To think most property owners don’t understand how hard it now is to buy a house

[Boredfromboredshire]

DP and me earn 40k between us and our rent is 1200 a month for a 3 bed house. We don’t have rich relatives, we are in our early 40’s and circumstances (ill health) meant that we didn’t buy a house before. We can’t save a deposit & houses are expensive by us. We have stable jobs & our kids are happy so moving in the current uncertain time’s isn’t an option. Life has happened to us & some of it has been out it control.

Cue well meaning friend (who bought their house for peanuts) asking me why we couldn’t afford a house when we could get a house in a cheaper area for ‘only’ 400k. I’m so fed up of it. We really want a home of our own & we would move but in the current recession, it’s not a good idea to give up a job. And we can’t afford to save. My friend (whose deposit was 12k can’t understand it and looks on pityingly while telling me the house they bought for 120k is now worth 700k.

For many of us, the housing market is closed for ever. I’m so tired of the pity and the complete cluelessness- I quite often feel utter despair about it. It makes me feel such a failure for no real fault of our own. Some people were lucky because they happened to buy at a particular month in time & then some of us couldn’t & it’s over.

I don’t think people who own really understand what it’s like. Low interest rates, cheap mortgages, everything weighted in favour of owners while renters are treated like the Victorian poor.

Aibu to be sick of it. We are a normal family in normal jobs.

The ladder has always been a thing if you want to climb it.

Only if you are extremely lucky, choose a property that increases in value, choose to buy at the right time, don’t live through any recessions or financial crashes that cause you to go into negative equity, and also only if you have a job where your salary regularly increases.

For most people, the house you buy will be the house you live in for the rest of your life.

I'm not saying it's your fault OP, but 40k is not a lot in London.

Ha! Ha! People who say things like this must be terrible with money. I used to earn 25k and commute OUT of London because I wanted to live in London so much. £1720 take home and £1100 gone on rent/commute/bills. I still managed to save between £100-400 per month, totalling 3k at the end of the year. Then when I moved out of London that saving went up to £700 per month, then £1k+ when I moved in with my husband. I earn 35k now, rent a flat, and save half of it per month - yet I have friends who earn more than me yet have no savings at all. They spend £100 on going to a luxury gym, hundreds of pounds on alcohol, restaurants, luxury holidays and lots of clothes from Zara. You don't have to earn 6 figures, you just have to not spend your money on crap. Unless you are on minimum wage, rent does not take up your entire salary.

I mean, I drank tap water at bars and walked everywhere, but it's still doable and I wouldn't say I particularly suffered for it.

@beijingbikini that's great, well done to you. I'm not "terrible with money", my husband and I are actually extremely frugal and we save 70% of our income per month. We paid our mortgage off last year in our mid thirties.

I just don't think the annual £3k saving you mention adds up to much when the average mortgage is 4xsalary- so they'd get a mortgage of £160k- the rest would need to come from savings. £3k doesn't go far when you are buying a house of £500k.

Martin Lewis advice on first-time mortgages, HTB schemes, lifetime ISAS & all sorts:
www.moneysavingexpert.com/first-time-mortgage/

Oxford City Council link to Help To Buy:
www.oxford.gov.uk/info/20106/finding_a_home/409/help_to_buy_scheme

824 Properties within 15 miles of Oxford IF you really want to buy. I put a budget of £250k. Filters can obviously be changed.

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/find.html?locationIdentifier=REGION%5E1036&insId=1&minPrice=120000&maxPrice=250000&minBedrooms=2&maxBedrooms=3&radius=15.0&googleAnalyticsChannel=buying

For most people, the house you buy will be the house you live in for the rest of your life

Ds isn’t planning on living in the places he is going to buy and sell and buy and sell etc

Yes some people won’t move. I know people who have been in the same place for 30+ years but that isn’t anything to do with not being able to afford to move to a bigger place.

For those that end up not moving because they can’t afford to the question is why do they not move when others on less earnings do.

Your son is still a child/teen, yes?

Most teenagers have all kinds of grandiose ideas about how their futures will unfold. It’s very sweet, but real life isn’t like that.

Unless you have a wealthy family, of course.

It’s quite naive to assume that the economy will always be steady, that a child will one day grow up into an adult with a well-paying job with an ever-increasing salary, that one will never experience ill health or unemployment, that recessions will never occur, that banks will never fold, that homes will never lack for buyers, that homes will never go into negative equity.

Very sweet, but very naive.

We moved 3 hours drive to a cheaper area. Rents in our previous area were £1,650 ish for a 3 bed. We now pay £950 for a big 3 bed. We think that's cheap. But it's not really and we still can't save as I only earn £1750 a month so rent is a huge chunk of one salary.
My parents mortgage on their flash new build 4 bed swanky house is £380 per month and they are in a much nicer area than us. Makes me want to weep! We have no hope ever buying.

@pinkballoons20 apologies, I didn't mean it at you necessarily, I have just seen a lot of statements flying around MN over the years about how "you need at least 70k to be able to afford to live in London" and "you can't possibly rent and save" and (on this thread I believe) "rents are so high that my teacher son still lives with us at 30". Teachers start on about 24k which can quickly rise to 30k, and it's a job that is nationwide, so you could rent a flat or room in sharehouse for £400-500 a month. Where is the extra grand+ a month disappearing to??

I rent a nice flat in a nice town and don't have a super-lucrative salary and still save a large chunk. I guess I was "lucky" that I chose a degree/career that has a good work-life balance, decent salaries and isn't London-centric at all, so you're not tied into expensive season tickets.

Sure, 3k isn't much for a house but that went up and up every year as we lowered living costs and our salaries slowly went up, so now it's a decent deposit. In those 5 years some people on 45k have literally pissed their money down the toilet on £12 cocktails and their parents might be sitting on MN saying "My poor DC works so hard, but London rents are so expensive they just can't save!". Yeah right.

@ChocolatelyAsFuck it seems to me that her son is planning to buy a wreck for say £50k, flip it and then sell for a profit. Totally possible on minimum wage and it's more a business proposition than home ownership in a way. I am on a property traders FB group and there were members there earning £20k and also BTL landlords- just bought in cheaper areas.

Like any business, there are risks. A lot of landlords are suffering now cos their tenants can't pay. Rising costs and taxes erode the profits of property flippers. He can lose everything. I guess that's a risk he is willing to take. And of course it's less secure cos those areas are cheap for a reason. as an example, after the last recession, London property prices crashed but they also recovered the fastest .many people in NI are still in negative equity 12 years on..so just because NI property is cheaper than London property doesn't make it a good investment.

ChocolatelyAsFuck

He is just doing what his sister is doing

And for a lot less than £50k

The average teenager is not in a position to have a spare £50k lying around, unless they are from an exceptionally wealthy family, and I doubt a teenager would be approved for a mortgage.

The sheer amount of physical work needed to flip a property also seems unrealistic for a teenager who presumably has little job experience or indeed experience of the real world.

Spending £50k on a house is not realistic for a person on minimum wage with no employment history.

@ChocolatelyAsFuck my DH had £10k saved up when he met me. He was 23 but had saved that all up by age 19, tutoring and gap year working. He also had 3 As at a level so he didn't actually do that many part time jobs either..Minimum wage is £7.50 right. Let's say he works 25 hours a week and that's like 100 hours a month. So he would earn £9k per year and you can loan 4x your average wage. Only leaves a shortfall of £4k and he can probably work more during the summer or something. Definitely doable but of course not for anyone. Needs to be for an entrepreneur with a stomach for risk and an eye for opportunity. Who can be young- such people tend to start young. My dad who was a property developer started at 14 selling Christmas cards and he also earned an incredible amount of money at a very young age from such gigs.

I mean, it's not something I would necessarily encourage my child to do. I mean the traditional way is work super hard at school, get into Russell group uni, get graduate job, find similarly qualified partner and then the combined income +saving+ living with parents should hopefully mean you can afford London flat. I would be worried that the many minimum wage jobs might distract him from uni when he has the rest of his life to buy house wrecks. But some people have this real entrepreneurial streak and nothing anyone can do would stop him/her.

And for those who don’t have the GCSEs or just don’t want to work in an office environment it is about finding another way.

The “traditional” way for a lot of people just isn’t working.
Out of the young people Dd knows who are her age or little older. The ones who didn’t go to University and either did a plumbing/electrical/carpentry type course or just left school and got a job are the ones who are building careers, buying houses etc.
The ones at university and the ones who have left university are the ones who are floundering.

Maybe they will pull it round but statistics show that university isn’t the route to a well paid job for about 85% of those who go.

@Oliversmumsarmy a lot of it depends on what kind of university and what kind of degree. Very big difference between Oxbridge and Oxford Brookes.
Covid also exposes the gap between degree holders and non degree holders. DH and I don't have particularly good jobs compared to many of our peers but we are working from home, saving 50% of salary. Most of our peers are still working and drawing full pay.

The people who are in more manual, customer facing jobs are on UC or furloughed.

www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/20/uk-workers-without-degrees-face-deeper-job-insecurity-amid-coronavirus-pandemic

Its also non degree holders who were the most affected by globalization hence brexit and trump.

@Oliversmumsarmy nearly 80% of workers facing job insecurity – including cuts to hours or pay, temporary furloughs, or permanent layoffs – do not have a university degree, according to new research by the consultancy firm McKinsey.

Maybe I am crazy but I would rather have a job and on full pay than be on uc

Genuinely, how do you manage to find any job without GCSEs?

I wasn’t allowed to sit GCSEs until I was 19 due to being in hospital for most of my teens, and when I tried to job-hunt there were simply no employers who would consider people with no GCSEs. You can’t even get a job stacking shelves at ASDA without GCSEs.

And again, the idea of plucky children starting out early is very outmoded. In the 50s and 60s it was common for children to work weekend or after school jobs. Those jobs either don’t exist or are extremely rare nowadays.

I think older people really have no idea how much the world has changed.

Incidentally Desiringonlychild how much did your DH pay in rent, to be able to save £10k by the age of 19? Or did he live with his parents the entire time, because that goes back to the whole “bank of mum and dad” thing.

No teenager is going to be able to earn enough to be able to pay full market rent and build up substantial savings.

I’ve yet to see a single example of these much-vaunted home-owning teenagers (being held up as role models for us feckless renters) where the teens in question were not being supported by their parents in one way or the other.

@ChocolatelyAsFuck he was living with parents yes. Most teenagers do live with parents though so it is something that they are able to do. He also didn't buy until he was 29. We had to save up £70k to buy our London flat. But the initial £10k helped. We were able to buy 3 years after we returned to live in the UK.

DH's mother has never earned more than £16k her whole life and she raised 4 kids on that in London. So you really can't say my DH is from a privileged background. I think its obvious that people don't have equal opportunities, we just have to make the best of what we do have.

One of the definitions of privilege is considering your own level of privilege to be normal.

Maybe it’s normal where you are for working adults to be living off the bank of mum and dad. It certainly isn’t normal for people from my background.

I’m not criticising your DH, he clearly has a strong work ethic and a sound sense of fiscal responsibility. But the fact he was able to live with his parents while working to save money does make him privileged. And again, this is another example of something that happened many years ago.

The property market, job market and economy are totally different now.

@ChocolatelyAsFuck owning in London is difficult. A lot of it is very unfair. A big reason why I own a flat in london was because I married at 22 and my DH was my classmate at law school so he had more earning power than other people's DH. He is also very frugal. Other people got given deposits.

But that's the free market. I have never believed housing should be left to the free market (back in my home country, Singapore, the government builds high quality subsidized housing for 85% of the population). Most Brits disagree, and they would rather scrimp and save and eat pot noodle for 3 years to buy a roof over the heads. That's their choice and that's democracy I suppose.

Genuinely, how do you manage to find any job without GCSEs

Very easily if you aren’t looking at f/t work with contracts and designated working hours. The type of stuff Dd and Ds do they can work 7 days per week if they wanted to and even if it is minimum wage at times the length of the shifts and other perks boost the pay up.
All travelling expenses and food paid for etc

Like what? Can you give specific examples? I’d find it very useful. Thank you.