Buying a house (and renting)

Squinty wrote:Got 4 house viewings later. Just need to make sure they don't nick all my shite.

Less to pack for the move though.

andretmzt wrote:

Squinty wrote:Got 4 house viewings later. Just need to make sure they don't nick all my shite.

Less to pack for the move though.

That's true actually...

Just saw this flat in Brighton.







The strawberry floating "kitchen", and that door is obviously into a shower "room"/cupboard. The toilet is communal .

** NEWLY PAINTED & CARPETED **



What the strawberry float were they thinking with that mirror? Ah yes let's juts split your face in half while you're at the sink, that'll be a stylish remix.

I'm fighting tooth and nail to keep my current place, strawberry float that.

Hiya mate I can do you a 2 for 1 deal got some spare tiles me can do kitchen and bathroom talk to me





smashing mate, love it, love it

Green Gecko wrote:Just saw this flat in Brighton.







The strawberry floating "kitchen", and that door is obviously into a shower "room"/cupboard. The toilet is communal .

** NEWLY PAINTED & CARPETED **



What the strawberry float were they thinking with that mirror? Ah yes let's juts split your face in half while you're at the sink, that'll be a stylish remix.

I'm fighting tooth and nail to keep my current place, strawberry float that.

Are you supposed to sleep in that room too?

What's the asking price for that Brighton 'flat'?

Victor Mildew wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Just saw this flat in Brighton.







The strawberry floating "kitchen", and that door is obviously into a shower "room"/cupboard. The toilet is communal .

** NEWLY PAINTED & CARPETED **



What the strawberry float were they thinking with that mirror? Ah yes let's juts split your face in half while you're at the sink, that'll be a stylish remix.

I'm fighting tooth and nail to keep my current place, strawberry float that.

Are you supposed to sleep in that room too?

Yes.

My favourite bit is the bathroom extractor fan as an extractor for a hob apparently. That's definitely going to work, no build up of grease.

Also look how the electric heater is wodged in off axis to the old fireplace.

BTB wrote:What's the asking price for that Brighton 'flat'?

My search yielded 200 results that were about 70% student rooms and houseshares so I can't be bothered to find it again, but as a bedsit I think it was around £500-£600pcm mark.

I paid 700pcm in surrey for a 1 bed house with an attic and garden and studio kitchen/living room. I've seen worse, it's basically what I'm doomed for if I don't hit every point in my plans.

I do this purely as motivational ammo, because I have one of the best PCMs in the city for what I get. No chance strawberry floating anyone is going to come collect things like that up 8 sets of stairs and mucking around with a buzzer, that's one reason on its own. Shipping stuff is fine I guess but that's also a ballache for heavy shipments.

There's also this, advertised simply as "Basement with pole".

Holy strawberry float those are horrendous.

Hopefully got a buyer for the house. Slightly under, but will still make a good bit of money on it. If it pans out.

Now need to find another house. We have an offer in on one, but the seller is not really budging. The house is ridiculously overpriced for what it is.

Green Gecko wrote:

Victor Mildew wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Just saw this flat in Brighton.







The strawberry floating "kitchen", and that door is obviously into a shower "room"/cupboard. The toilet is communal .

** NEWLY PAINTED & CARPETED **



What the strawberry float were they thinking with that mirror? Ah yes let's juts split your face in half while you're at the sink, that'll be a stylish remix.

I'm fighting tooth and nail to keep my current place, strawberry float that.

Are you supposed to sleep in that room too?

Yes.

My favourite bit is the bathroom extractor fan as an extractor for a hob apparently. That's definitely going to work, no build up of grease.

Also look how the electric heater is wodged in off axis to the old fireplace.

BTB wrote:What's the asking price for that Brighton 'flat'?

My search yielded 200 results that were about 70% student rooms and houseshares so I can't be bothered to find it again, but as a bedsit I think it was around £500-£600pcm mark.

I paid 700pcm in surrey for a 1 bed house with an attic and garden and studio kitchen/living room. I've seen worse, it's basically what I'm doomed for if I don't hit every point in my plans.

I do this purely as motivational ammo, because I have one of the best PCMs in the city for what I get. No chance strawberry floating anyone is going to come collect things like that up 8 sets of stairs and mucking around with a buzzer, that's one reason on its own. Shipping stuff is fine I guess but that's also a ballache for heavy shipments.

There's also this, advertised simply as "Basement with pole".

That's Denster's house, Maggie Thatcher gives it away.

Very relateable problem in the money section of The Telegraph:

‘We bought two flats in Kew but our boys want to live in Hackney – what do we do?’

The mother-of-two recently sold the family home and is renting in the Thames-side village of Barnes with her husband. They have around £2m in a National Savings account earning 3.6pc in interest.

She wants to help them, but she also wants to know whether she and her husband can eventually retire. The two don’t have huge pensions, having cashed in over the years to pay school fees

Grumpy David wrote:Very relateable problem in the money section of The Telegraph:

‘We bought two flats in Kew but our boys want to live in Hackney – what do we do?’

The mother-of-two recently sold the family home and is renting in the Thames-side village of Barnes with her husband. They have around £2m in a National Savings account earning 3.6pc in interest.

She wants to help them, but she also wants to know whether she and her husband can eventually retire. The two don’t have huge pensions, having cashed in over the years to pay school fees

The Telegraph are obsessed with highlighting the struggles of insanely rich people.

"I can't afford to keep my castle warm!"

"I earn £3m a year, but school fees are crippling me!"

"I have £20m in the bank, so why does my friend have more classic cars than me?"

"I love my private island, but hate getting a boat, why can't I have a helipad?"

"I inherited hundreds of millions from my mother, but my youngest son married a mixed race American!"

I can't help you despite having 2 million in the bank. Sorry lads. Please understand.

I think the point is you can retire whether you have a huge pension or not.

Because you still have a pension. Who knows what "huge" means.

It's disgusting isn't it. The wealth gap, and how rich and entitled people feel they're hard-done by.

I've said already somewhere before. I have no pension whatsoever. I released £34 from Surrey council for the zero hours contract I did for a year and a half until I was disappeared off the payroll.

The full time job I had at the same time just above min wage had no pension scheme at all.

All my other jobs were temping/contracting.

Self employed given the order of magnitude greater investment needed (in the business rather than yourself at some future point of time) to get to a point where you can even have a salary, compared to traditional 9 to 5 PAYE, I would basically have to expect everything I do to make a good profit multiple times over anything approaching a reasonable standard of libbing to be able to pay into a pension.

I have enough national insurance credits eventually to get the state pension, provided I claim whatever I'm entitled to on a low income, which is itself exceptionally difficult because of the administration burden.

What pisses me off about the more well off is they can afford to just piss money into weak business ideas and they can afford to fail multiple times before I even get to succeed once (if I ever do). Obviosuly I can't afford to do that.

I.e. luck and time are both at their disposal but I can't exploit either of those things or get any time back (and neither can they, but they sort of can by trying over and over again because the money is just there already, regardless of where it came from, property, inheritance, nepotism, whatever. In fact they can pay people to run the entire operation for them, concurrently, multiple things, and never do any work besides paying money into it, if that counts).

It's miserable (which is why I don't do it) to look at people who can afford to fail infinite times and who moan about people like me who should "just get a job" (putting aside the idea that for some reason you only have a "job" if someone else told you you work for them now, which is not true), so that I can stop depending on their taxes (taxes they don't pay, but I actually do, via VAT and duty for example) to get the state pension, or (inversely) their companies/corporations to pay national insurance or pension contributions so that I can retire.

Whatever way you look at it with the rich they are always being persecuted or the victim of some unjust aspect of society while moaning about everyone else who is materially worse off than them, taking things away from them.

So yeah, I have close to zero choices (without endlessly being hired and "sunset", "moved on", "discontinued", "revised" or otherwise disappeared, which isn't exactly how you build a pension pot) but to achieve the near impossible (I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm saying it's close to impossible i.e. very very hard) goal of being able to retire whilst still being able to afford to live i.e. eat and gooseberry fool, by using money I pretty much made out of thin air i.e. 100% work. The irony?

That's literally thatcherism. It's literally what rich tories (generally speaking) strawberry floating want us to do. To enterprise, thrive despite, grow, create jobs, contribute to the economy etc, quit complaining, depending on the state and get on with it, the thing they work OH SO HARD to achieve to begin with, and we should be thankful that these rubbish jobs with crappy pay, zero benefits and bad/no pensions are offered to us if we don't work JUST AS HARD as they did.

So if you are not magically an overnight success and raking in mega money with your genius business ideas that have nothing at all to do with just buying everything out, putting down massive (tax deductible) capital investments (including property/commercial leases) with the right connections, snuggling up to the right people, your biggest client just happens to be your mum's great aunt's best friend's son/daughter/offspring... That's your fault, you failed and you must have done something wrong, so we go back to Just Get A Job.

But what if you can't hold down a job because the conditions for that are inhospitable, you're disabled, the commute you have to do is insane and costs quarter to a half of your salary and takes 30 hours a week off your life... And every time you try to do that (multiple times) somehow that manages to not work out... So you think, hmm maybe it really is all my fault, so I'll start my own business...

Yeah. strawberry float those people.

Moggy wrote:

Grumpy David wrote:Very relateable problem in the money section of The Telegraph:

‘We bought two flats in Kew but our boys want to live in Hackney – what do we do?’

The mother-of-two recently sold the family home and is renting in the Thames-side village of Barnes with her husband. They have around £2m in a National Savings account earning 3.6pc in interest.

She wants to help them, but she also wants to know whether she and her husband can eventually retire. The two don’t have huge pensions, having cashed in over the years to pay school fees

The Telegraph are obsessed with highlighting the struggles of insanely rich people.

"I can't afford to keep my castle warm!"

"I earn £3m a year, but school fees are crippling me!"

"I have £20m in the bank, so why does my friend have more classic cars than me?"

"I love my private island, but hate getting a boat, why can't I have a helipad?"

"I inherited hundreds of millions from my mother, but my youngest son married a mixed race American!"

Just saw an article on the BBC that reminded me of this. It's mostly about how awful leasehold is, but this section caught my eye:

Anti-leasehold campaigners say Mr Gove's legislative efforts don't go far enough.

"Leaseholders want full control over the homes they've bought , their services charges and ultimately as a result, their lives," says campaigner Harry Scoffin.

"What the government is proposing is transparency over those costs. The problem is we're going to find out how much we're being ripped off by, but the rip-offs won't stop".

Harry's mother Anna says she feels exploited. Service charges for her flat in London's Canary Wharf went up 40% in the last two years , she says, to over £33,000 a year.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68396525

Leasehold is strawberry floating awful, but I'm not sure that they are going to tug many heart strings by highlighting people paying service charges in the tens of thousands while living in swanky London apartments.

I feel sorry for people who bought leasehold properties, but I do sometimes wonder how they didn't receive warnings about it before hand. Even back in the 90s my dad was straight up saying 'never remotely consider leasehold" to my big brother. He absoutely drummed it into us.

It wasn't just my dad who warned me off them, but everyone I worked with all said the exact same thing 20 years ago when I was house-hunting. "Don't touch them with a bargepole". Whenever anyone says they're looking to buy a house, it's almost the first response you get from people you know.

I know estate agents can be scummy and persuasive, they often downplay the dangers of it, but still.

Imrahil wrote:I feel sorry for people who bought leasehold properties, but I do sometimes wonder how they didn't receive warnings about it before hand. Even back in the 90s my dad was straight up saying 'never remotely consider leasehold" to my big brother. He absoutely drummed it into us.

It wasn't just my dad who warned me off them, but everyone I worked with all said the exact same thing 20 years ago when I was house-hunting. "Don't touch them with a bargepole". Whenever anyone says they're looking to buy a house, it's almost the first response you get from people you know.

I know estate agents can be scummy and persuasive, they often downplay the dangers of it, but still.

It's great you had a dad and colleagues who were all aware of the pitfalls of leasehold. But it wasn't something I was aware of in 2010/11 when I was purchasing a flat.

I was in a situation where I could afford a flat for roughly half the cost of renting a flat. The ground rent was a pittance and the service charges were reasonable. I had zero chance of being able to afford a freehold house. Why wouldn't I do it?

Fast forward a couple of years and the freeholder of the building sold the property to an awful firm that jacked up the service charges and kept inventing expensive maintenance work that we had to pay for.

I know now from experience how awful leasehold is, but I completely understand how and why people buy them.

Moggy wrote:Leasehold is strawberry floating awful, but I'm not sure that they are going to tug many heart strings by highlighting people paying service charges in the tens of thousands while living in swanky London apartments.

Hehe, it's a good thing to highlight rip-off charges and a 40% increase is grim. But, yeah, showing how a wealthy person was paying around £24k a month service charge and now it's £33k isn't very relatable .

At my flats the monthly charge is around £115 and I'm involved in setting that figure as I'm on the residents committee. The fee is pretty low for an outer London site and our provisions are pretty basic. We're probably going to have to increase it, though, as health and safety requirements are really ramping up. That's probably a good thing, of course, but the expenses are steep. Our large car park/road area surface has really deteriorated these past few years but getting that re-done is going to be thousands of pounds; maybe a hundred or more (and that's when last we inquired about five years ago).

A big issue is the landowners/freeholders at all sites. They are charging increasingly huge amounts to extend leases and, currently, there's nothing that can really be done about it. The recent leases that have been extended at our site have cost around £18k per time... and, effectively, this is for a number to be changed on a lease; it's not like the landowner is going to tear down individual flats. It's a joke, really, and a lucrative enterprise for the landowners.

Moggy you should have just known better mate.