How important to you is it to own a house?

[catty]

For me i cant afford to rent! My mortgage on a 3 bedroom house is £498 pm (over 35 years and i had 25% deposit) for the same house renting im around £1200 - £1400 pm!!

Edit - actually think its closer to £1000 now, lots of redundancies around here lately

 

[zorak]

When we got married we had a choice. Buy a house or take up an opportunity and move to the US for 5 years. We chose adventure and moved. We.didn't buy there because we were in San Diego and houses are insanely expensive. I have known fertility issues so we went ahead and had two kids for fear of leaving it too late (glad we did as it took us years). We are now back in the UK with our kids and in a rental house we love. We are starting to think of buying but there's a chabce we may move abroad again in a couple of years so at the moment we are saving but not really looking.

So I guess you could say adventure is more important to us.

 

[RaspberryK]

Very important, we bought our house when I was 22 for a steal at £122000 but in a cheaper area than where we lived at the time, selling it 8 years later for £176000 and from my share of the equity I will be buying a shared ownership place.
I have had a glimpse of private renting and it horrifies me, the rental is far more than a mortgage and all of the fees and the insecurity plus the state of the houses is dreadful particularly if you have children.
I currently manage to pay £360 per month towards my mortgage on benefits plus a very part time job with very little from my ex in the way of maintenance plus all the other bills and a storage unit every month, I run a car and I wouldn't say that we go without. I don't really believe anyone who says they can't save for a deposit unless they are in a ridiculously high priced area for both renting and buying, in which case move.

x

 

[wishuwerehere]

I don't think it's fair to say if you're in a high priced area you should just move! We can't - our obly hope of getting a mortgage in the future is that my dh has a decent salary so he can't move jobs, my job is in the city centre to, my daughter goes to a good school where she is settled. We were in a lower priced rental but our old landlord sold last year which meant moving and a big rent hike to stay close to school. It's swings and roundabouts because we could move somewhere cheaper but my dh would need to move jobs and would probably have to take a paay cut

To answer op, yes it is important to us. I think it's a social expectation as much as anything as we are both the children of homeowners (although both our parents have been in various amounts of financial shit over their mortgage in the past) and i wish i could lose it as an expectation for myself as being tied up in the idea can be really stressful at times! House prices go up every few months near us as well so what seems affordable now won't be soon. We will be able to buy eventually it's just slogging away at the deposit which we are doing slowly

 

[Tasha]

Just move is very simplistic. We've tried and it isn't that easy. Firstly it is so difficult to save a deposit and six or eight weeks rent up front when you're already paying £2000 rent a month. Secondly it is so difficult to move to a different area, we tried last summer and so many times we would get down the motorway to be told that it's been let now.

 

[gingajewel]

We rented for about ten years because although we both worked full time we just couldn't afford to get a deposit together.
When the government introduced 5% deposits for mortgages we borrowed some money from a family member and put down a deposit on a two bed house that cost 97k.
I live in a very cheap area, a three bed house is probably 110k.
I can see how people fall into renting and struggle to buy. Its so hard to try and save a deposit when you are paying for everything else.
Also just for some context, I was renting a massive three bed house in a nice area by lo's school for £475 a month , my mortgage is about a hundred pound more a month but I now live in a smallish two bed.

 

[Rhio92]

Not massively important. We rent a nice 3 bedroom house with drive and garden for £550 pcm. We can relax knowing that if something were to go wrong we wouldn't have to shell out loads of money to fix it. Yeah, the landlord could end the tenancy or put the rent up, but it's not something to worry massively about.

 

[smileyfaces]

Mine and my husbands combined wages are about £23k, that's him working full time and me working part time. We do get more than that though once tax credits are taken into account.

We can't afford to buy because we don't have enough spare money left over each month to save for a deposit.

We have rented for 6 years. It makes me sick the amount of rent we have paid that could have been used towards our own home!

Tasha is right BTW, moving house when you rent isn't so easy, it is very expensive to do when you consider the deposit, first months rent, sometimes several months rent in advance etc.

 

[maryp0ppins]

Extremely important.
I hope to be mortgage free in the next 10 years,im 29 and DH is 30

 

[MindUtopia]

I would say it's really important, but it's not something we want to do tomorrow either. In the long run, it's incredibly important, but we're intentionally waiting because we know I'll need to move in a couple years for work and we really want to buy with the intention of staying somewhere a long time. So we're saving our money, renting for now (we couldn't, at this very moment, afford to buy the sort of house we're renting now), and looking to skip the starter house and keep ourselves out of a chain until we're ready to buy some place we want to stay. We have a business that we also want to base from our home, so we need some barns/outbuildings to house it, rather than to hire an external commercial space. So that plays a big part in it too. So yes, really important, but not really important to do right now. I'm 35, we've both lived and worked overseas a lot, now I'm doing a PhD, so hasn't really been a priority up til now, but will be once we're ready to settle down a bit more.

 

[Vesta]

It's very important to us. We plan to own 2 houses before we retire, and rent out the 2nd as our retirement income. I don't see how we could afford to retire at a reasonable age otherwise, and maintain our standard of living.

 

[topsy]

So important to us.

DH got a mortgage when he was 21 and he is on Minimum wadge so earns £16000 a year.
I dont work for health reason. But our mortgage is lower than my friend rent. We will prob be paying it off till we are in our 50`s. But it will be ours. Its a small 3 bedroom house but we could downsize when we are older, like someone else said I dont trust pensions to be worth anything when I retire.

xxxx

 

[Kiwiberry]

We actually just purchased our first home and to us it's a pretty big deal. I would say that if you plan to have two or more children it's almost essential just for space reasons. The issue we ran into where we live is we were paying stupidly absurd prices for a two-bedroom apartment. Now that we purchased the house we are going to be paying half of what we are paying now for the apartment.

Not only that but now we have a huge yard for the kids to play in and tons of privacy. The best part is it's our home and we don't have to answer to anyone . It of course will not be our permanent family home but it's a start for us.

 

[Lauraxamy]

It was always really important to me and I was pleased when I met my OH that it was also important to him too.
We both hated renting, being told we couldn't do this and couldn't do that, having somewhere that didn't feel like we could make it our own.
Plus our mortgage now is a lot less than our rent when we were renting and at least our money now is going towards our home rather than someone elses..

 

[RaspberryK]

The reason we bought a house first before having children was for the reasons you all mention, my ex used to commute and I know loads of people who commute to London or Birmingham for work.
We weren't on huge salaries when we got our mortgage, I think where the big salaries are and where the expensive housing is, is all relative so if you have less salary you are probably in a cheaper area in terms of renting or house prices.

x

 

[Tasha]

Not always, minimum wage is still minimum wage. Those jobs in tesco or what ever still need filling where ever you are.

 

[loeylo]

The reason we bought a house first before having children was for the reasons you all mention, my ex used to commute and I know loads of people who commute to London or Birmingham for work.
We weren't on huge salaries when we got our mortgage, I think where the big salaries are and where the expensive housing is, is all relative so if you have less salary you are probably in a cheaper area in terms of renting or house prices.

x

Probably true, but not always. My salary is set nationally and there are no discrepancies for more expensive areas. I live in an average-low cost area (a large town in a built up area close to a major city) but I would be paid the same if I worked in say St. Andrews or Edinburgh, and I definitely couldn't afford to buy there for a long time!

It also isn't as easy as "move" - I have been qualified for 4 years and have literally just got a permanent job. I need to live where the jobs are!

 

[catty]

I do agree with its not as easy just to move. We rely on help from family for me to go to work. If i moved id have no help and therefore no job.

 

[Pearls18]

My husband's salary is also set nationally, we were posted to London and he got no extra allowance in his wages for that (thankfully the rent was set nationally too!! But we never could have bought a house there) my wages arent much different across the country either, it's better paid in London (but no where near in line with house price difference) or if I did my job in the university sector, but because I generally work in local authorities it's the same down here as it is up north where we would get a heck of a lot more house for our money. Lots of companies are national and don't always reflect the areas. That said, we have opted to buy a little further from where we work as we can get much more house, we're buying a new build, the exact same house just 30 miles away from the same developer is £160,000 more than what we're paying...THIRTY miles?!

 

[JessyG]

Pretty important to me.

I like the ability to decorate my home as a please but that is a fairly superficial reason. I also like the fact that once paid off i will have something to leave my children when i die.

I bought my first flat when i was 21/22 it was a government incentive scheme whereby i owned the property but only paid a mortgage for 70% with no attaching rent. It was brilliant but i broke even when i left as the market had dropped so much that I sold it for the same as i bought it. Essentially when i bought my current house we had to start a fresh. Thankfully my mortgage was dirt cheap and with no children and two full time incomes we were able to save for our deposit and legal fees within a year.

We certainly wont be mortgage fee anytime soon in fact i think we will be 60 by the time its paid but i like owning over renting.