Owning your own home

My loft conversion last year (in London) cost about £40-45k.

Because?

I do know people who have lived there and Snaresbrook and loved it. Might be too expensive.

I’ve only been to forest gate once and there are some nice streets, pal lives there and says yes, not 100% sure I’d move there yet though. 650k is plenty for both Leyton and Walthamstow, St James is a nice area and super quick bath to civilisation (London Fields crack bench). Village is spenny but not my vibe anyway.

With reference specifically to the Wanstead high street area it has great pubs, cafes, a big variety of restaurants, good community, supermarkets near by, Epping forest / Wanstead flats, decent LBS, 10 mins to Stratford for jubilee line

Edit: + direct cycle route into town, for me it’s the nearest place to London that doesn’t feel like London. It should be snobby but it’s not

Hither Green. Train to London Bridge in ten minutes. Here's a three-bed, with a big garden, for £650k. Should be buying it myself, frankly.

https://www.winkworth.co.uk/properties/11806206/sales/pascoe-road-hither-green-se13/BLA180630

That’s pretty good but needs a lot of work and is top of our budget. Might go have a look tho

aim the same distance south of the station and save yourself 100k+. but then you're next door to amey again.

Or wait until March and save 35%

we're now all ready for solar... Probably a couple of years off but good to know we're good to go when the time comes...

I've just started looking into solar. Looks like you'll need to do it before April to make more significant savings, as government solar panel payments are ending soon.

Yes but to do that we’d have to sell our flat now and rent. I can see the potential benefits but my other half isn’t so keen.

We’ve sold up and in a couple of months will be living with in-laws for a for extra deposit saving and lack of chain. If we haven’t found somewhere we want by Dec/Jan then we’ll probably just wait out Brexit.

This could turn out to be a great decision.

Yep, just as long as banks will lend against deprecating assets.

If you like being hugely overexposed to Sterling

Meh, you can manage that with your reinvestment strategy in the interim

of course that’s well easy, cheap and entirely risk free.

? If you’re worried about sterling, buy euros or dollars

I’m not convinced that London property is independent of FX anyway, so I think you are long sterling whether you have the property or whether you have cash. In reality, owning property is a levered exposure so you de-risk by going to cash.

So what if everyone follows this sage advice ?

That's an interesting thought experiment - what do you think?

Except for almost all of the modern era, cash under performs property, so you increase risk by going to cash.

Obviously past performance is no guide to future returns etc.

Let's all do a market timing experiment with our homes - i'm sure it'll be fine.

Like all these things it'd be fascinating to watch from a safe location.

No developed economy has ever done what we are attempting - with incredible, epochal incompetence.

No wonder the Brexiters are recommending investing in gold.

Except for almost all of the modern era, cash under performs property, so you increase risk by going to cash.

Just to be pedantic - Cash is risk free, almost axiomatically - You can always invest it at the risk free rate (i.e. supported by the national bank).

Property has outperformed cash historically, but has also been riskier, and the property portion of any portfolio has a higher risk weighting than the cash portion.

Any notion of protecting yourself against FX risk doesn't make much sense if your entire portfolio is based in one currency - Any instrument you try to hedge the risk with would already have that risk priced in, and you'd end up paying spread & transaction costs both when you enter into the position, and when you leave it.

Of course, we could all lose our jobs, sterling could go down the shitter, and we could all be left with big mortgages, a higher cost of living, and no jobs.

Anyone want a 4 bedder for £100k?

I take your point, in investment terms, but if your objective is to own a house then being in cash has not been a great strategy over the vast majority of the last century or so. Not sure about before that.

I can remember the last period of significant numbers of people being in negative equity - but I was quite young and can't recall what outcome was for many, did people by and large weather it or did many have to sell at a loss and continue to pay off the remaining mortgage?

Mixture of both. People who became forced sellers suffered quite badly.