Bank of mum and dad

Halle71

When I bought my first flat 16 years ago my dad gave me a contribution of £3.5k, most of the deposit on my one bed flat.
Only a year or so out of uni I wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise.

I only found out later how sentimental that precious deposit was. When I was 8 my dad's mum passed away (his dad passed away when he was 17) and he was left a very modest sum. My dad who is the fairest and most financially astute man, reasoned that, if she had not had demetia she would have written a will that included grand children. Many years later he worked out how much we should get taking inflation into account and we were all given the deposits for our first homes. Although today they would barely cover the arrangement fees :-)

Then, five years ago, my dad's cousin died - we barely knew him but had reconnected in recent years. It was a complete surprise but, childless and a widower, he had decided to divide his inheritance tax free allowance between all the second cousins in my generation. We recieved circa £45k and this enabled me to move from a flat to a house when I was pregnant and had been made redundent and for which I will be eternally grateful.

In between these gifts I still moved three times in London as a single woman with no help but I always knew that if I got into difficulties my parents were there. I am very fortunate.

My parents are now due to give me a lump sum to pay towards my mortgage so we can move when the time is right with schools and in the hope we can avoid inheritence tax. It's brilliant but the price is that it is becaue my dad has a horrendous degenerative neurological disease. Sometimes money can't help.

QTPie

In-laws have given us a substantial gift: basically my husband's inheritance, but BEFORE they die (when they die the rest of their estate will go to various charities). This way they get to enjoy seeing us use it and they also get joy out of it (since they live abroad and come to stay with us rather regularly). Their lifestyle is in no way effected by their gift to us.

QT

DRP

both our sets of parents (and my grandparents) have helped with various expensive jobs, repairs, SDLT etc during our 2 house purchases over the last decade.

Very much appreciated too.

Jackie132

Once I took some help from my parents when I had to buy a house, but after some time I paid back to the parents. Since then I didn't demand yet. It is not bad to borrow or demand money from your parents, and it depends on the situation. If you think that you need money then you should not hesitate.

pops5588

jules888 wrote: »

No help from either sets of parents of me or my boyfriend.
Didnt expect it either.Kids are spolit enough these days as it is!

Pardon? I haven't seen anyone on here come across as spoilt, everyone who has said they had a bit of assistance has also said they are appreciative and know that they are lucky and very grateful. What's wrong with that?

Eponym

I'm I'm the process of buying my first home now.

I've saved the deposit myself, partly by being allowed to live at home for a low rent. My parents will give me £2000 towards the fees of buying the house. I got a new job before Christmas which required me to drive to work and they gave me my mom's car - she bought a new one. (It is 11 years old with only 33,000 miles on the clock and we worked out that it would be worth approx £3500. It was always planed that I would have the car and she would get a new one - I think they would have done it earlier for preference.)

My purchase will incur about £1300 of Stamp Duty which they've said they'll pay, as they liked the place so much and wanted to make sure I could offer enough not to miss out.

They've also drawn up a list of various old and spare bits of furniture, utensils etc I can have when I move in.

I'm very grateful!

brenda10

Great to see you all so appreciative of your parents if they were fit to help, having thoughtful children is wonderful for me as a parent who is in the process of helping my daughter and her boyfriend out, we are average Joe blogs but every little helps, it gives great pleasure to give no matter how much/little, in my case little.
Martin Lewis is my HERO.

onlyroz

My parents lent us £20k which enabled us to look at £250k houses rather than £230k houses, which made a *huge* difference due to the stamp duty theshold artificially deflating the value of houses in the £250-270k range. We paid them back about a year later when we sold our old flat (we tried being landlords for a year but gave up after a horrendous experience).

leccyblue

Help doesn't always come in the form of money...

We were helped by my wife's parents, who 5 years ago purchased a repossessed, run-down property for us to live in rent free. Over the first 3 years, we renovated the property throughout. Luckily we were able to do the majority of the work ourselves, saving a fortune. Over the last two years, we have been saving a £20k deposit to buy the property from them. We completed in January!

The purchase price took into account everything they had invested into the property, including all legal fees, buildings insurance etc. I guess this type of arrangement involves a lot of trust from both sides - for them, that we would be in a position to buy the property from them - and for us, investing money in renovating a property we didn't at the time own. But we were all comfortable with this and we are, and always will be really grateful for their help.

Living rent free was saving us circa £500 a month in rent, which helped massively with the renovation costs and subsequent saving - this, in conjunction with doing the renovation ourselves has meant we are now living in a property of a size and condition that we would have otherwise been unable to afford.

My parents aren't fortunate enough to be in a position to afford to do this sort of thing - however my Dad gave up a lot of his time to help with renovating, especially when fitting the new kitchen. We're also really grateful to him for this.

Moomum

We had a loan of £30k from the inlaws which paid our stamp duty. We saved nearly £200k for the deposit. We live in London.