to reaally not be able to understand why, people say they can't afford to buy or rent a house if they are working?

[iamtrickyjigsaw]

i mean me and dh don't earn much, but we managed it just about.
i just can't understand all these peple on here saying i can't afford rent or a morgage.

Can I also add that I think it's a funny old world when one half of the population (mainly baby boomers it seems to me) are able to afford to buy whopping great places and turn whole bedrooms into dressing rooms, gyms and so on, when the other half of the population are all squashed up with their kids trying to keep sane surrounded by wet washing, Lego and Barbies. There's no justice in that, is there?

Gosh, I'm not that old.

YABVVU

Aye to that, Boffin.

i used to know a single person who earend 50k a year, but couldnt afford to buy. she shared rent with a flatmate.

ExDp bought this house 11 years ago when he had an extremely well paid job or what would now be peanuts or a 3 bed semi here. He was then made redundant and when the place he was aorking was closed and he went to a job that paid almost ha what he was earning before at a time when house prices were soaring to a point that we would never have been able to afford to buy one, thank god that was one sensible thing he did.
Now these houses are selling for almost 4 times what ExDP paid for it.
Had he not had this house when dd was born we would have had to applied for a concil house becaus the rent per month in this area would be more than half months salary here.

So simple with other bills plus the rent we would probably already have been paying living in our own flats had he not had this place we would never have managed to save up a deposit or afforded or been given a mortgage on anything suitable for a family.

You are right Expat. They have built over 50 new houses just up my road and theres no way I'd be able to afford them. I live in Bath so they are catered for the rich people who move from London not the young people around Bath.

I understand it doesn't happen overnight I'm not expecting it too. Just trying to make people see that not everyone is made of money.

Thanks for the thought BoffinMum but have already been to see them and it was a no go.

A lad who works as a handyman for our landlord is 22. He and his gf both work ft and have another pt job at the weekend. They don't go out, don't buy clothes, don't have any dc's so just save, save, save and he has worked out that it will take them 10 years to save a deposit to buy.

Very sad imo they have to live like this rather than enjoying themselves while they are young just to try and get a foot on the ladder.

squeaky fgs are you mad? Expat you are wating your breath with this one

which is why in a great many cultures, people live withtheir parents. this is the real resaon behindextended families living under one roof.

my neighbour has a 22 year old who still lives at home. he cant afford to pay rent, let alone mortgage.
my other neighbours are four generations living under one roof.

I should point out that I am fortunate in the respect that we bought our first flat from my mum at the same price she paid for it 8 years previously.

When we sold it to move (for dh's work) we made enough for a 10% but we still can't get a big enough mortgage for the rest.

Holding onto the hope that house prices continue to fall until we can find something we can afford.

Hey, Policywonk, here's my cunning plan for revising Council Tax on Planet BoffinMum. What do you think? Measure the floor area of everyone's home, divide it by the number of people living in it, charge a certain amount per square metre for adults only, kids go free. That way gyms and dressing rooms will end up being very expensive and big houses will be freed up (hopefully) for families.

dh and i got on the 'property ladder' in the early 90s when i was at uni- i got a guarantor mortgage as it was cheaper than renting. back then we bought a flat for 37K and then bought the upstairs flat a few years later for 75K. we owed a little over 100k on the whole building and sold it in march for £470k. we were v v lucky. we benifitted from a rising market and bought when we were ridiculously young. my friends who have bougth houses later in life have found it v hard to buy. i totally can see how its hard to break into the housing market!

btw, in case anyone thinks i'm feeling smug- i'm not, as dh was intent on moving to a bigger place and cashing in on our equity, which we did 6months ago...things have changed and we now cant afford the mortgage (1800 a month!!). wish we'd never moved- but thats another story...

I'm busy saving and planning and saving and hoping. But even though I havenee got a pot to piss in, I don't get all begrudgery-ish about what other people have.

I hate begrudgery.

sb6699 so sorry to hear of lack of success with Housing Associations. If they can't help your friend, it makes me wonder what they're there for, frankly.

stitch you are right which is why I hope prices never fall adn I can keep my lovely ds at home forever

Sounds quite canny! Mind you I'm more temperamentally inclined towards working out what people's incomes are and taxing proportionally. Call me old-fashioned...

(You do realise that I'm a SAHM and have no influence whatever over anything, right? )

OP - think you're very fortunate but would agree with a lot of what has been said, it is genuinely very hard to get on the housing market right now and rent in certain places is horrendous. A very good friend of ours is in a proffessional job - primary school teacher - on a reasonable wage and can't get on the housing market to buy - the vast majority of her wage goes on her rent coz of the city she lives in.

As for us personally dh has had to move with work - he's a surgeon so again decent wage - we're paying both a mortgage on a house that won't shift on a dead market and renting in an expensive area and it is crippling us financially. We don't spend extravagantly, and are careful but it's a struggle. I can clearly understand why some people can barely afford to do one or the other.

BoffinMum - I love that idea, as things stand the rich can hire accountants to ensure they pay as little tax as possible. Your idea would mean they had to pay more (so it probably won't come into effect).

Income is a good thing, we should tax it less and use taxes to discourage people from antisocial behaviour, including hogging our limited accomodation

I know prices are higher now and it is a greater struggle, but those of us who bouth in the 80s and 90s had to work hard to get there. It wasn't easy. It mean going without and not being able to do up a house on day 1.

We were married and both working when we bought our first house, but lots of single colleagues actually bought houses together - (2 or 3 of them in platonic relationships). The negative equity of the 1990s was particularly bad for them.

I'm not going to make excuses for my generation. It wasn't a breeze, and it was certainly harder for me than it was for my parents when they bought their first house (in their mid-late 30s) in 1969 for £4500. When my dad bought their house, he had just moved into management from being a journeyman plumber - he could not have afforded to own his own house before that. Home ownership in the 1970s was something for people in management (a relatively small % of the workforce). It wasn't until the big sell off 10 years later that brought ownership to the general population.

You can either hark bark to olden days (when you wouldn't have owned) or whinge about today. Either way, same difference.

Squeaky - The implication being that those of us who still can't afford mortgages today are not making enough sacrifices or working hard enough. That's very presumptuous of you and pretty rude actually.

Woman after my own heart, Upwind.

What about this one too? Childcare costs represent a nasty supertax on women who work (and let's politely include lone fathers in the spirit of this).

So childcare should immediately become completely free, so we can keep what we earn, instead of actually paying for the privilege of working. And have proper pensions. And afford homes. And equality, old fashioned stuff like that. (Mop me brow, ladies, I can feel a revolution coming on!!)

Actually, I said that if you had money left over after paying all the essential bills, then it was a choice to either save that money or buy discretionary goods. At no point did I say that everyone had leftover money.