How times have changed....

wymondham

The market conditions and prices have changed so much since we bought our house 13 years ago back in 1996.

Back then we got our 3 bed semi with garage and large rooms and garden in nice area for £34k and even then we were worried sick about how we would pay for it and had to really hunt for a lender who would touch us!!. We even managed to get this reduced from £36k as we thought this was too much!!

Our wages have no way near kept up with how much our house has 'supposedly' increased, so these must be hard times indeed.

I'm bewildered by how anyone now can take on a treble digit mortgage and expect to pay it off in their lifetime - it must be possible, but boy, what an enourmous change in such a short time!

Is a house worth any more now than back then?? - probably not really, it's the same bricks and mortar, it's just the 'market' - whatever that beast is!! Hopefully things are now correcting themselves a tad.

Not sure of the point of this post other than probably show my age (!!), and to express my admiration and guts for people taking this all in their stride!!

PasturesNew

I agree ... the sums they borrow are staggering. On the other hand, I am staggered by just how much people do earn too. Not everybody, but there do seem to be plenty of lemmings prepared to throw themselves into the abyss willingly.

Have you looked to see how much you'd be paying to rent a small place where you live now? I bet you'd be horrified at that price too and wondering where the money would come from. You'd probably imagine that by now you'd be living in a tent.

I bought in 2000 in a market that was racing ahead and I leapt on in what was (to me) a cheap area (compared to where I'd grown up) and I paid £90k then spent about £15k on essential improvements and 'must have' maintenance over the next 7 years.

amcluesent

>we got our 3 bed semi with garage and large rooms and garden in nice area for £34k<

Enjoy it while it lasts. There a queue of peeps going around the block who will all ride roughshod over property rights as the consequences of unfunded state provision turns into an emergency. "Obscene! Theft from the people! Hoarder!"

Twenty years from now, it could be very smart to have have nothing, so you'll pay nothing.

Inheritance levy planned for long-term care of the elderly

SailorSam

I'd hate to be a young first time buyer now. What was once thought to be a mortgage that you worried about taking out you now find you're paying less in a month than people are paying in a week.

safe

wymondham wrote: »

Is a house worth any more now than back then??

Yes. You probably couldn't build a house for anything like 34k now even if the land and labour was free.

Although it's not really a reflective comparison, what have you estimated the re-build cost on your home insurance?

pawpurrs

How much did you sell for PN?
House prices are completley crazy, and its amazing to think they kept selling at such high amounts.

loadsacash

We bought our flat in Edinburgh in 1998 for £49,000. I was a little worried as the survey said that it was only worth £48,000 and it seemed crazy to buy a flat for more that it was worth!

We had loads of problem getting a mortgage for more that 80%. I was temping at the time and they would not take my wages into account.

It seems that in just a few years that the banks have gove from being over cautious to being increadibly foolish

Davesnave

OK. If it's 'oldies reveal what incredible amounts of filthy lucre they have made via their property' time, here goes.....

I bought my first house in 1977, after an estate agent friend advised me against it, because 'house prices are not going to shoot up again.' He was renting me a large flat at the time, admittedly at a decent rate. I spotted a small 3 bed house that was sound, but needed modernising, and purchased it by sealed bid for £9 251. The advertising and sale process lasted 72 hours, as it was to close an estate. The agent chosen valued the house low to get instant interest, but the beneficiary was elderly and 'not of sound mind,' which also helped!;)

I sold that house ten years later for £58k, having modernised it twice; the first time painfully, as I had little money, and the second time at no monetary cost, due to a visitor losing their cigarette end......:rolleyes: (The emotional cost was with us for a few years though!)

So, 6x increase in price in 10 years. HPI is old news. If I go back a bit further, in 1960 my Dad bought a ramshackle Queen Anne 5 bedder for exactly £1k!

Treadmill

I bought my first house in 1998 for 43K, it was a three bedroom terrace on an estate, I regret now not stretching myself further ,for about 60K which I could have afforded at a real stretch,we could have bought a 4 bed detached in a more rural location, we sold our house for three times what we paid for it but there's more of a ceiling on teraces than detached, I reckon the bigger house we where looking at would have fetched 100K more if we had bought that.

I think buying the biggest we could afford and stretching ourselves would have been the right move for us, but say that today and its frowned upon, interestingly my multiplier at the time was well over 5x and I was never late or missed a payment.

wymondham

safe wrote: »

what have you estimated the re-build cost on your home insurance?

We havent really as the default home insurance amount automatically assumes £1million !!! (maybe they know something we don't - I'll probably have to increase this next year??!!)

thanks for all the replies chaps and chappets!

1echidna

I can remember being terribly resentful of the difficulty us youngsters had in buying a home and how much less the older generation had to pay (didn't quite realise the effect of inflation and how it would benefit me in the long run). We paid 20k in 1980 and have just sold (touchwood as contracts have not yet been exchanged) for 290k. Not quite a doubling in price every seven years but not far short.