How to save for a house deposit 🏠

This guide covers the practical steps you can take to start saving for a deposit on a home

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I find it hard to imagine (at my young age) ever wanting to buy a house outright. :houses:

The double commitment to a single physical place and decades of debt aren’t appealing. :pound:

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I bought my own home last year (when I was 24). I’m much happier than I was when I was renting. You have a lot more control over your living space which I much prefer.

Saving for a house deposit is easy. Use a LISA or help to buy isa and then spend less that you earn.

I would much rather have a decade of debt than a lifetime of rent payments

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For me (almost 24) I want to buy a house outright because landlords generally suck.

Owning a house means things like roof leaks can be fixed within a year, and waste pipes aren’t held together by Poundland parcel tape. (I wish that was a joke…)

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It never occurred to me to not buy a house. In my experience rent is expensive, rented houses are badly maintained & landlords never fix anything.

Plus if you don’t buy, you have to keep paying rent when you retire.

I’d always recommend people buy, if they can raise the deposit.

Each to their own though.

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One bad landlord would change that view pretty quickly i’d imagine

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Bought mid twenties, our mortgage payment is half of what our rent was and we now have a new build house rather than a tenement flat! Couldn’t have done it without the support of family though!

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I’m learning in this thread that I’m just scared of commitment. :joy:

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I used to always think of a house as a debt, but once I reframed it in my head as being a debt AND an asset/investment, it felt a little better.

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Ditto. I get itchy feet after a few years and want to move on. A mortgage would tie me down too much

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You can then additionally think its your debt and your investment, whilst renting is solely you paying off someone elses debt and wasting money you could be investing for yourself

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Very true! I really resent paying off my landlords debt for them whilst they swan off on six holidays+ a year and don’t actually work.

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You’re paying your landlord’s tax too. :fire:

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Same here. A mortgage at the moment is just an anchor to make decisions about where I want to be over the next few years harder.

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I don’t understand why young people would want to rent. I’m lucky in that I’m happy to live at home for a few years and save up a deposit. I do have to pay rent to live at home but at least my parents will help me when I do come to move out and I’m not paying someone else’s mortgage and tax who couldn’t care less about me

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I had a lot of debt when I was younger and was generally crap with my finances. Regretting it so much now. I’ve been telling my friends daughter that she needs to get a LISA and start paying in ASAP. I wish I had put even a small amount aside in savings each month rather than putting playstations or iphones on a credit card. I just didn’t have a clue!

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The flexibility of being able to leave at any time. I’ve lived in and out of the UK on and off over the last few years, and being able to just pick up and leave has been worth the cost of renting.

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But you can’t just leave can you? there are notice periods andminimum tenancy periods etc. I found it all very complicated when I was renting. At least with a house I know its just a case of selling it (houses seem to sell pretty quickly in my area) and then I can leave with a substantial amount of cash

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The notice period in Scotland is generally 2 months, with zero hassle of sorting out anything other than saying you are leaving. You can generally find minimum contract periods of 6 months.

If you are renting a room in a house then you can generally find someone new to take the room within a couple of weeks and just swap the agreement over.

Once I pick a country that I want to settle in it will be different, but for now I don’t have anywhere I particularly want to stay.

Edit: Id like to note I’m not recommending this particularly, just explaining why I make the choice not to buy.

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There are pros and cons to both renting and buying, and it’s a very personal thing. I’m glad to be on the property ladder, but I never spent a day privately renting so I cannot compare the two. My mortgage is currently half the price of the rent for an identical house opposite me.

One thing that does annoy me hugely, is shared ownership. You mortgage a percentage of the property and rent the other. So who pays the bill if the boiler blows up? You. All of it. Yet if you rent, your landlord forks out. Seems a con to me.

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