Does anyone remember when mortgage rates were almost 17%!

Oh golly yes! We'd decided to leave school boarding and move into a house of our own, two weeks before DD2 arrived. Then the 17% happened. Ha! We ate a hell of a lot of grated carrots in things to pad the tasty bits out and lentils became our staple. Probably very healthy. Mind you, we bought with a mortgage, miniscule deposit, based solely on 3x my husband's teacher's salary (for £27,000). You couldn't do that now.

I do, we bought our first house in August 1979 and at the time the interest rate was 17%, plus you only qualified for 2.5 times your joint salary, could only have a mortgage term of 25 years and had to find at least 5% deposit, no extras thrown to help first time buyers.
I clearly remember our monthly payment on a £18,000 mortgage being £179 per month. My salary at the time was £181 per month, so that left my husbands salary to pay all the household expenses. I was also pregnant at the time with our first child, so was going on maternity leave, when you only got paid 90% of your salary for 6 weeks, then 12 weeks at half pay.
Tough times, but I was fortunate enough to have my lovely mum look after our daughter when I went back to work full time in March 1980.

I remember I the mid 70’s you just couldn’t get a mortgage and house prices were good but no way of getting a mortgage.
Then in early 80’s the interest rates hit the roof. More economising
In the early 70’s sugar was rationed - there was only electricity for some part of the day. Bin men and grave diggers were on strike.
There was mass unemployment. Factories particularly engineering.
The government stopped children having free milk at school.
Then we had the miners strike.
Memories!

We both lived at home until we married and nothing prepared us for the reality of mortgages and prices spiralling out of control. We had a warm air electric heating system that we couldn’t afford to run. We heated our newborn’s room in January but that was all. Initially my maternity benefit/pay covered our food bill but within a couple of months it only covered 3/4 of it. I remember the blind panic when the mortgage leapt up every other day, then it occurred to me that they couldn’t make all of the young mortgagees homeless. Could they? OH lost his job when the company he worked for went under.

What an easy time we all had! We celebrate our 50th anniversary next Spring!

Yes bought our first house in 1979 in north London for £17,500 now selling for £420,000

Yes, bought for £17,500. It's now selling for about £260,000.

I had a mortgage for three times my salary. Today, my starting salary would be about £25,000. There's no way I could afford that flat.

I paid 17% interest at one stage, but I'd rather that than a much lower percentage of an unaffordable amount.

Anneeba

Oh golly yes! We'd decided to leave school boarding and move into a house of our own, two weeks before DD2 arrived. Then the 17% happened. Ha! We ate a hell of a lot of grated carrots in things to pad the tasty bits out and lentils became our staple. Probably very healthy. Mind you, we bought with a mortgage, miniscule deposit, based solely on 3x my husband's teacher's salary (for £27,000). You couldn't do that now.

No, you couldn't.

I left my husband in the 80s and bought a small town house. At the time I was desperate to get away and just grateful to be able to just afford a mortgage on my own. As far as I understood my mortgage was a fixed rate and I felt safe as the rates rocketed. I hadn't realised that the Fixed rate was for a fixed time - one year. Exactly a year after I moved in, I had a letter to inform me that my mortgage payments had doubled. I think I grew up overnight and have always made sure since then that I take nothing for granted especially financially. I married some years later and am now comfortably off and happily retired but I still find it hard to relax about money.

I remember the rocketing of interest rates only too well. We had two small children and our plans for me to return to some part time work quickly changed to - find full time or else we might not be able to:
1. keep our home
2. stay in the area where we had friends
3. keep the children at local school/nursery where they were happy and settled.
No family near, either. We never had any childcare we didn't pay for. What would have happened if I hadn't found work, I can't imagine....

Me and my X bought a new build one bed flat in bury for £5500 which we had to borrow £500 deposit from the builder!! We sold for £8500less than 3years later and moved to Chorley in detached 3bed for £14995 to avoid £15k stamp duty threshold!! Nearly lost it in 1989 when our personal rate shot up to 18%!!! We had the rate loaded because my X was disabled!!! You can't believe that!?!?Many moves later and I now have zero mortgage but still careful with the outgoings, we live very well but don't squander on several foreign hols, takeaways eating out, and all the other utter junk younger People appear to think are essential for them! Maybe if they "did without" more like we did they'd have less to bleat about? Just a thought........

Ps our flat bought in 1976!

Oh yes I remember it well. We had just moved house and were stretched financially anyway, and this rise knocked us sideways. But, like we did in those days, we just got on with things. Took on more work, cut back all treats in life and we survived. Every generation goes through some sort of hardship .

I find myself really envious (sorry) of those who worked in Banks/Building Societies and got staff mortgages etc. Married in 1966, I was immediately classed as temporary staff, removed from the pension scheme and denied annual bonuses, interest on my current account and access to staff mortgages. There was no maternity pay in those days, so I worked until 21 days before my DD was born. With a child we were then entitled to a Council flat (hell on earth). It took us 3 years, with DH working 2 jobs and me part-time to save enough for a deposit on a semi-derelict cottage (which had a huge garden so we lived on mainly home grown fruit & veg) and another 3 of DIY to make it a comfortable home for our, by then 2 DDs.

JIC anyone wondering? Conservative govs resided over all the worst deprivations of the 70/80/90s !!! Nothing changes does it?

Quite often sorting out the unholy mess left by Labour!

I so remember it. We moved from Scotland to North Wales with work in 1988 after 2 years there, sold for what we paid for a flat there, and our money then sat in the bank while house prices spiralled up, something to do with a change in the MIRAS regulations so both of a couple could claim relief I seem to remember, but don’t recall details. Houses were coming on to the market and being sold within hours, they didn’t get on the estate agents lists until their pet clients had had first pick, and people were having offers accepted and being gazumped by somebody offering more. I remember being in a bidding war while trying to do my job one day, being scared stiff because DH was out on site and not contactable (before mobiles) and being egged on by the estate agent to up my bid, way over what we had agreed we could afford, or we would lose the house, which we did.
When we did buy, in 1989, it was way more than we could truly afford, more than my salary was going on the mortgage, and DH often didn’t get paid till the end of the month (or the next month after threatening further action) by his clients. Then the mortgage rates started climbing. I remember 15%, may well have been higher but I was too frightened to look. We were living hand to mouth, and came very close to selling up. We have a garage with 2 rooms over it. DH, who is quite handy, put up a partition and converted one half into a little shower room and the other into a kitchenette and we let them out, which saved us.
30 years on, the rooms are DH workshop, but us letting them out in desperation has come back to haunt us. Because they were let out 30 years ago the council are classing them as a second home and charging us 200% Council Tax on the building. The Council Tax on that is almost as high as the main house. We have paid off our mortgage but are now helping DD with hers. We are now on a fixed income and can’t really afford the high tax, so are faced again with possibly having to sell up, causing us a lot of worry, and we really don’t want to let out again, the people were perfectly nice, but noise from the garage was a problem, we couldn’t park our car in our drive or get it out of the garage if they had visitors, and our house and garden were never our own. Appeals have got us nowhere.

My husband worked continental shifts, so it was impossible for me to go out to work. We had bought our house for £2,565 in 1967, and our mortgage started out at £17. 6. 3d a month, which we could just about afford. Rates and water rates were paid together at £52 per annum. I nearly had a heart attack when we got a rates demand, just after we moved in, for £35. Luckily they let us pay in instalments.
When the mortgage rates rocketed we were really struggling. I became a childminder, which didn't pay well in those days, but it helped a little. I remember receiving the yearly letter which showed that all our mortgage payments had gone to pay the interest, and our balance had gone down by a mere £3. I cried!
Somehow we struggled through, with DH working all the overtime he could get, almost killing himself from the strain. The children didn't go hungry, but I had to be very creative with my cooking. A bag of free scraps ' for the cat' from the market fish seller made tasty fishcakes. We couldn't afford a cat, or he might have ended up as catcakes! ?y
What doesn't kill you makes you strong! The only money I have ever owed was the mortgage. Cash only for everything else, and my children have learned from my experience, and are all good managers, with their own homes. Even on my basic pension I feel rich, compared with those times.

Yes I do!! I live in dread that the interest rates will go up and my daughter and her husband would have to go through what we did. It was horrible, we had just moved house and had a high mortgage and were hoping to ride it out even before the rates went up. We had two young children, I had a Saturday job in M&S but we then had to all sleep in one room so that we could rent the other two rooms out to lodgers. Do people still do that? I suppose they do but call it renting put a room and the people renting do their own cooking etc. I bet they wouldn't want to share a bathroom these days either!

Sorry, that should have said
'renting out a room'
I really must get into the habit of pressing the Preview button before Post button!

Gabriell56 - True
Kasimo - Really Really!!
None of the politicians leaders helped.
Those in the South had an easier time, (although still bad) than those in the North. It was true desperation.

Negative equity was also a terrible thing for people to deal with.

Ah yes remember it well !" In order to buy our first house we had to move from Essex to March in Cambridgeshire, get up at 5.00am and commute to London ....the building society only loaned 1.5times salary in those days (1972) and hardly considered the wife's income .....what they never took into account was even in those days our season tickets from there to London cost well over £750 each a year....which would have meant we could have bought nearer to London if this had been taken into account ! Mind you, the bungalow brand new cost £6,100 for three beds, garage and a big garden ....not that we saw much of it, getting home around 8.00pm made really long days ....and little money left over after petrol costs and running the car to get to the station 20 miles away at Peterborough to get the early fast train into London ....and the mortgage interest rate was insane ! Never had a lot to eat, or spend ....LV's every day working in London had to pay for a good lunch which they did back then !

Bought our first house in Hertfordshire in 1991 and the increase in interest rate was awful. Spent a whole winter boiling kettles and showering with a, watering can as the boiler was broken and we couldn't afford a new one! To add further stress my late husband had to work for a year with no pay as he worked for his pa and the practice was in dire straits. We sold up after a, couple of years and lost money but moved to Scotland and bought a much nicer house for less money. I can remember going to visit a pawnshop one day as we were so short of cash! I think my sons think I am exaggerating when I talk about how tough it was. They are both in their early twenties and have their own homes and no mortgages to worry about.

I remember it all too well. We bought our first house in 1985 just before our 1st child was born deposit paid by developers, much cheaper than renting. Upgraded to slightly larger house in 1989 just before 3rd child was born. Then interest rates started rising, it felt like daily! Husband lost his job.
Luckily we were able to sell, made no money but at least we didn’t end up with negative equity. Nightmare! Without family lending us money for a rental deposit & husband finding another job we would have been homeless.

Bought our first house in December 1981,
Rate at 15.5%
We both had to teach as we could not even pay the mortgage alone on one salary.
We had an endowment mortgage so if we lost our jobs the interest would still be paid ( we were young and believed anything anyone told us !)
We rushed down to Cornwall after getting married and applying ALL OVER the country for teaching jobs and lived in a winterlet flat for 3 months and then lived in a council house for 3 years in order to save up for a deposit.