To think where the hell do they get the money (and time)

[BetteDavisWeLuvU]

Just sat browsing through Instagram. I follow a lot of house reno accounts because up until having DC we were renovating ours, so as well people I follow I also get targeted by other home accs.

Obviously in lockdown I’ve had more time to browse, and am just astounded with the sheer amount of these accounts and how amazing most of them are and I’m just constantly thinking how the f do they afford it, and have time.

I’m pt (only 20hrs) but have a senior role and DH runs his own professional services businesses and is in the high earner tax bracket, we also have a relatively small mortgage living in the north. These seem like normal folks with normal jobs, like us, but there is no way we could afford the scales of these renovations and in the timescales, whole 4/5 bed houses with extensions in 2/3 years.

And before anyone starts it’s not jealousy per se, but more where the f are we going wrong?!? And the time, some of these people have multiple kids, I just don’t understand how you could hold down a job which would pay you the sort of salary you would need to pay for these renos and the quality of fittings (DH works 14 hr days, I worked 11 hr days before DC) along with planning and project managing it all and looking after young children. What are we missing?!?

Nb. Yes know it could be family money etc. in some cases but this unusual, the sheer volume of these accs means it can’t be that. And also yes I know I should spend less time on Instagram!!

Bette, comparison is the thief of joy. Maybe, as they say, think on. Instead of pressing your nose against the windows of others lives, go live and enjoy your own.

I think for people of my age who got a foot on the ladder early on, it is not uncommon to have little or no mortgage now.

I am 52. I bought my first flat in east London in 1991, before prices sky rocketed etc. I was an NQT teacher and I had to let out the living room to my friend to afford it.
I now live in a 4 bed detached house in a cheap town, and I am mortgage free. We have been for 10 years, so I was 42 when we moved here.

Dh and I both work for a charity, so we earn pennies, so our mortgage free house allows us to do that.
But if we had salaries from professional jobs, we would have plenty of spare cash to spend on holidays or house renovation etc, or we could take out a mortgage again to pay for it.

It is veyr unfair, but those 10 years between 1990 and 2000 were very good for home owners

We have done 2 renovations. The first was in our early 30’s. We maxed out our mortgage and went on to interest only for 10 years and paid off chunks of capital using DH bonuses. 10 years later we did another one on the same house which we paid for by increasing the mortgage. We took a calculated risk that if we fixed a mortgage for a long time at a very low rate it was a no brainier, we would see lid investment immediately increase with the work and we had enough capital in the house that we could always sell and buy outright if we needed the money. Clearing our mortgage was never a priority and the loan to value was still only a 40% mortgage and we had 60% equity at least.
This paid off. We paid about £400k for the house, no help from parents and it’s now worth £1.3m with a £300k mortgage on it.

I often think the same OP. I follow lots on them and the sheer luxury and extent of the renovations is jaw dropping.

DH and I are 33, we bought our second home in January. The first house we had was a detached 4 bed on a new build estate. We managed to get it cheap at the bottom of the last crash. When we sold it in January, it had gone up £105k in value (or actually, had just finally gotten back to the value it first sold at a few years before) DH is a fairly high earner £75k, I am not, at £25k! However, we live in a fairly cheap area of the country where having a fairly decent income and no children can mean you can have a good quality of life.

DH also had £70k of savings (yes I know, ridiculous ) that he’d managed to save over the past 8 years. I had £10k. He put £40k and I put £10k of savings into the new property, that, combined with the £100k equity from our old house and a bigger mortgage meant we were able to buy our current house in January.

It’s a big, detached 4 bed with a very big drive and 1/2 acre garden in a very picturesque rural village. (Cost £450k) However, it is in desperate need of modernisation and it’s been very neglected. It’s liveable but extremely dated. Everything that you can possibly think of that needs doing to this house, needs doing. You could sink £70k easily into it and have no spare change.

We don’t have a spare £70k so since moving in we have been doing small bits, entirely ourselves. Stripping walls, painting ceilings, architraves, skirting boards etc. Chipping tiles off and learning how to fit a new bathroom. I have bought lots of second hand furniture and up-cycled it to look ‘shabby chic’ and ‘rustic’ I’ve really enjoyed it actually and there is a lot of satisfaction to be had turning an old, £20 table off Facebook marketplace into something that looks more expensive. Even doing this and adding some ‘nice’ looking furniture (even if it is second hand and painted etc) has already made a difference.

By the autumn we will hopefully have enough saved to pay someone to come in and do some remedial work and early next year hopefully enough to have a new kitchen installed but it’s easily a 2 year project, just doing small bits here and there.

I have started an instagram account for mine, just so I can document the progress. I hardly have any followers though and I think that’s because there’s nothing exciting on there because we’ve been doing small bits and also, because the house just doesn’t look ‘Insta worthy’ yet. I would love to have moved in and just paid someone to come and do it all and document it all on my insta, I’m sure my followers will have picked up no end. But that just isn’t realistic for us, we don’t have the money and refuse to get credit/ loans. We’d rather save and if it takes us years, it takes us years.

The above isn’t a stealth boast at all by the way. On my salary there’s no way I could afford a £450k home! It’s all because of DH and I fully admit that. However, I’m sure people look at our house and probably think ‘how the fuck have they afforded that?!’ (£450k IS a lot of money for a house where we live, especially for our age) but I have been truthful about how we have afforded it. It is just managing to buy a cheap first house as we were lucky and bought at the right time, DH being on a fairly good wage (but hardly astronomical) and him being very frugal and a VERY good saver.

Rvk loves husband used student loans to buy buy-to-let's. That's how he got his start. Followed by a big cash injection from her mummy and daddy when they bought their own. I'm not sure of the ethics of using student loans to increase your own wealthy via property. I'm not UK based so perhaps that's allowed.

Some people made an awful lot of money from property, I work with people in their late 40s & 50 who are in 1m houses simple because of when they bought.

Oh yes you're talking about young people. DHs friend inherited a 2m home in his early 30s

I’m 30 and most of my friends are middle to high earners but we live in London. Most people have gone for properties which don’t need much work, the two that have done a lot of work followed very different approaches:

• Couple 1: high earners, corporate lawyer and finance. Bought £1.1m house then immediately did it all up - new kitchen, bathrooms, full decor, knocked through to the kitchen. They had a big deposit though as her DH had made quite a lot of money (£2-300k) on his previous property, then I assume they took a big mortgage to cover the cost of the renovation. Their house is dreamy.
• Couple 2: teacher and social investment fund worker so not highly paid. Live like students - no new clothes, buy discounted food, cycle everywhere, bike holidays in uk etc. Saved up to buy a extremely run down 1970s 3 bed in zone 5-6 for around £450k. Are doing it up 100% themselves, which involved living in a tent in the garden for a month. They literally stripped it back to the brick, put in a new staircase etc. I imagine the costs for doing it will be tiny as all the labour is being done by them, but can’t imagine the finished product will be very professional, even though it would probably look nice on a filtered Instagram pic, I imagine it will be quite shoddy in terms of the workmanship.

So basically - be high earners, get massive mortgage, live like paupers and do all the work yourself, have mates who will do the work for free, make loads of money from previous property, or inheritance.

I would say on your salary it shouldn’t be completely impossible to do a renovation though - just depends on your lifestyle and how big a mortgage you want to take on.

Family money, debt, people lie on Instagram.

If they are famous instagrammers it's because they get a lot of stuff free by name checking brands.

Couple of mums at my kids' school do it. They have nice houses but they make the Aloe juice mums look like glittering party hostesses in their variety of conversation. Many of their renovations cost them nothing or next to nothing.

I was going to say something about inequality and some people are just rich and then you posted about your joint salary, OP, and...I think you've just explained it. If you didn't save on that, then you simply weren't in the money-saving mind frame.

Dh and I were not in the kind of income bracket where you'd expect buying property at all, we were queuing up for a council flat. I am aware that we managed it partly because of buying at the time of the slump. But we still only got a mortgage for half the price due to our low incomes. The rest of the house was bought with money we had saved over the previous 6 or 7 years, by constantly being aware of money. Cheapest food, second-hand clothes, inviting friends over for a cheap meal rather than going out, basic holidays. Still living quite cheaply when out children were little, but I don't think it impacted them. Doing up the house and garden has been a gradual job over the last 30 years. Should be almost done soon.

If you live in London no doubt life is expensive, but plenty of people do manage to survive on say a joint income of 80k (or considerably less). If you had done that, that would be quite a bit of money in the bank by now.

It's not too late to start saving if that is what you want to do. If you don't, then that is a choice. Nice cars, nice holidays, shopping at Waitrose are all a choice you make instead of the house. Like choosing between turning right or turning left- you probably can't do both at the same time.

They afford it by fucking the dull but well off men they married for money 2-3 times a week.

I imagine it will be quite shoddy in terms of the workmanship.

why? no reason why they can't do a good job.

Also, as I said up thread the period between 1990 and 2000 was amazing for home owners in terms of increasing the price of their property.

I think there are quite a few people whose parents did well in this period, paid off their mortgage etc and now the parents have died, they have inherited that money. I'm not talking about rich families, just home owning families. My parents could buy a much larger house when they were young than we could now. selling those houses after they die gives people a big money pot.

the same will not be true of future generations in the same way. It was to do with the market shooting up over that period.

It's very interesting. I just looked at RVK - I don't think what she has done is particularly expensive I just think she has good taste if you like that sort of thing. the garden and utility are nice. The rest is a bit meh for me - but pretty sure you could do that on a budget

@WhittlingIhopMonkey I’ve friends who put student loans in an ISA at uni and lived off parental allowance and what they earned so I don’t think using it to buy property was against the rules. Arguably an odd use of education to base course choice on property prices mind you. I used my loan to pay for my hall fees etc.

My general conclusion for anyone owning property, especially in London, either is older and bought in the 90s or had some kind of cash injection from somewhere.

I put my student loan into an ISA (parents paid my tuition and I got a grant from my dads employers for my living costs) - a few years later (2007 right before the crash) that ISA paid all the stamp duty and fees on our first (100% mortgaged) flat in zone 2. We are now in a nice biggish house in the Home Counties and 4 years into a top to bottom restoration - mix of DIY and traders.

They afford it by fucking the dull but well off men they married for money 2-3 times a week.
I usually hate the 'you must be jealous/bitter' lines on here, but dear me you sound bitter.
Does it make you feel better to suggest women only have nice houses because they sleep with dull men?

RVK's reno is mostly copied from other more successful instagrammers, most notably Courtney Adamo (aka 'the heiress').

Love this thread and follow loads of renovation/interiors accounts because I love them! Though I’m way off being able to ever afford to buy somewhere let alone renovate it lol. I always wonder about Lust Living - I know she works for her parents’ company but I do wonder what kind of money she must be on to be able to afford everything they’ve done to the house! Not bitter about anybody, just curious and very envious.
Oh and Kate LaVie is another one - she’s very young but has bought/is renovating a second flat. I definitely think a lot of these people must have big loans from parents/relatives.

This is how Instagram works. Young, attractive privileged people get the family bank to finance the initial outlay in the Insta-pad, then they fill it with #gifted freebies and don’t declare it properly.

It’s all a massive con. Don’t fall for it. They’re not paying for the stuff.

It's more unusual for this money to NOT be inherited/gifted wealth.

It's why we live in the area we do and have been gifted in the past enough for a new bathroom.

When you've got the foundation of that wealth plenty of credit and disposable cash around.

But still it is a bit weird. Our neighbours paid over the odds for their house and must have spent £150k on it over the past 2 years. Don't see how the work could have cost less. Their house isn't worth what they've put into it, so I don't really get it. If they had that much money it's enough for the natural 4 beds on the road which are far lovelier.

Also agree with the comments about theft, it may have been tongue in cheek but my sister in law's dad has a massive mansion bought by the proceeds of dodgy dealings as a solicitor where he ripped off his clients. Legal - just about, ethical - now way. He was struck off for a few years but still just as rich.

I know a few people with kids who've moved to bigger houses and they all seem to do either whole house renovations where they need to move out or big extensions. I'm not sure how they afford it (especially since I found out how much extensions cost), I think it's a mix of higher wages, car loans, credit cards and mortgages that are far bigger and longer than we'd ever be comfortable with. I imagine the terms are 30 to 40 years. We moved too and have done some small things to the house like plastering, decorating etc but nothing big. Agree with PP who said people used to wait until they could afford it to do house renovations, now they do them straight away. It depends what your priorities are and either how much you earn and how much debt you are happy to take on.

Some people bought at the right time and have a lot of equity too. They also may have had help from family to buy.