to think I will never be able to own a house?

[igetmorelovefromthecat]

I am 30, and have been privately renting since I moved out of home 12 years ago. On average, I move once a year due to tenancies ending/houses being unsuitable etc (I am not an awful tenant and have never been kicked out of anywhere in case you were wondering).

I am now renting a lovely house and managed to get an 18 month tenancy on this one but I will definitely have to move at the end of that term as the owners want to sell. The thought of uprooting myself and my two DCs AGAIN makes me want to weep. DD1 is in school and we are very settled in this area which makes things harder as it is only a village and there aren't hundreds of rental properties to choose from.

I am really craving some security and stability for my DCs and have been looking into buying a house. With mortgages being what they are now I would need around £27K as a deposit to buy a very modest house in this area. I am a single parent and I run a small business which is successful but although I can afford to keep my head above water there isn't much left over for saving. I would die of old age before I saved £27K!!

It's so depressing to face a future of moving all the time. I know I'm not the only one in this situation and there are people a lot worse off than me but AIBU to just want to find somewhere to live and be able to stay there?

Thank you lisascat. It makes me beyond cross when people imply we are in this situation because we are feckless/greedy/too fussy.

Well said LisasCat! People shouldn't have to sacrifice their independence to be able to afford a house (eventually). Also, I think parents have a right not to have their kids at home indefinitely; much as I love my DC I hope they will not be living with me into their thirties! Equally it is unfair that the only way parents can 'get shot' of their DC is by stumping up huge sums of money as a deposit for them to buy a house. It should be possible for young people earning money to be able to get on the housing ladder without help from relatives.

Well said LisasCat. Agnetha seems to be assuming that EVERYONE has parents that will accomodate their children until they've saved deposit. Not true. At all.

I am buying my house and sometimes think it would sell it get the equity (if there is any!) and rent. But after reading this I'd obviously never really thought about it. I am very lucky I realise that now.

We have rented for the last 5 years. We're in Belgium though where it is much more common and much more secure. The standard rental contract is known as a 3-6-9 lease.

Basically you sign a 9 year lease with the landlord. The landlord can only give you notice to quit (providing you pay the rent/don't trash the place) if he or a member of his immediate family want the house for themselves. (We rent from a company) Leases are registered with a central agency and rent increases are linked with inflation.

If you want to leave within the first 3 years, you have to pay a penalty though of 3,2 or 1 month's rent. The deposit - normally 2 months rent - is lodged in a bank account. You can also get the bank to "lend" you this money - for which you pay an annual fee.

The responsibilities of landlord and tenant are very well defined in law. The trouble in the UK is that there are so many buy to let landlords who just want to make a quick buck, there would be no end of trouble trying to implement similar legislation - though I think it is well over due.

really interesting thread, another one here with no hope of buying :(

i despair at the state of the housing situation, i really do and worry all the time about what will happen when my DC grow up and leave home.

i am "lucky" as we have a local authority home (housing association) so we have a bit more security than if we were private rented. but the price we pay is living in a pretty bad area with shit schools and a bad reputation.

i would love to own my own house but i don't think we ever will.

Ha, when DH and I were living at home with our respective parents, we worked out that the amount we were paying in 'keep' was more than it would cost to pay a mortgage!!!

YANBU to want a stable home. Could you try and get a longer tenancy? We rent out a house to a lady with a young daughter and if she asked us to sign up to 5 years we'd jump at it. She has been in our house for 4 years now and has decorated etc. I do appreciate that rental property in nice areas is often in very short supply tho . We have only had two tenants the entire time we've been letting our house and both times they have been the first people to view - it has let within hours of becoming available.

Would agree that, given that many people will now need to rent long-term, that the position of tenants needs looking at.

Am at you having your own business (and making a success of it) by the way (off-topic, sorry).

Portofino - That sounds like a much better system. I'd be happy to have it here.

I feel your pain OP.

I have dreamed my whole life of being able to own my own house, yet the older I get the less likely it's going to be. And if we do own, it'll be something unsuitable for us as a family to live in - we can't afford anything big enough. And we live in a decent enough area housepricewise, compared to a lot of others.

Where our parents and grandparents bought the large houses of today (family homes) for a reasonable rate, these houses have now been sidelined for the phenomenally rich - usually those with no families!!
Around here (not an especially rich area btw)it's older folk and very very rich folk who have the decent family homes. No chance of us ever buying any in a nice enough area any time soon either - deposits are double my dh's annual wage. It will take a very very long time for us to get started - I really will be in my 40's and my kids will be grown...so what's the point?

So the alternative is...renting. Which is not ideal.

I love our current home and would love to live her for the rest of our days. It's just big enough, it has a wee patch of garden and it's really quiet.
But we do live with the ever-present fear that the landlord can just turnaround and declare he's selling the place. Which leaves us in a precarious spot!

I really don't mind renting - in a lot of ways it's better. If something goes wrong with the house or fixtures and fittings I can ask to have it fixed without any hassle and usually at no extra cost to myself. I love that security aspect of it.
Sadly, that's the only security we have :(

All I want and all I have ever wanted is a home. A settled home.

YANBU - we're in the same boat wrt being able to save a decent deposit in order to buy where we live..... just did a quick search on rightmove and there were less than 10 properties available for under £200,00 - the cheapest being £189,950 and 2 others being part-buy schemes in a nearby village which you have to have ties to (we don't) in order to qualify......the others are all crappy, run down options. Luckily our landlord inherited this house so isn't a typical btl'er and specifically wanted a family to move in long term.

YANBU. Everyone I know that owns a decent house managed to get on the ladder before prices rocketed. We live in an area where prices are not that bad, and all we could afford when we bought was an ex-council flat in a dubious part of town (although we were cautious with our mortgage, no huge multiplier for us). I have a reasonably well paying job and I don't see how we will ever be able to afford a house with a garden. When my parents were my age, in a similar financial situation, they bought a decent three-bed house which they still live in. There's no way we will ever be able to afford a similar place.

The expectation of owning a house is a fairly modern phenomenon, only the very wealthy owned homes until the 1930's. During the Depression and the South Sea Bubble of the 1930s interest rates were rubbish and shares were worthless so no-one wanted to save with an instiution. Lots of people were out of work so a programme was started where the buiding companies and the building societies got to gether and decided it would be in their best interests to employ lots of people to build houses (so the builders made money) and give mortgages (so the BS made money). Govt was happy as unemployment went down and people were happy because they had work and stability of housing of a decent quality (buiding regs brought in in the late 30s.

From 1969 to 1988 you got tax relief at source on the interest on your mortgage. This was the govts way of encouraging home ownership. Those already on the scheme finally had it taken away by Grdon Brown in early 2ooo. The abolition of MIRAS caused a huge rush to buy houses in 1988 and an artificial rise in house prices causing negative equity and repossessions when the prices reverted during the 1990s.

This caused house prices to slump and mortgage companies to lend 100 or 110% mortgages assuming that house prices had bottomed out and they would always get their money back if people defaulted. This coupled with investment in the sub prime market in America (in a nutshell the US govt insisted that the Govt sponsored mortgage companies provide mortgages to low and middle income families, to secure the funds for this the companies joined forces with UK and other banks who aggressively marketed mortgages to people without prime credit ratings (sub prime mortgages) and when they defaulted the house of cards began to topple), so huge losses in the US, overlending in the UK caused our banks and building socities to collapse and/or become very restrictive in their new lending.

The position of high prices and restricted avaialability of mortgages is the same now as it was in the late 80s and early 90s. Agne is right when she says the only way to get a mortgage then (I got my fist mortgage in April 1989) was to live with parent or in a shitty bedsit/shared house for a few years, save like buggery for a deposit hardly go out, have no kids, holidays or cars until you got your deposit for your first shed. You would spent the next few years sitting on orange boxes (DH1 had a second hand motorbike that he sold to buy us a bed). Once you had got over the first two years of living on toast for the last few days of the month and you had furniture then you could think about affording kids.

This is a potted history of the housing market to show that many assumptions about a long history of home ownership in the UK, and our parents had it so good and we have it so bad are misplaced. There is nothing wrong with wanting the security of having your own home, and I agree the rental market is dangerously unstable, but it is a fact that with the excetion of the late 1990s (and look where that got us) every generation had to choose between saving for a house and spending on children/cars/holidays and/or furniture.

YANBU. Once upon a time there were things called Council houses which meant that, although you didn't own them, people who couldn't afford to buy had a home where they would never be kicked out unless they did something really stupid and which they could treat like their own home. When they no longer needed a family sized house and didn't want to look after more space than they needed they could move to somewhere smaller and another family had a home. Then along came Margaret Thatcher.......

We need to ban the use of the pernicious term "property ladder" from discussions like these.

You don't need to get on a ladder. You need a home.

You don't need a "starter home" that you then sell for a "family home", moving constantly, always to a bigger and more expensive property.

The whole idea of the property ladder, where houses are investments rather than homes is the cultural blindness that got us into a situation where a generation of young people are not going to be able to provide stable homes for their children.

When the whole system relies on people at the bottom (greater fools) paying more for what you bought than you did, it is a pyramid. That's what the property ladder signifies - a Ponzi scheme where the last people in get fucked.

Young people should have it within their reach to live independently from their parents in a home they can call their own (even if it is rented) and can live in long-term. It is a nonsense to suggest that people should have to choose between children and a home to bring them up in.

If you can save £700 a month by living frugally you are a lot better off than most people in this country.

There are plenty of working families who are living frugrally and still have nothing to save at the end of the month.

They deserve to be able to put a stable roof over their children's heads. That means proper rights for tenants.

Completely agree with spidookly

If long term, reasonably protected tenancies were available, then there would not be such a perceived need to buy.

We need long term tenancies. Surely it would benefit landlords as well, as they'd get long term reliable income (and wouldn't have to keep paying fees to letting agents either). I can't understand why the position here is so different to other European countries.

Well sure, there are always people who think they can't afford things because they spend all their money on other luxuries.

But that doesn't mean that "it can be done" if it requires people to save a lot of money. Not everyone has access to that money. For every person like your sister there are many more who say they can't afford to buy because they can't afford to buy and won't ever be able to afford to buy.

As take says it's always been hard and many many more people can afford to buy now than was the case historically in the UK when renting for life was for most people all they would ever have. People think there was some golden age when it was easy but there wasn't. In the 1901 census my grandfather lived in a small house with 21 young men - can you imagine that - how crammed together they must have been. He had to wait until he was well over 40 even to marry as it is expensive to have a family and was then.

When we bought it was expensive and all the children's clothes were from charity shops not that they minded and childcare (no child credits or childcare help in those days) took up 50% of our net joint wages of two of us.

But the past is the past. So people looking now - I have been looking a bit in relation to my daughter who might if she gets a job etc buy. It's not impossile and it's getting marginally better. There's an article in today's Times - Mind the affordability gap.

So the poster here "just" needs £27k and says her small business could never generate that as spare income. SO the question is assumine income cannot increase and she cannot take on a second job or start a second business, how can she generate £27k?

If you have a 10% deposit The Times says there's a Britannia fixed rate just under 6% with £1k fee. It says Barratt has a scheme where parents can borrow £50k for deposits for their children. Assetz hs a to pu shceme it says offering 15% top up loans at 5.5% fix for 3 - 5 years soon out.

it also says rents are up 4% this year and coudl go up to 8% overall this year too.

I'm not saying it's easy now nor that it has been in the past but worth thinking laterally and I certainly haven't researched it much - just saved a few articles as they come out in case my daughter buys later this year.

My parents live in a detached 3 bed house (which is probably double the size of modern 3 beds) which they bought age 25 and 23 respectively with no help from their parents (parents grew up in living in council houses) on 2.5 times my dad's below average salary. They freely admit that it is much harder now. Numerous comparisons of house prices to earnings back this up. Nobody is saying it used to be easy to buy a house but it did used to be easier.

For the non-believers

House prices rose by 91% but the average salary increased by 40%

www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2011/jan/31/house-prices-doubled-decade

Excepy now people have two incomes more often rather than one and interest rates are less than the 8 or even 12% some of us used to pay and we had basic rate tax at 33% in my time too.

Anyway the past doesn't matter. It is what can be done for now and my suggestions about the top up loans and various schemes being issued are worth looking into if someone needs to raise £27k or whatever the sum might be.