To get annoyed that people renting get more help than people buying?

[lesley33]

Basically I think it is unfair that people made unemployed will usually get most if not all of their rent paid whilst people with a mortgage usually get nothing for 9 months.

I don't think people should get help paying the capital part of their mortgage, but they should imo get help earlier to pay the interest and thus keep their house until they get another job.

I know in theory people can get help with interest payments 13 weeks after they start receiving certain income based benefits. However in practice most people who have been working are entitled to contributory job seekers allowance for 6 months. This makes it unlikely you will qualify for the benefits you need to be receiving to be able to get help with mortgage interest. Even if you have exactly the same income as you would have had if you had been claiming income based benefits.

So in practice, most people get no help until after 9 months of being unemployed. Many people would have had their houses repossessed by then.

I wouldn't mind so much if home owning was confined to the well off. But many people who can't get a council or HA house end up buying on low incomes.

Also removed 4 bed rate; now for a family like ours that si quite pivotal as we don;t want a 4 bed- I was always quite happy to have 2 boys in each room- but SSD are insisting if we get rehoused at any point that at elast ds1 and ds3 need their own rooms for safety 9the ones dx'd with sutism) and as ds4 is being assessed who knows what they will say about him as well... we have a 3 bed now but that has meant that to comply with SSD insistence ds4 is still with us in our bed aged 3.5. He can't go with non-ASD ds2 as that room has bunks and he kept trying to throw himself off.

ATM ds3 sleeps downstairs, only way he is safe with ds1 anyway if he is near us, in the former dining area.

Peachy you may well still qualify as I asked worse case scenario one the 3 older dc gone and just me and Ds 3 we would get the extra room as he or I may need night tine care in the future.

Totem

Yes but they are even tighter in future does not matter if below LHA your Hb will still be cut which is going to affect a lot if elderly people in bigger houses. Idea is that they will then want to downsize

We'll get extra room but have to find the extra: personally I think it's a valid use fo teh DLA but once PIP comes in when they turn 16 it's unlikely ATOS will award it as he does not tick right boxes inw hcih case I will ahve to sell him on ebay or something I guess

sorry but piss off plupervert with your shit about 'generous tax subsidies' and 'monetary policy'. I did not say renters were better off, just that when it comes to the archaic benefits system, yet again, some people will milk the HB system and cock a snook at those of us who make the effort to get out of it, yet when we need a little bit of help we are denied it. Take that how you like, it's the reality.

Which then sounds like people renting just didn't make the effort

Ta then. Was that the meaning of take it how you like? Ho hum.

No, not at all, I said some people will milk the system HB wise, which is true of all benefits. i just get fed up when people make assumptions that we must be somehow ok cos we're buying our house! We're still paying interest only and will be for a while, because we were given no help whatsover when I was unemployed. As I said, a three month hiatus, payable back, would have made a huge difference.

Followed by a coment about people taking what they want from that- which on MN tends to be roughly equivalent to 'effort to get ourt of it' stinks of we did why didnl;t youI dont; want to be offensive but...'

I am not against your wish for help- quite the reverse, I suggest a version upthread that would allow people to either pay abck or sacrifice a % share; and Indeed I know how ahrd it can be, we actually lost our house- but the old 'effort bit always leads to we did why didn't you... which is a silly argument in such a diverse community and simply one I can;t be arsed to have twice in 2 days albeit on different threads

Fair enough. I know what I meant, guess it just came out wrong. Too late to go into it now

"sorry but piss off plupervert with your shit about 'generous tax subsidies' and 'monetary policy'. I did not say renters were better off, just that when it comes to the archaic benefits system, yet again, some people will milk the HB system and cock a snook at those of us who make the effort to get out of it, yet when we need a little bit of help we are denied it. Take that how you like, it's the reality."

There are subsidies - declared or not - for property purchases, and monetary policy screws savers (and both of those factors have helped inflate property prices and rental prices). Therefore it's disingenuous to compare the situations of renters and buyers!

As for "milking the HB system",

• the "HB system" wouldn't take in so many people if renting had not been thrown more and more into the private sector, placing more and more people in a "market" which is skewed (see next point);
• property owners - small-scale and large-scale landlords have been benefiting from HB, too, and that has supported rent levels, in some places above what the market would bear.

I am sorry you suffered that financial shock, however, and really well done to you for getting out of it. I hope you don't take that sarcastically; that is impressive. However, I think your anger may be misdirected.

Posters seem to assume that those buying have benefitted from rising prices. When I bought it was cheaper to buy a terraced house than it was to rent the grotty bedsit we were living in. We paid more in rent than our mortgage payments. We bought in 1993 for £28,500. We sold at a loss of £26,500 in 2000 - more than estate agents said we would get for it. This is fine, I am not complaining.

We bought a larger house and the value of our house has increased. But this isn't a good thing. It means it is harder for others to buy. But if we sold the house, we could only buy somewhere similar at inflated prices.

Inflated property prices only benefit buy to let people or those downsizing.

plupervert I probably was overly angry. It's something that infuriates me. Having woked with people who really do 'milk the system' I sometimes can't see the wood for the trees, so maybe should stay off threads like this.

Thanks, norriscoleforpm. I did actually pen an angry reply myself, but then I saw your next posts, and realised that would have been very mean, when you have gone through a difficult situation. For what it's worth, I think it's very shocking and sad that people have felt they had to stretch themselves so much, in order to buy property.

Evidently, some have been doing it in order to gain stability, some for reasons of needing expensive, health-related adaptations, some to make use of a windfall, etc. Yet equally, some did it to gain a windfall, either calculating that their capital would increase more than if it stayed in cash or other investments, or calculating that they could benefit from public funds (HB) to give them a great rental return which pure "market" forces wouldn't really justify.

The point I want to make is that a system which can shaft renters can also shaft buyers; there's no basic incompatibility between our victimhoods (hope that's not too dramatic a way of putting it!). There are, however, some who benefit from the perverse incentives of "the system".

I agree, as long as mortgage cover was capped at normal HB rates. I ended up with my flat repossessed and having to rent - for which I get HB. My flat, meanwhile, has been bought by a landlord and is being rented out. This mechanism, in effect, transfers ownership from poorer to richer with no benefit to the national coffers.