"Young need to save for 14 years for a home, says Shelter"
"How do you prepare for a lifetime of renting?"
Just two headlines from the BBC this week, two among hundreds in the press over the last couple of weeks as various surveys suggest it's getting near impossible for people to buy a house in the UK at the moment. I'm sorry, but have I missed something?
On the 3rd of January this year Joni and I were evicted from our rented home. On the 19th of April we moved into our first bought house. That’s saving period of 105 days. We didn't win the lottery, haven't had a penny of help from either set of parents and no ancient relative has dropped off this mortal coil and left us a small fortune.
Joni and I are a pretty normal pair of young people. We are quite lucky in that we both have full time work, paying the region of £18k each. But, we between us we have 4 over drafts, 2 credit cards and a loan on a car that is to this day higher than the cars value, so not exactly a bank mangers dream. When we were asked to leave our rented house we had considered buying a house 'some time later in the year', but we hadn't actually done anything about it. But renting had gotten too much. Too many estate agents had charges a fortune for contracts, landlords have taken money from us, or just decided one day they want their house back because their daughter has fallen out with her mother!
We looking into these 95% mortgages, and New Buy schemes run by the government, but they involved buying a brand new house and we just didn't think it was what we wanted. We wanted space and light and a garden, and there were no builds in our area that offered that.
So we knew we were going to need about £15K or so for the deposit and fees. Now, it's this next step that separates us from everyone else, and I don't think it’s a particularly revolutionary step. I don't think you need two BSc's and an MSc to reach this giant leap of imagination.
We needed some money.
So we went to the bank.
And we asked for some money.
Ta dah!
We sat down with a bank advisor and 3 separate occasions and we filled out forms and we showed her our budget and asked politely and we convinced her that we could handle it. And she believed us, so she gave us the money we needed. Joni and I aren’t particularly good with money, if we were we would have the debt we have in the first place, but we managed to convince our bank that we could pay them back.
Now, the loan we got it going to take 5 years to pay back, which actually matches quite nicely with what one of these reports says – based on our age and location apparently it would take us 4.8 years to save for a deposit.
But here, really is my point. There is nothing special about us. If we can but a house in 4 months then I think a lot of people can. And what's most amazing is in the 2 months since we bought our house it has already gone up in price. I wonder if perhaps the media stopped telling people they can't buy a house and told more stories of people like us who are loving our new home then perhaps the housing market would recover quicker.
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