Owning your own home

My folks was 14% but peoples lifestyles where certainly different then and folk dont wanna go without these days but in reality you cant have it all. Well that is unless you win the lottery or have a fuck off mega money job.

Have a LDNR or at least someone from SE (Kingston on thames, 60's/70's semi on an estate I think) moved in last year to our street. They sold up, bagged much equity, paid the most for any flat I've seen around here by a bit of a margin, and it needed work so have then dumped a fair amount more, and have chosen to retire now age 56-58. Both were doing very grey jobs, but just won the housing lottery.

On the upside, the trades hired to work on it got a few quid out of it.

Cladding crisis has kept us put for 4 years now and no idea if we'll ever be able to sell. Partner is pregnant and we're currently weighing up the options between staying put in a 2-bed (more like 1.5 bed) whilst we both WFH or mortgage ourselves up to the eyeballs getting a second property in the sticks where family can help us with kid but face possible financial ruin if any of the cards come down. Neither option feels particularly appealing.

14% interest rates but generally a lower fraction of take-home pay, given lower house prices, SDLT, income taxes / NIs, pension contributions and student loan repayments. The amount that one might or might not spend on avocado toast, fast fashion and boys' trips to Magaluf is irrelevant to that analysis.

The subltety of your post went, as usual, over my head. You're not wrong either. If supply keeps on being artificially restricted to keep prices high, then it's only going to get worse too.

the bloke next to me gleefully told me today he paid 35k for his house in 1977.

that was pretty much what I had to pay in stamp duty to buy my house next door a week ago.

At least you’re not paying ~6% of what it cost to buy your house p.a. in council tax ;-)

I’ve had similar chats over the years with my more long-tenured neighbours. The sense I get is that those that cared about the money cashed in long ago; those that remain genuinely like the house / location and are bemused by prices.

The worst kind is the person that thinks he’s god’s gift to business, investing and generally pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps because he decided to buy a house a long time ago and live in it.

oh man, you have my sympathy. We dodged the worst of the crisis by pure fluke, got an A2 rating. Even with passed EWS1 test I've seen places become worthless due to building flaws like missing fire breaks and the original construction company refusing to take blame.

Anybody in East London tried to get any building work done recently-I';ve heard there are long waits for builders....? We're buying a 3 bed house with a downstairs bathroom that we want to move upstairs by stealing a little from 2 bedrooms, so structural work iOS involved. Also wanting to put in a sliding patio door downstairs and knock out an internal wall that is load bearing so again more structural work...My wife is 6 months pregnant so there will be no time to do it for a while after moving in, but thinking if waiting times for builders are long it is best to get quotes and get on someones waiting list asap after buying so we at least know it will happen maybe next year? The house needs lots of redecorating and new kitchen etc ideally be bit loath to crack on with this if builders are coming in knocking the shite out of the place at some point.....BUt don't want to live in a non decorated house with a new baby (our first/only) for too long really....

You’re other issue you’ll face is pricing and the changing in pricing between get that and the work done. Material costs are changing so much folk don’t wanna be locked into anything but at the same time if the price goes up another 15 grand and you don’t have the money your screwed. It’s a real catch 22

Comes down to how much money you have and how desperate you are.

I'd imagine any 'wait' on a list that's longer than three months is pretty much a 'probably won't happen' situation or they'll just subcontract so you won't actually get who you thought you would to do the work.

buying a place that's been messed with and needs a lot of custom remedial work is probably the most painful way to go about things at the moment.

Agh! Wrote a long reply but deleted it by accident.

Tldr you don't have enough time to do what you want in the way you want to. You've basically got 8wks to get everything done - including buying.

To me your options are:

a) rent somewhere for 12m,
b) prioritise your wishlist and do what you can (eg is the kitchen dependent on the bathroom move? If not that + redecorating is theoretically achievable.), or
c) accept that you will have to crash somewhere else at times and live with work going on. Fwiw my parents house was semi-derelict/uninhabitable when they bought it. They stayed with a friend for a bit while they did a bathroom and a bedroom which they turned into a bedsit, then did the rest overtime. Admittedly mothers stayed in hospital longer than they do now, but it is definitely doable.

Also once the baby comes you'll be focused on other stuff and the decor will be less important.

On the kid + renovation: we ended up moving to my parents for three months with a 4 month old, after overlapping renting and new house ownership for 3 months.

We worked with trades to get the biggest parts (electrics, plumbing, kitchen and bathroom, most of the skimming) then aimed to do finishing like floors and decorating ourselves to save a few Bob - 2.5y down the line we’re still on it. Small babies make it a bit trickier (probably shouldn’t fill their lungs with dust eh?) and toddlers have a habit of escaping with your chisel/paint brush/drill…

We also did the “quote today, work in 12 months” for some outside work last year and material costs increases really kicked hard on the final bill!

So: all very doable, but factor in that a baby adds a challenge and the current universe makes the finances less predictable - if that feels ok, get some quotes in with a set time in the diary for work to start and don’t be surprised if that becomes a moving target. That’s my two cents!

Also once the baby comes you'll be focused on other stuff like the baby trashing the decor

Quite interesting:

This map is useless without marking the location of catford for user cozey.

I could have bought a 2 bedroom flat in hoxton back in 1993 for around 80k (haberdasher street)- this actual flat :

https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/66-haberdasher-street-london-n1-6ej

i would be minted now if i had but i made some immature decisions and spent all my wages at Charlie wrights on Dragon stout...

Wages were seriously crap back then though (i worked for Hackney social services).

Some people have just made the right decisons at the right time and sacrificed a lot of luxuries and non necesseties so good on them .

A mate's bro (genXer) bought a place in Hackney near the station with his mate not long out of uni. Good jobs, but nothing crazy just 95% mortgages and being young enough to not care about the area being a bit rough around the edges. Roll forward a few years and they had gained enough to sell up and buy their own houses in Walthamstow before the Stokey exodus of the twenty-tens.

Conversely another mate's bro the same age sold his place in Guilford just before the financial crisis so they could be cash buyers, then were unable to get another mortgage for over a year.

There is also quite a bit of good fortune involved too.

There is also quite a bit of bank of mum & dad involved too.

Not to forget the artificially low interest rates all through the 2010’s resulting in a huge influx of people investing in 2nd, 3rd, 4th… properties because it was seen as higher returns and a safer investment than other typical vehicles.

Ha! That too.

My dad works hard for my money, etc.

(Bill Hicks misquote)

Conversely another mate's bro the same age sold his place in Guilford just before the financial crisis so they could be cash buyers, then were unable to get another mortgage for over a year.

Nice timing! Sell at the top, hold cash and allow the market to drop 20% before you buy back is pretty much the dream.

Not sure they saw it like that when they'd started with a massive mortgage and no one would give them another, so they had to live with his folks while they saved up enough to hit the new LTV requirements.