Money related - Home Deposit - Bank of Mum and Dad/ self-earned/ inheritance

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We haven't bought yet but we have a 30k deposit ready to go. We both saved it up ourselves, my part mostly came from bonuses I got the last few years. My parents have subtly offered to help a little bit as they recently moved house and earned a great profit on it as they moved out of an expensive city into the countryside. I'd rather not take their money though as I'd prefer to see them enjoy it themselves. My grandmother is very wealthy because my granddad who passed away was a classic rags-to-riches story, worked himself from relying on charities for food to owning his own successful business. However my grandmother has said she doesn't want to give any inheritance to her grandkids as we can work for our own money lol, so definitely won't be depending on any inheritance. 😂
 
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I bought my house outright after losing my parents. Whilst it's nice to be mortgage free it's a crappy way to get it and id rather not have lost my parents when I was a teenager and would happily pay a mortgage so I could see them. But I've made the best out of a crap situation.

We are going to remortgage soon so we can extend the house.
 
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I’m very lucky as my in laws sat us down and told us they had news for us
I burst into tears thinking they where going to say that they where ill or something
Nope,they wanted to buy us a house-and we’d be paying a daft amount in rent (this is mainly because my fella is still married and they don’t want his ex to have any claim on it-so it’s in their names and we are the tenants)
It cost them &16,500 and is now worth just shy of £150,000-we pay £350 a month-over the road to us pay just over double for a smaller house
When they die it’s ours (and he’ll be divorced by then)
 
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Has anyone bought their council house? How does a right to buy mortgage work please?
 
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Saved every penny of our own. Both our parents are not well off so a gift or loan was never a question.

Bought our place in last 10 years. A modest 3 bed end terrace but the back garden looks exclusively onto a golf course (don’t worry; it’s not St Andrews 😂😂). 5% deposit was on offer at the time but not shared equity (thankfully!) Love our little place and by time we are planning to sell we will only have about £40k left on the mortgage. Money from the sale and our savings will allow us to buy our final/dream place.

Best bit of advice? Don’t overly stretch yourself on your first place. We took a place that 1 of us could cover bills/mortgage for in event of job loss or redundancy. I nearly sweated buckets when I seen the AIP offer from Halifax willing to lend us over £300k on my old (previously quite tit wage) realise £300k is NOTHING to most house buyers down South but in Scotland (Central Scotland especially) that’s McMansion material 😂
 
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Saved every penny of our own. Both our parents are not well off so a gift or loan was never a question.

Bought our place in last 10 years. A modest 3 bed end terrace but the back garden looks exclusively onto a golf course (don’t worry; it’s not St Andrews 😂😂). 5% deposit was on offer at the time but not shared equity (thankfully!) Love our little place and by time we are planning to sell we will only have about £40k left on the mortgage. Money from the sale and our savings will allow us to buy our final/dream place.

Best bit of advice? Don’t overly stretch yourself on your first place. We took a place that 1 of us could cover bills/mortgage for in event of job loss or redundancy. I nearly sweated buckets when I seen the AIP offer from Halifax willing to lend us over £300k on my old (previously quite tit wage) realise £300k is NOTHING to most house buyers down South but in Scotland (Central Scotland especially) that’s McMansion material 😂
Couldn’t agree more with this last bit. We also did the same and made sure either of us could comfortably pay the mortgage without the other wage. It turns out corona meant that happened and we haven’t even noticed the drop in one salary.
 
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I bought my house outright after losing my parents. Whilst it's nice to be mortgage free it's a crappy way to get it and id rather not have lost my parents when I was a teenager and would happily pay a mortgage so I could see them. But I've made the best out of a crap situation.

We are going to remortgage soon so we can extend the house.
im so sorry for your loss ❤

Saved every penny of our own. Both our parents are not well off so a gift or loan was never a question.

Bought our place in last 10 years. A modest 3 bed end terrace but the back garden looks exclusively onto a golf course (don’t worry; it’s not St Andrews 😂😂). 5% deposit was on offer at the time but not shared equity (thankfully!) Love our little place and by time we are planning to sell we will only have about £40k left on the mortgage. Money from the sale and our savings will allow us to buy our final/dream place.

Best bit of advice? Don’t overly stretch yourself on your first place. We took a place that 1 of us could cover bills/mortgage for in event of job loss or redundancy. I nearly sweated buckets when I seen the AIP offer from Halifax willing to lend us over £300k on my old (previously quite tit wage) realise £300k is NOTHING to most house buyers down South but in Scotland (Central Scotland especially) that’s McMansion material 😂
Great advice, COVID has many taught many people that life can change in an instant and it’s good to be in a position where you or your partner could handle the bills on their ow should anything happen xx
 
I have one friend whose parents gave her £150,000 and two others whose parents bought their houses outright (imagine having £250k just knocking around in your bank)!!

My partner and I saved about £30k. I genuinely have no idea how we did it. We bought a project.
 
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We were renting and had no savings, but when i lost my mum, she left me her house which I sold and we used the money for a 40k deposit on a 5 bed semi (we live up north) and the rest went towards doing it up, new carpets etc, paid off debts and i have some left over.
It was a horrible way to get the money, and I'd give it all up in a heartbeat to have my mum back, but I think I did the right thing with my inheritance.
 
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We bought our house in 2016 for £110,000 (3 bed semi up north) and put down 10%, we had never lived together before buying the house but had been together for 5 years. It was his £10,000 and we used my savings for fees, decorating the house. Over the 4 years we've redone the whole house including new windows and kitchen. We have been gifted £15,000 during that time. £5,000 from my husband's grandad for new windows etc. And £10,000 gifted by his parents from the same grandads estate when he died. We have alot to thank grandad Brian for ❤
 
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We were saving for our wedding actually then realised we did not want an expensive wedding at all and so just kept going with the idea that it would be a house deposit. I think we had about 18k saved but we live in a cheaper to buy place (not London!) - our house cost £136000 for a newly refurbed end terrace and we put down 10% on it. We owned absolutely zero furniture so that was a challenge too, slowly buying bits and having no proper bed for a little while.
 
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Has anyone bought their council house? How does a right to buy mortgage work please?
Yes we bought ours 12 yrs ago, didn’t need a deposit & because had been living in it for 5 yrs we got a huge discount, there was a clause in ours that if sold it in the first 10 yrs the council would have first refusal to buy it back & the discount would have to be paid back, we’ve done a fair bit to it over the yrs, we contacted the council to get the ball rolling.
 
This thread is soo crazy!! I’m 22 and get so panicky about how I’m ever going to afford a flat here in London. If you’ve bought in London, what would you say made you buy here and not further out where it’s cheaper?

I live in London and neither my parents own houses. My grandparents house they bought when they moved over from Jamaica in the 60s was sold when they passed and distributed to the children which I believe has all been spent on clearing debt so I’m literally saving from square one which of course I know a lot of people have had to do, I’m just such an impatient person like I’d love to have somewhere of my own

I can’t deal with London prices either, I was seeing 4 bed detached houses in Norfolk starting at £190k when in London that would barely get me a studio or 1 bed in a decent area🙈 I can’t justify spending such a huge amount knowing I can get so much better elsewhere!
 
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Just started saving by myself, aiming for 20k by the time I'm 30. I am turning 27 in a couple months and almost have 2k but only been working full-time 8 months,
 
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I bought a 2 bedroom flat age 23 with a lot of help from my parents. The flat was £175k - I took out a mortgage of about 3.5 x my graduate salary and the rest was cash from them. The cash is technically mine but I pay interest on it to them at a commercial rate. So essentially a second mortgage. It will be written off at some point but up to them when! They also paid fees, stamp duty and furniture/white goods. I have a flatmate to help pay mortgages and bills. If I wanted to buy a bigger place then it’s on me to save and buy.

It makes sense for them and for me, they still receive the same amount of income as if it was invested and it means I have an asset that has appreciated and I’m paying off my own mortgage rather than renting and paying someone else’s.

Although in hindsight I wish they had waited until I was older. I was awful with money until about 2 years ago, never saved and built up a lot of credit card debt which I’m still paying off!

I am so grateful to them for it and know that I am so so lucky. Sometimes I do feel guilty about it and I do get the impression that some of my friends resented me for it. I didn’t really tell people that I was buying a place because I didn’t want to look like a spoilt brat. If anyone were to ask how I bought it I would tell them but I wouldn’t volunteer it for fear of being judged. I think most people would guess I had help anyway.

Neither of my parents came from much so they (and my grandparents) worked hard to get where they are today and give me the life I have had. The way I think about it is parents would want to give children the best life they can and if they can afford to help financially then great. I would get the money when they die anyway so may as well have it now while it’s useful to me.

I feel weird posting this so might delete 😬
 
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This thread is soo crazy!! I’m 22 and get so panicky about how I’m ever going to afford a flat here in London. If you’ve bought in London, what would you say made you buy here and not further out where it’s cheaper?

I live in London and neither my parents own houses. My grandparents house they bought when they moved over from Jamaica in the 60s was sold when they passed and distributed to the children which I believe has all been spent on clearing debt so I’m literally saving from square one which of course I know a lot of people have had to do, I’m just such an impatient person like I’d love to have somewhere of my own

I can’t deal with London prices either, I was seeing 4 bed detached houses in Norfolk starting at £190k when in London that would barely get me a studio or 1 bed in a decent area🙈 I can’t justify spending such a huge amount knowing I can get so much better elsewhere!
I'm not from London but I've been living here for the last few years (working and renting) and I absolutely could never see myself buying here. I've had a look to see what's out there and it's incredibly depressing. A colleague of mine was showing us some flats he was looking at buying (he's from London so wants to stay here) and it only confirmed for me that I will never ever buy here. Everywhere he showed was a flat which was really just one floor of your average terraced house or even just the converted attic space, in pretty crappy and very-far-from-central areas, all around 250k! That is mental. I get the pain of not being able to afford to live in your hometowen as well though as I'm from Dublin and it's the same situation there, maybe not quite as bad. But it's extremely difficult to buy there too. I've looked at buying in cities like Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester and holy moley, you really see how ripped off you are in Dublin and London.
 
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This thread is soo crazy!! I’m 22 and get so panicky about how I’m ever going to afford a flat here in London. If you’ve bought in London, what would you say made you buy here and not further out where it’s cheaper?

I live in London and neither my parents own houses. My grandparents house they bought when they moved over from Jamaica in the 60s was sold when they passed and distributed to the children which I believe has all been spent on clearing debt so I’m literally saving from square one which of course I know a lot of people have had to do, I’m just such an impatient person like I’d love to have somewhere of my own

I can’t deal with London prices either, I was seeing 4 bed detached houses in Norfolk starting at £190k when in London that would barely get me a studio or 1 bed in a decent area🙈 I can’t justify spending such a huge amount knowing I can get so much better elsewhere!
Some boroughs seem to have their own shared ownership schemes if you are from there. My friend bought a place recently in west London (born and raised) and she bought part of the property with a mortgage and rents the other part from the council, but the council pays/heavily subsidises the rent for her. I don’t know if relevant for you and there might be more to it but could be worth looking in to! ☺
 
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I'm not from London but I've been living here for the last few years (working and renting) and I absolutely could never see myself buying here. I've had a look to see what's out there and it's incredibly depressing. A colleague of mine was showing us some flats he was looking at buying (he's from London so wants to stay here) and it only confirmed for me that I will never ever buy here. Everywhere he showed was a flat which was really just one floor of your average terraced house or even just the converted attic space, in pretty crappy and very-far-from-central areas, all around 250k! That is mental. I get the pain of not being able to afford to live in your hometowen as well though as I'm from Dublin and it's the same situation there, maybe not quite as bad. But it's extremely difficult to buy there too. I've looked at buying in cities like Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester and holy moley, you really see how ripped off you are in Dublin and London.
The prices are ridiculous aren’t they!! I saw something on twitter about the average deposit for a house in London was £40k. On my salary that will take a lifetime to save! Especially with renting looking at a minimum of £1200 a month when I move out. Funnily enough where I live is being gentrified massively so you’ve got all of the new build flats ( studios, 1 beds and 2 beds if you’re lucky) being sold starting at £400k on one side of the town and on the other, the house prices are going up but the town is in awful condition and has a terrible reputation. I honestly can’t justify paying that much at all. Knowing what you can get elsewhere if you live an hour or two out I really can’t bare to think of it.

London is good socially and for work but you can easily travel back and forth when needed

Some boroughs seem to have their own shared ownership schemes. My friend bought a place recently in west London and she bought part of the property with a mortgage and rents the other part from the council, but the council pays/heavily subsidises the rent for her. I don’t know if relevant for you and there might be more to it but could be worth looking in to! ☺
Oh thank you! 😁 I did look briefly into shared ownership but I’ve heard so many people have had a lot of issues with it in terms of quality and repairs etc so it put me off a bit. There’s quite a few around here too so I’ll have a more in depth look!
 
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Yes is hard to save for a flat in London , you are paying essentially 1.2k in rent and that doesn’t include council tax, bills etc. People always say why don’t you rent outside of London, and tbh commuting is pain. 1-1.5h traveling to London and facing with constant delay plus extortionate fare. Also not all roles can be found outside of London, hence why staying in London becomes quite essential to some. I sounded very millennial I know, but glad that we have overcome the first step.
 
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We bought our first London flat in 2003 when deposits were much lower and mortgages very easy to get. We put down £40k ish which my husband saved (he was very well paid)

My friends generally bought with other friends (where highly paid) got 100-110% mortgages, or both. i think all of them did very well out of it, even though 100% mortgages are very looked down upon now
 
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