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.

"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."

Never read such absolute tripe in all my time on MN

I hear you op, most of my friends and colleagues who are same age as you or younger have only managed to get on the ladder due to inheritance or family assistance.

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
Exactly. And posting eye rolling emojis because people are sharing the shifts they worked, or the fact they didn't eat out or buy coffees or have a car or go on holiday, seems both rude and petulant.
If you want to moan that you can't afford to buy where you want to live then feel free OP but that's very different from not being able to afford to buy a house at all. There are lots of places I can't afford to live.

@PerfidiousAlbion we bought our first house aged 26 in 2016 and had none of those things. We just saved our money and rented a house that was smaller and cheaper than many do. For most people outside London it’s not difficult if you make saving s priority and buy before you have children

Friend of mine bought a house elsewhere in an 'up and coming area' that she could afford to buy in. Immediately rented it out on long let which covers the mortgage. She is still renting in Central London and simultaneously building up capital in her owned property. She hopes in time to have enough capital in the owned property to sell and use the capital as deposit to buy in London where she works and actually wants to be. Far from ideal and a bad tenant is always a potential risk, but it's an option? She had no government schemes open to her either in area she lives in (except the help to buy ISA for first time buyers at the time).

I bought my first run down flat in Scotland for 70k, several very carefully planned moves up the ladder later combined with a lot of DIY learning doing them up I now have a 250k 3 bed house with DH just outside edinburgh. I'm a homeowner and I fully empathise with the hurdles and sacrifices needed by a lot of people to own a house. I couldn't buy current house and save a 30% deposit whilst renting - let alone a 700k odd one in London! Also wouldn't want to work crazy hours and multiple jobs to achieve it. Some places in the UK are almost impossible for normal people to own homes in, learning about the prolific leasehold system (mainly relevant in England) also horrified me - I thought the freehold came as a given!

An as for 'move to a cheaper area' well even expensive areas need bus drivers and shop assistants and bin men and they all have to live somewhere. Telling people to move doesn't solve the problem.

There is shared ownership on offer in and close to Oxford and looking on sharetobuy.com and considering your wages you should be able to afford something if you have approx. £5000 plus for the deposit.You may have to move area but that shouldn't stop you if getting on the property ladder is what you want for your family.

I hope house prices drop too. I mine really burst that bubble and everything goes “poof”. People shouldn’t be buying houses to earn money. For some people it’s a fucking roof over their heads. I hope all the greedy land lords go bankrupt. I’ve been working 2 jobs for years, and dh also. As our deposit increases slowly, the house prices increase massively. Rent is more than a house mortgage. Life is shit.

I'm a homeowner and understand. I'm early 40's and bought 15 years ago when my salary was way less and I live in an expensive part of the SE.

Rent can often be as much, if not more than mortgage, which sucks if you're trying to save. Only thing I would say is anything that goes wrong in the house you're liable for. Guttering, roof, plumbing etc. Had to do emergency and unexpected fixes on all of this and much more, it really racks up. Comparing rent to mortgage costs alone doesn't tell the whole picture of overheads.

Problem with a crash, is it's still unlikely to help many first time buyers as deposits and LTV has already changed significantly. It will be v difficult to get mortgages.

I’m a homeowner and I get how hard it is to buy. I lived in Cambridge, so comparable prices to Oxford. We bought in 2017 and our combined income was similar to yours. We moved 30 miles outside of Cambridge so DH has a 40 minute commute because he can catch the train, I commute for at least an hour but most days it’s closer to 1hr 20. Buying in Cambridge wasn’t feasible. A shared ownership flat was more expensive than our house, which is not shared ownership. So that’s the compromise we made. We would have to commute to be able to afford to buy. We didn’t come into money or get gifted money. We didn’t work a second job. We rented a shitty 2 bed flat in the crap part of town and spent a bloody fortune doing the flat up. We saved. We didn’t have holidays. We had a 5% deposit, literally the bare minimum. We were so skint when we moved that we could barely afford food for the first few months. If the first mortgage payment hadn’t come out until 5 weeks after we moved in, we wouldn’t have eaten. We also bought a fixer upper. We took old furniture from relatives or our furniture that we had already purchased. We were lucky, the seller included the cooker in the contract and we already had a washing machine and fridge. We’ve not had a holiday since we bought our house 3 years ago because our savings have gone into fixing the house up. We’ve not got to touching the big ticket items like the kitchen or bathroom, which definitely need doing as both are older than us. We’ve been doing things nobody notices and that doesn’t influence the cost of the house - windows, electrics. It was hard. It is still hard. However, that was our priority. You can have a different priority from us and that’s fine but YABU to say that homeowners don’t get how hard it is. Buying a house wasn’t your priority, and as a homeowner, the issue is the assumption that everyone’s priority needs to be owning a house. This is partly because rents are stupidly high and I think if there was a cap on rental prices you wouldn’t have the presumption that everyone needs to own a house. People would then be able to live their life by their own priorities without the pressure of other people.

@lynzpynz leasehold is a funny thing- there are flats in Kensington for millions and houses in rural Wales for ridiculously small amounts. I would much rather have the flat in Kensington!

I own a 2 bed London flat, the residents own the freehold and my DH is on the management committee. There are bad leaseholds and ok leaseholds, you have to be wise. And it's always shocking to me how few people take commuting costs when calculating where to live.

PS, Oxford has a massive dodgy landlord problem. I have family members who are part of the problem. Mortgage free houses being rented out at atrocious prices. Bubble should burst to bring everyone down a peg or two.

We need more social housing for crying out loud

Op many people have kids and understand how hard it is because their kids are trying to get on the property ladder or they themselves have done it recently if their kids are young,

Forty k between two adults is below average joint wage for the uk, but you’re renting a 1200 property, which is expensive, but a lower rent property would allow you to save, your age is against you, but if you moved to a 800 property for five years that is a saving of 5k a year giving you 25 k after five years, it’s doable.

@sunflowery

Houses should be homes, not investments. That’s the whole problem. One of the reasons house prices have shot up over the last 20 years and btl landlords. I’m surprised the Tory government have made small steps to try and address this - capital gains tax on 2nd homes, taxes brought in last year, extra stamp duty. I’m surprised because labour should have nipped it all in the bud 15 odd years ago, with extra taxes.

However, if you view your house as an investment, you could well be about to realise that investments go down in value, as well as up.

And it's always shocking to me how few people take commuting costs when calculating where to live.

It's a funny thing though. When we brought our first house it was, frankly, a real stretch. But lenders were willing to lend us X amount which left us only able to buy quite far away from work and leaving us with several hundred pounds of commuting costs each month (this was 20 years ago and that was an expensive commute for the time and the area we lived in). But they wouldn't entertain the idea of lending us a bit more which would in turn have allowed us to live in the city where we worked and have almost cut out the cost of commuting.

I empathise. And I feel your frustration.

We bought 2 years ago. I am now 47. We live in a 2 bed flat, 4 of us. We saved for 7 years to get a 5% deposit. It is lovely to have our own - albeit small - place, it really is. It is super expensive where we live but it is home and we both have local jobs (average pay) so there was no way that we were going to move away from the area.

Contrary to what people have said on here, we couldn't have bought before we did, our salaries were never enough to save, I lived abroad for 5 years earning little, then life - aka children - happens and nursery fees etc etc.

We have never had help from family, friends who did bought years before we did. We got lucky too in that this flat came onto the market at the right time.

It's tough, there are many people out there in their 40s who can't buy a place to live. One of my work colleagues bought a flat the same year as me and has just turned 50.

Our mortgage is more expensive than our rent ever was too.

It is hard. But many people your age bought years ago, before having kids. Kids are expensive and also reduce your earning capacity. But you have a good reason as to why you and DH couldn't buy, and you live in an expensive town on not particularly high incomes. So that is how it it.

Life doesn't go to plan. Sometimes you have to make the most of what you've got. You have jobs, live in a nice place, and I'm guessing DH got over his health concerns. That is all good isn't it?

YABU.

We bought a starter home last year. We know how difficult it has been.

We lived separately, taking contracts abroad, living with housemates to save money, relocating to a cheaper area far from family and friends.

I massively empathise and feel your frustration, but it’s disheartening for you to blanket statement that we would not understand.

@Desiringonlychild it's just a totally alien concept to me (although obviously the norm to others!). Watching homes under the hammer when on maternity opened my eyes massively to so many different property options - it was an education! 😂.

@TazSyd it is a home, but prices being as they are it is a starter home until we grow enough equity to buy a family home. I don’t want prices to go up but we’d literally be fucked if they want down too much.

I just get the rage when people go on about how much they hope prices crash so they can get a bargain when it’s at the expense of people like me who’ve also struggled to hop on the ladder at the very bottom rung.

I agree it’s really tough with no help from family. I’m amazed how many have hand outs or large cash sums from inheritance on tap.

I do empathise. What makes it worse is having to hear fools go on about how much their house was bought for back in 1970, expectant of some sort of awe in response. It's happened to me many, many times (use public transport so a lot of opportunities). It is a rather odd attitude - like saying to an innocent man on death row with a fat grin, "oh well when I first got here, you see they still had the rule of as many appeals as you want, but of course you don't have that now do you".

We bought in 2016 and spent years living with parents in one bedroom scraping pennies together To get enough to put a deposit on a tiny 2 bed.

Since then we have saved and scraped again to try and up the equity we have so that we are able to move.

If properties do crash people like us who have worked hard for years will loose out too. Literally 10 years of saving for us to buy an average 3 bed semi wiped out in a few months.

Nothing about it is good for anyone. If house prices crash the banks won’t lend and we will all be fucked unless you have the cash to buy outright which I doubt most of us do.

YANBU. I know Oxford is an expensive area though. When I was in my early 20s I earned really shit (and I mean under £10k) wages. That was full time admin-type jobs in NW England.

My DM always used to go on at me for spending on ‘rubbish’ like having my nails done and how if I saved I’d be able to buy somewhere. The max I could borrow was about £30k and even in the ‘cheap’ north where I lived, the cheapest terrace was about £50k and would need loads of work and be in a less desirable area. My DM forgets that her MIL gave them 50% of the purchase price as a deposit back in the early ‘70s.

I only own now as I met DH who owned a house when we met. Even when I moved to the SE and earned a decent wage some years later, it still was nowhere near enough to get a mortgage on my own and I was, by then paying high rents and had no chance to save.

I was unlucky to not be born a few years earlier; a lad I went out with when I was late teens/early 20s had a sister a few years older. She had a good job (lawyer) with a great starting salary. She bought a flat in London (zone 2/3) for £45k in the late ‘90s, sold it within three years for treble what she paid. For a lot of people it is just luck and circumstances.