Is anyone else just constantly financially hammered by life?

[Haruka]

It feels never-ending since I bought my house 2 years ago.

Car crash that totalled my car a year and a half ago, the only halfway decent one I could afford short-term seems to constantly need repairs now. But I need it for work and other cars are financially out of my reach.

The house has needed urgent repairs since - fence, boiler, stop tap, broken water taps, roof, missing side tiles from the storms. There is still so much else that needs fixing, but right now I can't afford this.

3x the need for pest control in that time - first bed bugs, then pigeons (with proofing being installed shortly), now it appears we have wasps happily building a nest and need another callout.

I save up as much as I can every month, but it feels like every time I have saved up a few hundred, the next big thing happens. Others don't ever seem to have to deal with all this, especially in such a short space of time (all of the above happened within 2 years).

I am good with money, but I am on my arse financially. I am a single mother of two and pray every month that not another thing goes wrong as I am fast approaching the line where necessary repairs will lead to debt.

Part of me wants to go fuck it and go back to renting, but then I remember that having to move all the time because of landlords selling up wasn't much better.

Am I just incredibly unlucky recently or is everyone just being financially hammered all the time?

I think you've just been unlucky, but it does sound like you've done most of the major bits to the house now so that's does bode well for the future. Everything is so expensive now, it's awful.

I've been paying the minimum on credit cards for a long time and they keep helpfully writing to me about persistent debt and helpfully suggesting I double the payment. If I could pay any more, I would. All it does is make me feel rubbish for not being able to do more.

I'm stuck in the childcare years so hoping there will be an improvement in a few years when my youngest starts school but the time between now and then seems a long way away.

You are doing what you can, and owning a home is an incredible achievement. You should be so proud of that fact and it will be a blessing, I think we just have to hold on for now. It's rubbish though.

But you're paying your credit cards off, so in that way you are making progress. Childcare does wane eventually; I am now in the last phase of just wrap-around care, so you're right that this will get easier.

I guess the house repairs are progress, but the only real, visible one is the fence as everything else seems to have broken after I moved in. The surveyor said the roof was fine, 6 months later during gutter cleaning my roofers found a huge hole with pigeons nesting in it and it cost £750 to repair that alone. The tap one day just snapped off, the boiler part broke after about a year. The tiles flew off in the winter storms, got repaired and now another one has already gone again. I will get cladding eventually, but again that's a few grand and low on the list of priorities that also includes rewiring and a rusting bath tub (though I do believe the old owner just painted over that one).

The bed bugs were a holiday gift, the pigeons now like my solar panels and the wasps have found a gap in the tiles that have broken off again to build a nest near my entrance, so now I can't go in the garden without them being everywhere.

Everything just feels like I'm running after issues to stop the house regressing further, not actually moving ahead and making real improvements. And I'm quite handy and can do a fair bit myself.

Yes, owning a house is expensive. It's something the renters often forget when comparing the cost of renting vs. paying a mortgage.

We first five years after buying first house and with young kids.

It was never ending the structure survey hadn't picked up anything but was vague terms and lots of payee more money for another additional survey cost hundred to thousands - also had redundancy and serious accidents on top and we'd fixed mortgage just as rates were dropping like a stone.

We kept telling ourselves we'd benefit in the end - we didn't work out like that move us on and we sold for less than we bought due to market at time.

New house has needed very little doing to it at all 8 years in that and pay rises gave us some financial buffer - thank god as cost of living and food prices would have buried us otherwise.

I’m sorry you’ve had all this. Few years we bought a house, at least we thought it was a house. Turned out it was a fecking renovation project.

For the pigeons, we once had a fake owl. I’m sure it was bought on Amazon. It as fixed on the roof and the pigeons gave up.

I don’t think going back to renting would be better as there’s no stability right now. Landlords are either raising rents or selling up all over.

Keep saving as much as you can and split it, like House repairs fund, Car fund, DC’s needs fund etc.

Are you actually me?! Right down to the need for several pest control call-outs. Although I’ve been a homeowner for 17 years now. We’ve had terrible luck with cars for the entirety of our adult lives. I sometimes think we’re cursed.

Our friends have built up huge savings pots whilst we have been in and out several debt cycles and only ever accumulate a few hundred before yet another issue clears the balance to zero again.

However, we have just given our household budget another overhaul and decided to just keep on keeping on - our fortune surely has to change at some point? And I still feel very fortunate to have our own house too.

I own my own home too and yes there always seems to be something. I live on one income but ds is 19 and works full time do pays housekeeping.

I just had to shell out £800 to the roofers recently. I also have to find c £70 for a loose tap for the plumber soon. I pay £50 twice a year to a really good handyman for two hours each time too. He has not long been to help. I could also do to replace the 50 year old electric trip which will cost £450. Never ending!

Surely op your luck is bound to change soon!!

I feel your pain, I bought back in 2019 since moving in I've had to replace the Immersion heater, the heat pump(basically got a whole new air source heatpump fitted to replace my broken one), my patio door locking mechanism is broken,my car needed over £1000s of work doing to it,twice! I need £1200 of dental work with the periodontal specialist (it's not something I can opt out of unless I want to eventually lose my teeth, thankfully it's only a one off treatment).

I pay off the minimum or just over on my credit cards and still get letters about persistent debt. I'm paying it, not spending on them so leave me to it!

I bought myself a new pair of jeans the other day and instantly felt bad as it takes money from elsewhere. They were £15 from Tesco and needed as I've worn out 3 pairs in the last 4 months.

I need new carpet badly but it's going to have to wait(hopefully I'll get my bonus this year and can use that) I want to decorate but can't really justify the cost of paint.

I feel lucky I have my own home but boy life is no fun at the moment.

That's what I'm worried about, that this is it now until I die. Yes, I have made the mistake of going for an old house; newbuilds are out of my reach on a single income and renting has become a nightmare recently if I want to keep the kids in the same schools as I am bound to the area. Prices increasing, landlords selling up everywhere, no security.

Your handyman sounds good. I am slowly building up contacts of decent tradesmen around the area, but I have also had a few horrendous experiences with some companies who massively overcharged or made mistakes which I then had to pay more to fix. I now have decent roofers, a great plumber and a great pest control guy.

But like I said, it's the constant issues, at least one every month. And that means an even longer wait for preventative measures like a new fuse board and rewiring, let alone taking a look at the state of the wall behind my rusty bath tub.

I do have different savings accounts for different things, into which I pay every month, but the money comes out as fast as it goes in, if not faster in months where everything seems to go wrong at once.

Houses are money pits so the one good thing about renting (if you have a decent landlord who fixes things in a timely manner), is that they bear that cost. However, the security of having your own home is really worth it, even if you sometimes hit a phase of everything breaking/going wrong at once.

It sounds like you've had a real run of bad luck OP, but I'd hang in there, if I were you. You are coping and though it doesn't feel like it, you're keeping on top of things, even if it's massively stressful.

We did get past it - last two years in first house we were slowly building savings so we could afford to move as we knew it was on the cards and since moving we've been without the stress and worry.

We still have to be careful with money - plan for foreseeable expenses and have saving to cover up expected ones but constant worry of next shoe dropping is gone.

Annoying thing is we did nothing wrong - it was just string of bad luck - and we are very financially conservative and responsible yet everyone seemed to want to lecture us and judge. Even got told we shouldn't have bought but waited - we had big deposit saved and wanted stability for kids schooling and now 14-15 year later on track to be mortgage free just before retirement I'm glad we didn't listen to that.

I don't suppose you have a spare room for a lodger even for twelve months? Just to get on top of things.

No, and with kids in the house I wouldn't let a stranger live here anyway.

@GingerAndLimeCurd I'm glad things worked out for you. It is nice to hear that things can get better.

True.

Owning a house is expensive, I used to have a 1975 semi that was an endless money pit. Add to that we had a year where every white good we owned broke in quick succession.

We ended up selling the house (luckily bought in an extremely popular area so made £100k and sold in 3 days) and bought a 10 year old house. Still there are things starting to need to be done on this house now as well.

I swear, I must have broke a mirror at some stage!

Ugh. Me

I find Spotted page on Facebook to be very useful for asking for e.g. handyman or gardener recommendations. You search Spotted Norwich for example or Spotted Poole et c depending where you live.

I found out they are honey bees. Not wasps. Removal can easily be £1000. Wasps would have been around £100, for comparison.

They moved their queen in today. There were thousands.

I cannot even find an adequate enough swear word to describe just how I'm feeling right now.

@Haruka perhaps you will be lucky and the bees will swarm; then all you need is a swarm collector (a friend is one). You should be able to alert them via a Facebook noticeboard.

Don't they only swarm once they have a new queen and the old one is moving out with half of the lot?

We had honey bees the other year. Find a bee keeper (on Facebook etc). They will come and take it if they can to populate a hive. Cost us nothing - and the chap was excited about such a large colony. I'll try and find a picture!

I was hoping to find the picture of the hive but couldn't but this was the removal. The beekeeper puts a chunk of the hive Inc the Queen in the box then the rest of the bees choose to go into the box (over an evening). The beekeeper seals it up and takes it away for their hive.

Wasps: at night when it is dark, sneak up to the nest, and squirt some of this stuff in the hole at the bottom (wear a face mask it is indeed vile stuff that kills) https://www.screwfix.com/p/zero-in-ultra-power-fly-wasp-killer-600ml/390hv

The kids are now teens and we've been in this house for over a decade and I feel that we've finally had a couple of stable years. For a period, things were constantly going wrong whether it was the washing machine breaking the day after the warranty expired, another puncture or various bits of the house going wrong. It seemed endless. I couldn't believe my luck this week when, for the first time ever, a tyre issue was resolved by being repaired rather than having to be replaced and a plumbing issue which I expected to be major was dealt with within minutes.