To ask how you afford to live in London?

[seekinglondonlife]

Name changed regular as my family are on MN and I don't want my posting history linked.
We decided to do Christmas in London this year, we've had a crap year and just wanted to get away. We're staying in a fairly central hotel, have been travelling around and exploring by bus everyday and I feel like I really want to move here. The diversity, having shops open on a Sunday past 5pm, the atmosphere, the ability to choose 5 or 6 different ethnic restaurants on the same street. The public transport is fantastic.

I've been looking in so many estate agents windows and cannot get over the cost of rent/to buy a property. How do 'normal' people live here? I've been friendly with a few of the hotel staff, they've lived and worked in London for 20+ years and have raised their families here, but they are on NMW jobs, so how do they do it? Does everyone get housing benefit?

If you feel inclined please say roughly where you live and how much you pay for rent/mortgage. Also what are the downsides? (Apart from the cost of housing!)

TIA

Definitely don’t need a million plus to buy a family home with a garden, especially if you look towards zone 5 or 6 - lovely 3 bed properties in nice enough areas for £550k+

@Tiredalwaystired

Definitely don’t need a million plus to buy a family home with a garden, especially if you look towards zone 5 or 6 - lovely 3 bed properties in nice enough areas for £550k+

Certainly there are cheaper areas. My friend is buying a house for the same price as my z3 flat i.e. £425k in Romford. She thinks Romford is nice and who am I to say it isn't!

@Tiredalwaystired

Definitely don’t need a million plus to buy a family home with a garden, especially if you look towards zone 5 or 6 - lovely 3 bed properties in nice enough areas for £550k+

Agree...we are in zone 3..border of four. Our four bed is probably worth between 475-500...reasons being is that it's a 1970s house so nor much kerb appeal despite the fact we're on a nice road...if it was a Victorian house, it would probably be worth double that.

We looked at moving to London. We were in a fortunate position that we would receive very nice accommodation as part of the job.

Even with that the nursery fees would have been utterly crippling.

I’m a higher rate tax payer but unless we lived on noodles until they went to school it would have been miserable.

When DS was at little school most of the families had relocation packages which paid for their accommodation - absolutely amazing some of them (we had some embassy kids, so you can imagine these). The grumbling that went on - ‘I hate having to go up and down three flights of stairs in my house’ (this was a whole house in Kensington), ‘they don’t pay for school lunches’… one family had their groceries paid for (Wholefoods).

Different world… anyhoo - companies renting out/buying properties doesn’t help locals wanting to buy.

Has anyone gone the shared ownership route?

Yes I too would be interested to know about shared ownership and if it is cost efficient.

[quote seekinglondonlife]@nordica would you care to elaborate? I spoke to two workers in the hotel and they both said London is terrible for teens - drug taking, underage pregnancies and gangs. It just seems in such contrast to what is being said on here, perhaps it depends on what area you are in?[/quote]
London has plenty of teens growing up in areas of deprivation. They are vulnerable to exploitation by gangs and live hard lives.

In contrast, it also has plenty of teens who live in a million+ house within catchment of outstanding schools. They live comfortable and safe lives.

London is a place of vast financial and social contrast. There is a home there for anyone who wants it but it depends if you want what you could afford.

I have quite a few friends who've done shared ownership. Mixed bag of experiences (much like property in general?). Those who've either had enough money to buy the full share, or who have and will stay put have been happy and content, and that's most of them. A few trying to sell within a few years lost money. To be fair, rapid buying and selling of any property can often lead to losses once taxes are taken into account (and suspicious buyers wondering what is wrong for a place to be resold so fast); it seems though that there can be bigger difficulties in managing the sale with very low or very high property share; the difficulty of matching the % with buyer needs maybe or something else I don't quite understand.

If you wanted to do it, I'd suggest talking to an estate agent about what works and doesn't work around percentages or other issues for resale. Of course a brand new flat immediately becomes not-brand-new for the next owner and perhaps that's part of the price difficulty in selling over a short period.

@seekinglondonlife. We did it in the past but then moved away. Hard if you want a house but ok for flats , worksxwell if you just want stability, like a rental you can’t be moved on from and don’t mind new builds

shared ownership. Mixed bag of experiences (much like property in general?). Those who've either had enough money to buy the full share, or who have and will stay put have been happy and content, and that's most of them. A few trying to sell within a few years lost money. To be fair, rapid buying and selling of any property can often lead to losses once taxes are taken into account (and suspicious buyers wondering what is wrong for a place to be resold so fast); it seems though that there can be bigger difficulties in managing the sale with very low or very high property share; the difficulty of matching the % with buyer needs maybe or something else I don't quite understand.

This is my understanding too.

OP we're in London zone 2 (south east... the less desirable bit!). In a (large) two bed flat with three DC, household income £200k, mortgage £1800 p/m. But my first home was an ex-council flat in a not very fashionable part of town, which I bought on my trainee solicitor's salary. I would say that most people (especially in the pre-school years) find they need more space and move out, perhaps to the suburbs of London. Exacerbated by covid, I'd say, where people find they want to fuck off to Devon instead of Catford.

I used to live in London I found those with decent sized houses, not bought by parents but by their own earnings, tended to be 40+ professional couples that bought tiny flats as soon as they could get a mortgage then worked their way up the property ladder.

Unless you have seriously high earnings or savings moving to London later in life and not having your lifestyle seriously curtailed and living in a much smaller property is pretty much impossible.

Why not look at other cities that are cheaper but offer a lot of what you are looking for in London?

@Sexnotgender

We looked at moving to London. We were in a fortunate position that we would receive very nice accommodation as part of the job.

Even with that the nursery fees would have been utterly crippling.

I’m a higher rate tax payer but unless we lived on noodles until they went to school it would have been miserable.

Yep, that definitely is a fact of life. For the few years I had two in nursery I had to pay out of my savings for the privilege of working. It was important to me to have a balance and also keep my hand it at my career so I didn’t fall behind. Most people that I know went through that stage, but we all came out the other side.

@Sexnotgender

We looked at moving to London. We were in a fortunate position that we would receive very nice accommodation as part of the job.

Even with that the nursery fees would have been utterly crippling.

I’m a higher rate tax payer but unless we lived on noodles until they went to school it would have been miserable.

It’s the reality for lots of people who nonetheless feel it’s longterm worth it over the course of a career.

Before we bought a house we were renting a 2 bed flat in an outer London borough that cost over 1/2 of our income.
We were gifted some money for a large deposit and our incomes increased and now we own a house.

@seekinglondonlife there was plenty of drug taking and dealing, underage drinking and teen pregnancy in the seemingly naice middle class pretty town I grew up in because there’s fuck all to do there for teenagers. That’s not particular to London!

@seekinglondonlife

If you live in a flat can you hear neighbours, or is there good soundproofing? That would be a big worry for me.

Depends on the building and what the neighbours are doing. I hear the person upstairs walking about. I grew up in a terrace where the elderly deaf neighbours had their TV turned up to 100 all the time and since I moved out, have only ever lived in shared houses or, when I started living alone, flats. The idea of not being overlooked or not hearing neighbours is so alien to me that it’s never bothered me, it’s just part of life

@Sexnotgender

We looked at moving to London. We were in a fortunate position that we would receive very nice accommodation as part of the job.

Even with that the nursery fees would have been utterly crippling.

I’m a higher rate tax payer but unless we lived on noodles until they went to school it would have been miserable.

I don’t get this. You’d have had free accommodation and a higher rate tax salary, but still find nursery fees a stretch?

I get really confused by the “so many free things to do” . Do other English cities not have free activities or museums?

@giggly

I get really confused by the “so many free things to do” . Do other English cities not have free activities or museums?

Absolutely nothing comparable in any other UK city.

But surely that’s subjective. I live in Glasgow and we have dozens of free activities, shops open 24hrs (op wanted shops open past 4 on a Sunday, that’s an English thing) , apart from a Palace, Westminster (spat that out) oh and thousands of tourists can’t say I’m much impressed with London

@giggly London is a much larger city, i have been here for 8 years but haven't even been to every single museum, there are also many parks and green spaces. I am a north londoner for example and haven't properly explored most of south london!

I love glasgow too and really enjoyed myself when I was there but for me the main con of Scotland is independence. I looked at moving to edinburgh very briefly and posted a thread on mumsnet exploring the possibility of that (as I like apartment living and Edinburgh has a much larger supply of beautiful large 3 bedroom tenement flats), but the main feedback was the risk of independence. OK for pensioners I suppose but I think Scotland would be independent within my lifetime and that would have a big impact on the prospects of the young. London is therefore a safer (albeit more expensive bet) on a big city.

@giggly

I get really confused by the “so many free things to do” . Do other English cities not have free activities or museums?

Do any other British cities have more than 170 musuems?

There are also around 50 art galleries and around 1,500 permanent exhibition spaces.

Most are free.

There are also around 3,000 parks.

I have a six year old, there is so so much to do and I very rarelt pay anything for a day out beyond the bus or paying to park. When we go away, it often means having to pay entry fees to the small number of attractions.

Our combined income is 90k and I would consider Shepherds Bush and Golders Green to be far too expensive areas for us. As with anywhere, it depends what you prioritise - nice, relatively central locations like those (London is huge, so Shepherds Bush is still relatively central though it's obviously not Central London) or more space somewhere further out/less nice. As a rule, more affordable places start in zone 3/4, assume all travel takes an hour (except to your local neighborhoods) and check out SE London for better bang for your buck - much better than West or North.