Since when has wingnut given any politician a hard time? Marr's sucked enough political cock to put a handrail around the British coastline

Fair point.

Clegg is going to let parents and grandparents use their pension pots as security for their offspring to get mortgages and to get their feet on the property ladder.

I'd do that if it obtained a mortgage for either of mine, my pension pot is fooked as a pension pot now but its still more than is required for either of them to use as security, I've rolled over and accepted that those who control the money supply have shagged me senseless over the past forty years and so all thats left now is for me to pass on what I can to my offspring.

I'm not thinking of going anytime soon you understand though...

You got 80 grand minimum in your pot then McF?

Sounds a load of baloney to me and not getting anywhere near the root/heart of the problem.
The Lib-Dems ''admitted the scheme is still at the early stages of development'.

Mmmm!

[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check/2012/sep/23/nick-clegg-pension-property[/url

Quoted from that article...



I could cover that amount and bearing in mind that I don't, can't retire until I'm well past 65 (if we want to keep this house its going to be 70 as a minimum) then standing as guarantor for £10k against a property for the next ten years is probably safer than trusting NatWest to run the fookin thing efficiently, the jury is out on whether Aviva (who have bought NWB pension business) can do a better job.

Before I heard of this suggestion I was seriously thinking of taking out a further advance on the mortgage next year to give to the eldest as a deposit, her and her boyfriend have "professional" qualifications and jobs but are years and years away from saving anything like a deposit amount - when I was her age my dad lent me £500 which was all I needed to secure a mortgage on my first flat

The best thing that could happen to the housing market is the reintroduction of the three time salary guideline in terms of what you can borrow.
I'd say I hate banging on about this, but I really don't

Yup, sounds like a real idea. Let parents & grandparents use their pension pot so the kids can get a mortgage. Then the kids can rermortgage the gaff to pay for the care of their parents & grandparents. I can see this one has been thought through carefully and predict it will fly [size=30all the way to the wastepaper bin[/size

Aye, it sounds a load of bollards.

Mind, I'd be feeling desperate if I was lagging behind Nigel and his party in the polls.

Agreed.

Yep.
Average wage = £25,000
Average house price = £240,000

Also there's the issue of rent. There are too many people paying effectively a mortgage rate as rent.

I came up with a solution to affordable rents some time ago

It is already the case, which is what is causing the problem, prices for most of the housing stock on the market are far beyond three times the average 25 year olds income.

Far beyond three times mine. It's ludicrous.
If it were the rule, then prices would have to return to sensible levels

And when you then add into that equation the increasing use of one-year and zero-hours contracts (particularly for young people) it becomes even more difficult – including with even to rent.

The short-sightedness of so much going on in this country at present pretty much beggars belief.

Someone who's bought a house for £240k is unlikely to be able to afford to sell it for £75k. And that's the scale of the drop that would be required to bring house prices back into line with average earnings. So although it would work for new builds the existing housing stock would be a different matter entirely.

Getting out of the mindset of a house as an investment rather than somewhere to live is also required. Besides, we all know the valule of investments can go down as well as up, so tough luck. Gamblers often lose.

A great start would be getting away from the mindset that renting is somehow inferior to buying. There were plenty of what would now be categorised as middle class households in rented accommodation through the 1950s, 60s & 70s

I have never viewed buying a house as an investment. I never understood why people who only "own" one house would do so. It is a place to live and for me buying has been cheaper than renting an equivalent property. I have never gambled on the value of it going up. The fact housing prices have usually gone up over the years means little to me because I would be selling and buying in the same market.

However people do have to move house occasionally so where there a housing price crash then that would make it impossible for many who also didn't buy their house as an investment to move.

So ideally you want price stability but we will never get that in our supply and demand driven market unless there was just the right amount of housebuilding to stop the generally ever upward trend in prices and I don't see that happening.

If on the other hand you buy a house to rent then I guess you ought to do this based on your returns of the invested cash. So if you bought a house for £150K to rent, is the rent you will receive a better return on that money than investing it elsewhere? Basing your rate of return on rent + increasing value of the asset [iis[/i gambling. Mind you I am sure some people will still see property as a safer place for their money than a bank! Even if prices did crash the property is unlikely to be worthless and you could reasonably expect to continue getting some rental income off it.

Spot on! I'd happily rent, at least for a few years anyway. But it's just not worth it as the rental price is almost the same as the mortgage rate.

House prices need to be significantly cheaper, rental prices need to be massively cheaper. Think of the benefit to the economy if people weren't spending such a huge chunk of their income on housing.

I think the economic benefits work the opposite way. Personally I'd have got off the treadmill years ago if it weren't for the mortgage. At one time food was the main expenditure, now its housing. In the future it will probably be food, energy and housing.

Pain for the few for the long-term good of everyone. Call me Jeremy Bentham.

Agreed

Its incredibly expensive to rent. I've just sold my house and looking for somewhere to rent until we find somewhere to buy. I'd perhaps naively hoped that if we rented a house with a comparable value to the one we've sold, the rent could be paid by the interest on the sales proceeds. Not even close. Obviously the current depressed interest rates are a major factor, but given that they're not likely incease much for a while, it just makes the rental sector very pricey.

The solution is for lenders to stop equating loans to a ficticious formula that once was a reasonable guide to affordability but now is not.

Its time for lenders to do proper and fit assessements again, possibly to employ people fit do do such assessments and then trust those people to offer a home loan linked to the buyers income and age.

For example with my eldest and her partner at 24 years of age and both working in what a lender would class "professional" jobs, there is no reason why a home loan for them has to be limited to 25 years or three times their income, the absolute criteria should be their household budget which any lender should insist on - "show us how you are going to afford a £900 a month mortgage on your income" and then set the term, interest rate and total offer based on that.

In that respect I am pushing her towards The Nationwide in that they do still employ people who seem to know what they are talking about when it comes to homeloans, being as that is still a major part of their business model.

We're one of very few (any?) nations in Europe that do not have rent regulations.

And yet most other European nations have bigger rental sectors than exists in the UK, which presumably means that rent regulation (hardly a new thing) does not send prospective landlords off in a grand funk about not being able to make enough profit to make it worthwhile.