I'm 22 but I've scared myself reading all the doom and gloom of house buying so I've started saving for one by putting a few hundred a month away.
What age did you lads start saving ? I like to think I'm ahead of the curve but there can't be that many homeowners who managed to whip up a deposit by starting late.
I strongly suggest you get a halifax help-to-buy ISA. At 4% interest and unlimited withdrawals you're absolutely stupid not to if you've got the money to save, even if you are never able to take advantage of the bonus.
Only downsides are the £1000 opening cap, and £200 a month cap on paying in.
I've just started my deposit this year at 26. I'm a bit late sure to university, first year of work I had nothing to spare, and my savings in the second year of working went towards a less-shite car.
If all goes well, I might be able to start thinking about a house by the time I'm 30, touch wood.
I'm 28 and bought a house last year (I'm >>5624) with a £30,000 deposit. £10,000 of that was from my Nan dying but the other £20,000 was from about five years of saving. It should be even easier now with the Help to Buy ISA and that.
I'm 25 and have about £1,600 in the Halifax Help-to-Buy ISA and I feed that from a Santander 123 account which has around £10, 000 in (the £200 a month cap is a pain). I got two other accounts, one with just over £5,000 and the other with just under £3,000 which I could use to top things up with.
Goodness knows when I'll get a property. Even if I had the cash now I don't want to feel tied down to a location I might not want to be in come a years time. Plus, I want to try the whole living abroad *cough*find a way to leap from extended working holiday to permanent residency*cough* sooner rather than later.
In my head, as long as I'm continuing to save as much as I can when I can, I'll be okay. Or I could just be really naive.
> Other than sunken money, I'm starting to question if it's worth tying myself to one house for life.
The general idea of the "property ladder" is to be able to sell your house, even before your mortgage is paid off. If you're lucky and bought somewhere nice enough you can often sell it for more than you paid for it (even when taking into account interest on your mortgage payments) and buy somewhere nicer. Surely you've watched enough Phil and Kirsty to have figured this out by now?
This thread has made me feel pretty naive. I'm 25 and I really have no savings, and no intention of buying any property. Like a few others I'm reluctant because I don't particularly want to live where I am now.
Is there a way I could make up ground in the future?
>>6234 If you can afford to save, and still have disposable income, then save.
It might take you a decade to save for a good deposit, if you start saving now and in a few years time decide you don't want a house, you've got a few grand to spend on whatever you want.
Don't worry, you're not alone. We live in a generation of spend as you earn and live for the moment people. Credit comes easy and the thrills come cheap (but soon add up).
You're certainly not alone. Start saving now. Make arrangements, set up an account and work out a budget and how to cut back on the little things (who knew that taking a bottle of water to work instead of buying there could save so much?)
Good luck. You're never going to turn around and say 'I'm so fucking pissed I saved all them thousands of pounds', but you might just say 'I'm so fucking pissed I never made an effort to save'.
>>6236 My boss just bought a two bedroom detached house here in Vegas for $285,000 in one of the poshest neighbourhoods in the city with a view over a man-made lake with yachts and shit. That's just shy of £200,000, which buys you a terraced house down my parents' street in Hull, which is immediately next to a pair of council estates. Though posh by comparison to a two-minute walk down the lane, it doesn't add up.
>>6239 >That's just shy of £200,000, which buys you a terraced house down my parents' street in Hull
I'm calling bollocks, unless prices have shot up dramatically since I left just over two years ago. Then again, wherever you are in Hull you're never more than five minutes away from at least one council estate.
>>6240 Depends which end of the street(s), the ones at the back end have bigger gardens and their own private tenny between four or so houses so they regularly reel in £200k.
>>6242 I've been here just under three weeks so I couldn't say. I would imagine you need to do something to build up any kind of credit rating before a bank will consider giving you a mortgage. I have a bank reference from my UK bank heading over in lieu of a credit score to try and get myself a car, so I'll have a better idea of how you get treat soon enough.
One thing I've noticed is that it doesn't take nearly as much to be middle class here because the majority of Americans are poor as owt. My boss is an associate professor at the uni here and lives in what would be classed as a small mansion in England. I would have been able to afford a property just like it on my postdoc wage if I'd wanted to.
If you have a trade you can wangle into transferring abroad and nothing tying you down in the UK (and don't mind driving everywhere), I'd recommend giving it a shot over here. You'll just be a foreigner for a while, but ultimately if you're earning money then nobody would give a shit if you're a Martian with Al Qaeda connections.
It's incredibly easy to buy property in America. It doesn't help with visas or green cards or anything, but it's America. They'll sell you anything they can. They don't even check to see if you can drive before you buy a car over there.
>>6243 On top of that, if you do things which seem *completely fucking normal to someone from an up-to-date country*, such as have your rent and bill payments just come right out of your bank account without having to literally traipse a cheque into the offices once a month, then you will quite quickly build up a good credit score because they'll think you're some kind of millionaire wizard from the future.
> They don't even check to see if you can drive before you buy a car over there.
I've never bought a car in the UK but is that actually a thing? It seems somewhat stupid to me. What if you wanted to buy a car for your old mum or for your wife? What if you wanted to learn to drive in your own car? What if you just wanted to sit the fucker in your driveway, turn the air conditioning up high, and drink Stellas in the back seat of a weekend? For fucks sake, I wouldn't expect Robert Dyas to make sure I could cook before they sold me a wok. Broken Britain.
>>6247 My rent people refused to accept direct debit. Luckily, my bank has a service called Bill Pay, whereby they pay your bills for you to save you the hassle. They brag about it all over their branches and it's pretty popular for being an alternative to writing a paper cheque once a month, but I've since found out that what it actually does is send a physical paper cheque on your behalf to a payee whenever you tell it to. I'm having to kick up a fuss to get the uni to pay my through direct debit. They have it, sure, but they don't use it.
I'm gonna use my contactless Co-Op card somewhere and blow somebody's mind.
>>6232 So far, so good. As I mentioned in that thread, there's a house down the street which is a fair bit smaller than mine and is being rented out for around £100 pcm more than my mortgage payments.
Even if you don't want to move anywhere at the moment there's no harm in saving and you can always change houses later on.
>>6249 Maybe at official dealerships, but the local one I bought my car off suggested driving it 50 miles without tax (it was insured) and just show the V5C New Owners and receipt in the unlikely event I got pulled over.
