Do you feel lucky to have a house

[Lm1981]

I am early 40s and have a nice house which i constantly feel very fortunate to have. I rented all my 20s so can still relate to how renting felt like. I often think I am very lucky to be in this position and slightly embarrassed. I did work hard I just know that things could have been different. Does anyone else have any feelings like this?

I'd love to one day own a house but at 43 (me) and 48 (hubby) it's not likely to happen! We both work our bums off but don't earn enough to be able to afford a place to meet our needs (min 3 bed). Still privately renting.
But I do feel fortunate to have a roof over our heads and I feel very safe here ❤️

I feel extremely lucky every day. Lucky to have my house & health. If I was renting now, I would be homeless. I never take it for granted & I’m forever grateful that I have my house & no one can ever take it.

The word LUCK, implies tidy it is of good fortune and chance. Like getting a windfall or winning the lottery. That's what I call luck.

When you buy a house through hard work hard, it's not luck IMO.

How "HARD" do you think you should need to work to be able to afford your own home? Would you say that, for example, care workers, or labourers, or other people on minimum wage are simply not working "hard" enough? Or professionals in the south east? Are they not working "hard" enough either?

I feel very lucky indeed. I fell off the property ladder and thought I wouldn't get back on. I did around the age of 50. That's pretty lucky. Living in rental was so unstable even though the house was ok.

Of course you’re lucky if you had financial help from parents 🙄

Yes OP, I do. I bought in London 2 years ago with no help (parents very poor) and it’s no palace but I feel incredibly fortunate and lucky to have that security. Yes, I worked and saved but I don’t feel like I made any sacrifices really. I do feel smug that I did it alone, and like it’s more of an achievement than someone who got help. But nothing is ever solely down to hard work - privilege, luck, good fortune, whatever you want to call it, all play a part.

I grew up never going on holiday or doing anything frivolous really (again, poor parents) so I don’t feel like I had to give anything up because I never did it in the first place. I was pursuing a silly arts career where a lot of drinking and socialising came for free at industry events so my fun was on someone else’s dime. I wasn’t slaving away in a job I hated just to make money. I also have the luck that despite being poor my parents were culturally engaged and encouraged reading, creativity and learning and pursuing my goals, so I always felt confident in doing that, which got me to the point of being able to afford my flat. It was luck that I got offered the job that paid enough! I’m sure I interviewed well but I believe that even with the most preparation a lot of things are down to chance and circumstance.

@Fallenangelofthenorth
I totally agree. Husband and both work; I'm currently working as support staff in a school and he is a care worker in adult mental health.
But clearly neither of us work quite hard enough as we are still in a private rental at 43 and 48.
Must try harder(!)

Yes, also agree with this. It should be a basic accessible thing for everyone to have a secure home whether they’re a CEO or on the dole. In our current society being able to buy a home is in itself lucky.

I feel very lucky. I've worked all my life, rented shared houses for 17 years through uni and my husband and I only bought when I was 40 and he was 37. Six years later property prices have blown up so much we would have found it almost impossible to get a house now, and that's including me having had an inheritance due to my mum's early passing. I love having my own four walls.

This is satire right?

The fact it increased in value at that point in time and on your desired tome line is pure luck though. There could’ve been a recession and you’d have had no power over that

Extremely lucky. Home ownership is increasingly difficult for even those on average salaries. I inherited some money and whilst I’ll always be desperately sad about losing my family I’m very grateful to have a secure home.

I rented when my kids were tiny, having found myself falling off the housing ladder in the 2007 recession (dh was in financial sector recruitment!) and it was quite scary always knowing at any point you can be asked to vacate with 60 days notice.

We desperately need to fix housing in this country. So many people are too rich for social housing and too poor for ownership and there’s next to no security in private rental.

Every single day. We bought a terrace house in a sea side resort for 63k in our 40s. A developer offered us 275k which we took and bought a 5 bed doer upper 4 miles inland. The kids left home so we thought we would downsize but I found a damp patch the size of a salad plate on an internal wall the same day that the estate agents gave us a valuation ( the same price that we bought it!!! As we bought at the height of the boom Tbf it was always Monopoly money to us!) That damp patch via our insurance company (ALWAYS get the best insurance) renovated 5 rooms downstairs as the water leak was in the concrete floors, it took over 6 months and we had to move out! When we got the insurance breakdown we found that it cost them £50k and we got a brand new open plan kitchen. After all that we decided not to move!!! So yes we have been extremely lucky indeed

I feel fortunate that we are in a position to just about afford what we need at the grand old ages of 42 and 48.

I am grateful we didn’t buy three years ago and overstretch ourselves on cheap debt; we have learned a lesson of being extremely careful through other people’s misfortunes.

I am angry that our last two landlords have tens of millions of pounds in the bank between them and are the two who have broken most housing laws and terms of our lease out of the lot of them. I can’t wait to get out of our rental and start bothering whomever is the next Housing minister to find a way to force landlords to take their responsibilities more seriously - as I understand a section 21 ban is a double edge sword, I don’t think that’s the right thing to lobby for for future tenants to generally have a better time of it.

I've been thinking about this sort of logic. I guess two things are simultaneously true-

I feel like DH and I have worked incredibly hard to get where we are- true.

I feel incredibly lucky that our house is a happy home, that neither of us have had significant misfortunes or illnesses fingers crossed, to have interrupted such hard work yet: also true.

Very lucky to be mortgage free in a gentrifying area. We had significant help from my parents to buy this house, we feel both lucky and incredibly grateful. They decided they would rather see us in a mortgaged house than waiting for inheritance.

Yes! I’m in my late 20s and my DP is in their early 30s. We bought our first home last year, it’s a small two up and two down house, but to us - it’s perfect!

We feel incredibly lucky, but we had rented together for years before being in a position to buy. We had no help from our parents either, it was just us and our Lifetime ISAs against the world

I feel lucky, yeah.

Uni in London in the 90s with a grant including London weighting, halls cost a quarter of what they do now in my city, zero course fees.

Made almost 100% equity in 6 years on my first tiny house in the early 2000s then relocated to the north east after divorce. Sudden death of parent meant my mortgage is almost paid off now.

Fortunate maybe, not to have had eyewateringly expensive uni fees to repay, and to have received some inheritance. But relocation after (and because of) abusive divorce was the hardest decision of my life, I spent 16 years slogging myself as a solo parent and lost a parent in utterly harrowing circumstances. Yet I have the security of (almost) my own home 15 years earlier than expected, way before my younger colleagues can even dream of.

Like others, we've worked hard and delayed having our dd so that we could buy a home we wanted. However, we still feel incredibly lucky to have been able to do that. Many people work hard, it doesn't always lead to the same amount of choices and opportunities.
My home is a smallish cottage far from the city, but near enough to commute when needed. It has views over the forest and gives me the most wonderful feeling of peace. The garden is a wilderness, but I love everything about it. I feel lucky that I've been able to find somewhere I enjoy living so much.

Anyone who owns their own home is lucky, I agree it shouldn’t be like that though.

Anyone who bought their home 20 years or more ago is extremely lucky and it’s rather grating to hear all the self-aggrandising about hard work when it’s mostly luck of being born at the right time.

This is particularly prevalent in my parents friendship
group where they are all (yes all of the 9 I can think of) sat in houses worth £1m plus, these are “regular” people such as doctors, small business owners, teachers etc. often with stay at home wives, all who bought these houses before starting their families. I don’t know a single person in my generation (30s) who owns a house anywhere near that size/value despite having two people working just as hard or harder!

Of course it’s luck. For example ,it’s sheer luck that you are able to work and that you’re not living with a chronic illness which makes it impossible for you to work.

I am the same. Whenever I look up at it when I'm leaving or arriving I think I cannot believe you are mine. Its a house beyond my wildest dreams and not many of my friends are home owners so I feel doubly grateful.

I thank my lucky stars every day.

Bought my first house at 23 alone in the 90’s.
Worked every hour I could, saved like crazy.

Sold 7 years later for a small profit and bought our house now with dh, we saved for 2 solid years for a substantial deposit.

It’s worth 4 times what we paid for it, will be mortgage free in 2 years and the mortgage is very very low.

It’s too small now as our family gets older but there’s no way we would move and topple such good fortune over. Another 5-10 years we will be empty nesters so it will be just the right size.

I was watching ds kicking a football around the back garden yesterday thinking how lucky we are that we have somewhere for our kids to safely play in the sunshine. Our patch of land.

Extremely lucky and grateful.

Yes I do feel lucky that my husband and I benefited from an easier time to buy property plus I have been fortunate to inherit some money which means the mortgage will be paid off by the time I’m 58, husband will be 63. Considering at one time our mortgage seemed scarily high & seemingly endless, it’s a relief to get to this point.

We didn’t have to pay uni tuition fees either so that’s another thing to be grateful for.

Home ownership hasn’t always worked out well for us from a financial point of view and it’s been a bit like a game of snakes & ladders over the last 30 odd years. Nevertheless, we’ve ended up with a 4 bed detached house in a nice area. We made some good choices over the years but also were lucky with the timing as happened to already be on the property ladder when prices shot up (though had lost money on our first two properties).

This, absolutely.

I'm lucky I have my health, my ds, my siblings.

But my house is down to slogging away at a business degree when I would have much preferred Art, and choosing a career that paid well.

Then not spending money partying, and not having ds until I was in my 40s. Keeping working full time despite being a single mum. Buying scruffy homes and doing them up.