Food for thought.

Hectors_House

She is renting in London to be fair but how does someone, supposedly intelligent end up in this situation.

There is mention of two children but not their father so that might explain some of her decisions.

From today’s Daily Mail:

Generation Rent is what you call young people locked out of the property market because of the soaring rise in house prices. So what do you call someone over the age of 50 who rents rather than owns their flat? Stupid, probably.

That, however, is my position. I am the sucker who never got round to buying a home. Instead, after I graduated in the Eighties, I rented a room in someone’s house.
Later, in my 30s, when my contemporaries were busy paying their mortgages, I was introduced to a nice landlord who was asking less than £700 a month for a flat in a part of London I was already living in. He was benign; a paternal figure who owned a family property business.
I began living in one of his flats in a characterful mansion block. Later, I gravitated to another next door which had two bedrooms.


It was still affordable; a bit over £800 a month. Why would I want to own somewhere less congenial? So I remained where I was, even after I got married and had two children.
The answer came when my nice paternal landlord was succeeded by the next generation of the family. The rent almost doubled, to £1,500, about four years ago.
As he wrote to me apologetically, his extended family had got involved, including the in-laws. And I’m afraid they — including the American daughter-in-law — didn’t think about the business in a paternalistic way, but as a means of maximising income.
They gave me a couple of months’ respite, in case I needed to find new schools for my children, before the rent went up.
I found the money, but at a stroke my disposable income nosedived to very little. I work as a journalist, critic and columnist — a terrific occupation, but rather less stable and well paid than it was when I began my career.
Then my landlord got in touch again to say he was selling the mansion block, with its tenants, to a property company. And the inevitable happened; they told me the rent would be going up by £150 a month, each year, until it reaches £2,000 a month.
Naturally, I wrote to the agents to ask them to reconsider; they refused. So, at a time when my job changed and my family income took a steep downturn, I have to pay more than £19,000 a year — rising to £24,000 — after tax to stay in a flat I’ve occupied for decades.


.... due to being unable to upload a link, and concerns about copyright please go to the Daily Mail website to read the full article. Thanks.

AdrianC

"From today's Daily Mail"

That tells you all you need to know. Sensationalised guff.

davidmcn

I think this is for the House Prices & the Economy board rather than here.

Also, please don't breach copyright by copying and pasting whole articles (even if it is the Daily Mail's copyright).

We ask forum users not to copy long text from other publications/websites as it may breach their copyright. If you want to let people know about something you saw or read elsewhere please use short quotes and state where you got them from, preferably by giving a link to the article.

sgun

Its from the Daily Mail. I wouldn't wipe my ar*e with it, or listen to anyone who gets opinions from the sh*t stirring piece of cr*p that calls itself a "newspaper".

mobileron

stick with the Sun.

PasturesNew

For somebody on a London wage, which she must have access to with her professional background and industry, £2k/month isn't so expensive when compared to many other areas.

She's had the option, over the years, to make different choices and didn't.

For me, I've always had a desperate need to "not end up in a rented bedsit" as I've always been single and, where I lived, there was no access to social housing for single people, it was all about housing couples and families. Indeed, when I was 30 and had been on the council list 10 years I did ask "how long would it be before I got anywhere?" and they suggested "in another 20 years' time you might get into a shared house". So I went down the shared ownership route (which turned out to be dud as I ended in negative equity). . . but at least I'd wondered about the question of where I'd be.

I'm guessing, with two kids, she just assumed being in a couple, two incomes, two people, thing's would just work out fine and they'd be "OK". It's easy to become comfortable in a couple as you're not wholly self reliant.

Her next article is probably going to be about their second home in Tuscany (and I've actually no idea where that even is).

AdrianC

mobileron wrote: »

stick with the Sun.

...and get the same lies, just with shorter words.

yksi

Actually what she did "wrong" was to raise a family on an ordinary wage and forget that she was living in London and getting an unbelievable deal. Eventually her unbelievable luck ran out. Those kind of amounts would have worked just fine if she'd lived a few hours away in any direction. There's nothing wrong with choosing to rent if that's what you want to do.

I don't live in London but I get an amazing rental deal. I'm very very conscious of the fact that if I leave here, or if it didn't continue, I would have to spend more money for my housing. I'd still be able to manage. She never made sure of that.

PasturesNew

Here she is, bemoaning her credit card debt - and she gives a family history.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2046291/Daiv-Cameron-youll-know-misery-drowning-debt.html

1997 - heavily in debt on multiple credit cards chose to do a PhD, still working as a journalist and still racked up more debt.
2002 - got married.
2003 - husband stopped work to resume medical studies, just as she had their first child.

She was then so deep in debt she needed a repayment plan.

In short: She spunked it up the wall.

csgohan4

Life choices, I moved out of London, if I didn't I wouldn't have saved a big enough deposit for a house. Simples. If you want the lifestyle and live in London, you pay for the privilege of it.


No one has a right to live in London, you earn it

Hectors_House

davidmcn wrote: »

I think this is for the House Prices & the Economy board rather than here.

Also, please don't breach copyright by copying and pasting whole articles (even if it is the Daily Mail's copyright).

Thank you davidmcn. I did try to just insert a link but it wouldn’t let me.