High cost of buying a house - how has it affected YOU and your family?

[rumtumtigger]

There is a story in the news that people are having fewer children and later in life due to the high cost of buying a house.

I am interested to see how it has affected us all - I am sure some people have benefited hugely from this phenomenon whilst others have found it a nightmare...what's your story?

[pebblemum]

We have also thought about buying abroad, it is a lot cheaper and the weather is better. If it wasnt for the fact I would miss my family and wouldnt be able to afford to pop back as often as I would like, I would go tomorrow.

The only good thing this flat has going for it is the front and back garden, without them i would go mad. Also we have a grass area out front for the boys to play on and the neighbours are very friendly, they understand what the situation is and keep trying to tell me they whne they come into my home they are there to see us not the damp but it still embarasses me. I have often said that if it wasnt for the damp I could stay here for a few years yet. We could always find a solution for the lack of storage. We have been offered the chance to buy the fact for half the market value approx £49,000 but there is no way any lender will allow us a mortgage for it unless the damp is sorted out. We did think about getting a quote to see how much we would need to spend to solve the problem then asking the council to drop the price further by that amount, that way we would now the problem is fixed properly not just to council standard (ie hide it)and then we would blitz the flat and do it up exactly how we want. It may still be worth a try if we get no joy elsewhere but I cant help thinking that no matter what we do to this flat i will always remember the way it is now.Plus the boys room is just about big enough for the both of them so any chance of having baby no.3 would go out of the window.

[purplemonkeydishwasher]

We're actually considering leaving the country cause of the house prices. We got this place for a song but could never sell it for enough to get anything better!

[expatinscotland]

the average price of a 2 bed 'home' in Edinburgh has gone up 20% in the past year. i wouldn't want most of them, anyhow, unless i were minted, b/c so many properties here are in terrible repair.

i'm glad they did away w/right to buy. i think it's done a lot to exacerbate the problem of out of control house prices and lack of affordable places to rent.

[GarfieldsGirl]

Good luck pebblemum. I know how you feel about living in awful conditions and how desperate you must feel.

[pebblemum]

Thanks garfieldsmum, sorry have only just had chance to catch up on the thread. We tried environmental health and even had solicitors involved, council still tried to deny there was a problem but put up false walls in both bedrooms. This stopped it for a coupe of months but of course all it had done was covered up the problem and now the damp has come through again. Now whenever i go to speak to someone at the council they are always busy and when i make an appointment suddenly there are a lot of emergencies and they have to cancel on me. Basically we have had enough of the council, the only time they take notice is when the tenant is the one in the wrong. We did think of withholding the rent but at the end of the day it is us who will go down as bad debters so the council would still win in the end.

I think i will look into the part buy schemes, maybe i will get lucky. As dh pointed out having a mortage will mean no holidays for a while but I could put up with that, if i had a decent house i wouldnt feel the need to leave it all the time

[Linnet]

Expat, the housing associations only withdrew the right to buy in 2001/2 I think.
that's why I asked if you had the right to buy as if you had been a tenant before that date you would have had a secure tenancy.

But since you aren't actually a HA tenant I see that it wouldn't have mattered for you anyway.

In my street of 20 flats there are 11 still owned by the HA. Out of those 11, 4 still have the right to buy as they have secure tenancies. The other 7 HA flats have all been given assuared tenancies when they moved in and so don't have the right to buy anymore.

[mumfor1standfinaltime]

We are renting a 2 bed terrace for £270 a month, and cant afford a mortgage.
The house prices where I am are around £130,000 just for a tiny 2 bed terrace with no parking and a back yard.

I have been renting since I was 19 (Im 28).
Moved in with dh when I was 19 into a 3 bed Council maisonette, it was ok but shabby and we made the best of it. We were young and didnt think of the future or babies! We looked into buying it 5 years later and we were given a price of £23k. We were on very low incomes at the time and we chickened out.
Part of me knows we should have bought it, they now sell for over £100k!

I think our time for buying will come, just not yet.

I feel that I am priced out of the market by 'buy to let' developers.

[GarfieldsGirl]

lusciouslynda - I was in the same situation as you - wanting to stay at home with LOs, but house prices etc and food shopping on credit cards meant I had to work even p/t. My mum used to get really angry about me working, felt I should be at home wi8th LOs and didn't understand that to get anything I HAD to work. It is as you say forcing mums to go out to work who don't want to, and so losing out on precious time with their children.

[joelalie]

I know the neg equity problem. We bought in 1988 for 39k just before the price crash. Sold for 26k in 1999 as our one-bed house just wasn't big enough for 3 of us. Had to get a 125% mortgage which did hurt. But if we hadn't had to move it wouldn't have been an issue. Anyway the falls we see these days are tiny compared to then.

[rarrie]

joelalie, I think the problem is for those who are new first time buyers. Take the example of a typical young couple in my area. They have recently bought for the first time, buying a house worth 150K with a 10% deposit. Should the house price fall below 15k, then they will be in negative equity.

It probably doesn't bother you or I, if you have a large amount of equity in the property, but if you don't it can be a real worry!

[Twiglett]

think we've done bloody well out of the housing market ..but we chose areas we believed would improve in London rather than those that had already seen a huge big improvement

So I bought my 2 bed flat in 1998 for 83K sold in 2001 for 190K

current house, despite fairly large mortgage is big enough for us to have another child if we want to .. I will be happy to live here till my kids grow up .. and the area has also zoomed up to a state where I couldn't afford to move here now but despite our big mortgage we're sitting on even bigger equity (not that that means anything apart from we're cushioned if the market crashes even by 50%)

[lusciouslynda]

I agree with Joelalie, falling house prices can only be a problem for those hoping to make a fast buck.

We moved back to our home town last Autumn. I had stopped working to look after DD. Now due to give birth to no 2. We had to borrow 4 times DH salary to afford a small house in a street where we could have bought much bigger five years ago and on 2 salaries.

Oh, and we were bidding against people who were obviously buying to let and pushing the prices up.

We are barely scraping by - food shopping on credit cards.

As soon as I have squeezed this baby out I am going to have to leave baby with my mum and go back to work.

So the rise in house prices has taken away my choice about working or not and dictates how we live.

[tallulah]

But are house prices really out of line? We bought our first house in 1983 for £19995. We earned £3k a year each at the time and the only reason the bank would give us a mortgage was because we joined their "getting married' scheme and saved £100 a month with them (a lot of money to find out of a gross salary of £250 a month) . We saved £2000 and they had to give us 10 times the amount we'd saved. They tried to get out of it because they said we didn't earn enough but I'd kept the original conditions. (ya boo sucks to them)

For a couple both on £15k, 5x our starting salary, a house costing 5x £19995 would be about right wouldn't it? (obviously not in London or other big cities).

It must be hard with student debt etc but we both went from our parent's homes to this first house, whereas people now don't seem to stay at home- you can't save for a deposit if you are paying out rent.

As for building more houses, we are unlucky enough to live in Ashford where Prescott has decreed that tens of thousands more houses will be dumped. The houses being built aren't for the likes of us, or for anyone who was born and brought up here- you need a fat relocation package or London weighting to be able to afford these. Prices here used to be reasonable but it's people relocating who are pushing up the prices for everyone else.

[expatinscotland]

'Expat, do you have the right to buy? or did you become a tenant in your flat once that right was withdrawn? '

This is not a council flat. Scotland's housing associations no longer offer right to buy, which I feel was a terrible idea anyhow and is responsible in part for the current situations.

We are also 'market value' renters, not housing association tenants in the sense that we get a discounted rent. We live here b/c we have an assured tenancy.

[joelalie]

Does anyone else get annoyed when house prices fall and it's universally announced as bad news??? For whom? If you own already and aren't intending to move it's irrelevant, if you own and are intending to move then whatever you buy will be cheaper too, and if you want to buy and currently don't, then at least you'll have more chance to get a foot on the ladder. It might be bad news for those people who speculate on house prices but personally I have more sympathy for those who want to buy to have a roof over their heads.

[Mercy]

Pebblemum - ask someone from Environmental Health to come and check your flat asap. Also, if the damp is affecting your children's health (I assume it must or will do), your GP should be able to write you a letter confirming this.

What an awful situation . Good luck

[Normsnockers]

We have been bl**dy fortunate, graduating at the right time and with my inclination to buy a little property after a few years of working and then pushing a reluctant dh to buy a large "fixer upper" of a property nearby.

We now have approx £350,000 of property with about £80,000 of finance outstanding.

However I fear that this is not really ours, only on paper and only at this point in time, pending any property price crashes.
It is not ours long term anyway as god knows how ds and his sibling due in the autumn will be able to manage to buy anything unless we pass some of it to them in the form of re-mortgage monies or other financial support before we die. Otherwise they'll be renting til we die and waiting for the day they can inherit funds for a home of their own.

[ruty]

true poppadum. But still doesn't explain why house prices rocketed` so fast here in comparison to other european countries with a similar/better standard of living. Also, here apartments are built like shoeboxes, with no open space for children to run around. I could hack this flat more easily if we could go downstairs and have space to play outside.

[Nightynight]

that is a fair enough point, poppadum. But a family with boys and girls needs at least 3 sleeping rooms, really (parents/boys/girls) as the children get older.

It used to be common in UK for big families to live in a 2 up, 2 down house. I think lots of families are squashed into 1 or 2 bedroom places now, but they dont want to admit it because it doesnt feature in English life as portrayed by the media.
We have been in this situation, and I know other people in RL who have been as well.

[poppadum]

Umm....I don't wish to start a flame war and haven't read the whole thread, but in answer to Ruty's questions about things elsewhere in the world: people in many other countries have much lower standards. Children generally share a room; my boy and girl share a room and will continue to share one until they are teenagers. I shared my room with my sister until I was in my teens myself, and have lived all over the world, but never had anything larger than a two and a half bedroom. A garden is a luxury in most metros, and so is a three bedroom house.

This isn't to make light of the difficulties people have here, just to say that Britain is by no means the worst place to buy a house.

[ruty]

that sounds like a good idea garfieldsgirl - do try pebblemum, you shouldn't have to put up with conditions like that.
BTW Flossam when i applied for a mortgage they were'nt the slightest bit interested in the fact that i was a graduate, only in how much money i earned...[confused emoticon]

[GarfieldsGirl]

Pebblemum - 1 - have you benn to environmental health? They were really good with us when we were renting private and as you're council there's more rules, and 2) you can get part buy/part rent. Go to PHA opposite St Marys Church, also try Eastleigh HA and Swaythling. We were offered a couple, but as we weren't council others got them. You are in an ideal position for part buy. PHA have loads of places, it's worth a try.

[Cristina7]

Our DS(6) and DD(1) share a bedroom. We'd like a bigger place etc but get on with life as it is.

[pebblemum]

According to the council it isnt damp but condensation WTF, they installed a special heater in our bedroom which is supposed to stop it but all it does is keep us awake with the humming noise it make, the damp is still there.

Dont feel bad about wanting a house linnet I think everyone should be able to afford their own homes, we work hard for what little money we earn. There is nothing selfish in wanting something that belongs solely to you. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing that you are paying money to someone else just for the privelige of living in a house. At least when you buy somewhere you know that every mortage payment is one step closer to owning your very own house instead of paying for your landlords holidays!!!

[Linnet]

Pebblemum, your situation sounds terrible and I'm sorry to hear how sad you are. I would have thought that with such a bad damp problem the council would HAVE to move you but obviously they have ways of avoiding it, which is so unfair to you and your family.

I feel really bad now saying that I'd love to live in a house and moaning about how we can't afford it. My family and I are very lucky where we live and we are not stuck for space so it's from a selfish point of view that I'd like to live in a house and not a flat.

Although it's still terrible just how many people can't get onto the property ladder because of the prices.