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?

But mosdt peiople owning homes over 40 year periods have felt emotional stability and over that type of person tend financially to benefit from it.

Deposits indeed have been less at various times but the articles I've read have suggested deposit lending products are available to some and if you are prepared to take the hit on a higher rate of interset you can still borrow 90%. If you buy before you have children as presumably my older 3 children will then that probably helps too in terms of assessment of affordability.

Most people have never been able to buy and many don't want to but those who do who aren't in minimum wage jobs often can find a way.

This all makes a case for a)wanting to get married at quite a young age, when to be frank, mother nature will have her way b)saving up for first modest home and getting married. b)i - Not over extending oneself on the wedding front. c) relatives being only too pleased to help young couples on their way.

Well yes. Teghre are lot of styupid materialistic young girls around taken in by advertising who think weddings have to cost £20k - more fool them - they would rather have a big fat materialistc wedding than a deposit on a house.

I really don't know if our parents generation did have it easier. Both of my parents lived at home and saved up until they got married and they couldn't afford a car when they were first married even though they were both teachers. Their first house was tiny and had no central heating. They had no washing machine and my mother washed cloth nappies by hand. They didn't have a foreign holiday until I was 13 and the concept of wandering about Europe on a 'gap year' seems greedy and selfish to them.

Yet they would consider themselves to have been fairly well off compared to other people.

AnnPann - I feel your pain, my last move (of many) was actually on my due date of DD who is now 7 months. I was due on the Monday and gave birth on the Saturday night before. So had a whole day to recover before moving day! That was fun...Good luck with your move and your baby!

And as someone else (sorry can't remember name) said, renting is like living in a show home. Every time another mystery mark appears in the carpet or something accidently breaks I see my deposit shrinking - we are careful and keep the place clean and tidy but it's very rare to get the whole deposit returned as tenants always seem to get penalised for reasonable wear and tear, especially if renting through an agency.

Xenia ime there's available and there's available :-)

I know of quite a few people recently who have had mortgages agreed in principle, only to have the lender turn round and say a month later that it's not possible any more.

YANBU but there are alternatives if you can be creative.
Lots of people are trying to move and struggling to get the start of the chain secure- these people are the renters.
In Sheffield there are a few ideas around about gifted deposits or similar that are built up along the chain to get the elusive FTB to get things rolling. It involves careful negotiation with the chain, but it has worked and both solicitors and mortgage companies are happy with it if handled effectively.
So don't be downhearted- just negotiate for your deposit!!!

I'm not really sure what my opinion is on this. Myself and DP are 23 and 25 respectively and are renting. I've always thought I wanted to buy a house so it was my home, but DP has never been to bothered.

Come September I will hopefully be in a job with a starting wage of approximately £21k and DP will be looking for a job that pays either around the same as now (approx £13k pa)or more.

Right now I am aware that we are paying relatively little in rent considering what we have (a large three bed with a garden) but that is because of the area we are in. I am researching areas with low house and rent prices and applying for jobs in those areas, because I don't want to have to pay ridiculous amounts. Saying that though, we are lucky to have complete flexibility in choosing where to live, I know for the OP this probably isn't the case.

I'm not sure I completely understand why the house prices have gone up, but I am hoping (however naively) that if they can go up then they can go down again.

In the mean time we are goign to keep living as frugally as possible to try and save money, whether for a deposit or just to feel more secure. I don't see myself waiting until I can afford to buy a house and do it up before I have children though.

Can I just say as a landlord I love tenants who want to stay put. That is my ideal. We've had one set of tenants now for 4 yrs and never put their rent up because we want to keep hold of them. Much better for us to have reliable rental income than to risk having void periods. Another set of tenants moved in last year and made it clear they wanted to stay long term. I was happy to reassure them that we had no intention of selling up and making them move (although of course you can never say never). Oh, and they have a dog.

I do feel for people living with that lack of security, it must be horribly unsettling. We were very lucky to have bought our first house when we did.

OP while you may never be able to afford to buy a house maybe it is worth keeping your eyes open at all times for a more long term rental house. You might have to take a hit to your finances to move when one comes up if it's not at the end of your current tenancy, but surely it would be worth it for the extra security? Good luck.

YANBU. OP I completely understand and sympathise with you, it's a horrible situation to be in with your children.

I seem to have the opposite problem to everyone else here. I have a great big deposit but cannot get a mortgage to top it up. Without a mortgage I cannot afford to buy a house. My income is too low to afford rent so if I were to rent it would need to come out of my deposit money. So even if things changed and I could get a mortgage by that time my deposit would be gone on rent!

It is incredibly unfair that in this day and age and in this country there are people without somewhere to call home. I believe it is a right to have shelter, and for that shelter to be secure. Must be awful to live knowing that you could be forced to move at any moment and to have to move your kids every year, that's no way to live at all.

tyler, tat may be so. We'll see how it goes if my daughter gets a job and finds a place to buy later this year. The so called "products" available might not materialise in practice to help first time buyers in reality.
kangers, clever idea.

I definitely think it's worth thinking laterally.

YABU (but only because everyone has this dream of owning their own house!)

Hopefully, there will be a cultural shift and more and more people will rent, with better (and more affordable?) homes on the rental market, with long, guaranteed tenancies. Apparently builders have started to 'build to let'.

Personally, I'd prefer to rent - let someone else worry about my central heating going wrong! Everyone says that rent money is dead money... have you seen the amount of money we pay in interest to mortgage companies?!

Also, property legacies don't matter if most people rent.

The Labour government started to draw up plans to make renting a more stable and long term option with better rights for tenants....the Con-Dems have just thrown this out so things aren't going to get a lot better in the short term with regards renting

I would prefer to rent long term as it allows for more flexibility and someone else has to pay for repairs! I am appalled by the lack of regulation in the private rental sector however and have never managed to live in a decent rental with a landlord prepared to do any repairs without a battle.

YANBU op - tis a national disgrace and one which will not be tackled by the present bunch of self serving twats in power.

Well I think houses are going to fall massively over the next few years so you may well be able to buy.

What changes smashingtime? Link?

This was from their Housing Plan stoatsrevenge, but can't find a link to the article I read about the changes recently - maybe Guardian or Indy:

Whether renters or owners, people must feel safe and secure in their home.
We are committed to strengthening the protections for homeowners facing
repossession. Labour will protect secure tenancies and affordable rents for
council and housing association tenants and extend the rights and support for
private renters helping them get a better deal.

Not a Labour flunky by the way - was just pleased when I heard they were dealing with this issue!

I swear that the big "change" came - not so much with Thatcher allowing people to buy their own houses, but with the 90s obsession that property was something to improve and make money on. Everyone ceased to see their house as their home, but started thinking in investment and profit terms.

For the most part, they don't do this on the continent. Prices have remained much more stable. Though no-one wants to live in granny's old house. They rent it out on a long term lease and build a new house in the suburbs. And stay there, unless work dictates they move to a new location.

We certainly have a different culture and the victoria sayings - things like no place olike home and an Englishman's home is his castle. I think we have more of an attachment to ownership than some countries although as said above most people in the UK have never been able to afford to own their own home historically.

There might also be an element, that under Napoleonic laws, you can't disinherit your children......

www.guardian.co.uk/society/davehillblog/2011/feb/16/will-government-affordable-housing-plans-help-london?INTCMP=SRCH

This seems to imply that some rents in London are going to be very high.

Was it a national Housing Plan smashingtime?

Sorry about this - I think things are happening all the time to erode our society, and we know nothing about them!

I agree with Portofino about the 90s obsession to improve. When we bought the house we live and were making it everybody was telling me what to do to 'add value'. But the thing is i wanted to make it for me, to my taste, to live in it, not to the taste of future buyers. In the end of the day if it is not to my taste and if i move every few years for the sake of 'the ladder' then i might aswell rent.

Oh i've seen houses where the owners were so proud of their feature wall they thought they 'll make 20k for that

There were a million "Add value" programmes on. It started quite innocently with House Doctor and then all of a sudden Sarah Beeney popped up and then everyone became a "property developer". I was off sick at the beginning of the week and watched Homes Under The Hammer. There was a 30 yo who owned 100+ properties! I was How?

"There were a million "Add value" programmes on."

The irony was, very few of the people featured did add value.

How many times did you hear the voiceover at the end "Helen and Pete spent 50,000 and sold the property for 100,000 more than they paid for it giving them a profit of 50,000. However, if they had done nothing at all to the property, they could have made a profit of 70,000"

tyler - you are quite right. Probably a coat of magnolia vs blood red did the trick - it is the psychological effect that made the real difference. Houses as "profit" as opposed to somewhere you live.