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?

END BUY TO LET MORTGAGES

@Butteryflakycrust83

END BUY TO LET MORTGAGES

So where would I have lived during 3rd year university and for the 3 years I saved for a deposit?

Where would I have lived before I bought a house?

After university I moved back to my home city. I couldn’t move back on with my violent alcoholic dad and the council wouldn’t have seen me as a single person as a priority to house. I was also temping whilst saving up to go and do a masters degree.

@takethegirloutofwales my DH's aunt moved out to Wales (third generation Londoner) and now her kid is back in north London! It's hard to say what young people will do and will not do.

Did I say end the rental market? No.

I said end buy to let, which allows people to take out a loan for poorer people to repay for them, whilst widening the gulf for them to also afford to buy their own home.

Most people do Interest Only on BTL, so don't repay the mortgage until they sell.

All this talk of moving to a cheaper area ignores the wider knock on impacts.

Lots of Londoners have moved to Bristol.

Bristol's house prices have gone up ridiculously. A few years ago I remember a complete wreck (to the extent it was unmortgageable) of a small 2 bed end of terrace house on the road I grew up on sold for £490k. More recently it was done up and sold on for £700k.

As a native Bristolian (5th generation) I've been priced out of my own city.

I moved to South Wales instead and made a life there. Eventually I ended up in a position to buy - using some proceeds from my portion of an inherited house in Bristol. Presumably now I'm one of the people pushing up house prices in South Wales. Presumably natives of this area will increasingly find themselves having to buy in old pit villages in the valleys with no jobs to speak of.

In the end you end up with a ripple effect of people priced out of their local areas, having to move away from their families and community ties broken up.

Is that really what we want for society as a whole?

Just playing devils advocate here

My parents are boomers and could get on the ladder easily and survive on one salary in the 70s: they were able to buy their huge detached house for less than my salary.

That being said, they didn't have multiple foreign holidays, wouldn't have dreamt of eating out. Once a blue moon? Takeaways were a rare treat. Wine and beer for special occasions. Probably never tasted champagne.

We had hand down clothes, meals cooked from scratch. Everyone drank instant coffee. We walked to school. Had one car.

Meals were basic. Cooked from scratch

Im not saying it's possible to live like this now. We do have expensive tastes these days though don't we!

@Butteryflakycrust83

Did I say end the rental market? No.

I said end buy to let, which allows people to take out a loan for poorer people to repay for them, whilst widening the gulf for them to also afford to buy their own home.

Where would all the necessary rental homes come from then if you remove people's ability to buy them?

Where would all the necessary rental homes come from then if you remove people's ability to buy them?

We used to have a large stock of council homes, until they were sold off.

A great many of those homes are now owned by BTL landlords.

They charge much higher rents than were ever charged by the council. They also point blank refuse to house a wide range of people - no one on benefits, with pets, with children... I've seen all banned in rental adverts.

When they do deign to house benefit claimants, the housing benefit element goes straight from the council's bank account and into lining the private landlords pockets, with them renting out a house that was sold by the council at a discount.

It would have been far cheaper to keep hold of the stocks of council houses - the cost of housing benefit would be far far lower.

Well that's you then. You made your choice.

I'm younger than you and a home owner. I went to uni. We didn't have highly paying jobs but chose to prioritise saving for a house over everything else and we managed it. Then got married (very cheaply) and had kids. No way would we have been able to save for a house whilst renting a family home and paying childcare.

Presumably that means you also had the luck of finding a suitable life partner relatively early, and settling straight into a career with no false starts, unexpected redundancies, insecure first few jobs or unforeseen events that gobble up your hard-earned savings, like a lot of new graduates contend with.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds like you've done well for yourself, but it's no cause for being smug and assuming everyone is in a position to have made those same choices.

The bottom line is, buying a modest house or flat used to be affordable for your average low-ish-paid couple in their mid 20s without having to make especially enormous sacrifices, whereas now it's not.

@PoshPyjamas

£14 for a gym membership? You sound as out of touch as Kirsty!

My gym membership costs £14 per month! And it's a flexible PAYG arrangement.

That being said, they didn't have multiple foreign holidays, wouldn't have dreamt of eating out. Once a blue moon? Takeaways were a rare treat.

You've got to remember that some of these things are massively cheaper than they used to be. I remember when we moved into a rented place my parents said 'oh, we would never have just been able to go out and buy a bed' as though buying a cheap IKEA bed was some evidence of our profligate ways. The fact is they had to save up because things like furniture and appliances were far more expensive relative to salaries than they are now. They could have afforded foreign holidays and buying new furniture out right if those things cost the same relatively as they do now.

It’s astonishing because she certainly knows, better than most people, that the price of houses has risen ridiculously in the last twenty years.
I suppose her excuse is that she probably doesn’t know anyone under the age of thirty well enough to realise that the jobs they are able to get are all paying about half of what they did when she was under thirty (in relative terms!) while the costs of housing and rents have more than quadrupled…

@SpaceDetective

Good point

@Russell19

Missing the point but YABU to say gym costs £14 a month 🤣 My local gym is more like £50

My gym membership is only £14 per month! What extras does your £50 gym offer? In mine I can use treadmills, rowing machines, cross-trainers, stationary bikes & several resistance machines & weights. Plus an annex for stretching & other such exercises. What more do you need? I mean, you go there to get fitter, and mine fulfills this function.

I got my first flat in London through shared ownership, where I bought a 40% share with a mortgage, and rented the other 60% share from the housing association. After 5 years, the value had doubled, and I was able to use the profit as a deposit for a house. So, there ARE ways of doing it without being super-rich, living at home, or scrimping & saving!

I feel like the "less desirable" suburbs that everyone is going on about are largely disappearing or are so far out that the savings get eaten up by travel costs. Where they exist there are often big issues making properties unmortgageable (non standard construction, cladding, too much of a wreck). Or the issues are so difficult to solve (transport, neighbour issues) that prices stagnate in that little pocket while shooting up in the areas without the issues so you can't work your way up the property ladder.

Our last owned house was on a (relatively) undesirable street on the unfashionable side of a leafy market town. Previous owners had extended heavily (bodged, missing building regs) and we sold it for the most any house in that street had gone for but made a minimal profit, none if you took into account our labour.

Another house we had viewed sold at a similar time to ours giving the sellers 100k profit when they'd not even redecorated in the 5 years they'd owned it because the street was much more desirable.

The estate agents said our house would have gone for much more anywhere else in the town. We bought it despite the issues and would have stayed but for relocation - and the area was fine, just people being snobby based on reputation in the 70s! So it's easy to get caught in the "wrong" house in the wrong area unless you have loads of local knowledge!

@user468375484

Where would all the necessary rental homes come from then if you remove people's ability to buy them?

We used to have a large stock of council homes, until they were sold off.

A great many of those homes are now owned by BTL landlords.

They charge much higher rents than were ever charged by the council. They also point blank refuse to house a wide range of people - no one on benefits, with pets, with children... I've seen all banned in rental adverts.

When they do deign to house benefit claimants, the housing benefit element goes straight from the council's bank account and into lining the private landlords pockets, with them renting out a house that was sold by the council at a discount.

It would have been far cheaper to keep hold of the stocks of council houses - the cost of housing benefit would be far far lower.

But if we ban buy to let mortgages, we don't magically regain all those sold off ex council properties! It's two separate issues.

Even in the dim distant 90s, dh’s parents helped him out and I inherited so that was a massive boost.
We can help our kids too when the time comes, but I appreciate we are very lucky.

That being said, they didn't have multiple foreign holidays, wouldn't have dreamt of eating out. Once a blue moon? Takeaways were a rare treat.

Furnishing a house was pretty expensive in the 70s and 80s. My parents paid about £800 for bedroom furniture in 1975, (excluding a bed) over £100 for a washing machine, and tvs were £100s.
Clothes and household items couldn't be bought cheaply at the supermarket and cheapy flights weren't a thing. So if they paid comparatively more for those things they possibly wouldn't have gone out as much.

But if we ban buy to let mortgages, we don't magically regain all those sold off ex council properties! It's two separate issues.

The original question was about where the necessary rental properties would come from - I answered where the ones we had (before BTL mortgages became available in 1996) went.

In the long term the government would be better off either building or buying new housing stock, the cost of which will eventually be paid off, instead of having to spend so much on housing benefit, the cost of which will only ever increase.

You've got to remember that some of these things are massively cheaper than they used to be. I remember when we moved into a rented place my parents said 'oh, we would never have just been able to go out and buy a bed' as though buying a cheap IKEA bed was some evidence of our profligate ways. The fact is they had to save up because things like furniture and appliances were far more expensive relative to salaries than they are now. They could have afforded foreign holidays and buying new furniture out right if those things cost the same relatively as they do now.

It's a good point. The advent of things like Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace has also made it much quicker and easier to buy and sell things second hand. For instance, I got a solid wood coffee table and two matching side tables for £50 on Facebook, and I can be reasonably confident that I could resell them for the same amount if they no longer fitted in with my decor.

There's several double bedframes up for sale between £20-50, or to put it another way, between 2.24 and 5.6 hours of minimum wage work.

Years ago you had to go out and buy a copy of Trade It magazine, and hope there was something suitable in there (no pictures of course), or if you were selling then pay to place an advert, wait for the next edition to come out, and then hope somebody phoned up.

Basically they want you back down the pit, living in squalor. Where you should be. God forbid you buy a coffee, you should be SAVING

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirstie_Allsopp

^^

Wiki but still. Her dad worked for Christie's, also some peerage in her family.

Bet it was easier for you, eh Kirstles?

@puffyisgood

Yeah. I don't doubt that she really knows her stuff on matters of upmarket interior design [and the the little I've seen of her in the past hints at passably good TV presenting chops], but she really, really, needs to play to these strengths & not stray too far out of this comfort zone.

When she starts dishing out lectures on budgeting to people from a very different generation and a very [very] different social class like this, honestly, it's the biggest insult imaginable.

Why is it an insult - all she was basically saying was that the further up north you go, the more you get for your money.