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Fifteen rented homes in 15 years – mine is an everyday housing story
Topic Started: 6 Oct 2015, 03:45 PM (2,571 Views)
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How old is ‘too old’ to rent?

Oct 5, 2015, Hannah Betts

Dinner parties can often be a bore, but there are few things more tedious than being the lone renter at the table, forced to endure endless discussions about mortgage rates, areas on the up, and how Anthony and Lavinia have been “clever” with their investment property. If one’s lucky, the conversation might veer on to the subject of second homes before one is outed as that freakish thing: a middle-aged grown-up who does not even possess abode number one. Cue the Mexican wave of horror.

“How cunning of you to keep your freedom!” home owners will trill, when what renting actually means is the constant threat of being ejected. “Why, you must be the model tenant – treat the place like your own home,” patronises another, which I do because, er, it is. “Goodness,” tinkled some hausfrau at a recent gathering, “it’s like being an asylum seeker!” Meanwhile, others perceive it as an attempt to eschew capitalism, equivalent to living in a tree house, surviving on nuts and berries. Forget the 40 year-old virgin; the 40-year-old tenant is yet more of an oddball.

Except, increasingly, he or she isn’t. We middle-aged renters might not yet be legion, but nor am I the only member of the forty-something Generation Rent. Half of British tenants despair of ever being able to afford a home of their own, according to a recent Post Office survey. A separate survey by SpareRoom, the flatshare website, suggested there was good reason for this: between 2009 and 2014, it found, the number of flatsharers aged 35 to 44 rose by 186 per cent, while those aged 45 to 54 soared by an alarming 300 per cent.

I’m not a sharer but, at the unseasonable age of 44, I am one of those “still renting”, as the smug mortgaged will insist on referring to it. Levels of home ownership have gone into a decline after years in which the only way was up, recession and social changes having both played their part.

Still, I am relatively fortunate. At least I can afford to rent on my own. My ability to endure the horror of flatmates ended abruptly in my 20s with a woman so neurotic she monitored not only her own, but my eating, and required a daily pep talk before she could leave the house. One’s tolerance for this kind of malarkey tends to be short-lived, and yet the middle-aged flatmate has become a new cultural phenomenon.

More of we oldsters are single now, too, meaning more of us struggle to get a foothold in the property market, or become locked out of it when relationships fail: one income makes mortgages a good deal less likely. Divorce thrusts many mid-lifers back into the rental sector, suddenly pricing them out of ownership and back into the student digs they imagined they’d left behind.

Countless acquaintances admit to using their relationships to get on to the property ladder, a few confessing to staying in unhappy ones to remain there. A lawyer I know refers to this as a “London particular”, after the old pea-souper fogs. “It’s the black cloud that descends when a couple realises that, separated, they could never house themselves or their family, so they stay in their noxious conjugal smog,” he says bleakly. His own marriage languishes under such a pall, but still he cannot envisage renting.

Those of us that must, bring baggage, literal and metaphorical. Being a tenant of a certain age means I come with things: not least the furniture that estate agents inform me “doesn’t work well at your end of the market”. Still, at least it doesn’t involve offspring, as it does for certain friends forced to spin nippers sleeping on their rented floors as “camping”.

My own ability to buy has proved hair-tearingly snakes and ladders. The point at which I had mustered enough deposit I had also just gone freelance, viewed as a flighty employment option by lenders. Since then, whenever I have amassed enough dosh, some life event invariably occurs to nuke my savings.

For a long time, I harboured no angst about my itinerant status. But as I cruise towards 50, increasingly I worry about being a poor, pensionless, vagrant old lady, forced to live off the kindness of strangers. I eye friends’ basements in the way they eye country cottages.

The last time I felt anywhere near flush enough to claw my way on to the ladder, I went to view the cheapest flat available in my area. It was so claustrophobic a folly that one wonders how planning permission was ever achieved. Opposite walls were touchable simultaneously, the bedroom half the size of my bed. It was without wardrobes or kitchen cupboards, possessing nil furniture space.

Somehow managing to retain a straight face, the estate agent recommended I construct a shed in which to store myself and my possessions.

Yet it was still more than I could afford.

Read more: http://www.domain.com.au/news/how-old-is-too-old-to-rent-20151006-gk2am1/
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The Whole Truth
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stinkbug
7 Oct 2015, 12:07 AM
"However, by the time I hit 35 – two years ago – I’d lived in 15 privately rented homes and instead of savings had debts."

So a bit of a loser, financial speaking.
Yes, the quintessential whinging pom too it seems.
createdby
7 Oct 2015, 12:40 AM


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If she didn't have a caffeine addiction, she would have had enough deposit for a starter home amirite?
With a face like that she could go into porn movies, cheap porn movies.
Edited by The Whole Truth, 7 Oct 2015, 10:22 AM.
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." John Stuart Mill
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skamy
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The Whole Truth
7 Oct 2015, 10:21 AM
Yes, the quintessential whinging pom too it seems.

With a face like that she could go into porn movies, cheap porn movies.
You are a slimy creep.

Honestly what makes you think it is any way acceptable to make a comment like that about a woman. You should take that post down.

Definition of a doom and gloomer from 1993
The last camp is made up of the doom-and-gloomers. Their slogan is "it's the end of the world as we know it". Right now they are convinced that debt is the evil responsible for all our economic woes and must be eliminated at all cost. Many doom-and-gloomers believe that unprecedented debt levels mean that we are on the precipice of a worse crisis than the Great Depression. The doom-and-gloomers hang on the latest series of negative economic data.
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createdby
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http://www.domain.com.au/news/how-old-is-too-old-to-rent-20151006-gk2am1/

Unfortunately, many gullible consumers are affected by guilt pieces like this to burden themselves and their parents with debt slavery.

The investment community also invented the "don't time the market" mantra to encourage savers to invest in stocks anytime and every time, with no consideration for the macro environment.

"Don't time the market" is clever cherry picked spreadsheet manipulation invented by Vanguard. Very simple message and effective. Many an investor has parted with thousands of dollars with this simple propaganda.

Parting with future income to the tune of hundreds of thousand dollars in debt is more difficult, which is why the guilt piece articles by the RE industry are more elaborate and constant every week in newspapers.

It's just bullshit invented so they can earn their commission.

Without your savings or future income committed to their asset cum debt instruments, they won't earn their commission.

Once you buy that stock or ETF or get that mortgage, their off the hook and on to the next greater fool.
Edited by createdby, 7 Oct 2015, 01:02 PM.
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Foxy
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Zero is coming...

at least she has children,
Peter
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Trojan
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I have been reassured many times on this forum that renting (in the first year) is cheaper than buying.
Repeat that 15 times and she must be streets ahead of the owner who bought 15 years ago. :re:
I put trolls and time wasters on my ignore list so if I don't respond to you, you are probably on it ....
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newjez
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skamy
7 Oct 2015, 11:32 AM
You are a slimy creep.

Honestly what makes you think it is any way acceptable to make a comment like that about a woman. You should take that post down.
We can only assume he spends much of his time watching cheap porn.
Whenever you have an argument with someone, there comes a moment where you must ask yourself, whatever your political persuasion, 'am I the Nazi?'
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stinkbug
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Trojan
7 Oct 2015, 02:03 PM
I have been reassured many times on this forum that renting (in the first year) is cheaper than buying.
Repeat that 15 times and she must be streets ahead of the owner who bought 15 years ago. :re:
Ha! :lol
---------------------------------------------------------------

While it's true that those who win never quit, and those who quit never win, those who never win and never quit are idiots.

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The Whole Truth
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skamy
7 Oct 2015, 11:32 AM
The Whole Truth
7 Oct 2015, 10:21 AM
Yes, the quintessential whinging pom too it seems.

With a face like that she could go into porn movies, cheap porn movies.
You are a slimy creep.

Honestly what makes you think it is any way acceptable to make a comment like that about a woman. You should take that post down.

How dare you denigate women who choose to work in the sex industy! Do you think they are any less a woman and less worthy of respect simply because of the profession they choose? You are the worst type of woman, a bitchy trumped up little prima Donna who thinks she's better than her fellow sisters. You bring disgrace to your gender.
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." John Stuart Mill
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Foxy
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Zero is coming...

The Whole Truth
7 Oct 2015, 06:06 PM
How dare you denigate women who choose to work in the sex industy! Do you think they are any less a woman and less worthy of respect simply because of the profession they choose? You are the worst type of woman, a bitchy trumped up little prima Donna who thinks she's better than her fellow sisters. You bring disgrace to your gender.
I like your thinking, it is correct.

Why is it assumed that a whore is any less of a person.

There are millions of whores working in the world right now.

And millions of respectable married women that are retired whores, that have families and hold up half of the families responsibilities.

They are people and should not be put down.

Well spotted and well put.

Peter
Edited by Foxy, 7 Oct 2015, 06:28 PM.
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