Let's do the math for Kirsty regarding an affordable home

[kirstyalslap]

I'm sure everyone has heard that kirsty Allsopp has came out saying that people can afford homes if they only cut out netflix, the gym and takeaway coffees.

I just worked out a meal deal costs £3 a day. X that by 5 days a week 52 weeks a year is £720. Netflix is £8 for 2 screens (?) so times that by 12 months is £96 a year.
Let's add a £20 takeaway every 2 weeks for good measure. £520. Gym costs £14 a month so £168 a year.

So in one year of cutting back on netflix, lunch for work and takeaways I can save £1504
Wow
Now I need 14000 for a deposit so I'm only 10 years away (probably a little but more actually including fees.)

Right now let's think about increase in property value.
My parents bought their house 8 years ago for £90 thousand. A massive 2 reception with 4 bed and 2 huge gardens with a drive.
Bad condition.
Last year the neighbours sold for £230k
This year the other neighbours has been valued at £280k. My parents are thinking of selling for approx £290k.
So in 8 years their house has increased by £200k
(this hurts me as I started saving 8 years ago, nearly 9 and was looking at saving for a smaller house for about 80k needed 4k at the time and had a 5 year plan to get there. No family helping with deposit)

£90k now would get you nothing at all.
Also you need a 10% deposit.
Also rents back then was £500pcm for 2 bed flat. Now they are £700+pcm for same flat.

So how can we do it? How? Please tell me!

Oh also, everyone I know saving for a house has already cut out take away, meal deals, gym (first to go come on!) and much much more.
Batch cooking, shopping around for deals, having friends round rather than going out.
Every thing is rising in price now, I don't know how my children will afford to live away from us, it is scary because as much as we are okay now, we won't be able to have 3 grown adults living in one bedroom until they are in their 30s! Or will it be 40s or 50s by then?

@Topsyturvyloo

Do you know what irks me more than anything in this whole debate.

the idea that i’m not allowed to buy a sandwich or have netflix if i want to buy a blooming house.

i work 60 hours a week. i provide a good life for my kids . i try to help others sometimes .

i can’t by a house because frankly i had no idea what i was doing or how to survive at 21 -30 . sorted my life out. work hard etc.

but apparently i can’t buy a house because i’d quite like to have some fun and bloody netflix in my life as a treat to working all the time.

is this attitude to it all not ludicrous ? am i alone ? isn’t it more about the fact that the housing system is an utter shambles …

help to buy in my area - on a 600,0000house ..ridiculous

making shared ownership homes markedly of less quality than other new builds yet you pay rent and mortgage so you can never up your share

oh actually let me just move away from everyone and everything i know then …
because it’s my fault obviously …
i just can’t even …

Well its down the choices you make.

By the post looks like you choose to have kids before buying a house.

I choose to stripal my outgoings at the time, just rent, bills, cycled to work and only allowed myself a cinema pass cos it was a fixed cost buy I got alot of great nights out with it. For 10yrs I did that. No holiday either. I made that choice and now I have a house.

Likewise if I want an Aston Martin ill need to cut back everything and save up for it.

It doesn't help either that people always says your young enjoy this time now go out on holidays life it up. Needs to be a balance.

Again - I had holidays back in the mid 90s. No saving for ten years, people like me on low wages were able to afford property. That’s how it should be, something has gone very wrong somewhere along the lines.

@Dreamstate
Could you afford that home now on that wage (or in the equivalent wage that job now earns)?
What's the difference in how much you had to save vs how much its worth now?

I didn't hear it directly from her, only what has been said on MN but surely she's referring to the affordability of a mortgage. They look in great detail at your outgoings when you apply for a mortgage.

I live in the North West and can't find a gym for less than £40 per month. So I don't go (and am a chub ). The Netflix idea would also encompass any TV- I know people with Netflix and Disney plus, and I know people in rented who spend £90 on their sky package.

There are people who will happily spend £3.50 on a coffee or latte - if you do that every weekday its £70 a month. So putting those figures together WILL reduce how much of a mortgage you will be offered - by thousands of pounds. I've just had a very detailed chat about exactly this with a broker.

@Dreamstate . YES I did choose to have kids- x3 ! 2 of them have different dads !! .straight after being a homeless jobless teenager .. i was also on benefits for a time. i was also a single mum for a time. i was in debt. lots of different wanky choices i made for wanky reasons.with lots of different wanky experiences some self inflicted some not.

BUT then i got it together . life changed and i was LUCKY enough to be in a position to make better choices.Earn good money - forge a good career . i work hard.

What is the crack with having to know what your doing at 20 to buy a house ? is that right ?

Are we actually saying that people who CHOOSE and are lucky enough to turn life around should be forever out if the running to own a home ?

how does that even make sense ?

isn’t the point to make better choices and keep
moving forward if you can ?

really - we can never hope for more, work for more ? sort ourselves out ?

what kind of way of being is that?

@Mynameisnew

I think the difficulty is in saying that much could make up your whole deposit. Using you 70 a month example and say 30 pounds on a take away a month, in a year I'd save 1200.

The cost of the average house increase means that the amount I'd need to save for a deposit would have increased by more than that (say a 200 property last year is now atleast 215 then a 10% deposit jumps from 20 grand to 21.5)

That's without try to save for the other 20,000. In my area that wouldn't touch the average deposit rise for a ftb

I didn't hear it directly from her, only what has been said on MN but surely she's referring to the affordability of a mortgage. They look in great detail at your outgoings when you apply for a mortgage.

They might look at outgoings that people are committed to paying but coffee or netflix isn't going to be included in that.

Well London and Country Mortgages have just asked me how much I spend on eating out every month, and on subscriptions like Netflix 🤷‍♀️

Kirstie Allsop is an insufferable fud of a woman, but first time buyers also have to realize that they may have to relocate. Lots of smaller towns in Scotland still have affordable property, and if you can work from home, then you can move. Nobody moves into their perfect home first time, unless they are millionaires or super lucky.

@Mynameisnew

Well London and Country Mortgages have just asked me how much I spend on eating out every month, and on subscriptions like Netflix 🤷‍♀️

That seems a very stupid question if they are looking at whether you can afford something, unless they are trying to see if you could easily economise in order to pay the mortgage.

[quote Greenlight4]@Mynameisnew

I think the difficulty is in saying that much could make up your whole deposit. Using you 70 a month example and say 30 pounds on a take away a month, in a year I'd save 1200.

The cost of the average house increase means that the amount I'd need to save for a deposit would have increased by more than that (say a 200 property last year is now atleast 215 then a 10% deposit jumps from 20 grand to 21.5)

That's without try to save for the other 20,000. In my area that wouldn't touch the average deposit rise for a ftb[/quote]
I don't know, did she say it would make up the whole deposit? I can't see the whole article because of a pay wall but the bit I can see says when she bought her first home there wasn't the gym and Netflix lifestyle. What else did she say?

Belladonna, I'm not sure. It was part of a full breakdown of my finances. Perhaps there's a broker or banker who can shed some more light.

@Mynameisnew did they? We’ve just used L&C for our mortgage and Netflix, coffees etc weren’t mentioned.

She’s another over privileged idiot with little notion of the real world. She should join our government. She’d fit right in.

[quote RussianSpy101]@Mynameisnew did they? We’ve just used L&C for our mortgage and Netflix, coffees etc weren’t mentioned.[/quote]
IIRC the question ran like, how much woukd you say you spend per month on eating out (in my head that included coffees out). Next question: how much do you spend on TV, Internet subscriptions, then how much on going out - entertainment and cinema etc. Perhaps because I was a bit borderline they probed more, but also I do know that different banks have different lending criteria and so presumably lines of questioning.

I do think that some people on a decent wage could save more. One of my friends loves going to expensive hotels in Dubai (pre covid), having monthly massages, manicures, pedicures and olaplex. She doesn't just go to the gym but has a personal trainer. She only ever buys designer clothes (and a lot too). And she loves complaining that she can't save enough to buy a flat. So in her case I do think that she could cut back on her luxury spending.

But leaving out Netflix while you're on minimum or low wage and renting will never solve the problem. Those people are just too far removed from ever saving a decent enough deposit to buy a home.

I'd like to know where there's a gym for £14! She's thinking London prices and it's up to £250/ month here for a couple membership at a chain gym: £3000k. Coffees can easily be £3/ day - say you don't get them every day but 40 weeks times 5 times 3 is still £600. Even dominós pizza for me and my daughter (2 mediums, one side one dessert) is over £30... so I think your calculations are way off. Even so, she is being disingenuous saying saving £5-10k a year on expenses (let's throw a holiday in there too) isn't going to make something affordable. I'd not want to cut back on EVERYTHING just to own a house.
But I haven't seen the original quote and Kirsty is not stupid, so I'd like to know the context.

"I'd like to know where there's a gym for £14! She's thinking London prices and it's up to £250/ month here for a couple membership at a chain gym: £3000k"

No Easy Gym or Simply Gym in London? £250 is for something like David Lloyd surely?

"By the post looks like you choose to have kids before buying a house."

Loads of people never buy a house. Are you saying they shouldn't have children?

IIRC the question ran like, how much woukd you say you spend per month on eating out (in my head that included coffees out). Next question: how much do you spend on TV, Internet subscriptions, then how much on going out - entertainment and cinema etc. Perhaps because I was a bit borderline they probed more, but also I do know that different banks have different lending criteria and so presumably lines of questioning.

If they do ask, surely they want to know how much you intend to spend in the future when you have a mortgage rather than how much you spend prior to the mortgage. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.

@Elsiebear90

Isn’t she privately educated and the daughter of a baron? I don’t really think anyone from such a privileged background should be lecturing the general public on how they can afford to buy a house.

^ Exactly. She really needs to shush

I can't believe how obtuse some people are being. If you really don't see that there is a drop in living standards and an affordable housing crisis then maybe you should craft yourself a brain. It's what Kirstie would want.

Well its down the choices you make.

By the post looks like you choose to have kids before buying a house.

Oh right. My grandparents bought their first house age 22 when they were expecting their first child, on sole mechanic's salary.

My parents (a van driver and a secretary) bought their first flat with a 100% mortgage at the age of 24.

I'm 34, with a degree and a professional-but-not-highly-paid job, married to a man in a similar boat. We could easily afford mortgage payments but we don't have the £20,000 minimum required for the deposit on a 1 bed flat in the area we currently live, or a 2 bed house if we move out of our city completely and to a cheaper town. If I cut out all socialising, fun and treats whatsoever then I could save maybe £1200 a year (I've already calculated this in detail for myself). Assuming DH does the same, it'll take 8 years before we've got a deposit. (We had started saving, but Covid hit our respective businesses hard and wiped out most of our savings so we are now starting from scratch). By which point I might be too old to have kids and houseprices will have increased anyway so the £20,000 we'll have saved will be insufficient anyway.

So yes, I'm very glad I decided to start a family before buying a house, rather than wait and potentially end up with neither.

[quote Topsyturvyloo]@Dreamstate . YES I did choose to have kids- x3 ! 2 of them have different dads !! .straight after being a homeless jobless teenager .. i was also on benefits for a time. i was also a single mum for a time. i was in debt. lots of different wanky choices i made for wanky reasons.with lots of different wanky experiences some self inflicted some not.

BUT then i got it together . life changed and i was LUCKY enough to be in a position to make better choices.Earn good money - forge a good career . i work hard.

What is the crack with having to know what your doing at 20 to buy a house ? is that right ?

Are we actually saying that people who CHOOSE and are lucky enough to turn life around should be forever out if the running to own a home ?

how does that even make sense ?

isn’t the point to make better choices and keep
moving forward if you can ?

really - we can never hope for more, work for more ? sort ourselves out ?

what kind of way of being is that?[/quote]
Well no of course not but this is reality and parents should be doing their best to ensure their children grow up understanding pensions, careers choices, houses, cost of children.

We were taught about investing in secondary school, that doesn't seem to happen a yore.

How many people sont event junk snout pensions until its too late.

End of the day your choices and decisions have an impact.

Do you want all those things well if so you have make the right decisions to make that happen.

We wanted to live in London.

Couldn’t afford even the rent. We had to move to an area we could afford.

We bought a small small small flat in a not so good area, then sold and bought something bigger. We didn’t and still don’t buy new furniture or clothes. We’re now doing ok but still don’t buy new if there’s an option. My parents and family nearly all have bought houses but not in the areas they wanted to live. We’re all split up as a family but all own our homes that we struggled to pay for. No coffees or meals out for us sadly. The £3 for coffee would pay my child’s school lunch for a day and a half. It’s just a mindset.

I’d love to have a new car and a designer wardrobe, shop in Waitrose, but it’s not going to happen as my priorities are different.
I can’t imagine ever paying £60 for a hair cut or nails done. Just us I guess. We all make decisions and mine was to move to an affordable area got a falling down house miles from where I grew up. I’m happy and mortgage free.
Feeling chilly, wear a couple of jumpers and 2 pairs of pants. Only heating on in the evening. Hurrah - fewer but affordable bills. Well I’m happy.