Home owners?

[pianowelsh]

How many of you guys own the home you live in and how many rent?? Im interested to know how the correlation of full-time emplyment in music fits with home ownership.  I work full-time in music and RENT currently.

[ahinton]

How many of you guys own the home you live in and how many rent?? Im interested to know how the correlation of full-time emplyment in music fits with home ownership.  I work full-time in music and RENT currently.

Depends what you mean by "own". I do know what you mean by it, of course but, although strictly speaking I "own" mine, it feels as though I actually rent it from the mortgage lender - not a pleasant feeling, that's for sure...

Best,

Alistair

[elspeth]

I own about half of mine, the mortgage people have their claws into the remainder, depressingly... I don't work in music per se, I'm in theatres and concert halls - providing performance facilities rather than performing myself.

[thalbergmad]

Thanks to the Wonderful Margaret Thatcher, i bought my council house for £18,000 in 1988.

What a great woman.

Thanks Mags

Thal

[zheer]

, i bought my council house for £18,000 in 1988.

  Very expensive in them days.

[pianowolfi]

Well I live in a rented flat at the time. I am searching for a different one because the house changed its owner and the new one will add on and renovate. After all these construction works (and all the disadvantages that come along with them ) are done the flat will cost double as much. Which I could perhaps afford if everything goes on as it is now and my income doesn't decrease. But it would not be easy. (and to me it is actually questionable when you are forced to pay a third of your income for a flat ) And the only reason for my current hesitation is that it is VERY hard to find a flat as an active musician. I actually don't care about owning or renting if I just can live my musicianship.

[ahinton]

  Very expensive in them days.

Not by UK standards, it wasn't - and in the city where I live, £18,000 wouldn't buy a small back yard nowadays, let alone any kind of inhabitable building to put on it; the average - and I stress AVERAGE - price of a house here is in excess of half a million dollars and still rising, despite higher interest rates than we've been accustomed to recently, with the result that, at present, most people's houses increase in value by as much or more than their gross salaries and, for the time being, the otherwise heavily taxed UK still differs from many other European countries in that there is no tax liability on the sale of one's main residence, so most people can make far more profit by selling their houses than by going to work. The downside is that the taxman still gets you in the end, as the average price of a house here in Bath, UK is just above the current UK threshold for inheritance tax, so the moment you drop down dead the taxman grabs 40% of everything you had above £285,000 which, in most people's cases here, includes abit of their houses unless they are heavily mortgaged (of course there are ways of mitigating inheritance tax - there have to be! - but that's another matter).

It is often argued that there's no folk quite like the Brits abroad when it comes to ratcheting up the prices of houses and apartments; it's even been joked that, if the wars in Afghanistan ever end, the Brits that decide to remain there will start a property price boom before so much as drawing their next breath. If you want an example of how this works in practice, just look at parts of eastern Spanish Catalunya (close to the French border) or Bulgaria to see what a difference the Brits (mostly) have made to property prices. They've done it in the Dordogne in France, too - which is why quite a few of them are now moving out (and even sacrificing some tax in order to do so) into cheaper areas of France where they'll likely cause the same thing to happen eventually.

There'll probably be quite a lot of this kind of thing in the immediate future, although one may question how long it may be sustained in Britain itself, since it is reckoned that at least a quater of a million Brits quit Britain annually.

Best,

Alistair

[zheer]

Not by UK standards, it wasn't - and in the city where I live, £18,000 wouldn't buy a small back yard nowadays

  For a council house outside London in 1988, 18 grand was a lot of money. Sure nowadays a small garage in High street Kensington will cost as little a £130.000, but thats cuz only recently has London become the most expensive city in the flipping world.

[zheer]

How many of you guys own the home you live in

 I own a property lader.

[ahinton]

I own a property lader.

I'm mortgaged to one.

Best,

Alistair

[thalbergmad]

  For a council house outside London in 1988, 18 grand was a lot of money. Sure nowadays a small garage in High street Kensington will cost as little a £130.000, but thats cuz only recently has London become the most expensive city in the flipping world.

I bought at £18,000, but that was with 70% discount.

Good on yer Mags.

Thal

[ahinton]

I bought at £18,000, but that was with 70% discount.

Good on yer Mags.

Thal

I remember that deal; one can't get anything like that nowadays, that's for sure. A taxi driver that I know who plies for hire around these parts has a property portfolio in excess of two and a half million pounds; he started with £26.50 at the age of 15 and he's only in his early 40s now. He still drives a taxi because he thinks he doesn't yet have enough for his retirement. He probably doesn't either - and he foresees a time when a one-bedroom studio apartment in the city of Bath will be unavailable to anyone with much less than what his property portfolio is worth today. He is probably unduly pessimistic, but he may well be on the right lines nonetheless. It will only take enough funny money from Russia and elsewhere pushing London property prices into eight figures to induce enough people now living there to get the hell out and make a massive buck in order to catapult prices here - already quite an established magnet for Londoners wanting to get out of London - and make his bizarre-sounding vision seem rather more like reality in the making...

Best,

Alistair

[thalbergmad]

I remember that deal; one can't get anything like that nowadays, that's for sure.

Indeed not and even though it was an incredible offer, it still took me a lot of time to convince my parents to do it.

My house is nothing special, but would now sell at about £250,000.

I feel sorry for the young people of today trying to get on the property ladder, especially those that have taken out 5 x salary mortgages.

Thal

[ahinton]

Indeed not and even though it was an incredible offer, it still took me a lot of time to convince my parents to do it.

My house is nothing special, but would now sell at about £250,000.

I feel sorry for the young people of today trying to get on the property ladder, especially those that have taken out 5 x salary mortgages.

Thal

Moi aussi - especially those who have taken out 5 × salary mortgages of more than 100% of the purchase price of their properties - and even more so for those who borrow six- or even occasionally seven-figure sums on mortgages having already borrowed a large fraction of the five- or six-figure amounts that they have put down as deposits on their homes to be mortgaged when they already had five-figure debts from their years at university. As a research pharmacologist that I know told me a while ago, "when I was 20, I owed £1,000 - now I am 30, I owe £10,000,000; since I could not pay back at the age of 20 what I owed then and can't pay back what at the age of 30 I owe now, who the **** cares if, by the time I reach 40 - if I ever do - I owe £100,000,000? - not me, that's for sure!". Now nearly 36, she claims that she owes only just over £2,000,000 so, compared to her expectations of only a few years back, she's doing really well. Just how much worse would she have done had she abandoned her risky career in pharmacological research and done what she first thought of doing - being a composer? I shudder to think...

Best,

Alistair

[pianistimo]

there's good and bad about homeownership, pianowelsh.  for one thing - here in pa - you are forced to join the homeowner's association.  i cannot think of anything that takes away a person's civil liberties more than that dumb association.  last year we had to take our window air conditioner out of my son's bedroom window - because it was 'unsightly.'  it was brand new and white like the house.  if anyone was looking - it was because they were staring up into space dreaming.  also, it was not noisy.

ok.  enough rant about that.  if you are not getting fined for adding a fence or a shed without permission as to shape, size, color (this makes me mad enough to spit on their feet - and i'm a christian.  you can imagine what other people do.  people do have guns here) then you are concerned about upkeep.  much better to buy new than old.  roofs are expensive and water heaters die at 7-8 years.  plumbing and electrical have to be new, too, to be able to re-sell a home up to standards.  that is why it is extremely important to buy NEW.  also, you save a good deal here in us with having energy saving appliances.  it's hard to sell a home without them.

we started our young lives renting for probably 10 years.  then, we moved miles away from LA and bought a two bedroom plus den - but had a commute (of which we had to pay for the gas and car expenses - which BELIEVE ME - were not small).  it's really a trade off.  do you want homeownership SO badly that you don't want the convenience of living in town.  and/or the rent to keep going up.   that part we hated.  also, with homeownership - you can deduct mortgage interest and save a lot on taxes.

perhaps starting out with a back house or a fixer-upper and moving up is better than renting a house.  we moved from our apartment to a rented house.  it was a lot of space and a yard - and we were so ready for it.  we had our first child and there were schools and parks nearby and it wasn't so close to major city streets.  the only bad thing was that just the same as renting an apartment - the house payment suddenly jumped up by several hundred dollars when we were least expecting it.  with an apartment there are guidelines that they have to follow.  with a private homeowner - it's sort of at their discretion according to what they want to do with the house.  btw, we were taking excellent care of the yard and house - so i know they just wanted more for whatever bills were coming their way.  we ended up moving very far away from work location.  it was worth it to have our own home finally - but that was after 10 years or so.  it makes you more grateful.

[pianistimo]

if you want quality construction, come to pennsylvania.  houses are square here and they are built really sturdily.  our house back in california had some discrepancy in one bathroom wall.  you could actually see it.  also, when buying a home - ALWAYS get an inspector.  especially for the foundation and roof and stuff that you don't have time to go over inch by inch.  the things you want fixed - you ask to be fixed before you agree to purchase.  once you say you are purchasing - things go downhill (esp if buying a pre-owned home).  don't let people rush you by saying 'the interest rates will go up - we can lock in.'  just get another bank.  this is a big purchase and decision.  never be rushed.

[ted]

It is interesting to read that property values are escalating elsewhere. I naively thought it was only happening in Auckland. With the average house and section value in Auckland sitting at more than ten times an average annual salary, I think the problem in this city is definitely worse than in many places though. Other areas of New Zealand do not reflect this trend to anywhere near the same extent.

A curious side-effect is that many older Auckland home owners have enormous assets and very little income. This has led to financial institutions offering reverse mortgages and other schemes enabling people to live on their houses as well as in them, so to speak. Exactly what happens when people die, and who actually ends up owning the houses I cannot yet fathom. Presumably it reaches a point in a couple of generations where banks own everything does it ? I don't know.

It is certain that the once common goal, almost regarded as a right here, of owning a house on a section with plenty of lawn and a few trees, is a fading dream here in Auckland.  Already, apartment living is proliferating. Sadly, many of these dwellings are of pretty shoddy construction, built quickly for a quick profit, as the recent "leaky buildings" controversy here proves.

I share Thal's sentiments regarding young couples starting families. Unless they are much wealthier than average to start with they don't have a show. This is going to cause all sorts of social problems in the next generation, and we have too many problems as it is now.

Our government is attempting to bring the housing market down by fiddling with the reserve bank cash interest rate. I don't understand economics very well but they have been doing this for a few years now and it hasn't made a scrap of difference. An old, neglected bungalow in Auckland, with rot and bits falling off, on a very ordinary section, still commands a price of $500,000 - ludicrous on the face of it.