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?

and we are both on good wages.

We have just bought our first house, I am 21 and my dp is 22. We paid just under 90k which is really really cheap and I know that.
It was paid for mostly with inheritance from dps nana. We agonised over buying it or not because thats a lot of money to spend, but I won't have a full time ok paying job (nurse) until at least 2008 and dps prospects are slight. If we had rented until 2008 we worked out we would have spent between us over 20,000 since leaving home, with no guarentee of even getting a morgage at the end. We also have £20,000 worth of (student) debt between us. Ho hum.

I am incredibly lucky that I live in an area where house prices are not crazy and that my dp had a large chunk of inheritance knocking around. And now I own a house I feel like a massive weight has been lifted off my shoulders, I can start to save for my wedding, I have actually started to think that maybe I might be able to have children before I am 40!

But it is frustrating, I hate the fact that I may never be able to afford my own house, I hate that in this country I still have to rely on handouts from my dp/parents etc just to survive. I worry a lot about my future and how I will afford to live. I am not extravagant, we have no car, we spend £30 a week on food between us, i save £100 pounds a month etc. But I still have no money and honestly even when I qualify I don't think I will be ok.

I am another one who bought at 19 (single p/t wage)for £26k in 1999.Now worth £90-95 k so couldn't have bought now.

Dh and I and our two dd's live in a housing association flat. It has 3 bedrooms and a shared drying green at the back, with the flat upstairs and a small area out front that is fenced so my girls can play there. It's in a small cul-de-sac and it's a fairly nice area and near to town so I don't complain too much.

But in an ideal world I would dearly love to live in a proper house with an upstairs, sad I know but I've lived my entire life in flats and would love to have something to call my own. Between us Dh and I don't earn enough to get a mortgage on a house. We would qualify for a small mortgage but all that would buy us would be a 1 or 2 bedroomed flat in the centre of town up a close above shops.

Out of interest I've just checked the property guide website in our area to see what the cheapest property is and it's a 1 bedroomed flat on the high street and it's selling for offers over £51,000 We wouldn't get a mortgage that big even if we wanted to buy that flat

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

We desperately need to move and would love to be able to afford our own place but it is impossible. We are stuck in a small 2 bed flat that is full of damp and yet the council wont move us or allow us to exchange. we have been fighting them for almost 5 yrs and have got no where. All we want is somewhere nice to live where our 2 boys wont have to put up with their clothes and toys being ruined by the damp all the time, and where i know they arent breathing in dangerous spores but we cant do that. We have spent the last 2yrs looking at different houses/morgages but to no avail. We have even tried looking at houses that are practically falling apart to see if we could afford them but even they are out of our price range. The council keep announcing plans for new low cost houses in the area but unless you are a public sector worker you cannot buy them. It has even got to the point where we are considering buying this flat, doing it up and then selling it on but i hate that idea. If you buy from the council you cant sell it for 5yrs by which time I would have gone mad.

I hate living here and have lost all enthusiasm for decorating as it gets ruined by the damp after a couple of months, I have to replace the boys clothes/toys every few months due to the damage the damp does and we have no space whatsoever to put things so everywhere looks cluttered all the time. I hate this flat so much that i no longer allow anyone to come inside unless it is absolutely neccessary ie gas man. My sons cant have their friends in, my neighbours dont come in for a coffee and where possible I try to spend as much time out of the flat as i can. The thought of having to live here for another 5 years is enough to make me scream. I would love for ds1 to have his friends stay over or have all the neighbours round for a bbq in the summer but all the time we live here i cant allow it, i am so embarassed by the damp problem that I dont want anyone to see it.

If prices keep rising but wages stay the same this problem is just going to continue. Dh works very hard for his wages and yet he can even afford a decent roof over his sons heads, i know he gets upset by this and feels he is letting us down but its not his fault and there are lots of others just like us.

To prove how ridiculous the house prices are round here, the flat above us sold last year for £99,500. It is identical to ours except it doesnt have the damp problem we do. We would ideally need a 3bed house so imagine how much that would cost!!!

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.

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!!!

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 - 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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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%)

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!

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.

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.

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.