If you want to go travelling, you can just put your stuff in storage, give the keys to a lettings agent and let some other prick pay your mortgage. If you price it fairly, you should be able to get a deposit and a signed letting agreement within a matter of days.

You can sell a house, you know? You're not stuck with it til the day you die.

I think getting on the property ladder is one of, perhaps the most important thing you can do in terms of securing yourself for the future. I know lots of people who have got better jobs than me, arguably got more prospects going for them than me, but they've left it late to think about buying a home, and if they ever do manage it by now, they'll be paying that mortgage off well into their retirement.

I'm a homeowner now and while that means I might be skint for the forseeable future, until I trick a bird into coming to live here with me, but the important thing is it means I know I won't be renting into old age. Just imagine when you're 70-odd and you've still got to force yourself out of bed to work, because the landlord keeps jacking your rent up. Isn't that just the bleakest fucking thing you can possibly imagine?

I might have fucked up my prospects in my early life, but I like to think I'm making up ground on my peers, because despite their better qualifications and higher salaries lots of them don't seem to have their priorities figured out. They still live like students, tethered to expensive city centre studios because none of them drive. That's all well and good while you're young, but there does come a point where you've missed the boat, and I think many of them will realise it too late.

I've kind of put it off myself. Left the money in equities to melt away and kept adding to it. My infallible logic is knowing that as soon as I buy a house I'll get serious with a woman and I'll be made to sell the fucking thing because she'd always see it as my house not our house. And the cost in surveys, stamp duty, dealing with wankers trying to get your house for pennies then adds up if you're not staying long-term.

So disregard wealth and marry a rich woman instead. Then you'll live in her house and she'll come home drunk in her high-power business suit and beat you.

Any further thoughts on this ? Did op buy?

>>460866
>You can sell a house, you know? You're not stuck with it til the day you die.

Feels like that right now. Had two people interested in the space of a month. It's a newbuild flat going for below market rate in a developing city centre. What the fuck more can I do? I want to escape this life and the flat is the one thing that's tying me down.

>>461133
He never said owt about flats tbf.

>>461133

To be fair this particular moment in time is a bit exceptional what with the interest rates being through the roof. Things aren't selling because prices were over-inflated to begin with, and when you put the rate rises on top of that it just pure and simply squeezes a big chunk of prospective buyers out of the market. Or at least, out of the segment of the market they thought they were in, anyhow.

We will either see prices fall enough to compensate for interest rates until things start shifting again, or if this is to be the "new normal" (which it may well be because prices dropping significantly would be a disaster in itself) it'll take a while for people to let go of that idealised notion that everyone lives in a 3-bed semi with a nice garden and a driveway, and adjust to the idea of a low-rise flat or terrace being not just a starter or investor property, but a realistic long term home.

>>461136
There may be fewer sales, but prices aren't falling, quite the opposite according to the ONS. Prices rose by close to 5% in the North East over the last 12 months. I suppose you could point out they're not appreciating faster than inflation.

Some mortgage providers have put out stories of falling prices, but that misses the fact that a large chunk of buyers don't take out mortgages.

>>461136
>We will either see prices fall enough to compensate for interest rates

From my parents experiance what we're seeing is a rise in scummy developers who will low-ball anyone that wants to sell and then turn the houses into rentals. At least that's what happened to them in their dying seaside community until they just accepted that they can't move. Which will be fun for me when I end up having to one day sell the place with my brothers.

So what I'm saying is you might see falls in house prices but those will be controlled by the people who have pockets deep enough.

>>461133
What is your plan? Can you not just rent it out ?

On a separate note when I first moved to London my room in a flat share cost 850 quid - now similar rooms are going for 1400 a month before bills.

It's utter madness, renting a flat in a city centre seems like a dream.

>>461139
>What is your plan? Can you not just rent it out ?
Without charging landbastard rates after my letting agents upped their take again on top of exorbitant mortgage interest rate hikes and service charges for the building? Not bloody likely.

I've had a few investors interested but morally I just can't sell to some soulless house-flipper or land baron that's only going to contribute to the current crisis for their own gain.

Think I'm going to bankrupt myself on it and live on the street while the bank gobbles up the profit.

I am in a similar position to OP.

Sick of shitty rented houses and shitty landlords and ever increasing rents.

Reluctant to buy though, because in the short term it is rather more expensive and because it feels a bit like death. I want to be free and uncommitted.

It also feels like I'd just be transferring a massive chunk of (mostly borrowed) money to a boomer. I went to see a house yesterday and the lovely old dear was telling me how when she sold the house (asking price is roughly twice what she paid in 2008) she was planning to move in with her new partner and invest the money in a BTL flat.

>>461142
Van life, or tiny house.

>>461142

You have to look at the long term, bigger picture. Right now the market might be faltering, but it's only turbulence. I wouldn't anticipate prices falling all that far in the long run, and I certainly don't forsee rents cooling down any time soon. Buying a home is obviously a big outlay and a big scary debt to take on, but in ten years when you are still paying the same (plus or minus interest) and compare that with rents that will probably have doubled again in that space of time, you'll be laughing.

It's a bit like with pensions- The sooner you get on the ladder, the better, and you are pretty much never going to be worse off for it. I've seen a couple of autists on the financial rudgwicks bore on about the hypothetical situation where renting over a given period would have been cheaper than a mortgage payment over the same time scale, and that would be a fair point, but hypothetical is the keyword. That's a relevant consideration in a fucking parallel reality where everything is backwards from the one we live in.

>>461146
> That's a relevant consideration in a fucking parallel reality where everything is backwards from the one we live in.

Rents really are cheaper than buying right now, for some people.

My rent is £715 a month. A very similar house sold last year for £275000. That is a gross yield of about 3%. Perhaps an unusual situation - the house is valued highly by buyers because it is a cute stone cottage in the peak district, and rents are still mainly linked to local wages - but it is real. Also, 18th century cottages are damp, cold money-pits, I am glad to be renting and not owning.

So, you could borrow that amount at about 5%, with a decent deposit, and you'd be be giving up about 5% interest from the deposit in the bank too. So the interest costs of buying are roughly (£275000 * 0.05)/12 = £1145 a month. A lot more than renting! And this ignores maintenance and transaction costs.

The only way buying makes sense (ignoring non-financial reasons, which are significant) is that capital gain is expected. That is far from certain to happen in the high inflation environment that we are probably in now. Perhaps it really will happen that inflation goes low again and stays there, and we also avoid a recession, but we don't know that this will happen. It seems far more likely to me that we will have a few years of rates at ~5%, and nominal house prices will slowly come down until they are at a level supported by wages.

I'm thinking of buying a place in Edinburgh. Where I don't live now. But it's the only "nice" place where I can afford to buy something. Which is probably dumb.

>>461147

The flaw in your reasoning here, other than as you say it's a highly unusual situation to begin with, is that there's no way in hell your rent is not going to stay fixed at £715 a month. If you lived there for the next 25 years I guarantee you would end up out of pocket compared to having bought the place.

In general, inflation alone means you come out ahead on a mortgage, even if properties didn't appreciate- You take out a mortgage for £500 a month now and that only gets smaller over the years. Rents on the other hand, only ever go up. Interest rates may vary sure, but aside from big shocks like we had last Autumn tend to be quite stable long term, and the more you have paid off the better deals you'll get.

If buying didn't make financial sense, nobody would. But in our property market, it absolutely does, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even before considering other factors.

Nobody has answered the op which I'd also like to know.

Is it viable to buy a house for a year or two and sell it if it's not for you or are you likely to end up shit out of luck and out of pocket ?

>>461155

Yes, you can do that, but it's just not as simple as signing up and/or fucking off from a rental.

Generally the main reason you wouldn't want to is that the buying/sale process itself costs you money, and depending on how unlucky you are can stretch anywhere between three months to a year, because solicitors are all utter wankstains who should be hung at the stake. If the place you're buying, or your buyer, is dealing with a chain situation then it can drag on even longer. Obviously that's not ideal if you just want to get out and move on quickly.

People have given plenty of reasons earlier in the thread why you might still want to. It's a sensible investment in the long term, and unless you're still in your 20s it's arguably worth trading in a bit of that "go where I please" freedom to build some equity, instead of just pissing money into some BTL boomer cunt's retirement fund.

>>461157
There's a very good chance the equity you build in the first year of a mortgage is outweighed by fees.

On the cheapest 90% LTV 180k mortgage at 5.1% interest, you're looking at £2750 equity above the deposit after year one if prices remain stable. With all the added expense, that seems like a terrible idea.

>>461155
The process of buying and selling not only cost a shitload but could easily wind up taking a year or two if not more to complete.

>>461158

I was making the assumption that once you do, you'd be selling in order to buy elsewhere, in which case you're basically just rolling it over to the new place. Buying somewhere for a year and then going back to renting? Yeah that's just daft and you're pouring money down the drain.

Anyway the long and short of it is there's no easy answer other than you have to understand the benefits and drawbacks. Echoing an earlier post in the thread, to me it's a pretty simple equation that the earlier in life you pay off a mortgage, the earlier you can realistically retire, therefore the sooner you want to get started.

>>461155
In the past, that would have been a great idea. Right now, with interest rates changing, I don't think anybody really knows if your house will still be worth more two years from now or not. After all, even if people can't borrow as much money any more, if inflation stays high and wages all go up, then £300,000 won't be as much, in real terms, two years from now as it is today. That was my reasoning when I considered pulling out of buying my house last year: I was paying £178,000 for a shitty ex-council money pit, but maybe £178,000 will be the average salary in 2025 and then I'd be sorted. Admittedly, it looks like I could be a moron and maybe you should ignore what I say, but my point is that there are so many unknown factors that you really can't be sure. I'm afraid it's always going to be a gamble, but if you're willing to wait long enough, the gamble will always pay off.

>>461148
So I was looking at a place that's 345+ offers and I thought I could afford it with 10% down, but turns out the owner won't accept below home report value (350) and the bank won't loan over the home report so anything I pay will be from the savings, plus the lawyer said his fees + taxes will be like 11k

Might as well buy 1 btc and yolo away my life savings

The whole thing is a fucking casino type merry go round scam.

I've had enough of this

>>461295
What are you going to do about it?0

Right I've given notice on my flat, I'm buying the house.

I'm going from a cramped one bedroom surrounded by people at literally every angle bar one and getting a house with two bedrooms, three reception rooms, a utility room, two toilets and nothing but woodland behind me.

It is going to cost me hundreds more a month in commute fees (and an extra few hours of my time on trains) but inexplicably, even getting shafted by interest rates, the mortgage still somehow cheaper than my rent at the minute so whilst I come out behind overall slightly, it's not massively so.

When the letting agents came round they said the flat was immaculate, but they think it will definitely go for even more which feels outrageous really.

It seems a no brainer, and I guess if I hate it, or want to eject and travel, I can become a morally questionable overseas landlord and let somebody else pay the mortgage.

Wish me luck.

>>461320
I'm not going to wish you luck because your house sounds nicer than mine and I'm jealous, but I hope you have fun at least.

>>461320
Why don't you drive like a normal person?

>>461324

Do normal people drive to London?

>>461326
If they have parking spaces at the office, most definitely yes.

>>461332
a ridiculous statement.

It is by no means normal to drive to work in London and I suspect you know that.

Besides I love not driving, on the train I can sit and read, watch a show, eat, I just turn up and it's somebody else's problem.

Driving is miserable as sin and I suspect most people cope with that by rattling on about it being 'normal' or providing freedom or whatever when cars are big millstones around necks - always breakingz costing loads of money, making the places we live polluted and miserable etc.

>>461334
I'm impressed you can read on the train, or at least envious. Whenever I've tried I become so sleepy so quickly it's like I've had Baileys delivered intravenously. However, I think I have some weird and very minor disorder that induces that rapid onset tiredness when I'm exposed to certain kinds of movement, but it's so minor I can't even remember what it is.

Enjoy the house!

>>461334

>Driving is miserable as sin and I suspect most people cope with that by rattling on about it being 'normal' or providing freedom or whatever when cars are big millstones around necks - always breakingz costing loads of money, making the places we live polluted and miserable etc.

I wouldn't go that far, and I suspect this is just cope because you never passed your driving test.

Where I live the public transport is awful and life without a car would be abject misery. But if I lived in or around London, I think I would probably only have a car for weekend recreational use, and trying to drive the daily commute in a city like that just seems fucking mental to me.

>>461338
He mentions experience driving, what makes you think he hasn't got a license? Sounds like "I spend a significant percentage of my income on a smelly machine" cope to me. I'm thirty minutes from the nearest bus stop and never so much as took a driving lesson. Can't miss what you've never had.

>>461335

Thanks!

>>461338
I used to drive everyday for work which is why I designed my life to minimize or remove or completely.

I'm not saying this works everywhere but I consciously chose somewhere because of this.

Driving to work made me utterly miserable, nobody ever really talks about how grim it is outside of wider commute grumbles.

>>461396

I've only ever commuted by motorcycle, which is a lot more fun but with obvious advantages and drawbacks.

I noticed that even then, though, doing something I really enjoy to get to work was starting to wear on me mainly due to the time constraints and grinding routine-ness involved.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's very possible to enjoy driving but still hate the commute, perhaps with the risk of sucking the fun out of something you love.

>>461412

Basically commuting is miserable and it would be miserable no matter how you commute. I can put a podcast or audiobook on in the car just the same as you can read or watch videos on the bus or a train. The part that sucks is having to drag your arse out in the freezing cold and dark of a Wednesday morning in midwinter.

The one saving grace of using the car for me is purely and simply that I don't have to stand in the freezing cold, wind and rain at the bus stop/train platform, and I am not beholden to a schedule, or the fickle whims of a company that cancels every other service. There's also the fact that if you are restricted to public transport, you are quite a bit more limited in the jobs you can take.

Again though a lot of this comes down to the distinction between London, and a provincial northern shithole that the government hasn't made significant investment in since the 70s.

>>461142
> Van life, or tiny house.

1 bed flats seem to have become very undesirable, presumably due to everyone wanting space to WFH, and the leasehold/cladding issues getting more press recently. Luckily I'm also norf/rich enough that I could buy an OK one for cash, have lots left over and then tell work to get stuffed and pick and choose jobs or go on long distance hikes as I fancy.

Yet I feel that somehow I will be letting myself and friends/family down if I don't buy a house with a garden. It is the British in me, unfortunately.

>>461412
Same, for a long time (a Honda 125, old reliable , nothing fancy). Doesn't take much to keep pottering along. Don't get out much anymore, but that feeling of opportunity, couple of quid in your leathers to fill up on motion lotion. Knock on a canal boat to ask for nights kip in the dry. I don't suppose trhat's allowed anymore.

>>461510
>Knock on a canal boat to ask for nights kip in the dry.

Ride your own ride, mate, but I've no idea what you're on about here.

>>461515

Not him, but there's a big subculture of weirdos on the canals. After the Tories started repressing the new age traveller movement in the late 80s, a lot of hippies and layabouts sold their vans and bought a dilapidated narrowboat. A lot of people who live on the canals would fit in on .gs - harmless eccentrics on the margins of society, hobbyists, tinkerers, skivers, bin-divers and potterers. The thought hadn't occurred to me before, but if I needed a bed for the night, a canal towpath would be a very sensible place to look. If you're the kind of person who goes around the country on an old CG125, you'd find plenty of kindred spirits on the canals.

>>461520

>a lot of hippies and layabouts sold their vans and bought a dilapidated narrowboat

The stretch of canal between Hebden Bridge and Todmorden is full of them. I'm considering living on a canal boat and just going off grid when I retire. I enjoy things like wild camping and being self sufficient with just basic necessities so I could live that life, just moving around and seeing the sights. I live next to a canal basin now so kind of see that culture daily.

>>461536

Can you even legitimately be "self sufficient" in this country, though?

You can't just go about chopping down trees, because all of our remaining woodland is protected. You can barely get enough juice out of some solar panels to power your gadgets in the 3 months a year it's sunny. You certainly won't have the space on a boat to grow any produce, and our population density/land values are such that having the space to do so practically already makes you part of the aristocracy.

I regularly go on hikes and I love the outdoor scenery we have in this country, but as far as camping or bushcraft goes, it is you're never going to be doing any real "survival", at best it's just going for a walk and sleeping somewhere overnight before walking back to the car to go home in the morning. And even that's legally dodgy, as far as I'm aware it's still illegally to wild camp in England, isn't it?

I do get rather jealous of all these Yanks and Canadians I watch on YouTube who just have acres of unspoiled wilderness on their doorstep. Sure they might get attacked by bears but you can go on an actual outdoor adventure there. In this country you're always within a couple hour's walk of a pub lunch at very worst. Which actually is a good thing a lot of the time, but yknow.

>>461537
>You can't just go about chopping down trees, because all of our remaining woodland is protected.
You don't want protected woodland, old growth grows slowly. You want younger, coppiced woodland. One acre can produce two tonnes of green wood a year, seven acres will be enough to heat a four bed home. How much power you get from solar varies but if you invest in more panels you can easily cover electric (net), batteries for more but not impossible.
While self-sufficiency in food is hard, how much attention is put into a given area matters more than how much area, if that makes sense - a field of allotments can generate significantly more calories than the same area of commercial farming simply because it's being paid more attention and can grow in more dimensions.
It's certainly not easy and would require a significant investment but it's possible if that's what you want to do.

>>461538

You say that like seven acres isn't a lot. That's 3.5 football pitches, more or less. That's the kind of land you could build a small housing estate on. It's not viable for everyone to have seven acres of woodland just for firewood- Let alone in the context I was talking about of being a roaming gypsy type.

In the States you can go camping for weeks at a time and there's enough dead branches etc to forage off the floor for a fire without ever worrying about cutting anything down. You are still able to hunt freely and the average working class person can just take a rifle and shoot a deer. Those two things alone make self sufficiency possible in a way that just isn't realistic at all over here- You can just have your two weeks holiday and take a tent into the wilderness, and if you have the skills, have a nice time without wanting for anything.

There's just nowhere in this country you'll manage anything like that without getting arrested for trespassing on someone's land, killing some landowner's game, and setting fires all over protected woodland.

>>461539
That's more 'living off the land' than self sufficiency, though, isn't it?
The latter (to me at least) means it's sustainable, same land, same people, sustainable. The former is wild west stuff - nice, but devastating to the land unless you do it really sparsely.
If you're trying to get by on seven acres, I'm not sure I'd be cropping firewood, I'd be growing food and pelletising residues as fuel if at all possible. (Was looking at pellet mills this afternoon, wondering if I could pelletise and burn piss-soaked straw rather than shovelling it onto and off muck heaps in the pouring bloody rain. )

>>461539
It's closer to 2.5 pitches. I just checked onthemarket and there's 20 acres for £180k and 12 for 120k. Either of those would be more than enough for both wood and a field of solar and food growing, for less than the price of a house elsewhere. There'll be cheaper and better options if you do a proper search. Tricky to set up on and build but it can be done. You asked if anyone can be self sufficient in this country, they can. That you can't do it by hunting and just picking up dead wood as you go, or that there isn't enough land for everyone to do it, those are different things.

>>461542

Alright, and what are you going to pay the mortgage with while you tend your crops and harvest your trees?

>>461543
The day job. All the smallholding stuff fits into your copious free time. Hell, even without a mortgage, a smallholding is a money pit, at least until you have all the equipment you need. And you never have all the equipment you need, so you do loads of manual work like a bastard, using hours that you don't have, knowing that you should be doing more hours of paid work, to buy the gear that means that you could stop doing the drudgery, but you can't, because the drudgery needs doing right now or it'll be harder later, or the animals will suffer.
I love it, but I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone without a lot of reservations.

>>461544

Where do you think that inflection point is of "enough cash to buy the machines to do it comfortably"?

>>461545
Nobody's said it's easy, just that it is possible, with investment. You going "yeah but how do you afford it" isn't making any sort of a point. I don't know how you afford it, how do you afford anything? It happens. People do it. It depends on personal circumstance.

Anybody care for an update? Probably not but I can share one anyway.

Got the house, moved in, had a bit of a meltdown at how shit bits of it are and trying to get set up, forked out some money for things that break, now weirdly starting to enjoy it.

First payment went out, largely interest, but even a tiny bit is going into equity for me, which is more than I'd ever have had whilst renting. Even if renting they said 'you can have 150 quid back a month in savings' I'd have thought it great.

The town is great, very cosy, I'm away from the traffic other than neighbours coming to park, there's a garden and it's actually mine, it's peaceful, pitch black at night and feels safe. I'm still connected by transport to a major city.

The weirdest part though is that house price increases in the news don't suck anymore in the same way. I'd rather we fixed it so we had affordable housing, but at least I'm in that game. I know that house price increases mean the next band up for me also becomes more inaccessible but at least I have something.

Would recommend.

>>461716

That was bloody quick. Buying my place took the better part of 9 months. Were you already in the process when you posted the thread?

Anyway well done mate. Hope it keeps you warm and dry for many years to come.

>>461723
When I bought a house eight years ago it only took about ten or eleven weeks between viewing the place and moving in.

>>461716
> The town is great, very cosy, I'm away from the traffic other than neighbours coming to park, there's a garden and it's actually mine, it's peaceful, pitch black at night and feels safe. I'm still connected by transport to a major city.

Beeston or Todmorden?

>>461723
Yeah I'd already started the process, just had a wobble mid way. Thanks vey much, it's not warm, but it will be eventually.

>>461753
Neither of those I'm afraid.

Had a dream last night that professionals started taking out mortgages to own a room in a flatshare. Need to hide this thread now.

>>461784

I bet you a tenner that the broadsheets have already done an article about exactly that, describing it as some sort of exciting experiment in shared living.

The update nobody asked for: Despite the new stresses of maintenance and the unknowns, this might be one of my best ever decisions.

No more landlords, rent increases, letting agents pestering (bullying), fresh air, equity (however small) added each month.

What a joy. I don't know how anybody could experience this and be a NIMBY and not want others to have this significant life upgrade.

>>462292
Wait, I've already posted a self satisfied update it appears weeks ago. I had no recollection.

Sorry everybody.

>>462292
>>462293

Did I already say "told you lad"? If not, told you, lad.

Now let's look down on the rent plebs together and start voting Tory.