buying-a-house

You know lots of people with houses worth hundreds of thousands of pounds – or even a million-plus – but a lot fewer with six- or seven-figure share portfolios. Why is that?

Having a big mortgage on your personal balance sheet dramatically shifts your financial posture.

In this guest post, Tejvan Pettinger of The Mortgage Blog explains why he thinks buying usually beats renting a home.

The UK house price crisis has been a long time on the boil. Here’s a suitably long post on ways we might constructively burst it.

Stamp duty has been unexpectedly overhauled, and once again Chancellor George Osborne has made an element of the tax system a bit better. (I know! I’m as surprised as anyone.)

A landlord is somebody who gets deeply in debt to give you to have a roof over your head. Time for a Christmas card, after all? Sort of…

Some people spend 25 years working to pay off a mortgage then claim their house is neither an asset or an investment. Huh? No wonder we have boiler room scams.

Are UK house prices going to stay elevated compared to their old incomes or rent measures, and why does it matter?

An interest only mortgage gives you more control over a huge chunk of your money, but with responsibility comes risk.

Stamp duty for first-time buyers was scrapped in the budget, provided they contain themselves to spending less than £250,000. Easy, unless you live near London.

First time buyers will pay no stamp duty on houses up to £250,000, but spending £1 million costs more

You can’t live in an equity portfolio, however much it helps you sleep at night. Should I follow the rich kids into property?

(Image by: magnus) What has the UK government got against young people? Why is it obsessed with pulling up the drawbridge to anyone who’d like to buy a home but who can’t afford (or won’t pay) credit bubble prices? I will declare my interest: I rent, having decided several years ago that housing was too [...]

In gloomy accord with Nationwide seeing UK house prices falling across every single region for the first time in 30 years, Halifax has now released monthly figures for March estimating UK house prices have dropped 2.5%. Some areas are down twice that. House prices have now fallen year on year. In March 2007, Halifax had [...]

More evidence that house prices are really falling comes from the Nationwide building society, in its latest official house price index. While it tries to draw attention more to annual figures in the accompanying commentary, which are still very much up, the quarterly figures for January to March 2008 are dreadful. House prices haven’t fallen [...]

While many people have made a fortune out of property in the UK over the past few years, some have lost a packet – even as prices continued to rise. These are the so-called ‘Sell-to-Rent’ brigade, who attempt to time the peaks and troughs of the house price cycle by selling their home at the [...]

New government statistics reveal home ownership in the UK is the lowest it’s been for a decade. In London there are an incredible 110,000 fewer home owners than in 2001 (not that surprising if you’ve seen London prices recently). Blame buy-to-let.

“A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.” Robert Frost Whether to buy your own home or not is a tricky question for anyone wanting financial freedom. Now that might seem to some a mad statement; in most English [...]