Quote: Originally posted by Paul_B on 02/11/2019
I found it hard to pay the mortgage in the early days but as the years progressed the £80 a month wasn't too bad and better still now its all paid off
Yes it's great when things work out like that, but sometimes life can take a wrong turn for some of us, and then it all goes pear-shaped. Unexpected events can hit anyone, anytime. We once had a mortgage of around £60 a month, and if things had gone the way we planned it would have been paid off nearly 20 years ago. However........... We have now been renting for nearly 40 years.
Quote: Originally posted by Bob61 on 29/10/2019
Sell your house and move into Council property...
Is that meant as a joke? I guess so.
I did not think it was possible to move into a council house these days unless you had some spectacularly bad circumstances. Are there any such houses left apart from ones with sitting tenants? And aren't those promptly sold off by the council when those tenants die (as they did in my father-in-law's case)?
They would not even offer council housing to my daughter with her two toddlers after her partner booted them out of the house (they did offer a "women's shelter"). They took the attitude that she should return and have a physical fight with him ("go back and throw him out" was the way they put it). Good job we could put them in the caravan.
As for renting generally, I am amazed by the good experiences described by some here. Not my experience, and from what I've heard from others. Landlords are predatory by nature it seems. The council even refused to fit grab handles around a cousin's council house after she had a leg amputated, and if "disability" is not a priority these days, nothing is.
There must be millions of people suffering spectacularly bad circumstances then, judging by the huge council estates and housing association estates scattered around the country...and most of the tenants I know drive nice cars, have huge TV's, mobile phones, computers, and go on holidays abroad...or in my case, camping in the UK.
It’s is possible to be an home owner and still be offered social housing under the ‘Sheltered housing scheme’. I have been offered this myself as an alternative to having structural disabled adaptions done at home, but declined the offer as it would have worked out more expensive in the long term as l would have had to have used the money from the sale of my own property to pay the high rents in full on the Sheltered social housing, and also been moved to a less convenient area as far as local facilities were concerned and having family living close by.
I ended up fully funding my own disabled bathroom on the ground floor of my house, along with a stairlift, and now a more disabled friendly kitchen with enough space for my wheelchair, a cooker hob and oven that at last l can easily reach into, and a worktop at a height comfortable for sitting and working at for preparing and eating meals. The entire lot has worked out more cost effective than if l had of sold up and gone down the route of a Social Sheltered housing scheme.
Julia
------------- Just love to be out amoungst Nature and Wildlife
Celebrating 37 years of Caravanning in 2019, Recently Considered Retiring, but Totally Addicted for Life!
Quote: Originally posted by Bob61 on 04/11/2019
There must be millions of people suffering spectacularly bad circumstances then, judging by the huge council estates and housing association estates scattered around the country...and most of the tenants I know drive nice cars.....
As I said, the vast majority of these will be sitting tenants from the days (pre-Thatcher?) when it was relatively easy to get a council house. Once in you can't be got out, even if the tenant gets rich. It is getting into the system which is hard nowadays, I believe judging by my daughter's experience.
And of course, if you look into it many of those houses on those estates have been sold to the tenant so are council houses no longer. In my father-in-law's road of typical 1930's council houses all tenants were offered their house to buy (at a silly bargain price) and most of them did.
Most "council houses" are run by housing associations nowadays,in this area they manage 38000 properties,a lot of which they took over from the local councils.
saxo1
Our (Tory) local council formed a housing association because right-to-buy was causing them big problems. All the decent housing was getting snapped up, leaving them with all the hard to maintain flats and maisonettes that nobody wanted. Many of the tenants of these were on housing benefit, so the net income from them was minimal.
I suppose it depends where you live and how the councils manage their properties. It is true that back in the day tenants bought their council houses (including me) but then, if they could afford to, they often sold the houses and move out of the council estates to nicer surroundings, as I did. I moved into a bungalow in a private residential area which was a little more rural.
Unfortunately for me the Child Support Agency nearly bankrupted me and I had to sell my bungalow. Fortunately for me my job provided me with a house but when I retired I was about to become homeless so the council gave me a two bedroom flat straight away, which was actually much nicer inside than the bungalow I had owned.
As soon as I reached the qualifying age for a pensioners bungalow I applied for one. It took 5 years but eventually they gave me one and again, it is far better than the bungalow I used to own and I don't have to worry about the roof caving in or the boiler packing up...even though I will have to pay rent for the rest of my life.
Although Winchester City Council may not be the best at handling their financial affairs they do look after their housing stock. A few years ago the Council were considering selling their housing stock to Housing Associations and asked the council tenants if they wanted to be taken over by Housing Associations...there was a resounding, 'No' and so we are still controlled by the council who do a good job overall.
Social housing is still being built in the area though and a small Housing Association estate has just been build down the road from me (much to my annoyance because we used to be a cul-de-sac and now we are a through road to the new estate). Councils may not be able to afford to build many new houses but it is big business for the Housing Associations and little estates are popping up here and there.
We live in a housing association house, and it's far better than the one I once owned, which I had to leave due to personal circumstances many years ago. In this area today your chances of getting any kind of social housing are virtually nil. Even if you are homeless and deemed top priority you will probably have to wait years for a home you can call your own. The best you are likely to be offered is one room in a converted office block, which they are currently calling "temporary accommodation", despite some people having been in them with families for years. Some of these "conversions" about 6 miles from us were on the national news recently. One such block being on a run-down industrial estate way outside town.
Had to have new boiler as nobody installs back boilers anymore, so had more upheaval as the combi-boiler could only go in one place in the kitchen. Had to loose a wall cupboard, gas pipe runs round the house. But at lest we the combi-boiler is a lot more efficient than the old back boiler, and we don't have gallons of water above our living room ceiling any more and to top it we have hot water and heating (which we hadn't had for 2 weeks).
We paid our mortgage off 2 years ago (earlier than expected), so the extra cash has come in handy. We've been in our house 23 years and its an ex-council house (previous owner bought it from council when houses could be bought at cheap rate). If we was to buy our house now, we couldn't afford it ! Bought in 1995 for £38k, houses in our road are now £130k.
Quote: Originally posted by RogLozLee on 09/11/2019
If we was to buy our house now, we couldn't afford it ! Bought in 1995 for £38k, houses in our road are now £130k.
Anyone who bought a house in this area in the 1970s must be laughing. You could have bought a 3 bed house around here then for around £9,000. Today you couldn't get one for less than £300,000. The only trouble is that less than 10% of the population living round here now could afford that unless they already had one to sell. Things have gone absolutely crazy!
Yes that's the thing Mrs Bonce, how on earth are young people to buy a home today? In 1975 it would have been just about possible for a bus driver in this area to buy a house, but today even on 3 times their wages they probably still couldn't do it.