House prices..

Artemic said:
To be honest, And i mean no offence to anyone here when i say this but £900 of disposable income a month is easy to live on.

Presonally i dont earn very much 19k, and my wife gets about 5k from work and after including child allowance etc.. but we have 2 children, a 100k mortgage on a 150k 4 bed house, a car, yeah we dont have sky TV but we have broadband etc.. and we live comforably enough and still manage to save a little here and there all the while paying extra off the mortage each month. We fixed the morgage a year and a half ago, so the payments are not quite what they would be now (about £600). But the idea that £900 is not enough to live on is laughable.

People just want too many luxuries. Please excuse my mini off topic rant :p

A bit more on topic, Personally if the house prices drop we could be screwed once our fixed rate finishes if the interest rates rise, but i honestly hope they wont rise too much for us to cope with, and if thats the case, we will just have to cut back on some of the little extras that we have. eg, the internet, xbox games etc
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Nice post. It's a shame you are in a minority. Financial prudence is not a trait possessed by many in modern day Britain! :(
 
I also agree with Artemic.

Sadly people want more, and they want it now.

The days of prudence are long gone - hence the reason the economy has done so well. Unfortunately the legs are starting to show signs of tiredness.

People will eventually run out of easy money. Once that happens its going to be bad. The longer it takes to happen the worse it will be.

For me its better to get it over and done with now than to go on another couple of years in false hope.
 
Artemic said:
To be honest, And i mean no offence to anyone here when i say this but £900 of disposable income a month is easy to live on.

Presonally i dont earn very much 19k, and my wife gets about 5k from work and after including child allowance etc.. but we have 2 children, a 100k mortgage on a 150k 4 bed house, a car, yeah we dont have sky TV but we have broadband etc.. and we live comforably enough and still manage to save a little here and there all the while paying extra off the mortage each month. We fixed the morgage a year and a half ago, so the payments are not quite what they would be now (about £600). But the idea that £900 is not enough to live on is laughable.

People just want too many luxuries. Please excuse my mini off topic rant :p

A bit more on topic, Personally if the house prices drop we could be screwed once our fixed rate finishes if the interest rates rise, but i honestly hope they wont rise too much for us to cope with, and if thats the case, we will just have to cut back on some of the little extras that we have. eg, the internet, xbox games etc
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It's really not that simple for some people. Where you live makes a huge difference. For people who live in my area and have 2 kids, a 2 bedroom maisonette although cramped would still cost them £235,000 upwards.

It's Greater London (Hillingdon) and wages aren't exactly Sky high either. Most people I know in their late 20s or early 30s are earning between £15k and £30k (most around 20k) so it's totally unaffordable to buy anywhere unless you are happy paying 60% odd of takehome pay on the house.
 
Artemic said:
To be honest, And i mean no offence to anyone here when i say this but £900 of disposable income a month is easy to live on.
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Really? Have you tried living in Cambridge (or anywhere else that is expensive)? I'm lucky in that I have quite a bit of disposable income, most of my money goes into savings. If I only have £900 a month however I'd really be struggling. Rental prices here are silly, as is council tax. Utilities keep on getting more expensive, food prices are high, and local transport is vastly overpriced.
 
platypus said:
Really? Have you tried living in Cambridge (or anywhere else that is expensive)? I'm lucky in that I have quite a bit of disposable income, most of my money goes into savings. If I only have £900 a month however I'd really be struggling. Rental prices here are silly, as is council tax. Utilities keep on getting more expensive, food prices are high, and local transport is vastly overpriced.
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:) As stated earler in the thread, the £900 was after mortgage (rent), and council tax and utility bills though, Running a car and foods is generally the same price most places in england. We get more than £900 a month in total and couldnt survive on just that either. though after essential bills mortgage etc we probably have about 500 ish I would think. ;)

carpmaster said:
It's really not that simple for some people. Where you live makes a huge difference. For people who live in my area and have 2 kids, a 2 bedroom maisonette although cramped would still cost them £235,000 upwards.

It's Greater London (Hillingdon) and wages aren't exactly Sky high either. Most people I know in their late 20s or early 30s are earning between £15k and £30k (most around 20k) so it's totally unaffordable to buy anywhere unless you are happy paying 60% odd of takehome pay on the house.
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Sorry, I think you may have missunderstood me, I wasnt saying it was easy for people to get houses everywhere, All i was saying is that I find people 'generally' want to spend too much on lifes luxuries and people can survive on less than they think. As i said it was a slightly off topic rant. :)
 
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Artemic said:
:) As stated earler in the thread, the £900 was after mortgage (rent), and council tax and utility bills though, Running a car and foods is generally the same price most places in england. We get more than £900 a month in total and couldnt survive on just that either. though after essential bills mortgage etc we probably have about 500 ish I would think. ;)
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Oh, er well. Yeah, £900 after all that is loads to live on.

Ignore me :).
 
Its taken maybe 4-5 years for the doom sayers like myself to finally feel vindicated .... but it looks like the wheels have finally fallen off the cart.

Apologies to everyone who was duped into thinking their houses could realistically triple in value for 'real' reasons, and that it had absolutely NOTHING to do with the biggest credit (debt) expansion in history.

Another bubble is finally bursting. Supply and demand is a logical enough argument, but if the money suddenly dries up, as opposed to this mythical housing 'shortage' people used to justify house price rises.... then the bottom just falls out of the market.

Do people REALLY think we could have a free lunch with 0% credit cards, loans coming out of our eyeballs and houses doubling in value every few years .... forever?
 
brid said:
Do people REALLY think we could have a free lunch with 0% credit cards, loans coming out of our eyeballs and houses doubling in value every few years .... forever?
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The scary thing is the whole economic foundations of the world are based on exponential growth.
It's just physically impossible for that to continue indefinitely, who knows when we'll reach the limits but it will cause problems, that's for sure.
 
Thats why we need and we HAVE economic cycles ... unfortunately people dont like to think that there could possibly be a situation where something they have bought might actually go down in value, or that they bought at the WRONG time.

I think the whole labour honeymoon 'no more boom and bust' was taken a bit too seriously, and a lot of people actually believed that the laws of economics could somehow be sidestepped by our amazing chancellor/leader.
 
haha funny how everyone was slating me a year ago for saying the same thing. Now suddenly all the bulls have turned into bears.

Typical.
 
brid said:
Thats why we need and we HAVE economic cycles ... unfortunately people dont like to think that there could possibly be a situation where something they have bought might actually go down in value, or that they bought at the WRONG time.

I think the whole labour honeymoon 'no more boom and bust' was taken a bit too seriously, and a lot of people actually believed that the laws of economics could somehow be sidestepped by our amazing chancellor/leader.
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Even taking economic cycles into account we're still ahead of where we were at the peak in 1929 and will still be ahead at the trough of any recession/depression that may come in years ahead.

Eventually there will come a time where economic growth just isn't possible anymore given the finite resources we have and that will have quite a profound impact on society IMO.
 
It seems to me that house prices are falling. We how have Nationwide reporting 3 months of consecutive falls, The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors reporting 4 months of consecutive falls, mortgage approvals are at a three-year low down 12% on last year, Rightmove report that asking prices have fallen 3.2% month-on-monht (when asking prices fall selling prices fall further as in a falling market the proportion of asking price got falls) and according to Hamptons International the number of buy-to-let mortgages has fallen from 44% of the market in Nov06 to just 18% in Nov07. This last figure is amazing as it shows just how the BTL market has dominated the housing market and in turn how quick things can change.

But the single most important thing is the credit crunch. House price inflation is totally dependent on money supply growth. With the banks not able/willing to increasing lending it’s physically impossible for prices to increase.

So, what’s happening to house prices? I think they are “crashing” by any sensible definition of the term.
 
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They may be falling over there now, I should imagine they need to. However, they'll recover and then gain a shed load. That's just house prices. Houses are long investments (yes you can buy and sell on in boom period, but generally speaking, long investments)
 
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