Pressures of home ownership

I totally get your point, not everyone likes the idea of dealing with what comes with owning a house and although most people love to get in the property ladder, it is not for everyone. It just depends on how much you valued then feeling of owning your place and if it is worth the little jobs that comes with it. In my case since owning my place I have learned so much about DYI 😂 leaking taps, hanging curtains, drilling in the wall have been mostly a 5min job. Of course stuff like changing the boiler and bigger plumbing issues I will leave them to someone professional but until now haven’t need them. For me, for a long time paying rent and having the landlord taking care of all that did make sense, and I didn’t care about paying extra cost of rent as it was making my life easier, but since having kids that change. I didnt want the not knowing if I was going to be able to live in the same place for long period as I didn’t know if my rent was going to go up and down. I wanted my own place

Your mortgage will be cheaper than rent, put some money into an account every month for maintenance

I think we had homeserve at one point and that did cover some of those things. However the landlord could also turn round and say he wants to sell his flat and you need to look for somewhere else so there is more security that way.

Yeah I agree with @Karen - the landlord can decide that they no longer want to extend the rental agreement or may even want you out in 2/3 months. The first landlord was uncontactable, refused to replace the broken washing machine, fought us on replacing the dishwasher (even trying to fix it himself). Second landlord was uncontactable, refused to deal with a mouse problem, told in December (2023) that us we had til September 2024 to move out but expected us to abide by an honour code that we would stay til September. Like WTF?! My husband had enough and decided it was best for us to buy a house instead. Our monthly cost has gone down where the market rental rate has gone up. So we saved money in that way.

I agree with @Kim that you definitely need to have a fund for house repairs and maintenance. However you should also have extra funds aside upfront cuz you don’t know what surprises you may find in the new home once it’s yours. We got our home in June and I’m glad we moved in 2 weeks after the deal closed cuz there was so much to sort out upfront. Plus my husband’s had to sort something out every month since 🙈

Also if you live in the UK and decide to buy a house, you don’t need to offer the same value they put the house on the market for. My husband believes we should’ve offered £50k less than their asking price cuz of the amount of maintenance required upfront.

@Andi they probably wouldn’t have accepted your offer then! You can always offer whatever you feel the property is worth but the seller doesn’t have to go with it

@Andi it’s completely different in Scotland

That is right. Owning a house, means you will always will be fixing something. It will never stop! But mortgage will be always be the same or lower! You get to control and do whatever you want on your place. And you are making some profit the longer you live in that house. Luckily my husband can do it all. And he’ll fix the smallest problems. We do have a handy man that help us with big projects but it isn’t a big deal! We did get rid of our grass though cuz we didn’t want to be paying someone to cut our grass every month! So it was an investment but in the long term “it’ll be a cheap one”… plus we are saving water etc.

Can you start with a flat maybe? Less maintenance and you would have maintenance for the building (with services fee though). Having a house can indeed be never ending things to repair or pay for in addition to your mortgage. Or target a newer house. When you buy don't put all your savings down. Keep an emergency/repair fund and have a good insurance. Have a survey done. Renting can be cheaper than your mortgage but indeed, it's less secure. Really weight pros and cons

Also in the uk we just went through really high increased of mortgage rate, they just started to go down, I remortgage recently and pay overall more than before, it will eventually go down but we are stuck with that rate for 2 years. Rate raising can happen again and put you in difficulty. So really target an affordable house with a low mortgage, don't go top budget

@Kim oh wow how so? Do you have to be prepared to offer up from asking price?

@Andi it really depends on the house market of the area. Sometimes houses go for over 15% over the asking price 😫😫

@Marie yes and no. Stay clear of leasehold (if you’re in the uk) as you will likely be surprised with other costs, or they’ll increase the rates as they want. Plus with a leasehold you still have to do the maintenance in your house but you have to ask permission when you want to fix things / make modifications in the house /property. We steered clear of both shared properties and leasehold intentionally.

@Andi all properties have an offer over price, people put in their offers and the buyer chooses one. Offers under won’t be accepted. It’s also closed bidding so you have no idea what others have offered

@Andi yes, that's why I mentioned maintenence fee, just didn't go into details, they are pros and cons on all, renting, buying a house or a flat, they will need to do their own research and see what suits them best....we personally started with a flat/maisonette and it was luckly freehold

@Kim I agree that the buyer chooses the best offer for them. But we were actually advised to offer 10% less than asking price cuz sellers were adding fat to their price.

@Andi https://www.zoopla.co.uk/discover/buying/5-differences-between-scottish-and-english-conveyancing-systems/ this will explain it better than I can 😂

@Marie that’s fair enough. I agree that OP will need to do their own research and weigh out their options. We can only share our own experiences and lessons learnt