I only needed a £7,000 deposit and I pay £370 a month on my mortgage for 20 years, that’s just £10 more a month than what my rent was.
That gets me a 2 bedroom house with loads of space in a pretty quiet location approx 15 mins walk from my local town
You can buy a parking space for £115k, we have houses cheaper than this round here 
I think everything in large cities is mega expensive. Probably not the best place to start looking if you’re a first time buyer.
There’s beach huts that go for more than houses around here!
Once again, sorry to be the exception to your weird worldview, but I saw it as a relatively short period of delayed gratification in order to free myself from ever-increasing rent demands. Very happy to forgo holidays for this payoff:
I live seven minutes from central London (London Bridge) by train, my mortgage payment is sub-£690 per month, compared with paying thousands off of someone else’s mortgage, my LTV is now sub-20%, my four bedroom house (which I now don’t share) earns more than I do every year and I have enough room to be able to help a friend out with the cheapest rent they’d ever be able to find in London.
Don’t know where you got the impression I live in a “crap house” from…?
It’s quite simple. You work out where you want to be in, say, ten years, work out how much that’s going to cost, and fit your life accordingly. I had no help, I just worked bloody hard for it.
I would agree with you, were it not for the fact that I was in the same position. I bought in 2011, having been living in London since 1994. To put that in context, my home then was worth around £49,000. I too watched in horror as property prices apparently supercharged through the early 2000s.
It is achievable, but there needs to be discipline from the buyer, and compromise on the ‘ideal’ life, which you won’t achieve straight away. In my opinion, there is some truth in the avocado stereotype; it’s a matter of priorities. If I were doing it now, I wouldn’t subscribe to Netflix, Spotify, or a gym, and I’d host friends at home rather than going to the pub, or a cafe for brunch.
I do partly agree with you. I got a better job, saved saved saved and moved out in less than a year. But I was living rent free at the time.
If you’re paying rent and bills, it’s nigh on impossible. Saving £200 a month isn’t going to get you very far.
I kind of did the same. I worked weekends for years - sometimes I went like a few months without a break. I was also so insanely tight, I lived in an absolute doss house in Plaistow, and didn’t really have a social life because I was working so much.
Still (and not saying this is your attitude, but it is some people’s) I don’t get people who say ‘I did it so why can’t you’. I don’t really want people to have to do that to just own a house and I can see why it puts a lot of people off. But then, I do also get slightly frustrated when people are moaning about it and then also only wanting to live in, like, Clapham or Walthamstow or something, only drink craft beer at £7 a pint etc. But then that’s really not everyone.
Clearly there’s a balance and most people in London will need to make a sacrifice to save enough to buy a house. But the current level of sacrifice needing to be made seems very high.
In London, always important to realise how localised this housing crisis is.
Just to add to this. You “only” need to save for a 5/10% deposit as long as you have a large enough salary to qualify for a mortgage to cover the remaining 90/95% of the house price.
For many this isn’t possible and therefore they need to spend more time saving for a larger deposit.
Unfortunately the more time it takes to save for this larger deposit the higher the house prices become which can quickly lead to a very depressing feeling that owning your own house is just impossible.
Which is fine. Buying isn’t for everyone and and the all the costs certainly don’t end there either.
I know plenty of people who are more than happy renting. There are pros and cons to both.
I disagree. I think it’s far from fine.
Sure buying isn’t for everyone, and plenty of people are happy with renting, which is fine. I just think that homeownership should be a lot more accessible.
Surely if house prices came down everything else would need to in proportion? The cost of buying the house is only one peice of the puzzle.
Then what about those who have managed to succeed. Do they just lose loads of equity?
Everyone should move up North 
There are plenty of properties up here of all types. I’ve seen them as low as £60k.
There are even more opportunities to work remotely now too. I’m starting to get lots of offers to get paid a city salary but stay at home half way across the country. Granted it’s not for everyone but I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “reduce house prices” to fix it all.
Don’t encourage the outsiders to come up north 
This is part of the problem as I see it. Too many people view houses as an investment. If house prices came down then the next house they go to buy to “move up the ladder” would also be cheaper. Alternatively if they have no intension of selling then they would be no worse off than before the price drop.
Ultimately though I think you’ve asked a question that only looks at one side of the equation. Why is it unfair for them to lose equity but the struggle for a first time buyer to save a deposit is fine? Just because the people currently on the ladder managed to do it doesn’t mean that things should always stay the same. Progress and accessibility for all requires change.
Ultimately though I don’t think we are going to see much change in the status quo. I just think residential properties should be primarily bought as homes, not as investments for future gains.
I think for the that businesses and non UK residents should not be allowed to own residential houses in the UK. With perhaps an exception for developers who own a property they just built, but even then their only option would be to sell to an individual in the UK.
I think there should also be a limit as to how many residential properties an individual can own.
I’m by no means saying that landlords are bad. I’ve rented many properties in my time as well as rooms in HMOs but I also think that part of the reason needed to rent for so long was down to the fact that houses are no longer primarily seen to be homes by their owners but rather cash cows and long term investments.
That’s because it is. For me at least and I’m pretty sure for most others too.
I moved away from all of my friends and family, I moved out of my nice home town that I grew up in, and I moved far away from my job just so that I could afford to buy my first house. It was a scummy area, run down, high crime rate and I couldn’t even afford public transport to work so I got up super early to cycle for miles and miles.
I stuck it out for years before I managed to “upgrade” and not feel like I’m going to get attacked or have my possessions stolen on a daily basis. So it absolutely was an investment and it was the only thing that kept me going knowing that one day it will be better.
Then what annoys me is reading articles like the one posted earlier of someone who is complaining because they can’t buy a beautiful cottage in the middle of nowhere by the coast as their first house. Or the other topic that we had on here (which I think got locked) where people won’t sacrifice things like game consoles, £1,000 phones and such to save for a deposit because they deem them “essential”.
You’ve hit the nail on the head there, which is what I believe to be a large part of the problem. There needs to be more tighter controls on people buying property for business gains, because even those people took advantage of the government schemes by using loop holes.
Or those who buy them and just leave them dormant, to get run down and hardly used. I watched a documentary on this for property in London bought up by foreign investors and just never used. It was shocking.
I think working from home will make a massive difference, but fear it’ll just be more prices going up not overpriced ‘commuter belt’ houses getting cheaper.
My house is apparently worth the same I paid for it (zero inflation) but I don’t care if it was worth half… it’s my home, not an investment.
I sympathise with anyone who has had to do this but I also don’t think that because people have had to do so in the past (and currently) that people should keep on having to do it. Heck I jumped on a plane to move to another part of the UK for a job so I’d be able to save more.
I believe a line has to be drawn at some point and and some time though and I think the sooner the better. Sure there will be some that will lose out but I think a lot more would win for many generations to come.
Anyway I’m a dreamer and my dreams rarely come true.
I concur.
Anyway I think I’d just be repeating myself and ranting if I kept going on this topic. Good chat 
I concur 
10 years is not a relatively short period!
From you, lol.
I bought a run-down property in an area not many people wanted to live in
I mean, I get it, you bought a shed in the ghetto. I just think it would be nice if you didn’t have to.
So, one way to tell this story is “I saved hard, bought a house with a friend, and now I gift another friend cheap rent. All you need to do is save hard like me and you can have a house, too. And if you don’t, it’s your fault.”
But another way might be “I saved hard, leveraged a friend’s existing housing equity in a way not dissimilar to a family gift, bought a house close to the nadir of prices after a global economic crash (2011) when most first-time-buyers were systemically denied access to the market through high LTV mortgage unavailability that was only resolved through government intervention in 2013, and now I get another friend to pay off my mortgage.”
So perhaps it’s purely down to people’s will to save on all those avocado on toasts. Or perhaps, you know… not.
What about when they retire though?
Then you pay the rent with a pension, assuming they’ve built one up. If not you get a claim in to get the rent paid and see how much they’ll stump up for that.