How much did your parents give you for a deposit?

[littlepieces]

If you've bought your first home in the past 10-15 years, how much did your parents or family contribute towards your deposit? (If they did). And how much was the house? In context, I'm 35, don't own a home, can't get enough deposit together, and I'm just curious. All of my friends own now (some on their 2nd or 3rd homes) because their parents helped them get on the ladder.

Ps. There's no need to comment if you're part of the 'I bought my 4 bedroom house in 1980 for £10,000 by working hard' crowd 😄I'm sure you worked hard, and that's really great, but it's not relevant to this post. Thank you!

Haha! Is this a thing now? Must be nice 👍

£4K in 2006 but I lived in a relatively cheap Northern town, that was 5% deposit.

In 1998, they gave me £6K. That was 10% of the value

I and my friends who have bought in the SE in the last few years show that it can be done though. As I said, I live in Berkshire. I have a friend who bought a similar priced house at the same time in Hampshire and I know her parents wouldn’t have been able to
help out.

DH's parents gave us 3k which was 50% of our deposit.

Our house only cost us 60k and that was seven years ago.

Charming 🙄

You do realise the number of people living in the South East is absolutely tiny compared to the number living in the rest of the country? Not that it makes the cost of living there any less important or people's lives there any easier but life exists beyond the south east, people are living, working (even as doctors!!) and buying houses in other places!

It is difficult. I live in the north and have to pedal my tractor down to London to see a doctor. Directions are difficult as nobody up here can read or write, and obviously with no electricity we can’t even google it so we just follow the sunshine and the smell of money.

I mean, at least our children can afford houses; a decent mud hut is only a few quid, even if it is overrun with ferrets.

My husband’s parents contributed £250,000.
We bought our house for £572,000 ( Greater London ). This privilege is not lost on me . I had a working class upbringing .

£0 too, i know

*Diamond7272
I couldnt give a monkeys about working class families. I need teachers, nurses, doctors and dentists in my town, all graduate jobs and skillsets.

All this 'we bought for 100k' in wales means nothing in my life or the lives of millions of families and elderly in the south east*

yeah good luck with that. You may have great dr’s but you’ll have no hospital admin, cleaners, supermarket and shop staff, plumbers, mechanics, bus drivers, dinner ladies…

that and all your graduates moving to your town will drive up house prices as the working class move out.

and the “i bought for 100k in wales” is relevant. You can get yourself on the property ladder with that house in wales, buy and rent it out, it will cover you mortgage and a chunk of your own rent so you can save. Inflation will grow your deposit, and those so desirable graduates you need so much can rent cheaply for a few years at uni and save their own deposit. There is more than one way to get on the housing ladder.

in my uni town it was very common for a student with a willing parent to guarantor a mortgage on a cheap student flat. Student would rent spare rooms to friends. Friends got cheap rent, student benefitted from any increase in value, parent would get any money back, a small amount or rent, and see their child on the housing ladder.

I agree with your point but the SE does make up a significant proportion of the population which is part of the reason it’s more expensive. The SE is approximately 9 million people, plus another 9 million in London, so more than a quarter of the population together in quite a small area. Vs Scotland which has only 5 million people!

My parents are lucky to live in an area where it's easy-ish to get a council retirement bungalow. So they sold their house (£160k) and gave me and my brother £25k each, and are stretching the rest to pay for a comfortable retirement.

They absolutely wouldn't have been able to contribute otherwise.

25k towards a £184k house in 2014
We moved in 2019. Original house sold for £200k new house cost £248k.

Nothing.

We are extremely fortunate that both sets of parents helped with allowing us to live rent free (with our respective parents) prior to marriage and also contributed towards the deposit.

Our parents had help from their own parents at a similar stage so they always wanted to do the same for us and we intend to do for our children.

Everyone in our circles of friends have had financial help in one way or another to get onto the property ladder - we all bought within the last 8 years

I would love to give my adult dc money towards a deposit but we are low earners so it's not possible. We live in South Dublin where house prices are through the roof. We have two teens also who are still in school, if we didn't we would definitely consider downsizing and giving them some cash each as we have a lot of equity in our house. The best we can do is let them live at home for a small rent so they can save for their own place.

They won't inherit anything from grandparents either as neither set owned any property.

No deposit gifted (or lent) to us. We rented for years, firstly in flat shares, then together as a couple, resisting the temptation to upgrade as our salaries increased.

By our late 30s we had saved 125k between us to put down on a 500k house in London which felt sickeningly expensive. That was about 8 years ago, and the house would be valued at closer to a million now.

Both my parents died by the time I was 31. So after my sister and I sold their house, sorted out a lifetime of stuff and all the associated admin, emotional stress etc I had 96k to put towards a house. Would much rather have my parents obviously. To never be able to even call them for a chat or advice or ever have a hug again is horrible. My mum never saw me get married or met my kids. My dad was at my wedding and met my first child which I am grateful for. But we wouldn’t have been able to get on the ladder at all without that inheritance so in one way we are fortunate and in another very very unfortunate.

Anyway we started searching for a house and also talking to mortgage brokers etc. A shared ownership house in an amazing village came up - never ever in a million years thought we’d be able to live here. So we used the whole lot to buy the 50% so that we were cash buyers and could it get it all through quickly. we now pay rent on the other 50% while we save up to extend the lease. The lease was not long enough for mortgage lenders to lend to us to start stair casing to own the rest, but we need about 20k to extend it. We are lower earners but once my youngest gets his free nursery hours I am going to double my workload so we can begin to save that 20k. It’ll still take a good few years. But the short lease was one of the reasons this house was such a steal in this area, and how we managed to get it. If the lease had been long enough for mortgage lenders to be happy to lend we would have lost out to a higher bidder but because we could cash buy the 50% outright we really did snag a mega bargain.

very long and probably not relevant at all. Sorry I do ramble. It’s really shit that house prices are so astronomically out of reach for so many people. We could only afford to have a second child because of my parents dying and being able to buy this house. I really truly don’t even know how we’d have been able to afford to have rented long term either. We were squeezed into a tiny damp house before all that happened, and the rent was still a stretch! It’s so so crap and the whole bloody economic world we’ve created is topsy turvy but I don’t know how it could be fixed!

I do appreciate that, it must be awful for a lot of people trying to live in that area but am just a bit sick of 'moving to Wales' or 'moving up North' being scorned at as if no-one in their right mind would consider living there when the South East exists 🙄

mine and dps 'borrowed' some of our deposit. One paid back the other we found out took more. Took years to stop saying yes, thankfully we had a help to buy isa in which the money couldn't be put back in after we took it out so that wasy excuse to stop lending.

So in the end our parents cost us £4600, plus the interest lost.

got there in the end. low, single income too. with many children from a teen pregnancy (early teens too) Jeremy Kyle worthy?

Nothing. We bought this house 13 years ago and put down a 30K deposit which we saved like fucking crazy for with 2 young dc living in a 1 bed flat. We managed to buy this house without selling our flat which was our aim and I’m really proud of it because it really is an achievement to be able to say we did it off our own backs. It was hard!!
So much harder now too, now that property prices here (SE) have gone up so much and wages don’t seem to have risen at the same rate.
2 bed terrace on the road behind us is going for 500K. Nice garden etc but Jesus. We aren’t in London or even anywhere particularly fancy.

No help from family and didn't live with them either whilst saving. Bought a house for £325k in the SE in 2010. Both DH and I had good wages and we lived pretty frugally, saved as much as we could and took on extra agency work where possible. I was very happy when the inlaws bought us a rotary washing line and a lawn mower as a moving in present 😆

Absolutely zero. Bought my house with my husband when we were 34, saved extremely hard for 5 years to make a 10% deposit.

I didn't. We rented (750pcm) and saved like mad for 5 years and then we put a deposit down to buy. Own a 1950s 4 bed semi detached with front and back garden. 50k a year between the two of us. Made huge cutbacks to achieve it