How can it be THIS difficult to live in the south?!

[CharlotteB94]

So I don’t think this is going to be a popular post. I’m 12 weeks pregnant with first baby and last night husband and I were talking budgets as we are trying to buy our first home out of London, currently renting in London.

I would just like to say we are working in industries that don’t exist or are far lower paid outside London and when I say that I mean we also don’t want to go and live somewhere miles and miles from family and friends where opportunities for career growth are limited. We want some form of quality of life.

We have both worked extremely hard for years and built good careers and salaries, and are buying without any parental help or inheritance and have managed to save while renting for years which of course is a feat in itself.

Even with this in mind, we are finding the house prices anywhere within commuting distance of London, safe and reasonably desirable to bring up a family, absolutely prohibitive when I’m about to go onto SMP. I am talking mortgage repayments of £3k a month. It’s really crushing to have worked and saved so hard and to realise that we are going to have to buy a place that isn’t suitable or what we wanted.

in addition, I wanted to highlight that in this current crisis, people like us who have higher salaries, get absolutely nothing from the government: no child benefit, no funded hours, nothing. Based on the budget calcations we did yesterday we would be living hand to mouth each month saving nothing while I’m off and hardly any better off when I go back to work with these crippling mortgage payments.

I don’t know what age gap people are putting in between kids when they have no help from government as we simply couldn’t ever afford for me to be off work or for a house to live in while paying £40k a year in childcare for 2. This is based on my husband being on over £100k a year. It is WILD.

i honestly don’t know how the system is so broken!! it’s depressing being pregnant for the first time in this world having tried everything to make a successful life for our kids and still being in this position. I just cannot understand at all how people are coping. I wish I could leave the UK but family are here.

that’s all I wanted to say, any thoughts welcome.

@DarkForces

London is really expensive but your wages are high too. Some areas you can't earn anywhere close, but they're still expensive. Life is hard for most people and we all have to make compromises as you'll soon be teaching your child.

Most people in London don't work in high flying city jobs. Most jobs are paid very similar or slightly more in London certainly not anywhere near the amount needed to balance out the difference in cost of living. Key workers get London weighting but it still doesn't make it equal to doing the same job elsewhere in the country

OP I'm also wondering how you define "London"
I never got near that kind of salary but bought alone in Zone 5.

No government help, not that I needed or expected it.

Even east Kent is rather different to west Kent- try Folkestone, Faversham, Ashford, Canterbury. All on the high speed link into St Pancras

Op says they do a job that doesn't exist outside London. Doesn't scream key worker to me

Whilst I sympathise OP, you are buying at the wrong time. Interest rates are high (and although they will never go back to the very low figures they will settle within the next couple of years) and you're just about to have a period of maternity leave.

My advice would be:

• Wait until you are back at work/earning
• Buy a smaller property. If you're instantly looking at 4 bed huge homes then you probably need to adjust your expectations
• Keep an eye on the interest rates
• Keep renting and saving in the meantime

I agree that it's bloody hard. But London property is price resilient and historically a great investment. You just need to be open minded about areas when you go from renting to buying as it is a different ballgame and it's unlikely you'll get to be as central as you're used to. If I were you I'd move somewhere a bit further out with good transport links and schools, like Enfield Town or Palmers Green, so you can commute easily and cheaply within the TFL zones. Or if you want to be on a fast tube line you could try Leyton or Wanstead. Wanstead has good transport links, a lovely park and high street with lots of fancy shops, and you can get a nice Victorian ground floor flat with three beds and a garden for about £500k. A relative of mine has a flat in Leyton which she bought for less than £400k a couple of years ago and she loves it - walking distance to walthamstow village, its gained a lot of value even in just a few years, and her garden is multiple times the size of the one in my (more central) house. There's also areas like Streatham. They might not be what you dreamed of but I bet all these areas will become increasingly full of couples like you, decent primary schools and coffee shops etc over the next ten years, and you'll be pleased you bought while you could still afford to. Good luck OP

Renting or buying anywhere near London is insanely expensive. It has been for years.

It's not that hard though. 3k a month is a mortgage of 550k so a property of at least 600k. There are 100s of properties commutable to London less than that

We bought our starter home in outer London seventeen years ago.

We are still in it.

The crazy gap between a two bed to three bed or three bed to four bed or terraced to semi are huuuuge.

Weve managed to extend rather than move but it was never the intention.

Starter home really is forever home for a lot of Londoners.

And yes I know we could move but we have outstanding schools here which we want to retain and great transport.

We will move when we retire (although it’s going to be hard to start again then)

Buy something, anything you can afford as soon as possible. Commute, safety and availability of decent rated nurseries or childminders is the only thing that really matters at this point. If you only get SMP then your employer is either crap or you don’t meet eligibility criteria. As others have said, compromise drastically. I saved for both my mat leaves, planned based on eligibility and we moved to bigger place between children.

under 3 don’t need a lot of room.

you should still have 6mths savings between you whether renting or mortgage.

keep looking and see if rates fall in the meantime, you still have time.

I know this isn't the point but I'd be considering a job change at some point. I don't want to worry you but a company that pays someone on a 6-figure salary only SMP does not sound like a company that's going to be family friendly in its employment approach.

What are you calling "what we want"? Most people's first purchase isn't their dream home.

Also most people recognise their income will reduce will reduce on SMP and save something towards that.

Interest rates being so high means its much harder when buying a more expensive house. We've paid off our current mortgage and now earn lots more than we used to and would love to buy our dream home and move out of our ugly 3 bed semi with no spare room and no space for entertaining but to buy what we want the mortgage costs would be huge and we just cannot bring ourselves to do it. Anything within our reach isn't much better than what we have so we are stuck and as always the really nice houses are still beyond our means unless we want to totally overstretch ourselves which we don't.

I took the quality of life reference as referring to being able to see friends and family easily at the weekend, rather than moving somewhere where they don’t know a soul and have to build a social life from scratch.

I echo others, where are you looking, where in London do you need to get into for work, what’s your budget and what size property is the minimum requirements?

The first house we bought certainly wasn’t our dream. Area I don’t like, scruffy maisonette, awkward garden. But it was the best we could do at the time and we were able to build up some equity to help us with the next purchase… which also wasn’t our dream but slightly closer!

It's true to say that a £100k salary doesn't go as far as it ought to, but it's also true that central London isn't the be all and end all- there are plenty of nice places in the outer zones where you'll get a lot more for your money - and it's also completely normal to live month to month or have to dip in to savings when children are very small. So I think it's more a case of adjusting your expectations.

We live in a 4 bed semi in a nice, leafy part of zone 6, with decent schools, extra curriculars galore, lovely parks and decent restaurants in walking distance and my DH can be in his office in Shoreditch in 45 minutes door to door - on a household income quite a bit under £100k. We had little spare cash until the kids were both at school but we're pretty comfortable now.
Admittedly we bought before prices went quite so crazy but £500k would still get you a pretty decent 3 bed here.

If you let us know whereabouts you need to commute to I'm sure people can suggest areas to look at.

We don’t get any government help either but bought properties before having children and then had them close together. That way I was on maternity leave and we didn’t need triple childcare costs (nursery is just over £100 per day here).

I think you need to either change where or what you are looking, or save a larger deposit.

You do know that you don’t have to live in London - you can commute in for work, which will bring your mortgage payments down by 50% - and will live in a nicer environment.

I'm shocked you think you are hard done by. Really shocked.

I know this house is just an example, but I don't think it's the best one. Replies like this make me wonder if people who bought years ago are out of touch.

Assuming a 10% deposit and 5.3% interest rate (which is a pretty good interest rate in the current market), the mortgage payments on that are £3800 per month. Is that in the OP's budget?

And they might struggle to get a loan for that amount (a quick google showed HSBC only lends £550k for a first time buyer with a 10% deposit).

I think this actually proves OP's point... which i don't think you were trying to do

We're in a similar situation - about to leave London to buy a house. We've had to go as far as Southampton as we couldn't afford the home counties, but thankfully my husband only has one day in the office in London per week. We're not entitled to any government help or free hours.

Hi Op

could have written this myself. We live in a shitty area of SE London and are quickly being priced out even on a combined salary of 70k. Like you, our careers and salaries don’t translate outside of the London.

move further out and train fares get higher and more unreliable.

so we are sort of stuck unless we retrain into different fields. Which is shit - because then your industry starts to suffer or becomes options only for people with more privilege.

We are from just outside London, Sussex and Surrey. We moved to the Midlands for jobs, and so we could afford a small house. We always intended to move back South- but soon realised it would be just impossible to have the same standard of living. We were able to trade small house for larger, and then much larger- something we could have never ever have achieved down South. Both great jobs.

If I were you I would stay in your rental flat for the next year or 2 or 3 until interest rates have started coming back down and you’re back in work and potentially one of you has had a promotion/pay rise.