Doesn’t everyone aspire to own a house?

[Letsmoveondude]

Is it just me? I thought everyone aspired to own a home in their lifetime.

I know that it’s a luxury many of my generation will not have.

Currently trying to understand why someone who has the ability would not take it

I wouldn't say it's something I aspire to. It would be nice but there is no way we could ever afford it so it would be like aspiring to own a unicorn. There is very little point as it's never going to happen.

Rents in some areas are so high that working families are having to claim housing benefit to afford the rent - only to then have Land Lords turn their noses up at them and refuse ''Benefit claimants'' as tenants.

Makes me bloody furious.

It's just another part of the unpleasantness of renting in this country. The red tape hoops you have to jump through to get approved as a tenant, the amount of actual illegal clauses put into the contracts (such as not being allowed to change utility supplier, and having to allow inspections at a moments notice) which you have to cheerfully agree to or be seen as troublesome. Paying £££ to the agent, paying £££ upfront as a deposit, paying £££ to move your stuff, settling your children ... getting through that and then living from year to year, or 6 months to 6 months, hoping LL will renew the contract and you've not got to start all over again. That was my reality of renting. And that was with the good fortune to have good landlords twice in a row.

How is the social housing bill going to be funded to pay rent for millions of pensioners who have never been able to buy their own
place?

Some social policy analysts believe that this is going to make the "pensions timebomb" pale into insignificance when the Millennial generation reach retirement age.

If something doesn't change, it could happen that the majority of peope over retirement age will have high rents and low incomes, and will be reliant on state support for their housing costs as well as their pensions. If that level of state support is unaffordable, what happens then? The housing benefit bill would be massive, especially as, unless there is a massive programme of building social housing, an awful lot of them are likely to be paying market rents.

The prospect of a significant proportion of older people, struggling to pay high rents out of low incomes, for maybe 30 years of their lives is really depressing.

Thankfully, I'll be long gone by then.

obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-housing-benefit/

Laiste we didn’t have a contract that was free from illegal clauses- ever.
The way that tenants get treated is dreadful, there was someone posting on here the other day who had just let out an inherited house and had already decided to sell it, she thought it was perfectly acceptable for the tenant to pay full rent for her to market the property and let viewers in while the tenant was at work.

I have to say, I find the people who talking about buying a house making you 'inflexible' or 'fixed' odd.

I've lived in four different countries since buying a house. I just rent it out, and use the rental income to pay towards the rent of the place I'm living in.

I would be much worse off financially if I hadn't bought, and had to pay full rent everywhere. Obviously you have to be careful about where/what you buy and nothing in life is without risk.

Yes rental gives you flexibility...

But...

Can you afford rent in your 70s,80s, 90s..??

Not ‘odd’, just different circumstances to you at the time!
Our money, at the point at which we were travelling, was better off elsewhere. We both work in financial services and did plenty of research into this. We had no ‘base’ in which we knew we would settle, and had never lived anywhere for more than 6 months.
We were better off not buying a house, so we didn’t.

No, I don't aspire to own a house because I've owned three and it's overrated.

I gave up my last home for various reasons and live in social housing. I love it - no more stress of being cold because I can't afford boiler repairs, or living with a blocked sink because I can't afford a plumber. My home has been adapted for my wheelchair which I couldn't have afforded in my last place so I was trapped in one room.

As for future security, I am secure. As for leaving a house to my child, I didn't have that done for me. I had to work for my house and that I did. He'll have to do the same.

I thought everyone aspired to own a home in their lifetime.

I used to think that but some people tell me they don't want a financial burden of having a mortgage. This is something I don't quite understand: assuming that you have to live somewhere (other than maybe rent-free with your parents) you have to pay rent. I would, therefore, prefer to pay my own mortgage rather than someone else's.
Yes, I agree it is a burden but, to be honest, I find the burden of having to pay someone else's mortgages in the form of rent till I die far more scary than the burden of my own mortgage while I have a full time job.

Having said that, I don't judge anyone, who doesn't want a mortgage. It's a personal choice. My colleague, for example, told me once that her dad worked for the same employer for 40+ years, never contributed a penny to his pension and now that he is retired without a penny to his name, he went straight on benefits. There are some people, who think along similar lines as far as their mortgage burden is concerned but not everyone.

While the overall trend ha been upwards in house prices, especially in the south east, over the sorter term there have been times when properties have lost value.

Younger people find it hard to get their heads round, but the crash at the end of the 80s was awful.

It was a perfect storm of overheated housing market, recession and rising interest rates. A change in the rules about tax relief on mortgage interest created a mad moment where everyone was desperate to buy before the new rules came in, and prices rose exponentially. Then they plummeted.

At one point, there were hundreds of repossession hearings in the courts every week. People who lost their homes were often in negative equity and were never able to clear the balance of the debt. Prices took a long, long time to recover to pre-crash levels.

A couple of months before the crash, my house was valued at £87.5k, A few months later, I wouldn't have been able to sell it for half that. I eventually sold 4 years later, for £49k, and it took several more years for prices to get back to what they were. I was fortunate in that I was able to rent the house out when I relocated, the rental income more than covered the mortgage, and I was able to rent cheaply in my new town.

I know that tighter lending criteria make it harder for people to buy, but they will (hopefully) mean that something like that never happens again.

Accepting the issues with housing in this country (discussing thst is another thread) It is madness to not buy if you are able.

Why,

Rents go up, mortgages go down, That alone is enough!

Mortgage free by retirement, this is huge.

If you have to move for work and are unable to sell you can rent out the property, to assist your rent elsewhere, it is always there.

No moving at short notice when you really don't want too, you are in control of your life and finances.

I think older generations were very driven to get a house in a way that some younger generations are not, as they want freedom and no responsibilities for many more years than their parents and Grandparents.....what many fail to face is that this has consequences later on see above!

Freedom and an absence of responsibilities is great at 20 and 30, but becomes overtaken by a need for security at 40 and 50, ofter then it is impossible.

I have lived in a HA place for most of my adult life. I have also been through some very tough times. If I had bought a house and had a mortgage, I would have lost it several times over and ended up homeless. With HA, if I hit tough times I can claim housing benefit to get me through. No loss of my home. That to me is security. Owning a home (until it's paid off at least) is not secure as some pp's have sadly experienced. A mortgage may be better then private renting but I'm not convinced it's better than social housing. And if my rent needs to be paid by me when I'm old, I can get a lodger. I live in an area where I can rent out one room for nearly the full months whole house rent. I'd be mad to ever give that up for a 25+ years mortgage.

Re if you don't keep up with mortgage, bank takes the house.
People still do get something back though from the sale unlike when you can't keep up with the rent. You will never get any rent back. So financially it still makes sense imo?

Country I come from is obsessed with owning their own. I was always taught to rather buy than rent as that's just money thrown out of the window. Majority of people did get their property through inheritance though.

Renting is a solid reliable thing here
Is only renting was a solid reliable thing in the uk!

in general I agree that owning a home is a good thing but buying at the grossly inflated prices that we have in the UK?
I think that's just too risky

My area is same price, if not cheaper than most of the central European country I am from... Where people in finance make same money as waitress here... UK is still a bliss, excluding south nd obviously London

We have just bought our own home as we had the opportunity and it was the sensible thing to do with a baby on the way.

However, I really aspire to have affordable, appropriate housing and I am actually pretty angry this is the only way to take any control over meeting my family's own housing needs.

I don't see the point in "aspiring" to something I'll never realistically achieve, and no amount of bewildered "but it's dead money/ what about your old age/ I just don't UNDERSTAND???" is going to change that.

I still need a roof over my head NOW.

PP saying their colleague was ringing around about fixing a broken boiler and they just rang their LL. Yes, but you're paying off your LL mortgage, allowing them to possibly retire easier than you.

Life is a bit of hard work, is fixing a broken boiler worth giving possibly £12k + a year to someone else

To the pp who lost their home due to redundancy, that is shit. But would renting give you more security, you came out with £6k, more than you would have renting.

There are situations where renting is preferable, but they are fewer than what is being made out on this thread.

And I've lived in 5 countries, and can confirm buying doesn't tie you down, unless you want it to.

A wealthy modern Society should have affordable and appropriate housing for people
this is a basic requirement like Health Care and education

I can see both sides to this. I do own my own home but for its less a sense of achievement or satisfaction that I have achieved this and more that I don't have to worry about having to move unexpectedly also knowing that barring any major upsets I should at least have this place to live in as I grow old. We might move again we might not but I guess it does give up a basic sense of security.

I am a homebody, I want a place which is my refuge where I can put my own mark on the decor, keep my books and art supplies and cosy up with loved one. When I was younger have a mortgage would have been too big a commitment for me, keeping me tied to one location or one country. I didn't have the mentality to keep a house and maintain a property but now I like it. I still have friends my age (early 40's) who don't plan to buy and tout the benefits of not having to pay for repairs or being able to just up and move but those are the same people who stand to inherit quite a lot from family members in the next decade so will get family home or large sums of money to buy with that way. A lot of people won't have that coming to them if they don't buy what they can afford now, I certainly wouldn't.

People also should forget that buying is also a compromise so its not like you can just rent and then one day walk into your dream home, not for most people anyway. When we started looking I realised I would need to make some massive compromises and it took over a year to find this house. I know people in much larger, more desirable properties and they still felt they had to compromise in order to buy something.

Ideally there would be lots of good social housing available or better terms or renters so everyone could find good housing that they could afford and that suited them.

My 85 year old mother in law rents privately and most of her rent is covered by housing benefit. She was widowed very young and with the cost of raising kids on her own, she couldn’t buy. She is in private rented accom & very comfortable. The housing benefit bill will be huge though for generation rent.

Also, what hasn’t been covered on this thread is that there is a massive housing crisis - quite a significant number of people rent because houses are too expensive. Housing has been made an investment rather than a roof over ones head- it’s all about how much money you can make from property.
Buy to let should be banned, houses returned to a roof over your head rather than an investment.

'Is only renting was a solid reliable thing in the uk!'

Quite!

Attitudes to homeowning and the situation for tenants in the UK appear to me to be two indivisible sides of the same coin.

Some people do tremendously well out of the 'property ladder' system, others it fucks up/lets down. A largish part of this is luck-related, yet owning is seen as some kind of moral achievement and not owning, conversely, as a moral failing (there's been some questioning of people's goals in life based on their aspiration or otherwise to home ownership on this thread). Accessibility and social acceptability of renting does seem to me to be a mark of a more egalitarian society.

I also find the perspective that you're 'paying someone else's mortgage' interesting. There are a lot of housing association-type landlords over here. Private landlords have often inherited the property. Buy-to-let is much less of a thing, apart from in the big cities (some of which are regrettably going a bit the way of London).

When I stayed in Japan for a few months I rented a room in a shared "house". I say it that way as it was huge! There were 5 floors with 10 rooms per floor. Each room was ensuite and each floor had a kitchen, with a massive kitchen and social room etc on the ground floor. Leaving the kitchen etc a mess, or making excessive noise, would earn you a warning in the first instance, but could lead to eviction so there were no problems like that. And it was really cheap. There were people of all age ranges there and it was actually a really nice place to live. We don't have anything like that here. Hostels tend to be for people with issues. Shared houses are usually family homes that have been divided up and there often seem to be fall outs over things. Or you can rent a room in someones family home but most people want their own space. We need more affordable options in this country.

Each room was ensuite and each floor had a kitchen, with a massive kitchen and social room etc on the ground floor. Leaving the kitchen etc a mess, or making excessive noise, would earn you a warning in the first instance, but could lead to eviction so there were no problems like that

That sounds just perfect 😊