Looking at buying a house (not a first time buyer.) Priced out of the city by the looks of things so would folk recommend Claudy or Eglinton as an area to live in for a forever home? We do a have a longer work commute but with the new road what’s 10 minutes at the end of the day.
Have an offer accepted on a house at £410k after a bidding war (went 35k over). It’s closer to my older parents (we moved from city to rural life 18 months ago but it’s too rural for me, so this is more small town/village and where I grew up.) We have to take out at 338k mortgage, we have combined take home pay of 6250 per month (both age 40). It’s looking like circa 2k per month mortgage with current rates increasing. We have 22 month old and full time childcare is about £800- £850 per month (and goes up every year.) we have household rates of about £2k per annum. We don’t have any car payments but both do longer commutes so probably could do with new cars in next year or two. Starting to worry about affordability eg. Though we think we are one and done- could we even afford another kid with this sort of mortgage? I like not worrying about money and I feel I might be doing a lot of worrying moving forward. Having choice taken away doesn’t feel great. But house prices have been going up alarmingly in our area and are still rising due to supply issues. Any reassurance or am I overthinking this?
So like every third post - the housing market is insane. And the inequity is astounding. Some people may not be feeling the cost of living crisis as they managed to buy much cheaper a few years earlier for the same product. The lack of visibility of data on house sale prices doesn’t help matters- more transparency the better surely. I was thinking if government won’t intervene and legislate (we know our Stormont doesn’t like to actually make laws) is there something a community can do? Surely a tech person could design an interface that pulls in data from PropertyPal (firstly to keep a record of what price house was listed at) and then if a listing is updated (ie house sells) then that can be reflected and then the site is promoted to the great public to voluntarily put the price they actually paid for the property onto it? I notice that speaking to colleagues etc (gen z and millennials) people are more than happy to divulge what they paid for their property in the context of ‘this market is mad and this was the 20th house we were bidding on.’ Or would people just not want to share that data as there is more movement now than our parents generation, ie. plan to sell again within 2-3 years? I am not techy but do not mind doing manual work on updating listings etc in the interest of supporting people who are getting fucked over currently and are just sitting back and accepting it all with a polite shrug (and debt up to their eyeballs).
Advice needed- how bad is the traffic at these roadworks at the glenshane climbing lane? Saw some complaining on one of those cop vosa pages pop up on my feed yesterday. I have to get back from Belfast to pick a child up. According to trafficwatch ni these roadworks don’t exist, confused as I thought this was the info source for all of NI or is it just excluding west of the Bann these days?! https://www.trafficwatchni.com/twni/traffic-news