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?

We have been extremely lucky. Bought in 1998, moved about 18 months later to a different county where we got a house split into 2 flats for the same money next door to a park and close to the sea. I hated the area and found that someone had been murdered in the park next door to it shortly before we got there. I was so desperate to get out that we remortgaged that house and bought another one with the equity as I couldn't wait for it to sell and let both the flats.

We then moved back to south coast again and got a very good deal on a bigger house as we were chain free. We can just manage it on one salary.The flats are in an area that is being heavily regenerated and house prices are likely to go up long term which may give us the chance to sell up and pay off our mortgage. Pure luck, no judgement what so ever and although we stand to gain I think it's rubbish what it's like for people who were born later than me or who weren't in the position to buy for whatever reason.

Yes - more houses built.. and I mean houses proper ones with gardens. Not flats, or teeny shoebox houses with stamp sized front lawn. And if possible some sort of house price cap - houses being a certain size with x amount of rooms can only cost a maximum of x amount... no idea how that would work though.

I'm guessing the retiring renters will end up in retirement renting complex type places - My mum likes the sound of the apartment places you get with a warden - she says she doesn't want to be old and doddery in the family home with the stairs - just a nice cosy apartment with someone to check that you haven't fallen over and broken a hip, and an alarm if you start to have a heart attack.

Meant to say have gained substantially and still may well do in the future.

We couldn't afford to buy in London so decided to move up North. All our friends said we were mad and that we'd never be able to come back.
We bought a 3bed detached for £70k and sold it 2 years later for £135k. With this bit of equity we came back and bought a good family house. Those friends who scoffed were still renting and now feel even further away from buying their own home.

I think that unless you absolutely have to stay in a certain city for work and can't work anywhere else in the country then moving to a more affordable area is a good option.

I know this isn't an option for everyone but I'm always amazed when people lament, 'but I've lived here all my life and I don't want to leave my family and friends.'

People may guess who I am in RL from this info, hence the namechange.

We've been very fortunate, which is all down to dh's foresight. He bought the house we are in at an auction in the early 90's, in the middle of a deep recession.

He was single at the time and didn't need a family house or the size of mortgage that went with it. He struggled many times to keep up the repayments and had to rent it out for a few years, but it seems to have been worth it.

He bought it for £100k about 15 years ago and it is now worth about £550 - 600K.

I'm one of those HM .

I am very very close to my mum (location and relationship) and the thought of moving fills me with dread. I don't make friends easily, and leaving the few I have got would make me sooo isolated. We did talk about it at one point, and even started researchign job options for DH, but I ended up on antidepressants in just the planning stage!

I think its all down to personality. As much as I want to own my own home, I want to stay near my support more.

It wouldn't be right for you then, Flame! One of the appeals for me was the distance from both mother and MIL!

People keep saying things like UK is only place with stupidly high prices... The cost of housing bck in my native california (San Diego) is much worse than anywhere I have lived in England. Average cost of a home there is currently about $400k (~£290k).

In 1989 my divorcing parents put their house on the market for about $730,000 (bit higher than Estate Agent suggested). They finally sold in 1995 for $430,000... the property market had fallen that much.

My mother bought a house in 1995 for $125,000, did about $60,000 of work on it. Sold it in 2003 for an area record $625,000. House prices are still going up in San Diego. So please don't think UK is only place with stupidly volatile housing market.

We were in the process of buying a house (5 bed, three storey) in 2002 - offer accepted in Feb, but still not completed in July/Aug. The value of the house (we were buying for £70K) had gone up by about £10K in this time, so the owners pulled out.

Then found out we were moving to a different part of the country so put house buying on the back burner. We can't afford to buy in this area (tourist Cornwall!) so bought a flat to let out in Gloucester for £105K - one bedroom with lounge/kitchen :(

We rent our house here, and hope to buy another flat to let in a couple of years when I go back to work. We will probably end up renting whilst DH is in the Navy (at least the next 25 years hopefully), and then hopefully selling the two flats will give us enough money to buy a house.

Just wish the solicitors had got their act together quicker on the purchase of the first house :(

Renting property round here is ruinously expensive - £1200 for a 3 bed terrace house in a reasonable part of town. Just can't see how anyone can afford to start a family .

And if you are renting can't the landlord give you 3 months notice whenever he likes?

Mine can give 2 months notice whenever he likes. But, then, so can I. I have to admit if he did I'd be in a very unpleasant crunch. oh my.... I haven't got a plan for this. I best come up with one....

i didn't know that about san diego but generally as a rule the UK is much worse than the rest of europe and certainly the parts of the US i have heard about from friends. I just wonder why it happened here and why the govt did nothing about it..

The government have done nothing about it because they are making a lot of money from it:

Much more tax revenue from stamp duty nearly everyone has to pay this now, many at 3% or more

Much more revenue from inheritance tax - many ordinary people have estates which become taxable at 40% because the value of their homes has increased so much

Plus those who suddenly have a lot of equity are re-mortgaging and boosting the economy with their consumerism

We rent our shabby 2 bed ex council house for 700 quid a month, as we cant afford to buy our own property. It makes me mad to think we are being ripped off blind for it because we can't afford to rent anything better (average family house rent here in Bath is £1000+ pcm) We decide that if we waited to be able to afford to buy a house we'd never have kids. As it is, we have a 16 month old DS and another on the way in September, and we will just have to make do for now. The high property prices in Bath come from the fact thet there is an inflated student population, so all the houses in affordable areas are snapped up by people on a buy to let basis, and there is also alot of second homes here. Dp earns a decent wedge, but we don't see a penny of it, as it goes on rates/council tax/rent. We also shit ourselves that we will be evicted, as our landlord is of no fixed abode and we are effectively living in his home.

yes i suppose that was a silly question about the govt.
Still don't know tho what made it happen here -even tho we had that recession which made prices fall, why did they have to gain so fast and so steeply afterwards? I HATE estate agents - so greedy.

If house prices crash, the govt would also be a deep sh_t because homeowners would be up in arms.

we are in oxford walrus, and i can't tell you how many times we've been in estate agents and some mop haired ex eton youth has swaggered in saying his parents want tp buy a property for him whilst at university - and then proceeds to look at house specs we can only dream about. When I was at university here my parents had no money, but i guess most do.

everyone I knew rented at Uni except for 1 person whose parents had bought them a house

It hasn't affected us as no#3 turned up unplanned. But if that hadn't happened we would have stuck at 2 as we don't have the space and can't afford to move.

Isn't this the price we pay to live in a capitalist society though?

We bought our house in the South East 6 years ago and it is now worth double what we paid so I suppose we bought at the right time.

When I bought my first house 14 years ago, I did so on my own (in the southeast). I lived in a bedsit for 2 years paying £50 a week rent in order that I could save a deposit plus fees. On top of that I had to pay council tax, gas and electric bills as well as run a car in order to be able to travel to work. I had my own kitchen facilities but shared bathroom. My take home pay then was just under £800 per month (newly graduated from PhD studies but earning below average salary). I now see friends and colleagues renting houses or flats and paying a fortune in rent but I think they would be better of sacrificing their home comforts for 2 years, live frugally in a bedsit or shared house in order that they could save up a sizable deposit. Similarly, I think they should consider living in cheaper areas whilst they save up but I find that many do not want to sacrifice their lifestyle. I did it when I was on my own so imagine what a couple could achieve? I'm just basing this thought on my own experience.

I don't see the connection to capitalism.

I agree that many people are unwilling to sacrifice today's lifestyle for later comforts. It seems to me that many people in the UK expect to be taken care of. They believe it is the governments responsibility to see that they will be taken care of.

Only trouble is, the government is not delivering on this promise. They don't have the money that people have been paying into the pension system. The birth rate is going down. And when those of us in our 30s are retired, there won't be enough money to support us.

I'm luck in that we can live in the US or the UK (or anywhere in Europe if I get my UK citizenship).

Ireland is just as bad and mortgage rules are stricter (you can't borrow 4x your salary.) We bought in 2000 for 130K (Irish pounds) and sold it for nearly 300K (euro).
Then we moved to Canada, where we just bought a four-bed detached house in a great area... CASH, no mortgage at all, just with the profit! Everything is relative though, here you pay property tax every year whereas in Ireland there's no tax except at the buying/selling point. And salaries are much lower, dh's job pays a third less. So we were pretty much counting on the house price thing. There aren't many SAHMs here at all so I'm pretty lucky.

means that I am a complete wage slave and have no real time to myself but thats also because DH is a SAHD and earns nothing (not that he ever earnt all that much tbh). Means that to geta decent garden we've had to move waaaaay out of London and I now have a 3-4 hour daily commute to deal with. Means that DH and I live somewhat separate lives during the week and then have a tense reengagement at the weekend. We'd love another kid but how? I couldn't do the commute heavily pg and would have to forget bfing altogether.

TBH I earn a very good wage and am lucky to do so/have worked f-ing hard to do so but I have to say I sometimes wonder if its worth it. The SE is stupidly expensive for lifes little luxuries like... er, housing,

Well, we have left the UK, hopefully to settle in France for good, when our travels are over.

All those years I worked and studied, and I don't even get a decent house? No thank you.

By capitalism I was thinking about the exchange of goods and services in a free market economy which is dictated by the foibles exchange rates, inflation, interest rates etc which in turn are affected by supply and demand in the market. I'm not an economist so I'm probably talking a load of bull.