John Smith Flooring

We would probably all love to move into a brand new spacious house with every modern convenience & everything working beautifully at first request.  This dream can be achieved but always after a lot of someone else#’s hard work to make it happen.  Very few young folk can walk straight into their palace of glittering delights.  It generally requires a gargantuan effort to come up woth a deposit for a tiny flat or house.  There is another way now though – via a starter home.  These are generally sited in little rows on the edge of a bigger new builds.  I have younger relatives who went that very route.  Having decided they like each other enough to want to live together they started looking at rented flats.  The choice in their catchment areas was seriously dire.   They spied an  advert for a new phase of starter homes and upon enquiring about funding, they found it was possible to get a mortgage needing repayments some £350 less per month than the cheapest rented place.    They borrowed the deposit on the then government ‘help to buy’ scheme.   This helped kick start the housing industry big time4 after years in the doldrums.   The draw back to the scheme is that if you don’t pay that deposit off as you go in the first five years, at very advantageous interest rate, then you have to pay a bigger percentage of the eventual sales prices when  you move on up the ladder.  To give an example, this couple borrowed £20K in the scheme and when they sold five years later, their house had risen substantially in value & they had to pay the government £46K.  Lesson learned.