Buying a House Together Before You're Married/Engaged

The immediate thought came to my mind of, house pricing, I've always had the impression possibly wrongly that houses are cheaper in the states to the UK. So first thing I thought of was in the UK we need longer to be able to pay our mortgages than in the states prior to retirement.

Next thing that came to mind was my grandparents, always install in that owning a home was your safety blanket and after the war and things it was what was strived to do.

otherthan that I'm not sure

I'm not sure why the attitudes are so different, but I know that when I decided to buy a house instead of rent it was mainly because I worked out that my monthly rent and mortgage payments were going to be about the same for a similar size place so I decided to stop wasting money in rent and buy.

Same monthly cost to me and eventually I'll own the place.... made sense.

It may also have to do with the fact that here in the UK, housing is at a premium. Being a much smaller country, we have a lot less space to build and therefore building up from a starter home to a larger family home is more difficult and time-consuming.

If you think about the TV shows that deal with houses for example - In the US you have 'Extreme Makeover'. Your house is no longer suitable - no problem, knock it down and start again.

In the UK - 'location, location, location'. Your house is no longer suitable, go on a long hunt with set needs and possibly find a new house somewhere else.

My and my OH bought a place after two years together. We wanted to get married at that point, and knew we did, but we couldn't do both. We chose to buy first instead. We didn't want to waste our money on rent, and in our area in Devon, a mortgage worked out cheaper. It's now almost 4 years later, and we finally have enough money to get married.

So from my experience, we bought first mostly down to the financial implications.

The reason we wanted to buy is because renting is just making someone else richer and us poorer, to us it is essentially just throwing our money away. A house is an investment for the future, we want to move up the property ladder and in turn Become better off financially. Our mortgage is over 35 years so the sooner you get on the property ladder in th UK the better.

There's also the security factor that a landlord can't just ask you to leave your home in a couple of months or put rent up when they want.

As others have said, we bought because it was actually cheaper than renting plus we would get to own it at the end of the repayments. Rather than rent just being dead money. If we rented we would not have been able to afford to pull together the deposit needed for a house.

We were lucky and got a repossessed 3 bed semi at a very good price. My nan is incredibly proud of my home and that I have my own roof over my head, so maybe it is related to our grandparents views post war?

When we bought we had the option of registering our property at the Land Registry as either tenants in common or joint tenants.

In a joint tenancy each person owns the whole property, if the other dies it passes to the remaining person.

A tenancy in common you own a specific percentage of the property. I.E. we could have said as I was putting more deposit in that I owned 60% and OH 40%. If one were to die, their % in the property would pass however their will (or laws of intestacy) stated. Not necessarily to the other home owner.

So I suppose that there is that level of protection available to people who want to protect their interest in the property should the relationship not work out. (I think I described that right)

We decided to go the tenants in common route as this was just best for us.

I think deposits have a lot to do with it as well. The amount of deposit required in the UK to get a first-time buyers mortgage can range from 5-30% of the purchase price of the property, depending on how expensive an area you live in. In contrast, my brother's ex-girlfriend just bought a house in Florida, and she only needed a 1% deposit to secure her mortgage. So, people here know that they need to start saving for a deposit early or they'll never get on the housing ladder. Once you've got the deposit saved, married or single, it makes sense to get yourself a "starter" property, so that hopefully you can roll the equity into a more expensive property once you need to.

My brother's ex is the only person my age that I know in Florida who owns her own home. Everyone else rents. I find that crazy, considering how low deposits are!

In my case, my husband purchased his first property, with his then-girlfriend, when he was 21. Now, 3 properties later, has around £50K of equity in his mortgage (and this is after splitting the equity with the ex he bought his first house with). So, the property we live in is in his name, and will remain that way even though we've now married. It was my choice to do this - if anything happens to him I'll be protected as the house will go to me as next of kin and he has a life insurance policy which would clear the mortgage. If we, god forbid, divorced, I don't have any right to the wise investments he made before he ever met me and would never dream of claiming part of them.

Oh, one more anecdote - my 40 year old cousin and his girlfriend both bought properties in London in the 1990s. When they got together in 2012, he sold his south London home and moved into her flat in the Brick Lane area as it was close to his work. Then they had a baby, sold her flat, and bought a house further out in East London. They made so much money from the sale of their properties relative to the price of their new 4 bedroom house that they have now both been able to quit their jobs and take a year off while they consider their options. Madness.

I think most of the reasons have already been included above but, for me, I would like to add that in no way could I justify spending the equivalent of a house deposit (in some parts of the country at least) on our wedding, if we were renting. We would ideally like to try for a child soon after the wedding and I would want to do that secure in the knowledge that we're going to bring our children up in our own home, and that we don't have the worry of whether or not a landlord decides to sell or find new tenants or hike the rent up at will.

I think our generation is a bit skewed.

Most of my friends (me included) left our corner of the US when we graduated either high school or college because it's expensive and there were more jobs elsewhere. The housing market crashed in 2008 and only recently started to recover. Many still move around. Those who settled have bought houses, and none of bought where we grew up.

My sister wanted to buy a house together back home last year and I regret not doing it. She ended up being sent to Texas then Georgia.

Compare that to my mom's generation where they all own one or more homes. None of them rent. Half of them aren't - and never were - married.

My husband bought his first house at 19. His parents strongly discouraged him, but it's put him (and us) in a comfortable position now. Under Australian law, partners start gaining an interest in assets once they're a de facto partner - which I believe is 6 months after living together.

I'm wondering if another reason is because in the areas of the US where real estate is much cheaper people also tend to get married much younger and be less mobile. So maybe, if they'd stayed single, they would have bought houses before marriage as well simply because it's affordable and as many people have said above, it makes more sense to buy than rent.

But the groups of people that marry at an older age tend to live in more urban areas where property is more expensive and don't necessarily want to be tied to one place for very long. I know I've lived in 5 different cities in my 20s, so having to sell a property every time I moved would just be a hassle.

I think it's for a number of reasons- the government has spent decades ingraining into us homeownership is something to aspire to and in terms of other tenures its only really been in the last 10 years or so that renting (other than social housing) has been readily available. Whereas social housing has been on the decline for numerous years, thank to Right to Buy legislation (this really boosted homeownership in the uk)

In the area I live is approximately 70% properties are owned and the Private rental market is about 12% with the rest social housing.

There is also no rent control schemes in the UK and many landlords have high mortgages and wish to make a profit on top. Often the repayments on a mortgage can often be significantly lower than rents.