How did you manage to buy your house?

Nichelette

We're in the process of buying a 2 bed house in SE. We're 32/33 and it has been hard. I have a bit of a long story due to helping my dad, but we pretty much saved a whole salary each month for some time now. Due to helping my dad I was no longer classed as a FTB so we have to pay stamp duty too which is so much here. We got married whilst saving too. It's not easy but if you can get your OH on board it helps a lot.

ProDave

Okay here is how I did it, quite a while ago now.

1986. I was convinced I was never going to afford to buy. House prices of the very cheapest homes were going up each month more than I earned in that month. Saving for a deposit would just not work.

Then a developer started building some very small houses on the edge of a grotty village. They were literally the cheapest houses on sale in the county. So I thought lets give it a go.

I reserved a 1 bedroom starter home. I went seeking a mortgage. The maximum I could get anywhere was 3.25 times my (above average) salary, even taking into account a pay increment due in 3 months time (high inflation was VERY handy)

That left me £5K (almost 15%) short of the purchase price to find. It was a new build, so I had a few months to scrape that together. So I sold a LOT of stuff, including a decent car, replaced with a very rusty £200 banger. Thankfully the builder took longer than expected to finish so that gave me another 4 months to scrimp and save and sell. I finally moved in with just £200 left in my bank account on completion day. Phew that was CLOSE.

There was no money for furniture. Parents bought me a carpet for downstairs as a moving in present. All furniture was old second hand donated cast offs. Upstairs had some bits of second hand carpet that nearly fitted.

I then had 6 months of "existing" I could only spend what I NEEDED (food and utility bills) No going out, no luxuries.

Again inflation, and pay rises that kept up with it was my saviour. Within a year I was starting to get just a little comfortable and could loosen the belt, just a little. I splashed out and got a landline telephone installed. 6 months after than I could afford to buy a microwave oven and a video recorder.

I nearly had kittens when interest rates spiked at 15%

Looking back now, the honest assesment was I did not earn enough to buy a house, but by a whisker I pulled it off and it set me up for the rest of my life, now mortgage free in a big detached house.

Whoever said it was easy to buy a house "back then"?

I can't imagine today's youngsters putting up with that hardship. There would be no money for no essentials like a mobile phone, pay tv, internet etc. And I would have been right royally stuffed if my £200 banger had packed up, there was no money to fix it.

YoungBlueEyes

I doubt many folk would live like that now, instant gratification is the order of the day!

Where was that first house ProDave?

ian1246

Myself and partner brought our house through a combination of hard work and luck.

We met in March 2015 - I was 25, she was 23. I'd wanted a house since finishing University in 2010, initially I ended up working in Peacocks (Clothes Store), between 16-20hrs a week, whilst living at home with my parents (£200 a month rent). Other than my rent, my only expenditure was lunches everyday (Wasted around £25 a week!) & keeping my car on the road (old Rover). I managed to save a couple of hundred £££ a month. Then when Peacocks went into administration in 2011, it forced me to look for work elsewhere & I ended up with a full time minimum wage job I kept my expenditure the same and saved the extra earnings. In 2014, I managed to join Western Power Distributions (fantastic company to work for!) in a decently paid role - my expenditure actually dropped, since I had a company van I could take home every night. I saved the extra earnings.

Then in 2015 I applied for & joined the emergency services - I took a pay hit to do so (3 years later and I m finally just past my old Western Power wage!). At the same time, I signed up to a dating site & met my partner through the site. We met in March 2015 - and in August 2015 we decided we wanted to live together and made the decision that rather than rent (wasted money), we would buy a property together and instead protect our "investment" by a deed of trust.

At the time, my partner was a Teaching Assistant and only earning £800 a month (Before tax/deductions). She'd been desperate to move out from home so had been scraping her own deposit up - which meant that when we decided to buy, we were able to scrape together a £41,250 deposit between us - we brought a £165,000 3 bedroom semi-detached house in the countryside, 2 miles from my parents house :-) Both the deposit & mortgage payments were split 60/40 respectively, as outlined in the deed of trust - should we have separated, property would have been sold & split based on that.....

....We married this year on August the 14th 2018 :-) It was a risk buying a property together rather than renting, but it was the correct one (Plus I figured provided we stayed together for at least 6months after buying, our solicitor/estate agent costs would have been recuperated from the increased property value!).

We were both fortunate that we were saving individually when we met and that both of us had parents who were willing for us to stay with them. I did inherit £4000 in savings from my great-grandmother, but that was never used for the purchase (Its instead been the emergency fund!).

The key is to save as much as possible and cut wastage out. Too many of our age group wastes £50-£100 every weekend on expensive nights out, or £50 a month on expensive unneeded phone contracts or having expensive cars on finance etc.. etc... Live within your means and save what you can. Be smart with your money - use the Money Saving Forum to identify the best paying current & saving accounts and use them when building up your deposit.

moneyistooshorttomention

ProDave - I know what you mean about the high inflation etc of the 1980s. It was a very mixed blessing too in my experience.

At the time I was belatedly able to buy my starter house (and only then courtesy of a sheer stroke of good luck providing the larger-than-normal deposit I needed because of my poor salary) - the position was that:

- the normal salary multiple that was loaned to people was 2.5 times their salary and the one and only perk of being a civil servant that I got was that I was able to "pick and choose" my building society at that time and find one that was prepared to lend me 3.25 times my salary (courtesy of being a civil servant) and also took into account my next salary increment. So basically, I was borrowing around 3.5 times my salary at a time when other people were only being allowed to borrow 2.5 times their salary.

- I had just managed to scrape through to getting the typical starter home (ie a 2 bedroom house) and I took in a lodger in the 2nd bedroom. That turned out to have to go on for years longer than I anticipated - as inflation raged away some more and the interest rates went up even more. I also had to carry on for quite some years doing the odd bit of overtime and seeking for further extra income where I could (second jobs etc) - as the house needed so much money spent on it (being a Victorian one and rather neglected).

- Yep..I was having to make do with make-do-and-mend secondhand carpet everywhere and there was no question of being able to rip the woodchip wallpaper off the walls and replaster before I painted said walls. I just had to paint over that woodchip and that (Victorian) house never did get replastered in the event or various other things (like the cheapie concrete paving stones in the back yard/courtyard garden are still there).

Davesnave

I don't think we boomers should be too self-congratulatory about buying back in the 70s and 80s.

Yes it was very hard, especially as a single person, but we found it possible, even in quite affluent areas.

Some didn't, of course, but there have always been ways to waste, save, delay gratification, or live in the moment. A window of opportunity opened and some climbed through it. The others are paying the price now.

Everything points to buying being harder now than it was then for most people. However, there's an even greater disparity between incomes, area-related prices and other factors, like increased BOMAD, which skew experiences.

Me, I'm just grateful that National Service was abolished; even as a young child, the thought of that filled me with so much fear that I planned to run away when my call-up papers arrived. Compared with that, a few years of beans on toast were a pushover!

Murphybear

Lots of interesting stories on here

I met my OH when we were 44/48. We were living in London, I was sharing with a friend, he rented a small flat. He wasn't working but had a large savings pot. We got engaged, I took redundancy and we moved to Milton Keynes. We bought a small house for cash which needed everything and spent a year doing it up. I got a high paid job at the OU and we sold our house and bought a bungalow.

We moved to Devon and bought a business. We are now happily retired and still engaged 22 years later :rotfl:

Nasqueron

claire111 wrote: »

1984 age 20. Boyfriend and I got 2.5 x joint income mortgage of £30k. We earned about £6k each. He was a delivery driver and I was an admin clerk and we borrowed the £500 deposit from family. It was a 1 bed 14 year old purpose built flat in south Croydon. We both ran second hand cars which were old and frequently breaking down and we ate a lot of plain mince and rice. No meals out or holidays for us ! We always knew were very lucky to get on the ladder when we did as within months the property was way out of our price range. We struggled with interest rates rising from 10 to 15% and lived very frugally for many years. My daughter of a similar age complains she will never be able to buy but she lives a very different much more extravagant life than we did back then.

A very common remark, unfortunately the reality is even if your daughter was frugal, houses are simply not affordable.

In 1984 the UK average house price was around 30-32k. The average salary in 1985 was £8890 - mortgage was 3-4x a single salary or 2x average salary for a couple

Today the UK average house is £194k just for a terrace, £225k for a semi. UK average salary is £27271 - 7x just for a terrace and that typically needs a deposit of 20-30k which can take years to save up.

The me generation (the youth of the 1970s) have very much pulled up the ladder

Davesnave

Nasqueron wrote: »

The me generation (the youth of the 1970s) have very much pulled up the ladder.

Speaking as one of them, I'm not sure how we did whatever that is.

All most of us did was buy a house, live in it and raise families. Doing that has meant that many of us still live in relatively modest circumstances, even if, on paper, we're worth a considerable amount by owning a property outright.

What do you suggest we do to redress the balance? Many of us are going to need these houses to fund our dotage, apparently.

Nasqueron

Davesnave wrote: »

Speaking as one of them, I'm not sure how we did whatever that is.

All most of us did was buy a house, live in it and raise families. Doing that has meant that many of us still live in relatively modest circumstances, even if, on paper, we're worth a considerable amount by owning a property outright.

What do you suggest we do to redress the balance? Many of us are going to need these houses to fund our dotage, apparently.

The obvious one would be for home owners to stop this cycle of pretending that because a house is a year older it's automatically worth x% more but that's never going to happen. Stop the nimby / oldiwonk obsession with blocking house building, particularly large scale developments so houses become more available thus dropping prices.

The other would be to end this nonsense that some of the generation before mine have of claiming my generation and millennial types especially are somehow lazy/extravagant on spending and that's the only reason they can't afford a home when the reality is house price rises and wage rises simply don't correlate.