To not want to move to Wales?

[dgarcia85]

My OH and I live in SE London and we are about to start TTC. We both agree we need to decide where we want to live as we want our kids to have a stable home and not move around. I work at a council and earn £35K. It’s a great place to work and I don’t want to leave. I also will be starting a second consulting job soon earning an additional £10K. My OH is studying p/t and earns £20K. I want to move closer to work most likely Purley renting first and then buying when we can afford too. OH doesn’t think we will ever be able to buy anything in Croydon/London and he wants to move to Wales where his parents are as it’s cheaper and they can help out with any kids. I’m from the Caribbean originally and I’ve been living in London for 15 years and made it my home and I don’t really want to start over in another new plus. Hi Plus I feel like our mixed race kids would fit in better in London and I love my job. I know Wales makes more sense financially but I can’t bring myself to agree to it and its now causing arguments....

Not all people have to be ambitious and driven, and want to work 70 hour weeks or be in senior roles.

I'm not particularly ambitious, nor do I want to work 70 hours a week or be in a senior role. But I learnt a signifucant amount more in London for the same level of office based job. I would be on about £40k if I was still in London and DP would have regular work. Here, I'm struggling to support the family on £25k for the same role, basically, and DP is struggling to keep his business afloat.

There are so many more opportunities in London.

I don't know about there being 'more opportunities in London'. There are also a lot more people, and a wider range of abilities in London. I've lived in London and rurally, though in commutable distance from a large town.

I was a big fish in a small pond in the town, I stood out from the crowd. In London I was one of hundreds. Much harder to find a job of the type that I would be happy in and would advance my career.

Yes I earned more in London, but not enough of a difference to make it worth the ridiculous property prices.

I'm not particularly ambitious, nor do I want to work 70 hours a week or be in a senior role. But I learnt a signifucant amount more in London for the same level of office based job. I would be on about £40k if I was still in London and DP would have regular work. Here, I'm struggling to support the family on £25k for the same role, basically, and DP is struggling to keep his business afloat.

Wouldn't the higher costs of living absorbed much of the extra pay you had in London though?

My DH absolutely loves going to Wales and anywhere where there’s mountains for climbing. He has a friend from when they were in the marines a long time ago who lives near Bangor and they often have reunions in Wales. They do allsorts. He has had a few experiences though of going into pubs in some villages and the place falls silent like you can hear the pins drop. He doesn’t take it as racist though (he’s British but Iranian / Indian). He just thinks it’s because he’s got his kit on and this kind of thing. Anyway he’s so carried away with the mountains etc he doesn’t care. It’s always pubs where it’s all men in the day. Once there was a near altercation because some kids were sitting on his car and when he told them to get off some men appeared out of a house and wanted a fight about nothing, but he doesn’t take it personally because you can’t deal with this type of mentality and there’s men like this everywhere. It’s boredom mainly, if you’ve got nothing better to do than be in the pub every afternoon. He does say though, that most people have no idea how much deprivation there is in some parts of Wales and you only really understand it when you drive through.

On the other hand, my son is looking at unis and I’m trying to encourage him to apply for somewhere like Bristol or Exeter or Cardiff because so I think these areas are a lovely part of the UK and it would be great for him to experience it and have access to the coastlines etc.

He does say though, that most people have no idea how much deprivation there is in some parts of Wales and you only really understand it when you drive through.

Absolutely true.

Though for balance you could pretty much substitute a lot of place names for Wales, in that phrase, particularly the word London.

Also with respect 'Wales' is huge and varied.

I think this thread has become a bit of a battle between people who think it's better to live in London and people who think it's better to live in Wales.

The OP has come back and updated us on the situation and I think she's made some good progress. Her partner moved to London to be with her and it's not working for him. She has a job she likes in London, but realistically it doesn't pay enough for them to be able to afford a decent property in the London area, and so financially it probably makes sense for them to move out of London if they can find decent jobs elsewhere.

At the same time, living in Abercarn isn't going to work for the OP, for a lot of very valid reasons such as the lack of job opportunities, less diversity and the OP's understandable unwillingness to live in her mother in law's pocket house.

If her partner is now prepared to compromise by moving to Cardiff or Bristol then that's a great result. It's a solution that they can potentially both live with.

In the OP's position I would be on the lookout for interesting jobs in both cities, and once lockdown is over (assuming she hasn't already found a job and made her decision) they could go and rent an Airbnb in each city for a weekend, get out and about, explore different areas, soak up the vibe and see whether they prefer one to the other. Both cities are large enough to have the culture and diversity the OP wants. Both cities offer a better chance of buying a suitable property to live in (Cardiff probably more so but there are affordable areas in Bristol too). Both cities are much closer to Abercarn and will enable them to visit her partner's parents regularly and also go surfing and mountain biking etc if that's the sort of thing they are interested in doing, which is an advantage over London.

I don't think the comments about her partner and their relationship are necessarily helpful, given that the OP has made her decision that this is the man she wants to start a family with. But I do think that if and when a baby arrives they would be better off paying for childcare and allowing her partner to pursue his degree and career even if it leaves them a little worse off financially in the short term, because he's late to the party professionally and so he needs to focus on getting somewhere with his chosen career sooner rather than later. If he finishes his degree and then takes a few years off to stay at home with kids, he risks finding it as difficult to find employment as all the women who can't get a job after 15 years at home looking after kids and no recent employment history. It's fine for the OP to be the higher earner, but personally I wouldn't want to have to shoulder the sole financial responsibility because my partner had never managed to establish a career.

Well no, the massive difference is that if the OP did move to Wales, they wouldn't have to take the deeply uninspiring option of at best buying a one or perhaps crappy two bed flat to have a baby in and pretend they liked it, because that's all they could afford. If they could buy at all. They could have a superior property. The vast gulf in property prices is the entire point

But with their joint money they wouldn’t be in a one or 2 bed flat in Purley but given they will be reduced to one salary and a lesser salary at that then they will be scrabbling for the grotty one bedroom flats in Cardiff or Abercarn or living with his mother for a long time.

deegee85 why the insistence to only stick to one bank when looking for a mortgage?

You look at everywhere and shop around.

You are on £35,0000 per year for I presume a f/t job you also have a £10,000 extra job and your dh earns £20,000 per year.
You have a £50,000 deposit saved up (I would ring fence that if you can so you don’t lose it if you divorce) and you can probably get more from your parents (also ring fence that)

So what are you waiting for?

Also I put those figures into a couple of the major banks mortgage calculators and they both came up with a £279,000 mortgage.

Who is telling you you can’t afford to buy in London

Who is Insisting that you remain with the bank you are with to get a mortgage?

Banks aren’t going to be upset if you go with another bank if they don’t offer you a mortgage.

Shop around with a whole of market broker to see what you could afford to buy

Be a little flexible with your search area.

Put in a 5 mile or 10 mile radius of where you want to be Rightmove/Zoopla/primelocation/onthemarket

Or on Rightmove there is an option
Where Do I Want To Live

You put in the address of where you work, the address of where your dh works, schools or any other addresses that you want to be close to by public transport or car/bike/walking etc and how long you want to be getting to each address and it comes up with the choices of areas that and what’s available in those areas

It certainly throws up different areas you may or may not have considered and the properties in those areas that are for sale.

Amazing tool to have.

sleepingpup living in London is great for teens. Free travel and loads of places to hang out.

I am sure that there is a wealth of opportunities to be had in other areas and the type of work dd and Ds have gone into could be done in a small number of locations around the country but it would be much more restrictive as there is only one employer in these locations.
Ordinarily they flit from one job to another to another. None really last more than a few weeks. Most are just for the day but there are so many that you could work everyday if you wanted.

Dd has just landed work for a company just solely because she is in London and has management experience.
A job that apparently takes a degree and 5 years experience working up through the ranks to do.

I would say it isn’t about the amount of opportunities that London has to offer but the ease in which doors open if you know where to push.

They really, really wont be in grotty one bedroom flats in Wales if they do as the OP has stipulated and wait until they both have jobs before moving oliversmumsarmy. Especially not with a 50k deposit and the potential of more help from her parents too. That assumption is entirely removed from reality.

The issue here is whether the superior quality housing that will be available to them even on lower incomes than they have now in Wales plus other advantages like easier access to beach and family support outweighs the plethora of job and cultural opportunities that are only available in London. There are certainly arguments in favour of London in this situation, it would be legitimate to weigh matters up and decide the job market takes priority, for example. But none of those legitimate pro-London takes involve being daft enough to claim they'll afford no more than a one bedroom flat in Abercarn.

Also I put those figures into a couple of the major banks mortgage calculators and they both came up with a £279,000 mortgage.

A mortgage at around 4x their joint salary would leave them brassic in every other respect.

You can get a 4-bed house in a half-decent bit of cardiff for not much more than half that: www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/53137200?search_identifier=78ff10a6d7fb54a0ad3154c05710acb3

"they will be reduced to one salary and a lesser salary at that then they will be scrabbling for the grotty one bedroom flats in Cardiff or Abercarn or living with his mother for a long time."

I doubt it. If she was a council worker in Abercarn, she should be able to afford a house there, even earning less than now.

Or you'd get this for 100k in Llanbradach, which takes about the same on the train as Croydon to London Bridge:

www.primelocation.com/for-sale/details/50236397?search_identifier=34ecf8fb740a5330b1933ed93ce5a63d

You're forgetting the rather fundamental point that she doesn't want to live in Abercarn or Llanbradach.

If the only factor to take into consideration was where are houses cheaper then this thread would not still be going after 20 pages.

A relevant point to bear in mind with regard to house prices is that house price inflation isn't likely to be the same in different regions. So you might pay four times as much for a similar sized property in greater London compared to Abercarn, but if house prices rise or remain stable or fall less in greater London compared to Abercarn, then in five years' time you could have a house in Abercarn worth one sixth of the price of a similar property in Greater London, making it much more difficult for you to move back the other way if you realise you made the wrong decision.

My parents had the opportunity to move from the south east to Gloucester in the early 1990s. They could have afforded a much nicer house in Gloucester, but they thought that the way house prices were going it would be difficult for them to move back to the south east later. After two years my dad's company shut its Gloucester office and so if he'd moved he would have either been made redundant or been transferred back to the south east, where prices had outstripped those in Gloucester. They were very glad they'd resisted the temptation of the big detached house and stayed where they were.

With Brexit and coronavirus, an economic shit storm is coming. It's going to be unpleasant for everyone, but you can bet your life that Greater London will weather the storm better than places like Abercarn.

I'd hesitate to buy a property anywhere right now, but the only way I would even consider buying one in a deprived town in South Wales would be if I could buy a run down place for £50k in cash, do a cheap renovation job, fit it out from IKEA and rent it out to someone. It would probably produce a better return than leaving £70k sitting in the bank not earning any interest. But to live in? No way.

That's true pepere, but oliversmumsarmy didn't restrict herself to Cardiff when making batshit claims about only being able to afford one bed flats, and people are replying to that post of hers.

You make an interesting point about the upcoming economic shitstorm and purchases pepere. I agree with much of what you say, but also wonder if now is a good time to be taking on a 4 x joint salary mortgage on an objectively not very desirable London property either, especially if it's potentially a one bed and you want a baby.

Part of the reason London property is so expensive is because people from all over the world have been allowed and encouraged to invest there, it's seen as a safe place for capital. A lot of that has been due to relative stability. Obviously that stability is a looking much less certain now than it did three months ago.

Now I expect that the nicer London property will still hold value, but the end of the market OP is talking about are relatively unimpressive flats in one of the less desirable areas of London. People tend to buy those properties in those areas at those prices because there isn't a better option available on their budget. Usually because, like OP, they were remiss enough to be born too late to avoid being utterly fleeced. I imagine if OPs 250-280k ish could buy her a luxury flat in Zone 1 or 2 or a house with a decent sized garden, she'd be doing that in preference. If staying in London in this situation, there's an argument for considering delaying the purchase for a bit. Now isn't a great time to be making big economic decisions even once people are allowed to do viewings etc again.

Yes, I think if she does want to buy a property the safest bet is going to be finding a reasonable place in Cardiff or Bristol that is big enough to be able to stay in for a few years but not in a small Welsh town where property isn't a good investment.

I feel like Bristol would be a good happy medium for you op. Lovely place to live with kids, diverse and only 30 mins from Wales. It's a good size city too.

sleepingpup living in London is great for teens. Free travel and loads of places to hang out.

Of course.

We are about to face a huge recession and I doubt South Wales is going to be a place to invest your money

Like I said the ones in Wales all seem to need work. Of the above 2 the kitchens and/or bathrooms definitely need to be done.
They do look like ex rentals
Rumney has a really high crime rate and the one in Llanbradach is at the start of a chicane with double yellow lines so you would have to park outside someone else’s house

If her partner is now prepared to compromise by moving to Cardiff or Bristol then that's a great result. It's a solution that they can potentially both live with.

But he won't though. I grew up with people like him and know some still, he'll never be happy until he is back home in the same village.

Can we stop with 'Wales' as a generic description for a country which is incredibly varied and 200 miles between north and south please?

We'd never refer to England in the same way, it would be by county...
In public sector jobs, demonstrating a willingness to learn the language is often a requirement and there are lots of resources being put into that - very often employers will pay for such training.
The government has a target of 1 million Welsh-speakers by 2050.

@oliversmumsarmy fair enough point regarding the previous properties posted but this house is listed for £250k and is a three bed detached, fully renovated, house with a garden in llanishen which is a lovely area of Cardiff, close by to rhiwbina which is one of the most sought after areas in the city, and for that price you could get what, an average two bed flat in the Croydon area??

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-80704997.html

Just so you're aware OP and anyone else reading, oliversmumsarmy has mentioned on here before that she buys, does up and sometimes just flips London property, and thus she has a vested interest in people continuing to pay vast prices for pokey flats there rather than looking elsewhere. Best to take any advice and opinions in that context.

I grew up with people like him and know some still, he'll never be happy until he is back home in the same village.

Which is why she should not even entertain the idea of moving to Abercarn. He can't make her.

Rumney has a really high crime rate

I grew up in Llanrumney, the neighbouring area. Rumney's not posh but it's certainly not rough. There are bits of Cardiff I'd avoid (Ely, Butetown) but Rumney wouldn't be on the list.

I would feel much, much safer in Rumney than Croydon.

the one in Llanbradach is at the start of a chicane with double yellow lines so you would have to park outside someone else’s house

Fuck me, this is desperate. Buy one further up the street then.

It won't make any difference to parking anyway. Most people in wales still ride donkeys.