BritishBibliophile Wants A House

savingwannabe

Congrats on your savings, the job and being savvy. You have just made my day.

BritishBibliophile

Thank you savingwannabe, I'm enjoying seeing your Kitchen Fund increase, well done on breaking the quarter mark!

Pay day came and went so I moved the money around, threw just over £300 in and, as usual, will hopefully be able to push more at it once I get past more of the month and see how things are going. I've got a budget for Christmas that I always stick to, and I've started the shopping, an Amazon box has arrived and there's a few gifts hidden in the boot of my car too So far my biggest problem buys are my Mum and one of my sisters. Mum I'll eventually figure out, sister is a bit more difficult as she will hopefully be going to university in September and I want to be able to surprise her with a little box of goodies on her departure, so everything I keep thinking of is actually being postponed until then :rotfl:

Saw Gentleman Caller this weekend, he's being a savvy saver at the moment as he's taken out one of the new Help to Buy savings accounts and will probably get the ISA soon as well. I on the other hand am keeping my current ISA, but we've been planning our holiday to Rome for next year and he's picked out a very expensive place to start on AirBNB, so I'm now going to research some cheaper options on that website to try and bring the cost down a bit. It'll be our 3 year anniversary and our first foreign holiday together, as well as a first foreign holiday for both of us in 4 years, otherwise we'd stick to our normal UK-based trip and save the money.

New total: £8347.46

savingwannabe

£8,000 holy moly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well done.

Everything you have posted is spot on and money saving really, really well done. Wow. That is my financial goal for my kitchen and what i will buy if i manage to keep my job during the next few years.

Congrats I hope planning for your holiday goes really well and you enjoy it.That is half the fun.

BritishBibliophile

It's the last day of 2015 so it's time for a round up of the savings. As of 31st December 2015 I now have £8414.51 in the house deposit fund :T I've been TT for the past few weeks but although I saved them on a spreadsheet I forgot to note them on here, and then I had some money left over from last month's wages so I just popped that in last night too.

My final total for 2014 was £6036.77, which means that this year I've managed to save £2377.74 Not brilliant compared to some of the numbers I see mentioned in the Saving to Buy a House thread, but I'm really pleased with it as I didn't qualify for the bonus at my old job this year (normally £800 after tax) and have only been in my new job for 5 months. A lot of that money has come in in the last 5 months though, which just shows how little I was able to save when living in London and being paid a rubbish wage.

Anyway, the big and exciting news for the end of the year is that Gentleman Caller looked at his savings, looked at rental prices, and then looked at the cost of a mortgage, and decided that instead of renting somewhere together we should buy in 2016! The cost of renting in this area would have been around £700 a month (unless you move REALLY fast and get one of the £600 a month flats, but you have to be first in the queue and ready to agree on the spot), which is also roughly the cost of a mortgage if we buy a property for £180k with the combined deposit we have.

Rather than get caught in the trap of ever increasing rent while mortgages rates stay low, we've decided to take a risk and buy even though the market really needs a drop. If we buy at the lower end of the market then hopefully we'll be spared too much of a drop, and we'll be OPing the mortgage anyway which will hopefully reduce the risk of too much negative equity.

We've both taken out Help to Buy ISAs, which we can't get the bonus for until March/April time, so that gives me until Easter to shove more money in the savings, put some aside for my car insurance, make sure my credit rating is looking healthy, and we're going to drive around a few places near my parents and near Gentleman Caller's parents and see what we like, and then take it from there. Then in the intervening time between looking and actually finding somewhere I'll be saving money towards a Furniture Fund, because all we've got at the moment are some bookcases and a TV :rotfl: And some kitchen things that my uncle very kindly bought me from a dedicated Amazon wishlist I set up, they're currently sitting in a box under a sofa.

I hope everyone has a wonderful, savings-fuelled 2016!

BritishBibliophile

1st January has been and gone and I've been busy with the accounts. £200 (maximum per month) has gone in to the Help to Buy ISA and a further £314.37 in what I think of as the main "house deposit" account, bringing me up to £8928.88

Tantalisingly close to £9000 but this is another expensive month as my road tax runs out at the end of the month and it's my youngest sister's birthday, but I'll try to have a lot of NSDs in the run up to both these things and maybe I'll be able to hit £9000 before the end of the month.

I also got a £5 Amazon giftcard the other day for 2 reviews I did for Smart Money People (they did a one-off on Christmas Eve, they don't normally pay for reviews) so I've added that to the Furniture Fund to bring it up to £170 (target is £1000). Saw Gentleman Caller today and told him it means we can afford to buy either a whisk or a cheese grater, he thinks we'll get more use out of the whisk. I'm actually going to wait and see if I can get that up to £10 by the summer and then buy both :P

ahX

Hi BritishBibliophile, I picked up this thread from a google search back in October time when I was asking myself a lot of similar questions to do with Money/Home Ownership/Savings/Salary etc & where I should be at my current age (27), basically feeling sorry for myself, without wanting to do anything about it!
You have helped to inspire me to get finances in order and as such I started a "3 year plan" of my own from October in order to get in a strong position financially to be somewhere near a deposit that is required when it comes to purchasing property in London.

For a few years now, I had convinced myself that there was no chance I would ever get on the ladder and would have to move out of London in order to get anywhere near property ownership and would have to settle for paying over inflated rents in zones 3/4 of the London tube map. Especially without financial backing from family members or winning the lottery etc. Then I started noticing that it wasn't just buy to let investors from foreign shores or people from homes under the hammer securing these properties it was increasingly more and more of people my age seemingly taking the leap and managing to purchase their own property in trendy sought after areas of east London and so on, which got me thinking surely if they can do it so can I. Like many of the responses that have reassured me in this post, I have also wasted a lot of money on partying, holidays & general nonsense without really giving the future a bit of thought, which ultimately lead me to the decision that I'm basically just starting from scratch and have got most of the partying out of my system and that with a fairly competitive salary and a long term significant other of whom we are currently sharing a 1 bedroom property together, there is indeed a chance to get myself sorted and on the ladder.

I've decided to take the after tax salary split % ratio of the following;
50% - Living expenses (rent, bills, food/groceries etc)
20% - For the lols (nights out, treats etc)
30% - Savings.

I was with the same bank for most of my years and this was pretty much by default as the building society I had been with as a child was absorbed by this particular high street bank. After subscribing to Martin's money saving tips & hints and following the MSE website advice on current and savings accounts and banking generally I decided to switch my current account for free & receive a £150 bonus for doing so! with this new account it has also allowed me to open a 6% regular saver account of which i can deposit a maximum of £300 per month with the rest of my savings sitting in a standard saving account all of which better off than any service I was offered by my previous bank.
Further to these accounts I have also opted to open a help to buy ISA with the Halifax at a 4% variable rate where I have deposited £1200 this month already and will proceed to put monthly amounts of (max) £200 into this account for the 3 year period of the plan which I hope to end up with roughly £8,000 which the government will add 25% to for free, happy days! My SO will also be doing a similar exercise with the HTB scheme.

So between these 3 savings accounts, I am aiming to put;
£200 HTB ISA
£300 Regular saver
£? any remaining I can spare (aiming for £150 per month) amount to a general savings account.

Anyway, the reason for posting all this was just to try and follow you on your journey and use the opportunity to share my current milestones towards my deposit.

Let's take Jan 16 as my start date & say currently I have £3600 safely invested towards my future House Deposit, with the 3 year plan I am hoping to have accumulated £30,000 for which I hope will be more than a competitive position within the housing market!

Happy to take any advice from anyone on here if there's any tricks I've missed or how I can improve the 3 year plan, thanks for the inspiration!

BritishBibliophile

Hello ahX and welcome to the board! :beer:

I'd highly recommend starting a thread here in the How Much Have You Saved forum so that we can all cheer you on! Trust me, once you start tracking it, it becomes really addictive!

Possibly the only thing I can really suggest is to set yourself targets for each year, which you can then break down further if you need to. Right now, 3 years is a long way away and you're probably sitting there thinking that the number you're aiming for is huuuuge. For me, £10k was a big number, one that I didn't think I would ever hit. But by aiming for the smaller numbers in the beginning, it helped encourage me to stay focused on the overall goal. When you break it down it becomes much easier and more manageable, plus you get to give yourself a big pat on the back when you hit another landmark

Anyway, did a little TT today of £2.68, I finished buying my youngest sister's birthday things (it's her birthday tomorrow) so it seemed like a good time to check the account. I've actually got more than expected in it, so once I fill up the petrol tank on Saturday I'll be able to shove more in the savings ahead of payday, let's just say I may be hitting a new mark before the end of January

Went over to visit Gentleman Caller last weekend and we drove around bits of Essex to see what areas we liked, gave ourselves some good options. Some places that we thought would be nice proved to be not quite what we were hoping for, but then this is why you view places before you start looking for properties! We've now both signed up for alerts from a local estate agent and I've got my Rightmove alerts set too, also need to sign up Zoopla and possibly a second agent in that area so we cover all bases, if a house comes up in our preferred area in our budget then I want to know about it!

I'm starting to get a bit impatient already though :rotfl: Haven't told Gentleman about it because I know it's just me. I just keep seeing furniture that I want to buy and paint colours that I like and NONE of it can go ahead until we actually buy somewhere, and right now we haven't even looked at a property. I must remain on my best behaviour over the coming months and not get carried away :A

savingwannabe

Well done you are doing brilliantly. What an amazing start to the year.

BritishBibliophile

Pay day has been and gone and my bank account is once again reeling from the blow :rotfl: £394.78 is now sitting comfortably in the savings accounts giving me a tasty total of £9397.44, it would be more but I had to pay road tax today.

Me and Gentleman Caller will be going to view a house on Saturday afternoon as part of an Open House viewing session. I'm trying my best to not get attached to it through photos, but it does tick a lot of boxes.

We're also potentially going to see someone at Nationwide on Saturday morning to discuss what kind of amount we'd be able to borrow. I tried their online calculator this evening and it said they wouldn't be able to offer us any mortgage But it didn't say why, just that "you need to discuss this with an advisor". So that's put me on a bit of a downer for the evening and has shown me that I must not get too excited about this house, it will never be as easy as I may hope.

Oh well, we'll see how they are in person, maybe there's something I missed.

In better news I got £44.25 in Amazon giftcard from Quidco, mostly cashback from the RAC. Picked Amazon over the bank transfer as it can go straight to the furniture fund without me appropriating it for the house deposit

New total: £9397.44
Furniture fund: £214.45

aardvaak

BritishBibliophile I would not like to belittle your efforts in your saving which is very well done but I would suggest £9397.44 is a long way off of buying even the smallest house even in a rough area