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What Are Other People Seeing That We Don't?


Timak

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HOLA441

There was a place in London where Aussies came and bought a campervan used it travelling around Europe and it was recycled again....very little loss between purchase and sale price....but a lot more gained in experience, meeting different people and learning lots on the journey....opening up a whole new world that didn't know existed....travel broadens the horizons, and enables people to see things from a different light and angle. ;)

regarding camper vans, they are a bit like holidays homes....massive expense, better off renting them when you need them, it's much better value and you're not stuck with the same one.

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HOLA442

regarding camper vans, they are a bit like holidays homes....massive expense, better off renting them when you need them, it's much better value and you're not stuck with the same one.

No not renting buying, and selling it back at a price or very similar price you bought it for...Earls Court is/was the place....all rent free only cost of fuel. ;)

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HOLA443
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HOLA445

A grand a week, maybe?

How much to insure, tax, mot one?

How much depreciation?

Lost or actual interest buying.

Always better to rent such items.

Peak time probably another 500 on top of that

Tax 6 months 120 1 year 220 ish M.O.T 30-50 class 4 (this includes every vehicle up to 7.5 ton)

Insurance 500-600 hundred with european breakdown cover limited mileage of 5k a year

Depreciation is like a new car for the first 3-4 years but it slows rapidly after that (not that i ever bought new or even nearly new )always self converted

Had a good six weeks away in mine in 2014, it never cost me anything like the price of the ones you posted but does the job i bought it in the first place because i use to regularly work away from home ,it has paid for itself twice over

If you are going to use it for two weeks a year renting would be a better bet ,but it`s the freedom of owning that appeals ,when the weather is nice of you go on the weekend no planning and praying for good weather just go when it is good weather

Edited by long time lurking
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HOLA446

There are other advantages, many pubs let you stay in carpark overnight so you can tour via pubs which is always a laugh, You can be on holiday every weekend either at sites or wild camping, scotland is good for amazing remote holidays as is europe who embrace them with lots of cheap/free facilities. If you have kids or pets its pretty much the greatest thing in the world to them. If you are into life adventures they are awesome and you dont have to spend a fortune a mate of mine converted a van and added a boat on a towbar, he pretty much is rarely at home. I have family who have them too and do most of europe the great thing is if you accidentally get pissed at a vineyard or whisky distillery you can sleep it off then wake up and have a bacon sandwich. None of them do it as a big show thing they just buy them instead of a flash car or some crap. Many folk post there van life adventures on youtube seeing countries one back road at a time meeting amazing folk and having adventures.

Or

be like the guy I work with, pressured into a house by his wife,stretched beyond his means, depression manifesting as various medical ailments, has to carefully think of every little purchase and looks totally broken. In 25 years we will both be nearly dead but he will "own" a house having spent his life as a debt serf. Mortgages should have a health warning on them like fags.

I just notice that in my life those who buy a house spend there whole time looking worried and never seem to do anything and those who dont always have something going on. A new guy just started and I asked him if he was buying here his response " nah I just rent, ill let someone else maintain it I enjoy my holidays and adventures too much to get into that shit!"

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HOLA448

You can get kits to convert most vans although these arent nealry as comfortable and spacious as a proper motorhome but you can do the conversion yourself. A van also fits in normal car park space too if you go for a vito,transporter,transit with a poptop. I have friends with one of each of these and still have great adventures, most vans have extensive fanclubs online. I think it costs from 6k upwards to pay to have it done but of course the more you do yourself the cheaper. I prefer a proper motorhome a good second hand one is pretty cheap if you let someone else take the depreciation, They are often low mileage too so if you hunt you can get a cracker. You can also pay an independent specialist to come and check it over for you before you buy. The advatage of a campervan versus a caravan is that it requires no setup so you can get more wild camping done.

Then you can live in any shit house in any shit part of this country and as soon as you are done with work ****** off somewhere better, keep your house as somewhere to shit and sleep and spend the rest of your life on holiday.

Thats my plan anyway :)

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HOLA449

The Bank of England has updated its database today with weighted average household interest rates for January 2015.

2-year and 5-year 75% LTV fixed rate mortgages have hit new all-time lows:

MortRates0115a.gif

Average rates on 2-year 95% LTV fixes dropped by almost 0.5% in a single month, and the 5-year 95% LTV rate also dropped significantly:

MortRates0115b.gif

Meanwhile deposit rates continue to fall (unless you're 65+):

DepositRates0115.gif

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HOLA4410

Had a good six weeks away in mine in 2014, it never cost me anything like the price of the ones you posted

I agree, if you use it a lot and keep the costs downb when buying it is probably a nice way to holiday.

However, i'm talking about the boomers, the london down sizers, the modern british idiots, buying these things brand new, using them 2 weeks a year ( after they get board of them ) and selling them 3 years later for 30K less.

Might as well rent.

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HOLA4411

I agree, if you use it a lot and keep the costs downb when buying it is probably a nice way to holiday.

However, i'm talking about the boomers, the london down sizers, the modern british idiots, buying these things brand new, using them 2 weeks a year ( after they get board of them ) and selling them 3 years later for 30K less.

Might as well rent.

Yup but that's just wasteful idiot Britain isn't it? People here do that with everything, You can actually rent your camper out when you dont use it, if you played it well you could make a small profit or at least pay for the van. However we live in a country of idiots and house prices are just a small indicator of large scale general idiocy. You have folk struggling on low pay jobs with massive teles,designer jeans and a leather corner couch on credit . You have people with 70k in credit card debt and this is seen as "normal". You have people driving around in mercs they cant afford to run. people in poverty getting the nails and hair done. You have people earning 23k a year buying 200k houses. my landlord has a new beemer "owns" a couple of houses and doesn't earn half what I do and is totally broke, balls deep in debt. This site is just a small part of a much much bigger problem, a credit and psychological problem and aside from a catastrophic economic disaster I dunno how it can ever be fixed.

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HOLA4412

I have converted two vans.

I used to use tow caravans, they are great if you have small children and only two weeks holiday.

Not only do I use the campervans to take holidays, but it is far more comfortable for long distance travel than a car, so even if my hotel is being paid for, I still go by campervan.

Days off, you can go to the Sea, River, Lake or Mountains just for the day. This is where you can make financial savings with your own cooking facilities. Bad weather is conquered, you can get out in the breaks in the rain, yet have a warm comfortable home to come back to.

I would not want to be without a campervan ever again, particularly as I get older and less fit. Want a doze in the afternoon? No problem.

The main consideration is how big a van?

There is a cut off point somewhere between a large, high top long wheel base van, either still having a van exterior or converted to a caravan exterior (coach built) and the larger vans.

The smaller van can be easily parked in car parks, too large and you get all sorts of trouble.

For instance, I regularly park up overnight on Dover seafront before catching a ferry. You could not do this with a coach built van.

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HOLA4414

First....where is the friend of a friend moving to or what are they buying if anything?...are they going to be taking on any more debt?.....not that interested by the buyers reasons for buying, they must only be buying because they hope to make as much as the sellers did in a short as time as possible otherwise why would they buy?

£500k is only a figure it has no relevance on productive work or future work.....it is either excess money that requires a home or easy borrowing that came about out of free printed or man-made money. ;)

Maybe there just buying it to live in and not an investment.

( :blink: No, I didn't believe that either.)

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HOLA4416

Interesting conversation today. Interesting by not really worthy of it's own thread......

Young lad, 22, on the same course as me at uni is moving out with his girlfriend and renting their first home. His mum obviously thinks he should he should be trying to buy. A few of us were standing around having this conversation which lead on to Help to buy, at which point I pointed out that it was almost the definition of a Ponzi scheme which also included shared ownership. An older fellow, mid 40s, actually agreed with me when I pointed out that shared ownership had all the disadvantages of buying with none of the advantages of renting. He actually added that it gets the worst case of both. I continued to add that both schemes really were symptom of a bigger problem, that houses are too damn expensive! This is where the gentleman in his mid-40s disagreed with me! :P

He said that you always better off buying a house, renting is dead money etc. Giving an extreme example, I asked whether you were better off buying a house and then losing it because you can't continue mortgage payments? Here, he is said something interesting that I have never heard of before and frankly thought was BS, but I thought I would open it up for debate to see if anyone has heard of a case like this. He said that if you own a certain percentage of your home then the bank cannot kick you out? He did say he didn't know what the amount was but something over 50% (I suggested it was 100% :P). I know banks were currently reluctant to repossess but does this man have any legitimacy in what he thinks?

Edit: spelling.

Edited by renting til I die
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HOLA4417

The deeds are in your name are they not, so you always own 100% of the house strictly speakly. But you offer the house to the bank as security against the loan, which to us in the main is as good as not owning it at all.

So what he is suggesting here is that the bank cannot exercise the right to take ownership of the house from you if the outstanding debt is less than 50% of the value of the house at some point, presumably at the time of the loan which seems preposterous.

Surely if this were the case, you wouldn't be able to get a mortgage for less than 50% LTV because the bank would have zero security from the beginning of the mortgage.

I don't have the knowledge to authoritatively confirm or deny his suggestion, but logic says it's nonsensical.

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HOLA4418

1, I'm not wearing a flack jacket, so please don't use real ammunition.

2, I'm not anti the concept of HPC.

3, I've just bought a terrace in Cambridge for close to that money.

4, I did think, long and hard about this decision.

5, The deposit, around 35% came from a previous 'profit' from our last, and first, house sale over a period of just 3 years.

6, Our whole lives are in Cambridge and want to be near the people we love, like and need in our lives.

7, We no longer live in a traffic jam to get in and out of this city.

8, Our household income in more than double average.

9, Our house will be a 5bed terrace by the end of this year, through hard work.

10, If we were 10 years older we'd have paid a similar amount, just got a much bigger house. We had two choices, not live in this city to buy a house similar in size to that which older people live in or accept a 50% drop in 'spacial returns' on our budget. (That phrase is used in jest.)

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HOLA4419

I can't see how to edit my post, just to clarify pt 10. I mean if we were 10 years older we may well have spent a similar amount 10 years ago, but the house would be much bigger. Obviously that seems unfair. We are very fortunate to be able to reduce our expectations in terms of what our money will buy us compared to older people. The scary thing is that we feel at the entry level for housing in the area of the city we have bought in. We also spent the best part of a year pursuing this goal, meeting estate agents and one of those relationships paid off where we were offered the 'opportunity' to buy the house without it being shown to any other buyers. For our younger selves, or us today with a few pounds less, this goal wouldn't have been possible to achieve. Is this house worth it, or is any these days, probably not in absolute terms. From a lifestyle point on view, it does currently feel worthwhile.

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HOLA4420

He said that you always better off buying a house, renting is dead money etc. Giving an extreme example, I asked whether you were better off buying a house and then losing it because you can't continue mortgage payments? Here, he is said something interesting that I have never heard of before and frankly thought was BS, but I thought I would open it up for debate to see if anyone has heard of a case like this. He said that if you own a certain percentage of your home then the bank cannot kick you out? He did say he didn't know what the amount was but something over 50% (I suggested it was 100% :P). I know banks were currently reluctant to repossess but does this man have any legitimacy in what he thinks?

We make our own decisions. 22 year old who think renting is dead money, got it into their heads can't be repoed, forever HPI, - make their own decisions.

Although some on HPC would fall in love with them when they taken on jumbo-mortgages vastly above their incomes, outbidding smarter positions, with their excuses that banks are there to cuddle and love debtors, and financial system devoted to rewarding them with more HPI, becasue 'advertising and marketing'.

Cambridge guy JusticC made his own decision too - in this market, buying at a price close to Timak's example. If he was 10 years older he'd have got much bigger house for the money? I've got money-income, renting, waiting for better buying values; expecting values to correct. It's a market, with market participants. Not some HPCers of glory to buyers 100% at extreme values all of the time.

I am struggling to think how to articulate this, which makes starting a topic a strange idea, but what are other people seeing that we don't?

What has bought this to prominence in my mind is the recent house sale by a friend of a friend.

The small terraced house in Mill Road, Cambridge they bought for £130k in the early 2000's has just sold for over £500k with a bidding war and several "name your price" offers.

Who can think that is a good deal? What are their expectations for their earnings? How can a tiny terraced house with no garden or parking be worth £500k? What are these people thinking?

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HOLA4421

5, The deposit, around 35% came from a previous 'profit' from our last, and first, house sale over a period of just 3 years.

Thanks for sharing.

What I don't get is, where did that 'profit' ultimately come from?

Someone in your situation stretches to buy in 2012. Then three years later that first house has gone up enough to provide enough equity for a sizeable deposit on a much more expensive house.

Without that equity, could you have bought even your original house at its inflated price? And how has the three-years-younger version of you who bought your original house from you found that extra money? Where is the money coming from? Surely there must be a limit to the amount people are willing or able to pay!

Is every year's set of first time buyers just borrowing more for smaller houses? What happens when there's nobody left with enough money to be a first time buyer?

I have some friends who, now they have bought, are convinced that rising house prices are good for them, because the gain in equity will mean a bigger deposit to lever up for their next move. This kind of thinking doesn't make any sense to me. Can you go through life just borrowing larger and ever larger sums? When are the debts paid back?!

Edited by irrationalactor
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HOLA4422

Thanks for sharing.

What I don't get is, where did that 'profit' ultimately come from?

Someone in your situation stretches to buy in 2012. Then three years later that first house has gone up enough to provide enough equity for a sizeable deposit on a much more expensive house.

Without that equity, could you have bought even your original house at its inflated price? And how has the three-years-younger version of you who bought your original house from you found that extra money? Where is the money coming from? Surely there must be a limit to the amount people are willing or able to pay!

Is every year's set of first time buyers just borrowing more for smaller houses? What happens when there's nobody left with enough money to be a first time buyer?

I have some friends who, now they have bought, are convinced that rising house prices are good for them, because the gain in equity will mean a bigger deposit to lever up for their next move. This kind of thinking doesn't make any sense to me. Can you go through life just borrowing larger and ever larger sums? When are the debts paid back?!

Thanks for the thanks. I think every point you make is spot on. As a system, it doesn't work. As a market it seems broken, surely? I am as unconvinced by all of this as you are, yet somehow and without taking risks that seem to put us in danger, we are moving up the housing ladder and navigating this market. Although I suspect this is as high as we will ever get. Although 5 years ago I said we'd never buy. 3 years ago I thought our then, first, house was all we'd ever be able to afford. So I won't hold my breath.

In terms of the money side of things yes your assumptions are correct. We bought the first house with a £29k deposit which was around 15%. We could have borrowed more but I didn't want to borrow a higher LTV than that and even that felt, after many years of reading and agreeing with much of what is said on here, as paramount to financial suicide. 3 years later and after £40k of renovations we sold for £110k more than we paid for it giving us the majority of the 35% deposit on the new house. The renovations were paid for from earnings and not debt. The price we sold for seemed bonkers to me. The agent described it as a 'freak sale' then two weeks later a similar sized house in the same village sold for £500 more. If our sale set that anchor point I feel shameful. Where did those next people get the money from? I don't know. Did they take a bigger risk than we did the first time? I don't know, I hope not. Would I have paid that much for that house? No.

The thing I will add to my story is that I do believe something about markets; that there is a right and wrong price to pay as well as a right and wrong time to buy.

My personal philosophy on house buying after doing it just twice, and formed through not having from parents who can help me or a job that pays me a banker's ransom, is to buy the shittiest house on the street that most would walk away from. Use the condition to get it for a good price and then make it a lovely home and enjoy living in it. If you are happy in it then stay forever, if not then sell it before the redecoration looks tired and move on. Find another house that most people wouldn't consider and make that a great home. Hopefully one day a house will be that forever home. Financially, I certainly don't believe in borrowing more and more only to have to exit the market altogether through being over stretched or down size before the mortgage is paid off. Although if we were due to retire shortly, I'd happily move out of this city and pay less for the same space. I'm just hoping Google make that autonomous car work so I can do that in 30 years time and not have to get the bus to the GP.

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HOLA4423

My personal philosophy on house buying after doing it just twice, and formed through not having from parents who can help me or a job that pays me a banker's ransom, is to buy the shittiest house on the street that most would walk away from.

It's your money, your debt, and therefore absolutely your decision.

Personally I'm not convinced that now is a good time to buy residential property, mortgage rates are just about touching bottom and even though they're unlikely to rise quickly or substantially the future direction can only be one way, which will act like a dead weight on any meaningful house price inflation for the next ten, twenty, or even thirty years.

But that's just my opinion and I can't see into the future.

However, to disagree with your recommendation to buy the cheapest property in the worst location I don't have to look into the future, I can see the error of that by looking at the past.

During the 1989/95 crash I both bought and sold houses. It was crystal clear that the homes that suffered the biggest price falls were those which a newly discriminating market judged to be substandard in the tiniest detail. It's a remarkable fact, but during booms we adjust our standards downwards, considering ourselves lucky to get anywhere at all. When the market cools we all suddenly become extremely picky and anything that doesn't tick every single box on the house buyers list gets dismissed out of hand. And I'm not talking about having HS2 running through your back door, anything other than a south west facing garden, off street parking, excellent access to transport and amenities, top quality extensions that blend harmoniously with the house and have the appropriate ratio of bathrooms to bedrooms, etc etc; if all of these conditions and more aren't met the property becomes very very difficult to sell.

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HOLA4424

The deeds are in your name are they not, so you always own 100% of the house strictly speakly. But you offer the house to the bank as security against the loan, which to us in the main is as good as not owning it at all.

So what he is suggesting here is that the bank cannot exercise the right to take ownership of the house from you if the outstanding debt is less than 50% of the value of the house at some point, presumably at the time of the loan which seems preposterous.

Surely if this were the case, you wouldn't be able to get a mortgage for less than 50% LTV because the bank would have zero security from the beginning of the mortgage.

I don't have the knowledge to authoritatively confirm or deny his suggestion, but logic says it's nonsensical.

That's exactly what I think! I put it down as a signs of the mass delusion of the population about property. If I didn't spend so much time reading about other posters experiences with the general populace on here, I think I would've been shocked by his naivete! As it was, I just thought he was just a bit dim! :P It shows what myths perpetuate around the holy Grail of home ownership!

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HOLA4425

The deeds are in your name are they not, so you always own 100% of the house strictly speakly. But you offer the house to the bank as security against the loan, which to us in the main is as good as not owning it at all.

So what he is suggesting here is that the bank cannot exercise the right to take ownership of the house from you if the outstanding debt is less than 50% of the value of the house at some point, presumably at the time of the loan which seems preposterous.

Surely if this were the case, you wouldn't be able to get a mortgage for less than 50% LTV because the bank would have zero security from the beginning of the mortgage.

I don't have the knowledge to authoritatively confirm or deny his suggestion, but logic says it's nonsensical.

As far as I am concerned this is just ********

Hell, banks can repossess your home if you default on unsecured debt, like a credit card bill or an overdraft.

This just reinforces my view that people are completely delusional when it comes to housing.

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