To ask how you managed to buy a house?

[ditziness]

We pay close to a grand rent a month. It's of our friend's mortgages are cheaper. As a consequence it's very difficult to save. But save we must to tryand get a deposit. So we have to continue to rent

Stuck in a vicious circle.

How the hell did you manage to buy a house?

Any financial, deposit raising, mortgage getting advice welcome

Changebagsandgladrags Love your attitude girl. I think I would have bought the champagne flutes and got my furniture and appliances off freecycle!

Yes we made a fair profit on our 1sr house, but we could only afford it by moving out of London. We then moved even further away for our current home. It has never been easy though & we are now stuck with school fees because the schools here are awful compared with the London borough we came from. However, we still pay much less on mortgage+school fees than we would have paid for a house nearer London & parents still have the hump with us for deserting them.
Conclusion- you can't have it all, you have to prioritise what's important to you!

I'd love to hear some stories about 'creative' brokers - what does that mean?

You might get a creative broker but that will be no use when it comes to actually putting in the full application for a mortgage IME. Agreements in Principle aren't worth the paper they're written on....

My husband & I have been saving for some time for making a sound deposit & after we sum up a reasonable deposit we hired a buying agent so that our house buying process goes smoothly. We inquired about different buying agents, their policies etc to know whether they could help us save some amount in any means. Because apart from the deposits, the stamp duty & legal fees turned up to be a huge amount. Considering all these factors we hired a Propsavvy agents in London as we could see that they can help us save a huge percentage in the form of deposits & stamp duty & also they provided us a mortgage broker(two in one) . And as we wished, everything went smoothly & we could save £27,000 in deposit & legal fees. Now we happily moved to our new home and settled down.

We saved, bought what we could afford and moved up and up.

I honestly can understand why young people find it so hard to get on the housing ladder these days.

Salaries not all that different to years ago, cost of living very high and house prices (and particularly the deposit) waaaay out of reach for many

I am rather old so bought my first house in 1991 (many of peers bought a few years before that and are now mortgage free)

We absolutely shit ourselves at first because very quickly interest rates climbed to 13%, but we were both working FT, earning great money and childfree.

We reap the benefits now but it was very difficult at the beginning...and would have been even more so if we were trying to do it these days as our salaries bear no comparison to back then in the "boom" years.

Luck really.

We were lucky to meet each other very young. We saved and saved and saved and ate beans etc for the first 4 years or so and then bought a house quite a way out of the city that we could afford.

We then continued to pour any extra money we could onto the mortgage - sold that house 10 years later for a house much closer in to work.

Most of our saving was done with two salaries pre-kids, now we are coming out of the baby phase, the 2 salaries are back so hopefully the saving can start again.

Me and dh moved to our respective parents. We didn't go on nights out. We didn't have holidays. We just had one 'treat' a month. Like going to the cinema or a meal or whatever. 18 months later we had a deposit/solicitors fees/moving costs

You know those mortgages that Northern Rock did, that caused all the problems? Ie, 125% of value etc?

I got one of them. It was absolutely fab. I had not one penny of a deposit, and saving would have been pointless as prices were rising faster than my entire pay cheque could have kept up.

So I got the evil mortgage, my wee flat went up in value, and in one year I came out with 17k.

Madness, but that's a property boom for you. Sheer luck, nothing more. DP did similar, and now we live in a nice big flat and will be mortgage free in about 9 years.

I feel so sorry for first time buyers now, its hopeless.

We rent at the moment, the rent is around half our monthly income. We were told a few years ago we needed a 20% deposit (we are self employed so they are not exactly falling over themselves to give is a mortgage!). The advice was incorporate our company and come back when we have two years accounts. we now have two years accounts (just submitted!) and we have 20% deposit BUT i feel like they will still say no tbh. Appointment to talk about it is soon. If they say no now I think we will give up for 5-10 years until things get easier again.
I am sick of giving all out money out for this shitty house - nothing works and the landlord wont fix it. If we dont get the mortgage we re spending the money on moving to a better rented house.

I never had the chance to live with family - they died when we were teenagers DH and I have been renting since we were 17/18.

Husband didn;t spend student loan and put it as deposit on a house in 2002. SO we could move last year as the equity had increased enough to cover even the fall from the crash - and lucky enough to sell ours.

We also saved up a lot. Took ages.

The mortgage company still tried to lend us 400k last year which there was no way we coudl afford without giving up verythign including living on anything but baked beans. Idiots - I thought the financial crisi was supposed to teach them something

I meant we saved for ages for the next house.

I got a full time job at 18 in 2001 instead of going to uni like my mates.

Anyway I saved like heck in a low paid office job and did part time uni courses. Me and ex-fiance bought after four years with a combined £15,000 deposit - most of which he inherited from his gran (all of which he got back when we split).

Then I met DH. DH saved for 10 years then bought his first house outright. He is 18 years older than me though so bought when prices were low.

We both lived with parents whilst saving hard.

Sheer luck!

First house (20+ years ago) - moderate increase in value of a terrace house
Second - bought right at our limit but it sold for quite a lot more
Third - Moved areas so house cheaper. Increased value £150k in 3yrs
Fourth - Stop gap house (lost most of money above on this one)
Fifth - Extended current house so have increased value but spent loads on it.

I don't know how my DC are ever going to be able to afford house though

Same position here as op. but I bought a house at 18, made 100k equity, ex remortgaged it to within an inch of its life he had all of it and then I signed it over to him when we split.
It grates me every single day, I just want MY house :0(

Lived in scuzzy, shared flats whilst working and saving. Then got a loan which I invested in dp's business. Six months later, I got my investment back with profit and used it as deposit on flat. Sorry, not much help for anyone else.

Born in the 1960s, first house was small and in a cheap area of the UK. I've never lived in London.

First house the vendor paid the deposit ...this one was purchased with a large deposit that was my divorce settlement

We bought our first house 18 years ago, the banks were practically throwing money at us to get a bigger and bigger mortgage. Looking back I wish we had stretched ourselves more because we could have afforded a bigger first home and would not have needed to move when I had my second DS.
We only needed £2000 for a disposit and borrowed £35,000!
I feel sorry for people nowadays who are trying to buy, the high cost of renting amazes me.

DP is 10 years older than me, so although I was quite young when we bought our house (27), he wasn't. He had saved up a good deposit (about £20k) over 15 years while living in cheap shared houses, with his mum and in a housing cooperative. I have never had the option of living with my parents since I left home (they're on another continent!), and have always worked in a low-paying sector, and I would never have been able to save enough by myself to buy a house or a flat. We bought in 2006, right before banks stopped lending out such large multiples of your salary, so we were lucky in that sense - our mortgage was 90% and almost 5 times our joint salary. I'm not sure we'd get those terms now.

Right now I'm the only one working as DP is a SAHD and the monthly mortgage payments take up well over half my pay - we got a 5-year fixed-term right before the interest rates plummeted. We'd love to get out of our current mortgage, as we'd save money every month even with the early repayment fees, but because we have only one salary right now we can't find anyone who will take us on. It's a bugger, but we are lucky that we have a house and can pay the mortgage every month and still - more or less - survive.

We bought our first house in 96 & only had to put down £2k deposit, sold up 5 years later and made a decent profit, moved in with pil for 2.5 years while we looked for our next home, had 2 dc by now. Then bought our current house just before house prices went crazy, would never have been able to afford our house in this current climate.

We didn't have any financial help from our parents and did it more or less on our own. I feel for anyone trying to get on the property ladder now, the deposits that are being demanded by banks these days are out of reach for young people just starting out.

We moved to a very cheap area many years ago, got a 95% mortgage and the 5% deposit "paid by seller". We couldn't afford to buy now. Savings? What are savings?