Interesting thread and made me wonder. So my figure based on mortgage, utilties, TV, (life and home) insurance and cooncil tax taken from joint income is 39%.
Add food, sofas, phones, diesel and childcare then I’m up to 67%.
So where does the rest of it go?

You can tell who bought before the housing boom, or are we all middle class?

Typical figures for someone on £30k a year who bought in the last few years might be:

Take home pay after deductions + 10% pension contribution: ~£1700 /month
Mortgage of £150k /25 years @4%: ~£800 /month

After utilities, council tax, commuting, food bills they would have almost nothing left. Depressing!

I’m paying off my mortgauge by the bucket load at the moment. Total for that + bills is ~70% of my take home pay. Its worth the ‘pinch’ (which isn’t that tight in my opinion) to have it paid off by the time I’m 36.

Even more depressing (for the younger generation who didn’t shrewdly invest get lucky: Average 2011 UK earnings £26000, average house price £228000.

tll me about it RJ

currently paying near that a month in rent…aberdeen is definantly cheaper to buy than rent at the current moment in time !

lucky my missus landed a full time perminant teachin position recently after only doing 2 days a week – that stretched my wage out a bit thin…..

oh an RJ – 228k is average but not average first time – must be about 150k is it ?

im looking between 150-180k

my dad was telling me when he bought their first house it was near enough all their combined pay he was a builders labourer and digger driver at the time.

about 80% of my wage goes on bills, mortgage, running a car and motorbike etc. Anything the Mrs makes is a bonus and most is saved, but that hasnt been much recently.

I don’t pay any rent or mortgage on my house 🙂
I do have tenants that pay them on other houses 🙂

228k isn’t even the average cost by most indecies. most of them put the figure around 160k. 228k is the average price of a new build property. 160k – 20% deposit is 128k. That’s £675/month for 25 years at 4% interest rate. Not cheap, but for a couple earning average wage (£52000 pre-tax, approx £35k after-tax), £8100 (23%) isn’t that much to pay for housing

I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Rent has jumped by 25% in Didsbury over the past 18 months and shows no sign of slowing, yet house prices in the north have fallen through the floor. A two-bed flat will set you back at least £750/month and I’ve been told to expect £800/month when my lease is due for renewal. So it’s a nightmare for anyone who wants to buy to even save towards a deposit unless they’re on a huge income.

Interesting thread.
My mortgage payment is 39% of my take-home pay.
Seems like a lot but it’s cheaper than when I was renting!
Supporting a family of 4 on one income is not easy in London…

18% here for mortgage + council tax + water + electric (no gas) but that’ll shoot up as soon as I manage to flog my flat (currently benefiting from ending a tracker that has reverted to Nationwides (old) SVR). Not that that will happen any time soon – the market is as flat as a pancake here (Woking, Surrey).

about 125%

Lost my job this time last year, documented on here. took a survival job that ment we were going under slowly. Quit that one and a month later started a “proper” job about the same money but without any of the perks. No company car which meant I had to buy a second hand car + insurance etc so i’m about £300/month down. Used to have a petrol card, now I have to pay for my fuel so thats another £300/month down. Because of the unemployed period and bills not getting paid, eveyone wants you to pay extra to make up the arrears. All those extra £50 soon mount up. The wife can’t even get a job as a cleaner – too qualified, she does have an interview next week which will pull us out of the hole.

So we’ve gone from being comfortable to bricking it in 12 months, what’s the next 12 months going to bring 🙂

About 48% Thats just rent and council tax 😆 That’s halfing the rent/council tax as well as i’m living with the GF.

Got to love London.

Our mortgage payment is 30% of my take home pay, but my OH earns too, so we are not too bad off. Bills are quite high though.

When we moved house, we could have afforded something much more extravagant/expensive but didn’t want to stretch ourselves while interest rates are so low.
Currently we could afford to live on one of our salaries.

We are currently overpaying the mortgage too – anything to get that out of the way a bit quicker. I might actually start paying more on that, as it seems stupid having money going into a savings account that’s earning 0.5% when I could be paying off the mortgage!

for a couple earning average wage (£52000 pre-tax

What is the average earning for a couple? I very much doubt its anything like what you state

What is the average earning for a couple? I very much doubt its anything like what you state

i was working on the average wage for one person, multiplied by 2. obviously if someone chooses to work part time they won’t get so much, but then not being able to afford a nice house because you work part time seems like a decision you’d have to make.

Starting salery for a policeman is £26k, for example.

eta : 26K is the average paye wage. The average overall wage for the UK is probably somewhat higher, as most highly paid jobs aren’t paid through PAYE. in addition, PAYE doesn’t include any income from investments (ie btl house), inheritance and so on. Neither does it include benefits, which can add up to a huge amount (housing benefit alone is worth up to 10k of pre-tax income for example)

26K is that the mean wage? The vast majority of people in the country will earn less than that. Even if that were not true the propability of two people living together and earning the average salary would be lower, by quite a lot according to my maths.

right, but the probability of 2 people living together and having that as their combined salery is pretty high 🙂

the mean property value is comparible to the mean wage. If you wanted to use median wage you should also compare it to the median house price, but even that is perhaps not valid as there’s never been a society where the absolute lowest earners could buy a house.

There’s some interesting info here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

average household with 0 children brings in £20000 after tax\benefits in 2006. if we assume wage inflation at 3% per annum on average since then (probably higher in the first few years, lower more recently), that’s 23185 per annum or £1932 per month. of that, £675 montly mortgauge would represent just under 35% of take home salery.

i think our biggest problem we have here is the prices of renting and buying. part of damn henley on thames! even maidenhead, which is a dead town, with every other shop closing, has windsor, marlow and cookham surrounding it and bump up their house prices to suit.