Buying a home was once considered to be 'a good investment'. Now, buying a home now looks a lot more like renting from the bank for much of your lifeIn the last three years, more than one million people have taken out mortgages that they will still be paying off in retirement decided to analyse data from the mortgage trade association UK Finance
The data I analysed from UK Finance showed that 826,046 mortgages running for 30 years or longer had been taken out since January 2020 alone. Buying a home was once considered to be “a good investment”. Not only did homes go up in value through much of the 90s, 00s and 2010s, but they also guaranteed the people who owned them equity – money they could draw on in retirement to go on holidays, pay for care or, increasingly, help their children and grandchildren buy homes.The point will, of course, be made that some millennials and Gen Zers will inherit money from their older family members later in life.
This has knock-on consequences for the rest of the economy: it means those homeowners will be saving less for their retirement and have less money to spend elsewhere too. One is interest-only mortgages. This risks having nothing at the end of the term if the homeowner doesn’t move to a repayment loan or comes in to a large amount of cash.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that the Conservative MP for Dover, Natalie Elphicke, defected from the Conservative Party to Labour last week.For now, I’d say three things about Elphicke.