AIBU to watch and wait?

[nofussatall]

We have a generous gifted deposit

We rent at the mo, our rent is mega cheap so we are lucky for that. It’s housing association so won’t be sold from under our feet. Big enough for us now and one small child (TTC). Two bed but very small two bed, though great area and garden.

To buy this very house would be 250k, so £1500 a month if we fixed for 2 or 5 years now atm thanks to the base rate. Prices are just crazy around here. We have heard in 2025 that rates will drop a bit.

Is it wasting money to continue to rent? I doubt affordability will change too much after we have a child as we will only need one day paid childcare a week and it’s possible that funded hours will have come in by then anyway. We both work FT and plan to stay that way.

I’m wondering if we try to invest the deposit well in an ISA or something & hope it accumulates while we bide our time. It would also be useful to have a cheap home while on maternity leave with less income temporarily than have to scrabble around and try and find the hundreds extra for the mortgage.

AIBU to just wait for now, is it a massive waste even though it’s cheap and we have more disposable income here?

It might be worth looking at a "lifetime ISA" - it might be a good investment for your purposes.

That’s what we are thinking of

Bide you time. If the house you live is the house you want to buy, wait until the market is more favourable.

It’s not, I probably wasn’t clear. I was just trying to evidence how expensive it would be to get a mortgage on even something as small as this right now vs our rent. Everyone insists we must buy before kids but it doesn’t seem to make sense in our scenario. Idk

It’s never going to feel more affordable to buy than our rent at the moment but maybe I’d kick myself if I chose to do it then went off on maternity and had to somehow manage to find an extra £700 than we usually pay on rent - as we would in the above situ!

Just bumping for more advice :-)

Are you married? Who's family is the one gifting the deposit?

Might make a bit of a difference in how you want to think about it.

Yes, married and mine.