100%+5 times salary=crazy?

nrsql

meanmachine wrote:

Actually, to be consistent, I think someone earning an average wage should be able to afford an average home.

It's assumed that a FTBer isn't earning average wage, unlike the OP. That's why the market's ground to a halt. If people on above average wages can't even afford an average property, who's going to buy the above average properties?

Nope - probably a FTB won't have much of a deposit and so will be trying to finance a large part of the property from a mortgage and hence salary.
The average is raised by maturer buyers on a perhaps lower salary but able to buy more equity hence a FTB on above average salary may not be able to afford an average property without savings.

Ian_W

Meanmachine wrote: SOme fair points.

Oh, dear me, just when I thought meanmachine was mellowing ...

Meanmachine wrote: How odd that Ian W knows what all doomsters think all the time.

Actually what I said was.....
" Many of the doomsters want to prices to fall so that property is affordable to them - I've no problem with them wanting that - so they can buy."
How do I know that? Because that's what most of them say when they post - "I'm not buying now, I'll wait for the crash and buy at 30% less" or words to that affect. I'm not making it up and I don't have super-natural powers. So I don't know what ALL the doomsters are thinking ALL the time [wouldn't want to!] only what I read in their posts.
But then the classic:

it works out cheaper than renting, provided you buy at the trough of a market, not the peak....
After that I couldn't give a monkeys whether my house goes up down or sideways....

If it really won't bother you whether your house goes up or down - why is so important to buy at a trough rather than a peak? If you can afford to buy, it shouldn't matter where the market is when you buy - if you don't REALLY care which way it goes after that.

But lets agree on one thing. I'm a homeowner who, it may surprise you to know, also "couldn't give a monkeys whether my house goes up down or sideways" - it wouldn't cause me a problem whatever it did.

In my life as an owner it's gone up, come down and gone sideways but the only time it's crashed is when the country has been in serious difficulties financially - recession. In a recession thousands of hard working ordinary people lose their homes, businesses and jobs - if their misery is the price of you buying a home "at a trough", I've no doubt you'll think it's a price well worth them paying!!

You've been quick to throw the "GREED" word at others - but your position really does take the biscuit. Life doesn't work like that, but it would be a lovely poetic irony if yours was one of the first P45's signalling a recession.

Spendless

Scott wrote:

Now, that's really not very nice, boys and girls.

Incidentally, renewed interest in the housing market would be one of the forces to pull the country back out of that recession.

Swings and roundabouts, eh?

I'm waiting for prices to come down to buy. Right now we're just getting all the furnishings together (only been married a year) so that we're all ready to go when the time is right. That may be further away than I'd hoped, in which case my hand may be forced.

But holding off to buy until prices come down (which is inevitable) may seem greedy, but it also contributes to solving the problem.

Is that because you can't afford to buy right now or that you want something better for your money. My own experience of house prices dropping was that people didn't buy the 1st rung of the ladder cheaper, they spent the same amount of money but got something more. Hence the leapfrog scenario I described earlier, but maybe that was just where I am.