Losing homes from rent increase or Mortgage hikes ?

[Dustydazzler]

My dads old boss , back in the late 1950s he started to buy up a load of empty shops on the Kings Road in Chelsea. At one point he owned something like 6 or 7 shops with the 3 or 4 flats above. He rented some of the shops out with some of the flats and the rest he just left empty. He paid something like £5000 per shop with the flats above, these were big old units.
I think by the time he sold the last one fairly recently he made something like a total of £70,000,000

 

[mattybram]

There'll be a lot of people in similar situations, but for many it could have been avoided.

Bad luck will play a part for some, but a lot of people fail to heed lessons from the past - including very recent past - and relied on a crazy assumption that incredibly low interest rates were here to stay.

All that 'free' covid money blown on fancy gardens, luxury goods and tat could have been put to better use, like paying a chunk off mortgages or into savings.

Retraining has meant a sizeable hit in earnings for me, but I'm frugal, live in a modest home and save excess income.

I'm not unsympathetic, especially to those for whom life has been unkind, but a lot of people ought to be asking questions of themselves and not of the government.

I have to agree to an extent.

But also unfortunately, a lot of people who will be hit by this will be first time buyers who effectively have to mortgage themselves to the hilt simply to get on the ladder...then a couple years later they are now getting blasted by super high interest rates.

Those people weren't in the housing market to learn from past events.

Unless rates drop I'll be paying a stupid amount extra on my mortgage at the end of this year. Luckily, from a few smart property purchases/sales in the last 10 years we didn't have to take out a vast mortgage on this property...so we should be able to afford it.

But if I think about the same happening when we purchased our first (tiny, run down) flat and how much we had to pay for that/vs how much we were earning we would basically be homeless - but that was the only way we could buy.