£450,000 for a tiny 2 bed in Brixton

[TheBogQueen]

I left London 10 years.

Holy moly I cannot believe the prices in 'trendy' and 'up and coming Croydon

Croydon???? (Yes I'm watching location)

London has changed so much. I lived in Dalston in the early nineties; it was unbelievably rough, quite a few of our friends were dubious about visiting. We has a very big, affordable flat though, with a big airy eat in kitchen. But yes, we ate out or got excellent takeaway most of the time.

I earned about £18000 in those days. I wonder what I'd need to be earning now for that lifestyle?

Yes banks are actually reducing some of their fixed rate products because although they know increases are on the way, they also know that rises will be slow. Even after the election goverments have to be cautious. Interest rises affect all sorts of things.

Its hard to imagine if you aren't in that position but alot of people have a lot more disposable income than you, and they, might think. There are many cuts people can make before they come close to not being able to pay their mortgage, they can scale down eating out, food bills, cinema trips, holidays, cleaners, gym memberships, sporting activities. However all this comes at a cost and the cost is jobs and a healthy economy.

When we first started ttc (sadly some years ago now and no actual living baby as yet), we looked at moving out of London as I sort of felt that so many of our colleagues couldn't be wrong.

But, basically, if you want a place that's a reasonable commute (an hour door to door is our max), it is more expensive than where we live on the border of zone 1/2, especially when you factor in season ticket costs. Important for us, too, was amount of time spent at home with our as yet hypothetical children - I don't see the point in having a nice five bedroom house if the kids are asleep when you get home and you barely see them during the week.

One of my former colleagues has a very high flying career, as does her husband, and they've gone for a two bedroom flat within 5 mins walk of their offices. It means their kids are sharing a room and they have no outside space but, on the other hand, they aren't spending 10+ hours a week of their lives on trains but with their kids instead.

We can't afford a place that close to our offices but, essentially, that's the same reasoning as us. I think moving out of London and commuting only really works if one of you either has a job that they can do locally (e.g. teacher, doctor, nurse) or is willing to stay at home with the kids. Both of us have chosen a career that we really need to be in London for and neither of us wants to give it up. So, yeah, it's stupidly expensive but we have our reasons for staying put...

Yes, most people can cut much more from budgets than they like to think. If I only drink tap water for example (very cheap not even tea never mind milk or alcohol and it's very good for your health so an investment in staying healthy) and there is nothing to stop anyone who feels short of money doing the same. Don't eat ou t. Don't be a member of a gym - scrub the floors and windows instead. Don't go out shopping every Sat am instead get a Saturday morning job to increase income etc etc.

I really really thought when my daughter bought nearly 2 years ago prices would stay the same in London or drop but didn't mind that as she'll own a property for 60 years and over that mind of timescale it tends to be sensible to have bought early. I was wrong. Prices rose.
My brother sold a London flat a good while back and waited and rented and told us all the property market would crash and it didn't even where they ultimately moved.

So my advice to young professionals who can afford it and with two full time salaries is buy before you breed and as soon as you can as much as you can afford even if you eat bread and jam for a few years, never go out and do not have any holidays. Have your jam tomorrow as it tends to pay off.

Takes me back tinkly My friend lived in a squat on Dalston Lane in 1984. It was a three or maybe four storey house plus basement.

It was rotting and had been used by rough sleepers, drug addicts, drinkers etc as was the rest of the terrace.

They broke in, secured it and systematically repaired it. By doing that, they preserved the house and its neighbours in the terrace from further decay. They also made the street safer - some of them were big people who were peaceable, up to a point. Even the small people helped. What makes a neighbourhood safe is having lots of decent people coming and going.

I didn't like everyone who lived there but they were essentially okay.

Hackney Council left them alone because though the house belonged to them, they couldn't afford to take it back. It was almost derelict. They eventually got the squatters out. I drove past about 10 years ago. It's a family house now and is probably worth just over £1 million.

The rest of the terrace is a mix of houses or buildings broken into flats.

There are loads of local jobs outside London that are not teacher/ doctor/ nurse . Is that honestly what you think people do outside London? Some of us work for profitable private businesses in a wide variety of occupations . I'm always slightly baffled by the can only work in London mantra that some people come out with, I think it just shows lack of imagination.

Although I do agree that commuting into London daily is a less than ideal option. That's why we moved away completely.

dooble - I didn't mean to suggest that those are the only things you can do outside London, just that these are careers where it is relatively easy to move, i.e. you could pick a commuter town that suited you and then, if you were a teacher, job hunt there and probably get a job within a year.

The career that my DH and I have genuinely is not something that we could both do outside London. Of course, we could retrain and do something different but neither of us want to.

Thank you IAmAPaleontologist Seriously considering that area, we have family in Northumberland!!

I grew up in London and loved it (though Brixton was not somewhere I wanted to go to back then) but we can't afford to live in London so moved out, but I'd love to be back there (rose tinted glasses).

What career is it? This statement fascinates me.

I also get sick of the whole London centric nature of the economy tbh most of the housing problems we are talking about could be solved by distributing employment around more evenly. I have no answers to this btw but the country isn't that big and if we managed to have multiple centres to the economy two hundred years ago why do we find it so difficult now?

double - it's a bit identifying so I don't really want to put it out on the internet, I'll send you a message..

Heseltine had a good plan to devolve to the regions all kinds of power so we could return to the Victorian hey day when Manchester was almost as important to London, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle - all those centres for commerce and industry but it does not seem to have been progressed. Mind you everytime I leave London I go to places with infrastructure and roads which looks so need and clean as if London has all the run down dross and we have spent a fortune on the roads in Northumberland so I am not so sure all money is spent in London

I act for businesses all over the country (and indeed the world) - there are lots of good places. I have done work in Aberdeen too which is it's own micro-climate type area for business.

However I hope to die in this house in outer London and live in it for 50 more years. So the value of the house is fairly irrelevant.

The last government did a lot to spread out its business to areas outside London. However the current government then cut loads of jobs which trashed local economies. So people stick to London.

We are taking the big jump and moving out of London/Kent borders up to the Midlands.

We will be mortgage free, DH will work shorter hours, stress levels hopefully reduced as a result.

As for childcare in the suburbs - one of us would drop off in the morning and the other do pick-up. Occasional use of after school club, very rarely grandma would pick up.

Only non jobs , type of communist state jobs, 3 cloakroom attendants on one cloakroom paid a salary but not doing much work, awful type of not proper jobs. We need private sector jobs not fake Labour party created state only jobs.

The houses my mother and my father grew up in cost about £65k today (NE England).

I work for a FTSE 100 company outside London

NHS doctors are not adding to the economy, although I would suggest we need them more than NHS managers and the huge load of pointless local authority jobs we have invented which are not needed. There are some parts of the country where most jobs are for the state - you might as well live in North Korea.