To wonder how the next generation will afford a house?

[Housepricewoes]

DH and I want to move to what will hopefully be our family home, in 2 years. Work commitments means we can't do it sooner but I'm stressing about how much house prices might rise in that time.

That got me thinking about how today's children will ever be able to buy a home.

I know it's a very British thing to aspire to home ownership but rightly or wrongly it is the norm.

Many of my friends and extended family have only been able to get on the property ladder with a significant hand out from the bank of mum and dad, but unless their circumstances drastically change, they are not going to be in a position to do the same for their children.

What do you think will happen about houses with the next generation?

Thanks mizu, I'm sure you'll get there. If you'd have told me this time last year that we would be buying our own house I'd never have believed it. House prices where we are have gone through the roof, even worse since this help to buy. I really thought it wouldn't ever happen for us. I think our landlord serving us notice on our rental was the best thing that could have happened now looking back, although it was bloody stressful at the time. I do worry about the mortgage and rate rises, but we've fixed for 5 years and rentals here are ridiculously priced. Hopefully we'll have higher earning potential in the next 5 years which would cover us for rate rises when our fix finishes. I worry endlessly about it, but the alternative is pay the same in rent and run the risk of being served notice again and with 3 dc that is not easy. All the best for you too. I don't love george by the way [yuk]

Oh dear, for some reason only the first page came up so i have posted the above with no idea what the other 24 pages may contain I am sure i have just made an utter baffoon of myself - so apologies, i'm sure the thread has moved on substantially

Can I be nosey & ask how you got your deposit etc together ilovegeorge ?

Ah yes, sorry, what a terrible mistake

I wrote love as well ! Sorry iHATEgeorge!

Looks like we have inadvertently given you a name change ihategeorge

namechange, we started saving in about 2004, when I got pregnant with dc1. I know this will sound really boring, but we have just had to be really tight with money. We started off saving a couple of £100 a month for a while. I mean we didn't really have a life at all. When we had dc2, we were very lucky to find a 3 bed house to rent way below market value from a private landlord (our most recent rental in fact). Don't get me wrong, it's a tiny 3 bed, in need of some work, awful carpets, etc, but the rent was so good for the area that we have been able to save 3 or 400 a month from living here. We just put aside what we would have paid if our rent would have been higher. We also still live like church mice. We NEVER go out, I mean seriously. Other people stop asking us, as I always say I can't afford it. We buy all our clothes second hand and very cheap sale stuff and hand me downs. We make a menu every week and stick to it religiously. I have been bloody bored of some of our meals. We just have one knackered old car, but that's cost us a lot of money as it's unreliable now. I don't know really, namechange, I guess we've been lucky with our rent and we really don't spend on non essentials. Not very exciting I know, but it's what we've had to do. No help from family and it's taken years. I could have given up many times and we have come close to divorce many times. We managed to save 30k to put down just over a 10% deposit. I really hope it's worth it and we don't end up regretting it. I'm just so tired of private renting and living in small cramped houses in need of repair and feeling ashamed to have friends round.

Thank you iHATEgeorge.

It sounds like you've had a really hard time doing it. i would desperately miss having a life/fun for that long... Well done though!

Thanks namechange, it's been hard and thoroughly depressing at times. The even more depressing thing is that we'll continue to have to live like this to pay the mortgage now! I so hope it's worth it

Thanks Precious, I'll let you know about the house warmer, probably when I've unpacked in about a years time

Some of London's outer suburbs are a lot less expensive than the inner areas that used to be run down- Sutton, Feltham, Bedfont, parts of Enfield. Now, I left London over a decade ago, but those are all areas that used to be OK, if nothing flash.

Yes, I agree about outer suburbs. My daughters (in their 20s) would have paid a lot less if buying out here. (Our first house bought 30 years ago sells for about £275k these days - small terrace, 3 beds, outer London, garden, freehold) You have to endure a commute in on the tube but people always have, even senior people, very senior at my work then commuted in from all over as inner London has always been prohibitive for most.

Or even th erest of the country.
£100K will buy a nice two bed property with a garden in a nice area in Scotland-many young couples can easily afford this.

There is life outside London.

Yes but are there enough interesting and fulfilling jobs?

Surprisingly we also have cities in scotland.

Ihategeorge - that is the only way to save.

We too live in a cheap (compared to other similar houses in the area) house as it has carpets that are threadbare and so much needs doing here I would need an hour to write it all down.

However it enables us to save about £500 a month. We argue frequently about money as I have become obsessed with saving and DH has a more relaxed attitude!

Before we bought our house 25 years ago, we lived in a damp bedsit and spent no money on anything not essential, in order to save up to buy a house.

It is harder to get jobs outside of London, but many people move out of London as I did, because of housing coss. Forget renting a house, when I lived there me and my partner had to rent a room in a shared house.

The poster who mentioned that her 25 yo son can't afford a deposit: he is 25! Most people only have enough in their early 30s earliest (for a one bed!)...and that has been the case for decades and decades, not just now. It's not unusual or a sign of the awful state of things.

On the challenge issued upthread to name two places in London that are still cheap; I can easily name two places in London that are still affordable (Woolwich and Tottenham). The places someone listed earlier as out of reach are pretty central still. I still think there is a feeling among Londoners that you 'have' to live no further than zone 3 or you are slumming it. Yes, travel costs are higher further out but the areas are cheaper. We live in zone 6. DH cycles in. I get the train and pay 55 quid a week. Not cheap, no, but is more than offset by the lower cost to buy out here.

Prices in London outstripping the rest of the UK is part of a global phenomenon. It's happening in other countries too - prices in the big cities are running away from outside them. I am kicking myself for not buying in Auckland, NZ back in the early 00s. Compared to incomes in NZ and Aus, house prices in the bigger centers: Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and so on are even worse than London.

don't know what's driving this phenomenon. It would be interesting to know if global growth is being concentrated in these places. I understand that outside London, there is pretty much no economic recovery in the UK. I have heard that foreign investors see property in London as a safe investment. This is also the case in Auckland: property is increasingly being bought up by overseas investors.

A couple of years ago I tried to persuade DW to return to the UK. I got nowhere, but in the meantime found out some quite interesting stuff about the property market. London was out of the question, but if I'd landed a job equivalent to the one I have here, we'd have been quite able to afford a pretty decent place in one of the bigger cities outside London. There seemed to be a lot of really reasonable places in Brum, which surprised me as it gets such a very bad rep.