To feel a rental failure

[Welshie1234]

Basically we rent and always have done mainly because by the time we had saved a deposit we were priced out of the market and due to house price inflation we can't keep up with our savings. I am now 40 and my dh is older and we have 2 kids. We live in an expensive city but have good jobs, friends, a life and the dcs are settled in school and have friends.
I want to own my own house I really do - I hate the insecurity of renting and have worked hard to try and make it happen but we just can't afford a deposit as the goal posts keep changing.
I get constant family pressure- we are viewed as the poor relations, as idiots for not buying sooner. We get comments about how ridiculous it is we pay high rent. A friend said to me that they couldnt imagine being in our 'situation'. I get told 'renting is dead money' regularly. My mother rang me yesterday (final straw) to tell me about my cousin's new house with big garden but the underlying theme is always everyone else can buy so what is wrong with you!

AIBU to feel like some kind of social failure?

I am so fed up of it all and dread (avoid) family occasions as I don't have the answers to our supposed 'situation'.

Ignore them. Buying in the UK is hugely expensive due to deposit requirements. If my husband and I had stayed in the UK I don't think we could've afforded to buy anywhere until one of us had an inheritance or something and we had good jobs and weren't even looking to buy in London.

Vastly increase the amount of social housing, charge a market rent but with the security of tenure social housing offers. Have enough of it to completely eliminate waiting lists so that everybody who wants to rent one, can.

why not just force tenure on private landlords? That would help a lot.

It is a hard situation in respect of Landlord requirements. However, I do believe that landlords should maybe have tier system in respect of the security of tenure they can offer.

?
Regulations for the private rental sector would obviously help the housing crisis, if rents were affordable many families would have much less stressful lives.

I won't be holding my breath though :( ?

The next time your mum opens her mouth, retaliate by going on and on about all your friends (invented if necessary) who only managed to buy with the help of their parents, and how very generous said parents were to help their children out with a deposit, and how sad it is that not all parents will do that in such a difficult market.

I bet that's the last you'll hear on the subject .

Generous parents enabling offspring to buy vastly overpriced properties are just fueling the bubble and contributing to the problem

I'm a renter too! We have lived in our three bed council house for thirteen years, having been moved from a one bed council flat when our son was five months old. If we had bought our flat, we would've been stuck there as we wouldn't have been able to afford to buy a bigger house. My hubby works in retail and has been made redundant four times over the last twenty years so had we had a mortgage we would have struggled to pay it. We may not own our house but it is our home and so we treat it as such - it amazes me when people automatically think that a council house is going to be a tip! We live in a lovely close with big gardens front and back, plenty of parking and lots of green spaces - I have a wood at the back of my garden and we are not overlooked at all - but if we were to buy it would have to be somewhere very different and much more built up. In the last eight years we have had a new central heating system and boiler, new roof and new doors and windows....all paid for by the council. My elderly neighbour, who owns her house, has always said that she regrets buying now as it is so expensive to maintain. She also has to have carers, which she pays for as she is a home owner, and should she need to go into care will have to sell her house to pay for it, so really can't see any advantage to scrimping to pay a mortgage for the last twenty years.
I also get the whole "why aren't you buying your house/you're wasting your money blah blah blah" spiel from people - and my boss of 26 years was horrified when I mentioned recently that I was a council tenant (he did know but had forgotten)! I do sometimes think maybe we should buy our house.....but then I come to my senses and think "Feck that!"

Some people are just incredibly rude and have no understanding of the reality of most people's lives.

In any case, some people will always look down on others for whatever reason. I have been fortunate to be able to buy a house, but because I am in London it's tiny, needs work done and has few mod cons - not anyone's idea of a dream home, but all I could get as a lone parent and I feel really lucky to have anything at all. But I have lots of wealthy relatives who have made all sorts of snide remarks about it - yes, really.

It's surprisingly hard to find a 100 years of house price graph, seems the market is only keen to publish the up, up, up bits.

Here's some data from Investors Chronicle there's a lot of peaks and troughs there and for all those making a profit someone at sometimes makes a loss.

After my parents bought a house in the late 60's interest rates went up to 15% in the 70's and several cousins got caught in a negative equity trap in the 80's.

YANBU to not buy a property and risk a massive financial liability.

You couldn't buy in another (cheaper) part of the country and rent that out so at least you would be on the housing ladder.

Yeh I used have pressure to buy. I would have done if I could have done (at the time). It's annoying.

I rent. I love it.

Boiler explodes? Not my issue.

Want to move? Off we go.

Interest rates rise? No impact.

Of course, there are downsides, like having to move at short notice and not having "security", but having watched my parents utter nightmare - they re-mortgaged several times in the 80s when everyone was doing it, ended up with crippling repayments, negative equity and having it re-possessed as they reached their 60s - I don't equate home ownership with security.

Interest rates rise? No impact

that may be the case in your personal situation but interest rate rises will have an impact on the rental market, large numbers of BTL LL's would be stuffed if rates went up and would need to evict tenants and sell up

I have rented for a long-time. I did buy a couple of times, but it did not work out (divorce, moving).

I have been fortunate that we have managed to rent some lovely houses on long-term leases. We have never been served notice (so far!).

For me, there is a thought of "we must buy at somepoint for financial security."

There are other things such as being at the whim of the landlord if they only want to do "good enough" repairs.

That said, it does give us flexibility and that we are open to work most places.

I do feel stupid sometimes for not buying in the late 90's though.

What do renters do when they retire? Will pension cover rent?

Some friends I know who are in rented for the long-term, plan to save and buy somewhere far smaller in a cheaper area.

YABU. I rent - out of choice. I could afford a deposit and mortgage on a small house but have decided not to.

Reasons are: I can rent a far nicer place than I could afford to buy, if anything goes wrong with the boiler, damp etc etc, it's not my problem (we just had a whole new bathroom which I didn't pay a penny for, and when I came home to find the ceiling had come down last week it was one phone call and sorted out the next day whilst I was at work.

I don't want to buy a crap house in a crap area and be stuck not being able to sell it or in negative equity. Rental to me means freedom and also (relative) stability. Yes, my landlord might sell but given that the agency has owned my flat since 1950 it's unlikely.

privately rented and privately owned housing are not separate self contained spheres...they feed into each other

Friend of mine who bought a pretty cottage in a village within commuting distance of London in the 1980s when houses were still affordable, once said to me when I expressed envy: "Yes but people forget - the house isn't your's and doesn't belong to you til the day you pay the last mortgage payment!" And she was right. Home 'owners' no more own their homes than renters, until the mortgage is done.

I missed the boat. Unemployed in the early-mid 80s, when you could still buy a house for £10,000. By the time I got a job (teacher) my wages were so low I was unmortgageable (as our oldest baby had a disability and husband had to give up job to look after him so I could work). By some miracle we did eventually "get on the ladder" (my vile MIL's favourite phrase and rod to beat us with - although she came from a family where no-one had owned their own home til the 1950s - which come to think of it prolly explains the snobbery). But then we split up and as I was pregnant, and moved across the country - forced to sell my house and was not allowed to claim benefits til I had lived off my profit from the house sale... so back to social housing. Now I'm in my early 50s and have missed all the boats. My brief foray into home 'ownership' ended in disaster even though I bought a house for £36,000 that was worth £46,000 the day I bought it - and only 2 years later was worth more than double that.

My brother meanwhile bought a house for under £10,000 in 1980 which is now worth... well, a lot more than that. And he paid the mortgage off years ago. And he bought a second house for his in-laws who had a tied cottage they were thrown out of when the considerate farmer employing them kicked them out when they retired. So my brother owns two mortgage-free houses. All I ever wanted was to own a 2 bed Victorian terrace - now I have nothing. But my own fault.

The hardest one to take was when my niece, who is 25, got married and bought what would have been my dream cottage. She said to me when she was engaged she was going to buy a country cottage and I thought "Dream on!" - but she married a bloke who had just inherited enough to buy a house cash from an inheritance.

My 'inheritance' will be split with a vast number of step relatives as my dad remarried. He is dead but my stepmother still alive and it is now even likely my stepsisters will have to sell her home to put her in a care home as she has dementia. So sod all inheritance. My husband doesn't even know if his dad has made a will and if he has, whether he is in it (as they always saw hhis sister as The Poor Relation and one to leave everything to - despite the fact she did buy her house in the 1980s, too...)

Friend of mine also in her 20s, bought a beautiful house in a stunning location a few months back. Again, inheritances.

I have a council house in a lovely place, with a low rent but no prospect of ever buying it and my son - who could afford to buy it for us - isn't allowed to.

One mate of mine went bankrupt and lost her home. I think that must be unbearable. But, like my experience, seeing her go through that made me realise that even people who are very complacent and patronising about being successful and home owners, can lose everything in the blink of an eye. My friend's business went to the wall for the sake of a couple of thousand quid a client was slow in paying - which led to cash flow problems and... she lost everything. I struggled to cope with my son's disability, our marriage floundered, and I lost everything. A year before if you'd have asked either of us what we thought of renting - we'd have been dismissive.

It is hard watching people half my age do the one thing I'd love to do, that I will never now be able to achieve. So OP another one who feels your pain.

Home owners do forget the home is actually the bank's, if they have a mortgage and that shit happens to de-rail the best of us.

We have only just bought in London, in our mid 30s and a complete wreck at that. All of our friends, mostly on very good wages, bought 5-6 years ago and laughed at us for not doing so. It didn't make economic sense for us until now and I simply had no interest in taking a hefty mortgage for a shitty little flat. Ignore, ignore, ignore the smug people. Home ownership only makes sense for some, and not owning a home is the right choice for many.

Have you looked into affordable housing options? We started off doing part-buy, part-let which worked out brilliantly as it meant we were paying a fairly low mortgage to start with but then as we started to earn more and save more we were able to buy more shares in the property. It gives you the security that you won't get renting in the private sector. Yes, as previous posters have said, renting gives you flexibility but, dependant on your circumstances of course, when you have two DCs who are already in school you don't need this - you want the security of knowing you won't have to leave the property at the request of your landlord/landlady at short notice. The government needs to do something about regulating and changing the types of rental agreements I think for this reason alone, especially as renting is on the rise.

Re your feelings on the matter - if I were you I would make my feelings clear to everyone who ventures to comment on your 'situation' to ensure they stopped harping on about it!

LaQueen, 'home' is what matters, eh? My kids are only just getting to the age they're aware they live in a council house. Or even know what one is. And they feel no stigma because we're just a stand of 4 houses between two villages, so it's not an estate or owt. That said I have lived in a council house that was a Victorian terrace and a system built 1950s one on an estate and that was lovely - great neighbours, everyone friendly, well-kept gardens, neat little allotments behind one house and the other on the edge of a country park - places I could never have afforded to buy a home.

I grew up quite middle class and privileged, even - in a very large house with an acre of land, etc. But my mum's sister lived at the other end of the village in a council house. And I was never aware there was any stigma or difference til I was a teenager and knew what they now call 'social housing' was. And even then - it carried no stigma. I loved my aunty's house. It was cleaner and tidier than our's, and very homely! She had a spectacular garden. There was never any sense of the people on the council estate not having their own 'home' - whereas I think now we use that insidious phrase 'social housing', we imply it is just a place for indigents to doss - not their home. I never thought of my aunty's house as any less her home because the rent man came round on Fridays!

Complacency can be challenged at the drop of a hat. Talking about that stigma of 'social housing'. I have lived in this council house 13 years and it is my favourite house I ever lived in. Then council moved in new neighbours who have been a nightmare and all our real joy in our home has gone. When I complained to the council's 'community officer' about who they'd moved in and why had they handed the keys to a beautiful 3 bedroom house to threatening, violent addicts/tossers he said:
"What do you expect? It's social housing. We give it to whoever comes to the top of the list."

Things out of your control can happen very quickly, like getting the neighbours from hell, that ruin your sense of 'home'. I often find a bit of comfort for my lack of home ownership in the thought that the chavs next door would be even more upsetting if I owned this house, now...

All my mates, growing up, came from the council estate - just by default. All those kids grew up in those houses, and lived there til they left home leaving their parents rattling around in the 3 bed houses but no-one ever questioned it or got indignant and wanted to turf the oldies out of their homes. I think we have become a callous society that has lost its sense of 'home'. The Bedroom Tax seems to be working for councils as they buy into this concept of 'social housing' and using council housing only for addicts and society's more issue-laden. When we used to respect all housing as people's homes.

Right - you said you have good jobs so that means that there is some element of choice in your decision making. Which means that either you have made an implicit choice that you didn't realise and isn't what you want (in which case - change it!) or - more likely - they are the correct decisions for you. In which case - be proud of them.

What I mean is:-

You live in an expensive city? Why? Close to relatives? So you have decided that the kids having a close relationship with their (eg) grandparents is more important than home ownership. Seems a reasonable decision althoughg some would decide the other way. Be open about it. (Works particularly well when it is mother you are talking to as you can then mutter about the beauty and cheapness of north Scotland and she'll never mention it again!)

Or are you there because of jobs? Is there more job choice where you are? As that is a form of security which arguably out ways the security of homeownership.

Or is it that you are in an expensive area because of schools? So you have decided to prioritise the children's education?

Could you commute (or commute longer) to your jobs and live somewhere cheaper? But you prefer to prioritise time with family.

Could you afford to buy a total wreck and spend every weekend for the next decade doing it up? But would you prefer to spend your weekends taking the kids to rugby?

Could you afford a smaller house but are prioritising giving the children space / privacy?

Do you see what I mean?