Chris and I have been together a little over eight years now and we have been privately renting the same house together for the past six years. A lot has happened in that time, including having two children, so the two-bedroomed terraced house with no garden just isn't what we need now as we require a lot more space. Sure, they can share their room for a little while longer but being of different genders, they will need their own space eventually and I feel a little guilty that they don't have access to a garden when they want it.
Saving to buy a house when you are already spending hundreds each month to rent a home is tough. In hindsight, I wish we had been able to stay living at home with parents, working and saving, then buying our first home together before children. Life doesn't always go to plan though and now, almost nine years later, we are finally at the stage that we will be making our first step on the property ladder, hopefully within the next 12-18 months.
The only frame of reference that I have are my parents who took a mortgage out on their house around 27 years ago and while discussing the situation with them, it's been really interesting to see just how different things are almost 30 years later. They tell me about how cheap their house was back then and this handy tool from Sunlife shows that within the past 20 years, the value of their home has increased by around £90,000. The home that we have our eye on, after doing a rough check, has increased by almost the same amount which makes it a lot harder for us buying now. We don't want to go for a cheaper house that we don't truly love. I wouldn't say that we are overly picky, we just have certain areas that we would prefer to live in with a nice garden for the children and a bedroom each for them.
I definitely use my parents' situation as a benchmark now, at the age of 26, I'd like to hope that when we are at a similar age to what my parents are now, we'll be close to paying off our mortgage (thinking about a fixed rate 40 year one). It isn't just house prices that are making that difficult for us though. Chris has a great, decently paid job and because I am at home with the children 100% of the time, besides school but I still have school runs to do, I earn money here on my blog through sponsored posts and advertising. Everything has gone up in price, even just from our childhood days. We often joke that we could go to the corner shop with a £1 coin and come back with a can of fizzy juice, crisps and mix up - there is no way you could do that now! Just living in general is more expensive when you factor in grocery shopping, buying new clothing for growing children and let's not even think about the costs of children's birthdays and Christmas! We do scrimp where we can but realistically, we do end up spending a lot of money on necessities in general day to day life.
We are at a much stable place, financially, now so we are very excited to finally find our forever home - although I'll be sad to leave the first home my children have had!
Do you have any tips for first time buyers?
(This is a sponsored post.)
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