well because the prices have rocketed for this size of house now, it's probably worth 475 and we'd never have been able to borrow that much. It needs work and we've spent 30k 'patching' as we can't really stretch to the work we need right now. There were definitely compromises in order to get the size of house and garden that we wanted/needed.

We did it through increased in income rather than making money on houses. Our first house dropped in price to the point that we've kept it to rent because we'd make such a huge loss in it. House never two we sold for what we bought it for. house number three was a bargain, and I don't think we could fail to make money on it - but I intend to never move! We never had any parental help/inheritances/lottery wins though!

Bought first terraced house late 20s in a less than desirable area of London £156,000, sold 5 years later for £252,500; next bought a doer-upper terraced in another part of SE London which was 'up-and-coming' for £385,000 and stayed 7 years, sold for £655,000; bought current detached period house for just over £1million in leafy London suburb which we've also down work on. No help with deposits, inheritance etc. Pure hard work and good luck.

Blind luck tbh... tiny first London flat bought in the days when the self employed didn't need to provide accounts! Then stretched myself to my limits to buy 3 bed terrace in a then hugely unfashionable area in 2010, flat value and earnings having increased in the intervening years.

Just sold it for almost double what I paid. Have left London in the intervening years and now have a farm for 200k less than last London house.

Don't think it would be doable moving into, rather than out of, London.