Now I know what the ‘squeezed middle’ is

[Romeoalpha]

I thought references to the squeezed middle-income earners was just code for entitled people who don’t like tightening their belts, but I realised today that I am one!!

I have been trying to buy a house for a year. With a 10% deposit I can afford to buy a house up to £200k, but with rising costs of everything, £170-180 would be safer.

Three years ago I would have found something easily, but recently any houses that don’t need major refurbishment are going for £210k minimum.
I live rurally and I just cannot move further away because there is just nowhere to go that is still within travelling distance to work. This is my community, my home.

Now there ARE lovely some absolutely lovely 2 and 3 bed homes being built within my exact price range of £160-£190, and I get so excited when I see them come up for sale, but they are all ‘affordable homes’ and I don’t meet the criteria. The non-affordable houses (exactly the same!) on the same estate are going for £210k!

I feel so deflated and increasingly angry that those better and worse off than me can buy a home but I cannot.

We had a similar situation - priced out of the cheapest options in our area, but "affordable" house buying schemes only applied to much more expensive nb homes, making our shared ownership house MUCH more expensive to pay for than the mortgage on the cheaper houses would have been.

E.g. we could afford a mortgage up to £150k
Prices locally started at £200k
Shared ownership houses started at £400k so we are paying the mortgage for £100k plus the rent (which is higher than the mortgage).

Well you can afford it then can’t you, you just don’t want to use all your savings and borrow the max. I don’t think it’s unusual for people to have no savings after buying a property

Yes, this too.

Plenty of flats have communal gardens, ground floor flats often have their own private ones. Being in a flat doesn’t mean continuously moving, if you find one that shuts your needs why wouldn’t you stay there long term?

The reality is this. At the planning application stage a developer has to promise a certain number or percentage of affordable homes. Once they have planning permission and start building they make an application to reduce the number of affordable units as it would make the development ‘uneconomic’. In other words, not enough profit. The planning authority invariably gives consent.

Ah, OK - I can well believe that. We had a very large posh development built near us, a little way out of the main town. It was sold as being like a village, with shops and communal areas, but that never happened and clearly never will now, as there was no room left for them in amongst the (expensive) houses.

Now, all of the people have to drive into the main town, just to pick up a pint of milk or loaf of bread, adding a lot of short journeys into the local traffic situation. What's the betting that the shops, amenities and other community facilities - making it a much 'greener' development than it turned out to be - were used as significant leverage in getting the permission in the first place.

I think there should be repercussions for the developers who deliberately do this. If I were on the council, I would propose turning down all of their future applications on the grounds that they have a track-record of bear-faced lying being unable to deliver realistically costed plans. Then again, most local councils are connected to the main political parties, so they're probably well used to people saying whatever they think will get their foot in the door and then doing a (potentially planned from the very beginning) complete u-turn on it once they've been safely given the gig.

That should have been bare-faced lying; they don't dress up as teddies before making their proposals....

I've never seen a ground floor flat with a private garden come up on Rightmove near me...if one did I might consider it!
Re: moving I meant in relation to the idea of 'getting on the ladder' with a view to move into a house. I'm not really interested in a ladder I just want a settled home..have been in my current rental house for 10 years.

There was a new piece a few years ago about the ridiculousness of a particular affordable housing scheme where the price was such that if you earned less than something like 34,500 you wouldnt be able to borrow enough, but if you warned more, you weren't eligible. Meaning the houses could only be bought by people who earned within a tiny tiny salary range.

I see a lot of people posting "We need more affordable housing" and "We need more Affordable Housing", not realising they are 2 different things and their local new build estate is likely to contain the latter, not the former. My estate has a few council discounted-rent flats and a few shared ownership houses. The only thing you needed for SO was a connection to the area and for the rent, mortgage and service charge to be less than 45% of your take-home pay. There was no minimum or maximum income. What there is not is a few smaller cheaper freehold houses where you can buy 100% outright, which some people assume is the case.

If you are 42 there will come a point where the mortgage term is such that £195k is no longer affordable from a lender who has terms up to age 70. It just might be in 5 years.

In the meantime, I'd buy while you can and then build your savings up.

I don’t begrudge them a house of their own, but it stings that I can’t have one too.

Well you could, I suppose. You could choose to earn less for a bit, pay more into your pension, etc. You are barely outside the criteria so it wouldn't require a massive change.

Just explain to the bank that you need your offer not to exceed £X. If they won’t play ball, play around with the figures and ask for a new offer due to a change in circs as per @RandomMess’s suggestion (or perhaps take out a loan with another bank to reduce affordability and pay it back upon receipt of the new mortgage offer).

Can you just not use all of your deposit or Chuck money into your pension for a few months to reduce your income and then stop once you have bought

either of these would bring down the amount

My son has just bought on shared ownership and he put down a big deposit but they didn’t ask him to put the rest which was almost equal to his initial deposit .
The HA financial advisor didn’t even ask how much he had in total just what would be his deposit .

They did say how much of a share he had to buy which was 60 percent with his deposit and salary but he only needed a mortgage of 94k for 60 percent .
His rent mortgage and service charge is around £800 a month .

My friend also keep back 10k for moving in cost and furniture in her shared ownership house as she was moving from her parents so didn’t have much apart from handbags and shoes 😂.

The way things are at the moment you need to think outside the box a bit
You don’t get any brownie points for doing everything the right way

@HTH1.
with taking out a loan to reduce income my sons mortgage ( Barclays ) wanted a 2k loan paid off before he exchange and completed
They wanted proof of this as a condition of his mortgage

Welcome to the pile!
And things are just getting worst!