It's a mixture of a bit of trepidation for the future, but also the rate at which EVERYTHING is going up and it just doesn't seem to stop.
Food. We've all seen the food inflation prices, on a basket of 500 regularly compared goods (idk? dried pasta, rice, milk, butter, etc?), but we've also all been in the shops. We know that stuff outside that basket has gone up, for the most part, 40-50%, if not more. And a lot of these are regular things, like a cucumber, doubling in price. Sugar's gone up by 60% and so have most things containing it. It's never been so expensive to be fat in my lifetime.
Insurance. I'm expecting our car insurance to be 30-40% more next year because it's been all over the news.
Car lease. The absolute cheapest we could find a new car lease went up from 250 to 352 per month last Spring.
Cooker. In Dec 22 I was looking to replace our cooker. I got annoyed trying to decide and left it til Feb 23, by which time it had gone up 10% (a low end range, so almost 2k).
Cat operation. Quoted 2.5k in October 22. Sat on the fence because it's quite a brutal procedure and I wasn't sure whether she could cope due to having two illnesses. Called about it in Feb 23. Now 3k.
Cat meds. Our cat had to have blood tests monthly and every single month I went in, it had gone up by a couple of quid. Might not seem like much, but when that couple of quid takes it to £196 for a blood test, it ain't cheap, and that's not even the super deluxe blood tests. A 34 hour emergency stay was £930 in October last year. Fecal sample, £250. Vet appt, £54ish. Monthly injections for other cat: £110 plus vet fee of £54 or nurse fee of £32 (the injection vet was taking the p*ss, we went elsewhere).
Energy. Yeah so the unit rate is going down on 1st Oct, but they're increasing the daily charge, and there's no £67 a month payment towards energy for six months this winter. People are going to feel that.
Petrol. Two, three weeks ago, it was 1.39 a litre. Now it's bounced back up above 1.45p. The volatility of it is unpleasant.
Aren't water companies about to put bills up massively? Mine is included in my rent so idk, but I think I read something. They've had a reputation for years of being a very cheap utility, so that's a bit of a shock.
BT put my broadband up from 52 to 59 in March even though I'm in a two year contract, because it's written in their T&Cs that they can still put prices up mid contract once a year. I can see they're offering the same deal for £32.99 at the moment, but when those folks contracts run out, it'll shoot to over 60, even though they have literally no extra work to do to keep the customer. I have absolutely no idea what they're going to propose to charge us when we're out of contract next August - ninety quid? But they do, because they can.
I could probably think of a load more examples but it's not necessary. It's not that things always need to go up in price, it's that things you don't usually notice a price increase on are shocking, because the increase is so substantial, or, things that have, in a roundabout fashion not really increased much over the years suddenly are. It's just relentless.
Added to that, mortgage rates we've been quoted (with 95% LTV) have gone from 2.77% to 6.56% from April 22 to August 2023. So the house you've quoted above would have cost £933 in April last year, this August it's £1371 a month.
If you look beyond affordability for a minute (we could buy that and still have over 3k a month disposable), look at the amount of money you're repaying in total for the loan. For a duration of 25 years:
Apr 2022 rate: total amount repayable - 299k
Aug 2023 rate: total amount repayable - 421k
This is how it ends up falling into the do I even want to? category.
Yeah, I know rates have historically been around 6% and we need to get used to the new normal, but the difference is what you get for your money. The actual bricks and mortar around you. How much of your income it takes up, that it's pretty obvious we're past the stage of houses rises in value 'so it'll be alright in the end', plus, for some, crippling anxiety about negative equity, particularly to those of child bearing age who KNOW if they start off really small, they're absolutely going to need a bigger home within 3-5 years.
I love that the government think they're doing citizens a good turn by encouraging banks to extend mortgage terms and so on. Yeah, it means people don't lose their homes and I think that's absolutely great, but on a 40 year mortgage at a 6.56% mortgage rate, you'll be paying back 574k for a 200k loan. It's not just your immediate disposable income you have to worry about, it's a lifetime's worth of it.
Of course the banks want you to extend your terms and not downsize. OF COURSE THEY DO!
Ooh, that went on a bit, didn't it?
/rant done
whistles