to feel shit about renting at 30?

[ScaredBUTstrong]

Been renting since I was 18, no way of ever saving for a deposit and all money was going in rent.
Husband similar position, I left my career after having our child and got £15000 redundancy however used it to keep me at home for the last few years and have now gone back to work as he starts school this year but we will never be able to save for a mortgage.
Rents are £1000 for a 2 bed here ( Horsham West Sussex ) and they are bloody hard to get, everyone's going after the same houses you get rejected for bad credit which I'm paying off lots of landlords don't want kids etc.
feels like my sons childhood has and will be spent with a whole load of uncertainty and worry.
Feeling like I've let him down.

Tenants like to pretend English lettings and landlords are dreadful but most private rentals in the UK are a much higher standard than they used to be with a lot of competition between landlords and tenants picking and choosing

It doesn't have to be either or, op. You can have a job that allows you to pick up and drop of children. Eg. Teaching assistant, working in a school kitchen, admin at a school, some retail work etc. Once they are all in school, they won't need you to be at home all day. It's good for your children to see you work too, think positive role model.

You make your choices, OP.

As with most of us, those choices will involve compromise along the way. If being a sahp was and is more important than having the deposit for a house then fair enough, it's a perfectly valid choice to make, but most of us don't have the luxury of having our cake and eating it. In our house for instance, we don't rent, but both dp and I work very full-time jobs. However, that's just the choices we made. We were still renting at 30 btw without having had the luxury of being sahp.

Oh dear,I'm so sorry that you find yourself in such an awful position. House prices are so expensive.

Yes, it can be about choice. I've worked without a break for 30 years full time always with a few weeks off for each baby and not surprisingly I earn quite a bit and own a house. That doesn't mean I haven't been lucky too nor that it is easy for everyone even if they work full time and don't really take maternity leaves as plenty of jobs now and always have paid so little there is no chance of buying a home.

All we can do is encourage our teenage girls to make informed choices about what jobs will mean you can own a house and which mean you can't and ensure they know the consequences of giving up full time work (unless they marry richer men who will not run off with someone else).

I ciuld buy in a few years, doubt I will though, money pits. The stock market out performs the property market and when the boiler packs up it isn't my problem

But in the OP's case, she had enough redunancy money fund a reasonable deposit on a house. She chose to use it to stay home instead and be a sahm to her dc. Fair enough, it's perfectly fine to have made that choice and to continue to not work now because she feels her children will benefit more from her being a sahm. Others would have made different choices. Most people can't have it all ways. There comes a point when you decide which factors are the most important to you.

i rent and am in my mid/late 30s, and i find it frustrating that i can't afford to buy (unlike my mates who all had help from parents with deposits etc) but there are other benefits, like not being tied down to a place / area etc, not having the financial burden of a mortgage e.g. if my workload went down (self employed) I would be scuppered!!

there are pros and cons to both situations. also you could just keep saving and saving a bit each month. You also have the option of keep looking for cheaper rental places so you can save a bit more.

i would do the part rent part buy thing if I could (maybe one day). but right now am able to save a bit, have a flexible part time career, and no tie down of a mortgage which is quite freeing in some ways.

All I can say OP is that home ownership caused me to make some shit decisions, staying with a man too long because I didn't want to loose the house, stuck in an area I didn't like because we couldn't sell the house, throwing money at a house that would have been better spent on other things the list goes on and on.

OP, My work colleage was paying slightly less than you in rent years ago and she lived in a beautiful new house.
She decided to buy a house that was 30 years old. That was 11 years ago, her repayment were more than what she was paying in rent, but she had a home of her own!
Fast forward a few years- her husband lost his job in the downturn, her mortgage repayments increased, her house developed leaks and she was unable to afford to get them repaired. The house is cold, damp and has an awful musty smell. In the meantime, rents came down in price.
She absolutely regrets buying her house. She passes by her former rented house every day and regrets the day she moved out.

YABU. I rent at 48, DH is 61. We'll rent forever unless we win the lottery.

I bought a house and had it re-possessed 14 years later.

I'm too old to get a mortgage now, even if some establishment were mad enough to offer me one! I've been renting a place for myself and my 8.5 year old ever since and the one we have now is luuuuurvely :-)