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.

😂😂😂 yes OP, stop eating avocados & bin the iPhone & in 10 years you might have half your deposit 😀 Must make sacrifices dear!!

It’s expensive for sure but I think YABU to say homeowners don’t understand.

Me and DH bought a few years ago in our mid twenties. It was expensive and we have a shoebox and a 30 min commute. Our mortgage is high and the amount we pay just in interest each month (90% LTV so no cheap rates) makes my eyes water. We made and still make sacrifices to afford it, we are very frugal and made/still make sacrifices to save for it.

We hope to build up enough equity to trade up and start a family in a few years and if there’s a 20% crash we lose everything we’ve worked hard for (to the poster who said homeowners ‘baulk’ at the thought of a price crash. Yes, I do.) Not all of us are sitting around with hundreds of thousands of equity and massive family homes.

We knew it would be harder once we had a family which is why we made the choice to prioritise buying first, you obviously made a different choice but please don’t tar all homeowners with the same brush!

It is hard and much harder after you’ve had children. Much easier to scrimp and save pre-children. Too late for you but deferring children until you’ve somewhere to live is a good idea.
When you’re younger you can do extra jobs to increase savings - even with children. It’s hard, but always has been.
I think plenty of home owners understand and many had an equally hard time when they started out.

@Boredfromboredshire

It’s shit. It’s been built in over the last 20 years. In a lot of areas you had to have bought before 2002 or in the crash pre 2012. Abnormally low interest rates don’t help - they both inflate prices (as people will borrow more) and make it harder to save as you hardly earn interest on what you can save. Rents are extortionate too and capital gains have ensured that people buy properties as investments, rather than homes. There is no political will to fix this, it started under labour and continued under the Tories. But it’s all because those who rent eat too many avocados 😂, not because you didn’t buy at the right time.

@GrumpyHoonMain Yeah, brilliant, 10k deposit - do you actually know how expensive even starter homes and flat are, especially in the South.

YABU to say most property owners don't understand when it was just your mate.

@rockbird - ok, I'm sorry, I missed the bit of your post where you explained you had a two bed house. I only saw the bit where you said you 'bet' her house was bigger.

Oh wait, there wasn't that bit, was there?

I understand OP.

We bought our home by the skin of our teeth. It was not easy. It could have so easily never happened. I see us as very lucky. It's not a big house. And it needs shitloads of work. But it is ours.

We spent years working towards it and hoping, often thinking we'd never pull it off. You just might.

Op how annoying is it??!!!!! People really don't understand! Not everyone who rents is just buying lunch everyday and going on holiday

It is really difficult if you already have a family because then you need your first property to be a house

This must be a significant factor for a lot of people. Without children not only can you buy a smaller place, but your expenses are less and it’s much easier to make sacrifices because you’re only making them for yourself. It’s easier to survive without furniture if you’re out at work all day, and I was happy being mortgaged to within an inch of my life because it was only me who was ‘at risk’.

For me, the pressure of paying the mortgage was also much easier than endlessly saving for a deposit would have been. (I had a small deposit which I could have managed with, but I was incredibly lucky and had help from my parents ... it was instead of paying for my theoretical future wedding )

Ultimately, if you really want to own, you do have to make sacrifices - they will be different from the ones people made in the past, and almost certainly harder. For you, it would be moving to a cheaper area. This may be so unpalatable and difficult that it’s nigh on impossible, but you could do it. On the other hand, renting definitely has its advantages and you may feel that area is more important.

Your friend sounds insensitive, to put it mildly. Maybe it would be better to focus on the fact that you have a happy family and other good things in your life that plenty of homeowners don’t have.

I do think most homeowners of our generation do appreciate the difficulty - I fully appreciate I only 'got on ladder' and moved upwards due to inheritance. If hadn't inherited that money, DH and I would never had been able to afford a family home in London (where we grew up) and would have had to have moved out of town, even though we have a decent household income. So I wouldn't dream of telling anyone they could buy easily unless I knew they had a significant lump sum as a deposit.

I think some older people don't appreciate how out of reach homebuying is and think people can 'just go without and save up' like they did (or think they did), without understanding that some people would never save up enough for deposit given the cost of renting, no matter how much they cut down.

I do have a little empathy with the “ don’t spend money on shite n save brigade “ because I did that when I was younger when a lot of my friends thought it was “boring” and bought my own house fairly young

However I lived at home / worked abroad n no housing cost for the most part of that time . once you get renting it’s incredibly difficult to save large amounts of money unless you earn loads . House prices were also cheaper when I bought after the recession and it was a shit hole that I slowly did up .

If I had to save a deposit now it would take me years .

God, yeah, with so many bars open it'll be so easy to pick up another job .

it wasn't drilled into them that you should buy a house first!! Not to mention that if they're in early 40s, as am I, life was very different then. Debt was not to be taken on lightly - a few hundred pounds debt was thought of as a major shame and problem - and we thought we had time on our side, since house prices back before about 1998 ish were only 3 times normal wages. You could even find houses at just double wages in cheap areas. Then they doubled, we all thought they'd fall again and waited: then they doubled again, tripled, and finally quadrupled and that was that, most people were locked out unless they had parents to help. It changed so quickly.

I think you need to bear in mind that while it might look like those who already own have got it easy.....they may have once been in your shoes.

When I bought my first property we could only borrow £31,000 as we were on a very low wage. We had no deposit as we were renting, and had to take out a 100% mortgage. Stamp duty was on anything £30k or over. Our mortgage interest rate was a whopping 16%!

It was extremely tough. We both had to take on part time jobs alongside our full time jobs just to survive.

I sold that property after we separated and bought on my own. I was a single parent working full time and struggled to get a mortgage due to my income. Again it was tough and I couldn't have taken on an extra job due to having a little one.

It really pisses me off when people have an 'it's alright for you' attitude when I know what a struggle it was.

My point is, not everyone who's 'made it' has had it easy. Life's tough and nothing gets handed to you on a plate.

Sounds like you're in a difficult position, but there are lots of people that have bought without help from parents / inheritance / the benefit of cheap prices.

I appreciate that we didn't have children but we both had weekend/seasonal jobs (on top of full time jobs) to save a deposit and we moved to a really cheap area in order to buy, both commuted into city. House prices in that area are exactly the same now as they were in 2004/5. They increased slightly before 2008/9 then dropped & are now only back to 2004/5 levels. And they're nowhere near £400k (more like half that).

Options are there but understand it would mean serious upheaval to a new (cheap) area - which i appreciate is a big decision / possibly a step too far.

You are definitely not being unreasonable!

We've had problems with health too and people just don't understand what a drag that is on finances when one person is not able to work.

We managed it, it was really not easy, my wife worked 2 jobs while I worked nights while living at her parents For 4 years.. Was it nice? Hell no... Was it worth it? Of course it was and I would do it again if I had too!

@Boredfromboredshire

I’m in the hope the coronavirus crisis causes a reduction in prices. Anyone who has bought recently will be fine if they’ve bought a home, rather than an investment because they’ll be able to live in their home. Prices will go back up over 10 years or so anyway. The obsession with constantly rising house prices is unhealthy and unsustainable.

The problem is the way people live their life has changed, Nowadays more often than not the pattern is university, get a job, rent a flat/house, have children, if you go down this route your monthly costs of rent, childcare etc would leave very few people able to save for a deposit, also when you already have children before you buy, you need to jump straight to a family sized house as your first home rather than starting at the bottom of the ladder and working up to that, it’s no wonder so many can’t afford it, tie that in with living in an expensive area than you are on a hiding to nothing unless you come into some money via inheritance.

"Not to mention that if they're in early 40s, as am I, life was very different then. Debt was not to be taken on lightly - a few hundred pounds debt was thought of as a major shame and problem"

Maybe in your world. Not in mine. Is debt ever to be taken lightly? A mortgage is an entirely different type of debt in many people's eyes.

@TazSyd not if they bought a small flat or starter home recently in the hope of building up equity to move. Our house is too small for a family so we would have to put our life on hold if prices were to reduce.

It pisses me off that people say that young people should both 1) start with a smaller home and work your way up and at the same time 2) buy a home to live in not an investment. It can be a home to live in and still a stepping stone.

I think that a lot of people of all ages have no idea how hard it is for youngsters to buy their first house these days. I'm not saying it was easy when we bought our first home- it wasn't and even then, over forty years ago, it needed both of us working to be able to afford a smallish terraced house. But, it was just about doable. One of our DCs had just bought their first home. He and his partner have very good salaries, but had to save for a long time in order to get the deposit. They've had to buy in a much cheaper area - ridiculous really, as the extra commuting expenses would have more than covered the extra mortgage in this area. Dc2 is renting, and realistically will be until we die and the dcs inherit this house. It's not as easy as working 2 jobs -dc and DIL both work shifts, so second jobs are unlikely to fit around that. And actually, I don't happen to think it reasonable for a couple to have to make so many sacrifices in order to afford a home of their own.