Buying house with DP… not sure what to do.

[cocunut]

Hi MN. I’ve been with my DP for a few years now and we are looking for somewhere to buy. We live in London/south east so expensive!
The problem is we are at loggerheads over what we are looking for. 300k max budget. I really don’t want to buy a flat - service charges, leasehold, not having your own garden or front door. But his income is much greater than mine (I'm a new graduate looking for an entry level job, he has an established career albeit self-employed).
He wants a flat purely due to cost. I feel like I have no say in this although I will be contributing to bills and some of the mortgage (with my contribution in proportion to his wages) once I’ve got a job. We’re looking for next year anyway but I don’t see myself on more than 20-25k by then. We are not married yet.
Im just not sure what to do! Does he have the overarching say in this? I want a forever home, don’t want to buy a flat to have to sell it in a few years when we have kids and I really want a garden. I just feel like I don’t have a leg to stand on as his income is the highest!!

Can anyone offer sensible advice on what property might suit us?

‘OP - get a job, get married, buy a flat and have a baby. If you are both successful with your careers, you can always sell, increase the mortgage and upsize. If you have to do those things, try to do them right ( less chance that it will all backfire).’

This is good advice.

Your relationship feels unequal - like he's an older person making decisions for you and you're wondering if you're entitled to push back. Your wants do seem unrealistic. I'd think clearly about what will happen with you providing the deposit and him paying a larger share of the mortgage. Are you going to marry? What about children, will he cover what you lose during maternity leave? If he's working away how will this work for you and DC? Also if you don't like London how do you feel about buying a home there.

How much older is he? How long have you known him? It seems a quite unequal relationship, almost as if you're skipping the footloose early 20s phase to go straight into a commitment with this man - but without life experience or financial protections.

Move away from London and you'll be able to get a house for that.

Are you having a laugh?! I live in "the North" and there is not a chance on this planet that you can get a 4 bed detached for £200k! Maybe in some really rough area on the outskirts of Liverpool or Manchester or in Bradford 😐

I own a 2 bed terrace which has just been valued at £290k. It's getting as ludicrous as "the South".

No not at all. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.

I'm in the north east and you can get a lovely house in a decent area for that. People can easily check Right Move and see for themselves.

Oh my god I've just rtft properly (company systems are down so extended coffee morning here!) and seen OP doesn't even have a job yet. And hasn't even lived with her bf. But is looking to move into their "forever home" straight out of her parents.

Sorry @cocunut have to agree with everyone else on here. You're living in lala land.

Also, there is no chance on this planet you are going to get a mortgage on a £300-£400k house with a 10% deposit when you will be earning £20k (which isn't even minimum wage?!) and your boyfriend is self employed.

You should have made it clear the deposit is mainly yours, as it didn’t seem from your other posts like you would be contributing much.

That doesn’t change the fact that you seem to have a champagne taste on a tap water budget. Buying any property in London is an achievement- if you want something bigger than a flat then look further afield/ up your income/ don’t go for low paying graduate jobs. But if you don’t want to compromise on career satisfaction by choosing a well-paying job in city law, finance, consulting etc instead of the job you actually want, then you have to recognise that you’ll need to make compromises in other areas such as housing affordability.

Oh and this!!! Me and DP earn close to £100k between us and our mortgage is £200k (on a £300k house). If we were to move (which we might) we could get a house costing half a million with a mortgage of roughly £350-£400k (with the equity and potentially savings as a deposit) but we would be absolutely maxed out each month with not much spare cash to do nice things.

Not a chance would I be pushing myself to the limit with a mortgage this high in my early 20s!

Just adding in my opinion - I think you are right to not bother with a flat first - if you want to move in a few years you then have the added whack of stamp duty and if one of you is on parental leave at that time and down to one income it's a a lot extra to find. Also with flats, the leasehold, extra fees, neighbour noise, it's not for me.

Joint income of 'nearly' 80k is not very high in London and I think you should spend another year saving hard for deposit and costs entailed with moving in. You will probably need a fixer-upper which sinks thousands more than you'd expect - our rewire alone last year was £5.5k.

Have another year of saving - then maybe you will be in an equal position and can go for a house instead.

Meh. I have a 4 bed semi bought for 315K in a the nice bit of a nof so nice area. You live somewhere really expensive.
4BD for 200K is unlikely though

Although OP, you both sounds like you can't buy independently? He has the income and you have the deposit. This seems to be putting pressure on things

It's a bad idea to buy with someone you've never lived with before. Selling up if the relationship ends can be a pain.

Agree that where I live would probably be classed as expensive to a certain degree but it annoys me when people say "the North" as though it's like Shameless or Happy Valley and everyone lives in run down working towns 😂

We live in West Yorkshire but I'm from Cheshire originally which is now ridiculously overpriced. But Yorkshire, Cumbria, Lancashire (Clitheroe, Forest of Bowland area), Calderdale (Hebden Bridge, Rishworth etc), a lot of Scotland but the cities and West Coast in particular. All of these places in "the North" and they are not cheap to live in! You're looking at an average of £250k for a 2 bed terrace in any of these areas.

Thanks for the advice everybody. To those who made assumptions about my life/age/career you are all wildly wrong 😂 I’m mid-20s - I went to uni as a mature student having worked full time in childcare for 4 years hence why I’m on here. I currently have two part time jobs and was doing that throughout my degree. Now just looking for the career I want to go into. Not hypothesising a huge salary for a graduate job because I didn’t do a particularly employable degree. Been with DP for 3 years and we are the same age, he just started his career at 18!

I think we all assumed you were in your 20s since you still live at home so I don't think we were all wildly wrong. Going from living with your parents straight to buy your forever house in you 20s in and around London is pretty much unheard of. Very few young people have that sort of capital and I really don't think you and your boyfriend are those people.

Why do you 'have to be in London for work' when you don't expect to earn above £25k?

Even NMW is £23k pa and you could earn that or more anywhere and buy a 3 bed semi in a nice area of the suburbs near a city in northern England for under £200k (I live here and know how much houses cost btw).

(accidentally quoted wrong post)

Rates in 1971 were in the 7.5% range, and they moved up steadily until they were at 10.03% in 1974. They briefly dipped into the mid- to high 8% range before climbing to 12.9% in 1979. This was during a period of high inflation that hit its peak early in the next decade.

Completely agree, it does annoy me when everyone thinks anything north of the M25 is a barren wasteland full of cheap housing. However 250K for a 2 bed terrace is still cheaper than much of Greater London, where you're looking at 300K minimum for a 1 bed flat without any buying schemes/hidden issues.

London median salary is only 10-15K higher than other regions.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/416139/full-time-annual-salary-in-the-uk-by-region/
After you account for taxes and childcare that's barely anything.
I mean London may be worth it for some people because of the high ceiling, but of course you need to work really hard to get the multiples of 6 figure salaries.

’Northern England’ is very vague, you won’t get a 3 bed semi in a particularly nice area in the suburbs of the northern city I live in for under £200k.

Agree about the sentiment of whether anyone who’s aiming to earn approx £25k needs to be in London, I wouldn’t even want to consider living in London on that salary, tbh I’d struggle to live on that and expect to live in a three bed semi in lots of places.

Well OP people assumed that because you're naive - and your choices do nothing to contradict that. You're hardworking , I'll give you that. But you went to university as a mature student to do an unemployable degree, and then expect to immediately buy your erm 'forever home'. In your mid-twenties. When even actual higher earners struggle.

80K isn't a particularly high joint income for London. It's 2 median salaries as per the figures I posted earlier. A 350K mortgage on 6% interest rate is just over 2.5K a month, your joint take home is 5.2. That's about 50% of your pay going on the mortgage before you consider bills, student loan repayments, potential child costs/part-time, and the over-reliance on your DP's high salary. If he lost his job and had to take on at a lower salary, you'd be screwed.

You need to work on the figures and make a decision on the scenarios you're comfortable with. It's really isn't about whose opinions matter more, but facts.