OS Daily Wed 1st April 09

Dobie

seabright wrote: »

You've done brilliantly - really inspiring. One point you've made that I would question is your desire to quit the housing ladder and move into rented. What always worries me is that (hopefully) I won't have to pay a mortgage when I'm retired, and on a much lower income, but I would still have to pay rent.

But, if it works for you, that's great! I'm happy for you and your family that you seem to have found serenity.

Well done & thanks for your story Useless with wonga. I'm sure there are a lot of people here who have gone through something similar but I really admire your open & hionest style & your complete & the fact that you take complete responsibility for the situation.
I admit that, like seabright, I'm interested to know your reasoning behind selling up & going into rented accomodation? Me & DH got into trouble with the mortgage repayments many years ago but ever since we've ploughed every spare £1 into paying it off. As a result, we're mortgage free in our 50's & are now ploughing every spare £1 into our retirement savings. We couldn't have looked forward to a worry free retirement (financially at least) if we were going to pay rent.
Your thinking is very different so I'm very interested to understand it.

Penelope_Penguin

Well done UWW :T I'll add this to the Daily Thread where people talk about the ups and downs of their Old Style days

Dobie wrote: »

We couldn't have looked forward to a worry free retirement (financially at least) if we were going to pay rent.
Your thinking is very different so I'm very interested to understand it.

I think you'll find that when you take all the costs into account or owning a home (maintenance, decorating, insurance, etc) renting and owning come out costing similar amounts

Penny. x

Useless_with_wonga

Well the thinking is that our mortgage is not due to complete until I'm 65:eek:
Thats a long, long time. I'm just shy of 40 now. Basically we bought our first house 13 years ago. We bought in a nice area but got the house cheap(All we could afford) because it was all but falling down. We knew it needed work when we bought it but didn't appreciate quite how much work:o Anyway roll on 10 years and the house still needed work it was a millstone around our necks sucking us dry. We had taken out numerous loans etc to get stuff done not extravagant but essential stuff like a new boiler,Windows etc etc this just added more and more to our debt in terms of loans and increased mortgage.
Eventually totally fed up with the incesant spend spend spend on the house we decided to sell it.
At this point we seriously considered renting but again through some sort of misplaced pride/snobbery we thought we should buy. We sold our old house the price acheived just covered what we owed including estate agent fees/solicitors fees. We had an endowment on the first house which was under performing quite dramatically (Claimed miselling but it went nowhere)
We cashed in the endowment and used it as the deposit on our current home. This has now been wiped out by the drop in property prices and we are now 7K in negative equity:mad:
This house has been much better in terms of maintenance. Still in 3 years we have had to fork out for window repairs and the chimmneys could do with looking at.
So all in we are sick to death of being home owners. It has not been a happy experience for us initially at the first house and now the second house havng swallowed our deposit and some. The mortgage company being unwilling to do anything to help basically they don't care and we feel trapped by them.
To top it all by the time we have eventually paid it off plus all the maintenance costs en route we will maybe get 10 to 15 years before we might end up having to consider OAPs home/s then because we have struggled all our life BUT own a house we will be made to sell it to pay toward care homes/OAP accom etc.
I will get an occupational pension in addition to my state pension and renting seems so much simpler in terms of no maintenance to worry about,no greedy banks to deal with. We can get a nice farm cottage very near to where we are now for about £200 a month cheaper than we are now paying on the mortgage it just seems to make sense all around for us to take that route but for now we are stuck where we are due to the downturn in the property market.
So thats our thinking fed up of thinking I have a decent job so therefore I should own a house because everyone else does(keeping up with the Jones' certainly rings true for our past way of thinking) when it clearly is not the right thing for us to be doing.