To ask how you managed to buy a house?

[Lollipop30]

If you’ve not had any parental help or outside input but have been able to buy a house recently..how?!
I’m feeling really down about it. We have a decent income and are able to save a modest amount per month but even with a 10% deposit the mortgage payments come out as double what we’re paying in rent for the same size.
Are interest rates really set to go up, and in which case should we just forget about even trying to buy.

The difficulty buying now in London/SE as opposed to 5 yrs ago is that lending is much tighter & many areas have gentrified in terms of prices. 20% deposit gives you much better rates & interest only terms are much harder to secure, plus stamp duty.

Not one if my friends (which inc some high earners) have done it without help myself included.

We bought a tiny house that needed a lot doing to it (at the height of the market unfortunately - 12 years later we are breaking even when all we’ve had to spend on it is taken into account.) Have stayed far past outgrowing it whilst we saved for a deposit on the next place, and sacrificed family time for my partner to work away during the week as the salary was better.

Same as eurochick for me.

Have you spoken to a mortgage broker? They know the whole market, and will advise you on your options.
I didn't think I could afford a place of my own, spoke to a broker just to scratch the itch, turned out at the time Help to Buy 2 was available so I only needed a 5% deposit.

DuchyDuke north wales.

DSIS and her husband have managed to scrape enough to buy in an expensive place through playing 0% credit cards.

lollipop i'm not in a dissimilar position and I really should learn not to read these threads as they just make me even more depressed.

Quite a few friends are finding it very hard to make the jump to a bigger house even with equity of 300k+ so they are moving to other cities.

Re interest rates I don’t think the economy is doing well enough but perhaps they may increase slightly so there is some wiggle room in case of a recession. I do think there will be some tax increases in some form over the next few years though.

I got £5000 off my parents. We moved home with them for 5 months and saved up a further £10,000. Bought a £200,000 house which we complete on next week.

We would have struggled massively without the support of my parents. Although we did have two children prior to this so it may well have been easier to do alone had we bought younger before children.

Its never even occured to us to expect parental help. They've done their duty to us? Dh and i saved very hard and bought our own home.

Put down a deposit we saved bloody hard for. Got a 95% mortgage. Don't have foreign holidays, don't have new cars, don't have huge disposable income. 5 years until it's paid off thank God

One thing that is really noticeable from this post is that you need to start on the bottom rung of the property ladder. Buy small, buy ugly, ex-council if possible, lower your standards, change your location. This is what we did and a fair few of our friends did. Those that refused to lower their standards to buy are still renting and can’t afford what they want. You simply have to start low and work your way up.

Just to add a bit more detail to what we did, I moved from a very smart, desirable rental with river views in zone 2 London to small ex-council flat near Heathrow with storage heaters, artex walls and a drug dealer next door Our commutes were shite, we ran a £900 car and we shared the mortgage and flat with a friend. No where near ideal or what we were used to renting. But it started us off. No help from family but we both worked long hours and earned decent money.

This was before we had kids which obviously made it a bit easier.

It’s also much harder to find a doer upper. We looked at a few but just couldn’t complete with property developers.

Saved hard for a few years (both lived with parents) and bought a cheap house that needed alot of work. Spent about 4 years doing it up (New bathroom, kitchen, boiler, re-wire) then sold it for a good profit. Used that plus equity to put down a deposit on our current house (more than double the price of first house) and luckily the prices have since gone up so in a good position now.
I would strongly advise against buying a brand new house as a first time buy. Buy something run down and do it up. It's bloody hard but was definitely worth it in the end. Our mortgage payments are less than £500, would be nearly £1k a month to rent the house we've got.

I flatshared for many years and squirreled away around £1000 per month until I had saved around 40K...and bought a crap flat in a crap area of London when the market dipped in 2009. It worked out as a 25% deposit and allowed me to get a low interest rate (for the time, when they weren't handing out mortgages without a big deposit). Managed to sell it for almost double what I paid for it about 5 years later, so now have a nice deposit for a bigger property, but am currently renting as the area I live in is far too expensive to buy in!

My DH bought a house in an awful area of the city before we met. It became a more desirable location for a certain demographic and so house prices went up and we bought a similar sized house but in a much better area together. Our house won't be big enough for us forever but hopefully we'll have enough equity in it to size up.

We paid £180k 3 months ago for a 3 bed semi. We were paying £700 in rent for a 2 bed flat in a not as nice area but very modern. Scrimped and saved! We missed anniversaries and birthdays, even Christmas for years. No takeaways, no holidays. It was shit but now we've bought a do up house and are currently gutting it to get what we wanted.
It's difficult but had to be done!

"One thing that is really noticeable from this post is that you need to start on the bottom rung of the property ladder. Buy small, buy ugly, ex-council if possible"

Our first purchase was an ex council three bed 1st floor cottage flat in a not dreadful but not particularly salubrious Paisley suburb. Not exactly exotic but with generously sized rooms. As I said we managed to sell it in '02 for £33k which meant we could negotiate a 75% 30 year mortgage on our semi. Over the 15 or so years we had the mortgage on the semi, we threw as much leftover money as we could at it without incurring penalties till it was paid off. That was on DH's sole salary which is currently approximately £43k gross, no child care expenses as I am an SAHM. I really don't know how parents on lower incomes who both have to work, but who have no family living nearby to provide FOC child care, manage.

Our broker was amazing and we managed to get a mortgage 2 years ago on a 5% deposit by the skin of our teeth. We also bought in a cheap part of the country.

I know we all supposedly had it easy buying back when I bought my flat but it was bloody hard. Full time job, worked in a pub evenings and weekends, antique stall on a Saturday in the market, rented a shared room in a house, no holidays, no car, basic food, rarely bought clothes. Furniture was mainly cast offs given by family and friends, when the interest rate hit 15% I rented out my only bedroom and lived/slept in the sitting room for a few months.

Ah the luxury of being a baby boomer

Help to Buy in the South West. Deposit on a 4 bed townhouse was £8500. Only 40 minutes from Bristol, 20 from Bath. We were the first to buy on the site so got a large discount. This is helped by us being together sharing expenses for 14 years and only now having our first baby in our mid 30s.

Oh I should have said as well that the only way we could afford the house we bought was because we moved from the SW to the East Midlands in order to buy.

I was lucky enough to reach house-buying age a long time ago. It's as simple as that. If I was starting out at work now earning what I earned then, a deposit to buy my first house for its current value would be an impossible dream.

We first bought in 2014. We moved to a town we didn't particularly like, in a house we didn't think was ideal, but we saw the potential in it.

For the two years beforehand we lived frugally. We reduced our spending to as little as possible and saved like mad - luxuries were exactly that, odd treats. We were paying £1100 pcm in rent at the time so it was a squeeze. We put down £20k as a deposit in the end.

We sold our starter home last year at a big profit and have moved into our forever home.

DH saved for a few years whilst living at home. Never went out, saved all his money, worked 3 jobs. Bought a studio flat in London. When that made money he bought a one bed. When that made money he bought a 2 bed. And so on to our house now. It is better to have something than nothing, the money for the deposit makes itself. Buy small in an area that is cheap now but will increase, then sell when the price is right for your next property. You don’t get a forever home first time round.

100% interest only mortgage over 35 years in 2003. Switched to a repayment mortgage 3 years later. We had a 2 bed terrace which cost £90,000; we sold it for £140,000 in 2007 and bought our current 3 bed semi. Unfortunately, that was the peak of the housing market & our house went down in value and only recently has it been worth more. Over time, the cost of our mortgage has come down.

We were in our early 30s when we bought our first house. We'd rented till then.

My parents are supposed "baby boomers", starting off married life in a bedsit with my older DB when he was first born. When I arrived two years later they bought a 3 bed terrace in Birkenhead, then a 3 bed semi and now a two bed bungalow in Little Neston overlooking the Dee, which is rather nice. My DM worked part time to supplement DF's wage, as we lived near my DM's family so had my Nan or Great Aunt to babysit us when DB and I were children, hence no child care costs. Holidays were once a year, caravan or sc flat in summer, always in the UK. My parents now own their bungalow outright after my DM inherited two properties from her DB when he died, one their childhood home - a 2 bed terrace which my grandparents had rented but which my DU bought after DGF died in '68 (DGM continued to live in it till her death in '97).The other was a 2 bed flat that DU lived in when not working away at sea. Both sold for about £40k each in '03, enabling my parents to pay the mortgage on their bungalow off completely.