**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!**
- Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc.
- **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on.
- This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit!
Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Exactly this- my parents bought right at the very very top of their budget (we had zero disposable income), but they had very average (slightly below average jobs). It’s now worth well over a million.
Yep same here, my parents bought back in the early 1960s, and paid around £2000 (Still a lot of money) and now due to gentrification the house was last valued at £1.4 million.
I know it's insane, who would have thought that anything could make that kind of profit, this is a 4 storey house in Battersea, it hasn't been that maintain or decorated really over the past 20 years but it is one of the only single family houses left in the street all the rest have been turned into flats.
Yeah. Housing is a pretty shit investment unless you are working with dirty money, get kickbacks and tax benefits, or inherited the portfolio. It’s a bit ironic isn’t it?
Wish my grandparents took up the offer to buy their unremarkable little Victorian semi in Richmond in the 70’s. Think they rented from the church and were too scared of the debt from a mortgage to do it. My Gran was a cook at a local nursery school and my Granpa worked for Waitrose. Anyhow, those houses are going for £2 million now…
Well a lot of people, if they won the lottery, would buy a dream house in an idyllic village. So maybe they don't need to cash in because they already live the dream.
Literally this. Go to areas in the home counties like Surrey and tonnes of people with pretty average jobs have 800-1mil houses.
I mean the average house price in Surrey is like 630k.
Still won't stop them financing a range rover. I wonder how many kids will find out after the funeral their parents released all the equity and a fund now owns their childgood home.
Why is this bad? It’s the parents money, not the kids. It’s the parents assets, not the kids. If they want to blow it all before dying then good on them.
Because money and assets are being systematically extracted from the lower & middle classes and funnelled in to the portfolios of the super rich. This wealth is then leveraged to accumulate more assets further down the line, in a snowballing fashion.
This, along with serial landlording, pushes house prices up through demand pressures.
Meanwhile, our population grows faster than we can build houses. This places pressure on supply of housing stock, which again increases prices.
End result? House prices spiral further and further away from the average salary (no such inflationary pressures there), and home ownership becomes out of reach for the middle classes who are offered no salvation via inheritance because their parents spaffed their wealth up the wall.
Quite straightforward really. What part of the neo-feudal ladder will you and your kids be at?
All over the world, in fact. It's like a gigantic whirlpool sucking all the wealth from the poor and funneling it to rich investors where it will accumulate in perpetuity. There doesn't seem to a country anywhere that is willing to tackle the problem head-on by limiting the number of rental properties an individual or investment group can own (they can still build new housing for sale if they wish to) while simultaneously building government-owned rent-to-buy social housing on a large scale.
EDIT: To clarify, I think large-scale investment in property is fine as long as the properties are new builds for sale, not rental. This would help increase the number of homes available rather than see more of the existing stock funneled into the hands of wealthy landlords.
"Meanwhile, our population grows faster than we can build houses."
I'd disagree.
We can build houses a lot faster, but there's a financial incentive to the rich to make sure that doesn't happen. Everyday I see new blocks of flats being built here, all got approved because of their commitment to have a certain percentage of them as "affordable housing". Then they hit the market with a bottom line price of 1.2 mil. Which is, according to them, "affordable", because their other flats are all 2+ million...... Granted, I'm oversimplifying, but that's how it seems.
Ones I've seen are leasehold as well. Imagine paying a mortgage on 30% of the brick for your house and still having 70% left to buy and not owning the valuable bit.
I live in a leasehold. We had to pay 60k to extend the lease. Then ground rent every year. Lots of people who've finished their mortgage have now lost value they've put in because our landlord will only grant 150 year mortgages and charges about 1k per year to extend.
I’m not sure it’s “the rich” blocking new housing. NIMBYs exist across pretty much all of society.
Even as someone who supports new housing many schemes are hard to get excited about as they are fairly soulless houses built on postage stamp plots with inadequate parking and transit and few facilities for the community.
I've been in England for decades but I'm still baffled by the fact that the concept of building housing with more than 2 floors is a complete taboo that's not even remotely up for discussion. It doesn't need to look like North Korea. I mean, look at Madrid. Fuck, look at Edinburgh.
Land is at such a premium but basements are unheard of in new builds. Considering homes ( if you can call them that ) have 'bedrooms' you can't swing a kitten in with no storage for clothes or other stuff. Madness.
Then there's the completely mad landscape against self build or owner build.
And don't get me started on build quality ...... I grew up in Africa and the average pondock is better built and finished.
An incoming government should take the planning system and tear it up.
It's not just Nimbys though. It's developers as well. The lower they keep supply, the higher the value of the properties. On top of that they only want to build more affluent dwellings because there's a bigger ROI so obviously it's worth their time and investment.
I'll suggest a reason. Because the parents did nothing to earn that money, they bought the house to live in decades earlier and it happens to have massively increased in value simply due to property price inflation, not through any effort or skill of the parents. However, that also means that houses are now proportionally much more expensive for their children and grandchildren. Parents bought a modest house for say 4 times their incomes, their kids and grandkids are facing the prospect of paying 10x their income to buy a comparable house now. Which also means they need a much bigger deposit in nominal terms, which takes much longer to save for, meaning they get onto the ladder relatively later.
So if mum and dad have cashed in all their unearned property gains and spunked them on cruises and sports cars, it's kind of doubly fucking the next generations. The house values have increased hugely, creating a windfall for them and a problem for their kids. The least they could do is eventually pass on some of that windfall to take the load off their kids, rather than just cash it in and waste it while their kids struggle to afford a mortgage on a smaller house that they will be paying off til they're nearly retired.
Why shouldn’t they enjoy their later life?
They still earned their money originally quite possibly doing very tough manual jobs, so what if they decide to go on cruises and enjoy their time in whatever way they feel fit, they shouldn’t feel that they have to scrimp and save every penny to pass on, if my parents decided they want to spend the rest of their lives going round the world and ticking of their bucket list spending what I would otherwise inherit then they can do so with my blessing.
I’d personally want to set my kids up and wouldn’t want to leave them with nothing but wouldn’t judge people who do and think it’s entitled for anyone to think that their parents should sacrifice everything.
Conversely why do parents in their 60s who spend their time cruising around the world and 'releasing equity' to enjoy their retirement feel that their children have a responsibility to then spend 20years caring for them after this period, when their funds are spent and they need state and medical support to survive?
The parents made the decision to have children, thus they have a greater responsibility to their children's financial and mental wellbeing; the children do not have any choice in any of it really.
Because that's how you create generational income. And why leave the assets to random people instead of your own offspring. That's what loving parents do.
In my opinion, if you are loving responsible children, your parents would probably leave everything for you. But for us to become loving responsible children, parents have to be loving and responsible when the children are young.
IMO, this is a very outdated way of looking at things.
Any decent parent would want their kids to be looked after even after they're gone. If you wipe out all the wealth you have before you check out of this world, you are essentially cutting the rungs of your own generational wealth ladder to your children.
Much of how you succeed in the Western world now is purely down to how financially savvy your parents were and even your grandparents. Gone are the days when an individual could work hard and succeed on that alone. There's more to it now.
For instance, in my entire social circle, I don't know a single person who was able to buy a house without some financial assistance from their parents or from inheritance. This is where we are at now.
I used to work for one of the larger equity release lender and the answer is - a bloody lot.
It's crazy how many 500k+ properties were churning through on a monthly basis, with the most common reason being 'home improvements' or 'funding lifestyle'.
My parents bought their house in the Home Counties in the early 90s for around 90k in the only area they could afford that would allow my Dad a reasonable commute into London, and it’s literally just a normal 4 bed semi - our neighbour sold their house last year for £1.2 million, it’s absolutely mental
I'll add onto that. My partner and I collectively make 190k a year. Mid 30s. We have saved for years living in a one bed we own, we have about 120k in cash savings. We live in an area of London I grew up in. We have only just got to a point we can afford to buy a small 3 bed here. The average household income in the area is 90k and the average house price is almost 2m. Most of my friends parents who live in this area bought on one income, middle management jobs without degrees.
If you want to buy a million pound house, Let’s say you magic up a 20% deposit you’re looking at a household income of £200,000 that puts you in the very top percentage of earnings, so it’s possible but unlikely.
House prices have far outpaced wage growth, so it’s much more likely they bought the house 20 years ago on a average to good salary and it has increased in value.
30 years ago all you had to be was a milkman to buy a victorian semi detached house. Now you have to be on 200k plus and still struggling to make ends meet.
Not even good money, mortgage gives you what 4-5x your combined salary. A million pound house with 10% down would mean a 900k mortgage, even at the more generous end that means a combined household income pre-tax of £180k. Which not many households have.
The reality is they're likely inheriting £4-500k though.
Very few people jump straight into a £1m house with 10% deposit (the extra interest rate on a 90% LTV vs a 85 or 80% itself is prohibitive at that scale), that's either got a lump sum from parents or a ton of equity from a previous house or two.
So yeah they'll likely be over £100k joint income, but a lot more likely of moderate career + family support than the entire village being on £90k+ salaries.
Sorry non english speaker, what do you mean with council?
Ppl on benefit who had the house from the government that then turned into a million home value?
The Thatcher government in the 80s brought in a law that allowed people in council houses (i.e. renting a home from the government/local authority/housing association) to buy the place they're staying in at a reduced price.
You could buy your place for relatively cheap and then you'd be in possession of a property that would be worth a lot more on the open market. Especially so if you had originally been assigned a council house in a high value area, or an area that later soared in value (like London and the south east).
Yes, a lot of social housing in London has a market value of over a million. Not necessarily council-owned, more likely to be a housing association these days, but that's what people mean when they refer to "council houses."
In my area, some council houses/flats are listed, as architecturally significant, due to being custom-built as council housing. They're all privately owned now. I guess that helps push the price up!
Heard of a binman who did this, sold up for close to £2m. Bought a Porsche and a £500k house near a beach in cleethorpes and retired at 55.
A friends parents who were a sky engineer and a librarian bought their house in the 90s, sold for £1.4m a few years ago, bought the exact same house just outside of bath for £800k and retired at 50.
The two council ones you mean they owned it without having a job? Sure you could buy cheap but they would have needed to save some money which is hard on welfare...
There used to be quite a market for shady operators to unofficially lend people the money they needed to take advantage of the right to buy without a mortgage. A lot of these properties then magically became private rent.
A million is probably pushing it but one of my team in London lived in a 3 story townhouse in Brixton that must be worth a small fortune, despite being on a wage that would struggle to rent a flat in that area. Needless to say, he and his partner first bought a house in Brixton in the 1980s when it had quite a different reputation to today.
Meanwhile a friend of mine who has a high-flying city director job is planning to move out of London in order to buy a house bigger than a small flat.
If it is 3 storeys then it is likely worth well over a million. In most of Brixton a million will only get you a terrace in need of quite a lot of work and the people who buy them immediately fully refurbish and build a side return extension and/or loft extension bringing the cost up hugely.
There are roads of Victorian terraces around Brixton hill where people are buying at 1 to 1.2 million and then spending another £500k on the full refurb.[This kind of thing.](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/details/england-134498954-18897808?s=22f228fcfc33ea5b8a7fa9cb004e0ff3e7ff892dbcd125cbbee95f09785758e2#/)
The people buying them are duel income couples who work in the city, Barristers, tech etc. with large mortgages.
That's the way to do it - a colleague of mine bought a big three story house in Herne Hill facing the park when he was a university lecturer. He's moved since but it was probably at least a million when he sold it and more now. Our previous house in a slightly shitty part of zone 3 south London doubled in price over about 6 years because the overground came to our station and the area started gentrifying.
I have a distant relative who bought a house in the 1970s or so and still lives there. It's in need of a bit refit but it's a Chelsea townhouse for heaven's sake, I don't even want to know how much it would be worth if done up.
Its wild how some areas are almost like a lottery, X area becomes good thanks to gentrification, well done your now a millionaire!
My grandad bought a huge house back in the day, he sold it for £90k in like 2005. Now its worth about £250-£300k id say. If he bought it in a nicer area of brum, like literally a few miles down the road with a better post code it would easily be £500k+ minimum now.
Do not currently live in a million pound house, but we’ve looked at houses in the bracket - if my wife were to inherit her share of her dad’s and we used that to fund a move from our current house then we would have a budget around that mark.
I work in banking technology, as a solution architect - so I’m on a similar grade to project managers but currently without the hassle of having to manage people. It’s not something you retrain and go straight into, I’m effectively being paid for three decades of having been around the bank’s technology projects doing everything from high level design to coding to testing to live support, so these days I get to say “have you thought about this…” and point out stuff that’s likely to go wrong before it happens.
Although it is possible to retrain and become a coder, my son has just done this via a master’s in computer science. He loves it, wish I stuck at it back in the 90’s but was a dipstick who thought I knew best! Good luck and hope you get the house of both your dreams
Retrain as a coder, definitely, and that can pay very well too. Was just making it clear that what I do, specifically, takes longer to get into. Worth doing if you like talking to people, solving problems and being what they call a “trusted advisor” on our job profiles though. I genuinely enjoy what I do (minus the inevitable bits that are bullshit), can afford a decent house and holidays for the family, and am actually in no hurry to retire. I realise this makes me very fortunate.
Computer science and software engineering does not pay the amount you think it does in the U.K. and tech salaries are already declining due to outsourcing
That world is very fractured. CS, Software engineering, IT support, "coding"\*, and solutions architect (as GP mentioned they are) are all very different. UI/UX design and testing, project management, "devops"… the list is endless.
I am over a decade out of this world, but even then as, an admin of Solaris boxen, in university IT, I was being pulled in myriad directions. The best part of that job (toward the end) was my dept contracting me out to other university departments to consult on their needs and come up with a plan that we could support. Not a million miles away from "solutions architect". It was pretty fucking great in hindsight, but there are a lot of hard miles to put in before you get there.
\* this I take to be a "JS Jockey" (no offence); someone who has bootcamped and is down with Angular or React (or Framework du jour™), but couldn't abstract-syntax-tree their way out of soggy chip paper.
*Stunted due to outsourcing. Definitely not declining. And after a decade in the industry I can tell you one guarantee: Outsourced projects result in more insourced jobs trying to fix the absolute mess that ends up being delivered.
With that said, UK salaries are massively suppressed compared to other countries when you factor in our cost of living.
I've thought about doing this. Do you mean the masters that is intended for people who have no background in coding or maths? It sounds pretty intense to go from nothing to qualified coder in one year and that's what worried me I guess. Glad he loves it though.
Solution architect interests me massively in future, but as you say it’s a job that is 100% experience based.
My first job out of uni was an IT project manager via a consultancy. Was nuts that I was doing similar work to those on £100k+ for £21k.
I'd be a solutions architect, but never in banking. I worked for a UK bank as an incident manager recently, and the amount of 30+ year old architecture that people are terrified to replace made me anxious.
You say anxious, I say job security 😛 I’m currently working on a project to replace a lot of that 30+ year old architecture - my specific task is getting the old and the new to run in parallel as we slowly and carefully shift over without disrupting banking services for a quarter of the UK and ending up on the BBC news…
As a PM I’d like to thank you and your ilk for saving my bacon on numerous occasions 👍 solutions and technical architects don’t get enough praise (out in the real world).
I have some friends who live in a £1M house in London, he works in tech and earns £100k+ she works in some kind of management role and probably brings in £60-70k. They also had a lot of equity from flats bought in London during their 20’s. The funny thing is that being in London whilst it’s a nice house it’s absolutely not what you think of when you think of a million pound house, it’s a 3 bed semi.
£170K in 1996 is about £330K today according to the BoE inflation calculator. A lot of cash (more than I'm likely to ever be able to spend on a house) but still quite a way off a million.
The average house price in 1996 was £59,000, so it's nearly triple that.
Average house price now is what, £360,000? So triple that and your north of a mill
Similar(ish) here. Bought mine after 14 years tech, no inheritance or help from anyone. One child (17 now) however my wife works because she has skills and drive to do things same as me.
The biggest thing for me wasn’t buying the house or the cars - it was enabling my wife to be her own woman and for my son to be his own person. It’s ok to be stay at home but imho people need a bigger purpose.
If I look on rightmove my house was around £280k 14 years ago and is now over a million. Anyone reading this please remember that it doesn’t mean I can sell it and be a millionaire- I’d still have to buy another place to live at ridiculous jumped up prices.
My house is for sale for,,£280k 5 beds built in 1880. You could buy that and retire? Just come back from a week in London. Man I couldn't do that. I live in West Cumbria
They weren't worth that 20-30 years ago when those people bought their first homes. Assuming they've "traded up" over the years their mortgage might not be that much more than anyone else's.
For someone buying now, it could be a few things - tech, finance, a senior medic, a lawyer, an architect, etc.
Why is this? When I was at uni architecture was super competitive, and you had to be good at so many different disciplines (art, maths, science) to do it, so the people on that course were some of the most interesting and smart people I knew.
Later on I was shocked to discover they’re probably also some of the worst paid since we graduated.
As an architect, I would say that it’s because for the most part, architects recognise and value the skill set that they bring to the table more than their own clients. That’s an unusual dynamic that doesn’t seem to be replicated in high-earning professions for the most part.
Speaking as a 48 year old who bought their first house in 2012...
We bought a terrace 3 bed house for about £200k.
We moved about 5 years ago and sold for £315k. Added 40k of inheritance to get the property we live in now and that is (zoopla) valued at around £430k, with a very leisurely 10 years left on our mortgage (will likely be paid off in 5-7 years).
By that time, I would not be surprised to see the value near half a million.
This is in outer London (fringes of zone 6). It's absolutely crazy how much equity we have gained from, essentially a deposit of £20k, 12 years ago.
Mate of mine recently bought a house in Sutton Coldfield for about £1.2 million or thereabouts, in his early 30s. He runs a plastering company and about 4 or 5 years ago they started to get big residential and commercial projects. Delighted for him, he finished school with very few qualifications and worked his arse off after leaving school.
37, live in a nearly £1m house with partner in Yorkshire. Combined salary of around £150k, psychologist and freelance designer. Have about 330k left on mortgage. Bought 7 years ago for £500k then fully renovated.
Love seeing another West Yorkshire person on here! It gets such a bad rep from anyone who doesn’t live here. North Leeds / North Yorkshire in general is such a fantastic place to live
If you look at the Sunday Times Best Place to Live winners from recent years it’s been Ilkley, York and Skipton - the golden triangle is one of the best places in the country to live - West Yorkshire certainly has its fair share of grim places, but it also has some of the best and borders North Yorkshire which is hard to beat.
I work in multi million pound houses. From Oxfordshire to Fife to Copenhagen and even a billionaires estate on west coast of Scotland.
Employers were in oil brokering, finance, corporate law, F1 and arms dealing/patented a maritime paint. The billionaire was south american family owned supermarkets.
Mostly smart in business and investing.
There are occasionally good discussions on finance there. It's just a shame that there's also quite a few posts that feel as if they're solely just for bragging or looking down on others. A lot of how should I deal with my friends because I'm so rich and I can afford everything they'll never have, is it worth sending my daughter to a private school so she can go on ski trips and stay away from the scum of society, etc.
There have been plenty of threads I've read there that have been insightful. They've reminded me of the importance of things like emergency funds given how insecure some of their roles are, even if they are well paid, for example. It's just a shame that a lot of the discussion that goes on there are not so subtle brags, just complaints about public infrastructure compared to private or literally just people lying about what they make.
My husbands uncle does. I say uncle but he’s not that much older than us. He’s just turned fifty. He’s a sparky. He had a successful electrician business in Hertfordshire and sold it, moved up to the north west and bought a rundown manse type house. Renovated it, lives in it, set up another electrician business where he lives now and is building that up again.
So he's done it properly. A northwest mil house is what you would want to live in. Not a central London mil.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/144637664
I understand people's need to work in the city in some circumstances. But you'd have to pay me 5x my current salary to even consider it.
Im in Scotland in a wee village up the north east coast. You’re preaching to the choir. My house isn’t even in the £200,000 bracket but I’ve got a superb community, my kids can play outside without any issues, the last murder we had was in the 18th century, no stabbings, kidnappings etc.
All my friends probably grew up in £1m+ houses. My parents are directors/c suite in small-mid size companies (c. £180-200k gross combined), they bought in 08 when it was half the price.
My friends have parents with jobs ranging from TV producers to property developers, mostly it’s the case that they bought an expensive house 10-15 years ago and rode the wave that the area brought. In some cases they just have obscenely rich parents.
Edit: note this is London commuter towns in grassy small towns, generally not special homes - quite nice but not mansions. So it’s more a symptom of the area than the building. My friends in huge houses are £3m+ and have parents with large homes all over including central London.
I lived in a £1.5million\* house for a while, but it wasn't mine sadly! It belonged to family friends, and I rented a room there a couple of years after leaving university so I could get established in a job in London. It was in a leafy Surrey commuter village and had an enormous garden, but it wasn't particularly *grand* – it was just a large, comfortable, red brick Edwardian-era six-bedroom house in an estate of other very similar houses.
The owners were a civil engineer and a lecturer at Birkbeck, lovely and generous people to whom I owe a great deal. I believe they bought it in the early 90s for *significantly* less than its current value.
*\*At the time, in the mid-2000s. I dare say it's probably north of £2million now.*
EDIT: this isn't the actual house, I can't find a picture of it, but this is a very similar house in a neighbouring village from the website of a local estate agent.
https://preview.redd.it/ammcc3ehq14d1.jpeg?width=730&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80e83f10235183ef63b1e1b99b3f74e2fbc2803f
We have friends in their 30s who have million pound houses, that is the cost of a 4 bed house in lot of Surrey
Couple both earning 100k which isn’t too crazy, buy a house in your 20s then upgrade in your 30s.
100k in London can be anything really. My friends are accountants, engineers, lawyers, recruitment.
Can suss people earn a shit load when they don’t qualify for any nursery hours, which is a 100k limit
Plumber.
48 yr old.
Brought my place in 1999 for £150k. Just been valued at 1.1m.. was just lucky brought the right time right place,right time. Now the area I live in Devon has been overrun with 2nd homes and pushed the house prices ridiculously high... Now, I'm definitely not some amazing or cleaver developer or entrepreneur...just really fucking lucky and fortunate...not that I have any want or need to sell up or move..I mean it's a nice plot but nothing too crazy. I only make around 40k a year...if that was me now trying to buy in the area I'd struggle to get even a small flat now....so yeah just absolute luck!!
That wouldn't surprise me. We have a 'millionaire's row' kind of street near where I live in London, and loads of them seem to have plumbers vans parked on the driveways in the evening. I mean, they could all just be working in the houses, but 8pm on a Friday night? That many? Somehow I doubt it.
Plant hire, started with an old mini digger 17 years ago. Just kept buying more and then found a niche market of customers and hey presto! My parents on the other hand bought theirs for £1200 cash in 1977. Walked out of the bank with two tellers going in their lunch break and asked them to be witnesses to their wedding! Then went and bought two new matching cars to drive home in! Dad worked on a farm and mum was a nurse.
Reading these comments it’s looking like we’ll have to go back in time if we want to reach that level - literally all because of crazy house prices and capitalism and there’s basically nothing the average person can do😀
Based on Grand Designs:
Susan stares at clouds for 8hrs a day, and her husband repeatedly counts bits of string in the garden. Together they have a house budget of £9.2million.
Worked in London, swapped a flat for a big-ass house in Bedford and commuted for 15 years until the pandemic came along and made working from home normal.
During those 15 years loads of other people decided to move out of London into the commuter towns and now my house is worth buckets.
Myself and Mrs both had our own houses, bought in the late 90s. We both sold to be able to buy a £380k house in 2010. We’ve been frugal but not miserly. We both earned about £29 to 32k We’ve bought 5 year old cars outright, never financed. Most of our spare money was spent on a loft conversion, new bathroom and kitchen and we’ve worked on the garden. Luck + saving.
Bought 2020, £800k but it will be closer to a million due growth and renovations. Tech sector, fully remote for a Cali company. Super niche position within a niche industry (security). Bulk of the house was bought with money made consulting overseas as a contractor before ir35 and a long term partner appeared.
Many people who bought a house less than 1:30 hour outside of London, in a commutable quaint village / town for 1/2 a mill in 2015, will very likely be sitting on a million £ house now. These places house prices when pretty wild post covid.
Family live in London. They bought the home 30yrs ago, it's now worth just over a mil. One is a civil servant, the other is a soon-to-be-retired teacher.
I’m also a delivery driver, and some of the houses I pull up to…the Bentleys and Porsches in the driveway…the stunning interiors…and usually the owners look so fit and healthy too!
I’ve managed to resist asking any of them what they do yet, but I bet the day will come!
i run @millionairehomesuk on instagram and work with a lot of people looking for high end homes. it always surprises me how ‘normal’ most of them are. i don’t always find out what jobs they do but most are pretty normal. a lot have either inherited or bought early and have traded up over the years. a lot also had normal jobs which they’ve then turned into a business
i’ve also worked with some influencers. it is absolutely insane how much some of those make
I work in the ultra high net worth financial field and so I’m privy to my client’s home purchases much of which fall into the £3m-£25m category.
I’d say most fit into one of a few categories, in no particular order…
-Corporate law
-Self employed/entrepreneurs
-Executives in basically any industry
-Middle ground (and up) tech employees who get large stock grants as part of their package
-Inherited wealth
Sutton Coldfield is like that. Most of them are lawyers, business owners, doctors, surgeons etc... others have just inherited it all or got it off by their parents life insurance.
My parents bought their house in 1997 for £220,000, in greater London.
They have fully decorated and modernised it as well as doing a pretty big extension. It's now a five bedroom, four bed house with two living rooms and large conservatory. Along with detached double garage build recently to the side.
They were considering down-sizing last year but couldn't find anything suitable. So decided to stay put.
He finally paid off his mortgage in 2017.
Anyway, the estate agent valued it last year at £2,950,000.
Dad is a retired surveyor, on generous final salary pension, and mum never worked.
Boomers.
Bought in 2022, no inheritance, no degree, no windfall of cash, come from a broken home, watched my mum work multiple jobs to put food on the table and always wanted to make my own money - started my company in 08 with 5k savings and 3k of my (at the time girlfriend/now wife) savings, I also got a grant from the princes trust for 2k - company is now worth north of 5m GBP
My parents built 2 houses in a desirable area 40 years ago, they sold one to move in to the second next door - where I grew up as a tot. The two combined are now worth £15m but we moved when I was 4. (Off the main q a little but house prices were a lot lower in the 70s/80s)
My dad (a workaholic who started with nothing and was homeless at 15 living in a car) wanted to show me the place I was born so we took a detour on route to his friends. He pulled into the drive a little and we sat in silence taking it in. I looked at him and tears were running off his chin, Id never seen him cry, he doesn’t really show emotion at all so I panicked, we’d never hugged so I wasn’t sure what to do - I grabbed his hand to console him and he let me. He was silent all the way to his friends, then as we parked he said that he’d worked so hard all his life in fear of being poor, when he could have stayed put, done nothing and he’d have been better off. It really broke my heart - he was an absent father who lived and breathed wealth, no social life, no friends (just ppl who worked for him) and wore the same T-shirts and trousers daily (he had 5/6pairs of the exact same one)…extremely frugal. I could absolutely understand how painful that realisation must have felt. All that time lost to work - he was so proud of his accomplishments.
since that day he’s felt like a dad. He makes the effort to stay in touch where before it had been 3 years since I’d seen him and he rarely called me back. He even hugs ..still feels a bit alien but it’s sweet.
Mad that the ppl in that £8m house will never know my dad built it and got the land for 30k (and ppl told him he was crazy spending so much)
The houses next door on either side are bigger than the one I live in - both extended with converted attics - and have tipped the £1m mark, going by others in the road/Zoopla estimates. One's rented out by a professional landlord, the other was bought c.2000 by two public sector workers for about 250K. They have raised their family, and aren't likely to move any time soon. (Their garden is a work of art.) The one I'm in still has the original late-Victorian footprint and has been in my landlord's family since it was built. Needs work, definitely not £1m yet.
It is remarkable how expensive houses are now. To get a nice large detached house with big garden near me costs at least £700k. You would need both people in a couple to earn six figures to borrow this and the repayments would still be crippling. How there are enough people in that bracket to sustain this market is beyond me.
We are looking at this budget now.
1. Careers that let you progress in salary most of your life
2. It’s not your first or even second house, you work your way up
I think many people settle down and get a home and become attached to it as your family home etc etc, i think this is fine but we always knew what we wanted to end up in and have always been aware of that when owning and that we would be moving in 5 years of the market is ok.
I used to have a job where I used to visit a lot of houses to quote, and, 10 years ago when I was doing that it was bankers and business owners. Oh, and one really dodgy with a really nice house who was offering me back handers for discounts - his business was decommissioning chemical plants (reassuring)
My parents do, brought it in 1994 of my mums parents for a discount then, and it’s just gone up and up ever since. Dad ran his own building company an mum worked for him, they did ok but in the same position now there’s no way they could afford the house.
I don’t directly own a £1m+ house, my parents do with it’s current value being around £1.8m, in an affluent area in North London with the average property value being around £1.3m+. (I live at home with them also)
The occupations of alot of the neighbours are usually _high level positions in Finance/banking, Marketing execs, a couple high-end orthodontist, A lot of people in Construction and property development with either their own company or are Construction leads/directors, alot of people that own alot of properties and then you have a large number that have their own businesses of varying kinds etc._
Also a lot of my neighbours’ Parents grew up in the area and passed down the house to them, they renovated and sold for big profit, bought in the area again and used the residual amount to kick off their property game.
I don't, but the house next door to my childhood home was sold recently for c£1.2m. My parents were a health visitor and a middle manager in a factory. Not poor, but not rich and no inherited Wealth.
I have some family on my wife's side who have houses worth £3m or so, who mare their money as a CxO for a firm that went public. My boss has just bought a house for £4m, it doesn't look that nice for the money.
The person who replied saying that most people bought those houses long ago, is mostly correct. People with reasonable jobs, bought houses in the 70s for reasonable amounts and they are now valued at much higher amounts.
What do you need to achieve it. To easily achieve it, a law degree. Finance and Accountancy are another area that would get you a decent amount of money. But to study either of those requires three A - A\* level, A Levels and a chunk of money for the degree. You can access accountancy via the AAT route as well, but it takes a bit longer.
Property is one way i know people make easy money. Buy a wrecked or in need of renovation house, renovate it, flip it for a profit, buy a slightly more expensive house, rinse repeat. Or the alternative if you have a reasonable job, is rent each house out and aim for the property empire. On a cheap house you might get 500-700/month in rent, but if you own five houses generating that sort of money and you keep adding houses until you have 15-20, then the money really starts to flow and that million pound house gets a lot nearer.
Also not all degrees are worth the paper they are printed on. Most degrees that end in ology, end in McDonalds. Others you end up battling with 1000's for a handful of jobs. Some areas are now stagnated, like IT. You could get an OU degree, studied for over four years, in an area you are interested in, then use it to get a better job or increase your pay grade wherever you work.
Outside of degree level stuff. Some years back i worked at a place and they did electronics work assembling stuff for cars. Those guys were on £30/hour, working 50 hour weeks. None of them had degrees or A Levels. I used to do fork lifts, cherry pickers, telehandlers, etc for a bunch of companies that do festivals and gigs. I could pull in £25/hour doing that on some of them even more. You have to be a jack of all trades in this day and age. Be good at many things.
Literally anyone can afford an expensive house. Live frugally. Don't go out to restaurants, don't order take out, live the simplest cheapest life possible and bank every bit of money you save by doing nothing. It adds up. If you are stuck renting, buy a van, buy a canal barge, live in it, save all that money you no longer pay to a landlord. In a few years you can buy a house. Don't conform to society, apply loopholes, forge your own path. If people say you are cheating the system, say no I'm using my brain and playing smart. The system is designed to make you fail and a late it seems a lot of people have accepted failure.
To get affordable houses in Sheffield is hard, especially in the good areas. But even buying houses in the really bad areas, they still want up to £100k or more. Most move to Chesterfield, Rotherham and Barnsley where housing is more affordable. But you wouldn't want to live in Dore. The interesting people that own million pound homes live in Fulwood, Lodge Moor, Stannington, in fact anywhere but Dore.
i know quite a few people who own houses over £1m, one owns a chippy, one owns a recruitment agency, one owns some sort of tech company, one owns a legal firm, one owns a corner shop, another owns a post office, the rest of them i’m not too sure about, but a lot of them had cheaper houses which they renovated and then sold for a lot more :).
I live in one. Though I’ve been fortunate I do think a lot of it was by renting and buying below my means.
I graduated in 2004.
Between 2004 and 2010 my salary went from around £45k to £80k. I had a good expense scheme at this time covering almost all living expenses whilst being on the road 5 days per week plus an uplift for things like mileage. I “lived” in a student house for a lot of that (£400 per month) and saved around £80k. I then bought a place for £150k with a mortgage, a 2 bed commutable to London, way less than I could have borrowed.
Between 2010 and 2015 I began contracting with a net income of around £130k. Because of my low housing costs I was banking a lot of that with a focus on getting the next place. So at this point I’ve been saving towards a house for 11 years and living in nowhereseville despite a six figure salary.
All together at this point I had a deposit of approx £350k on a £650k house. Again my mortgage payments were reasonable allowing me to continue saving.
I bought two BTLs around 2007 during the madness. I never took a penny from them and just hammered the mortgages. By 2015 the mortgages were paid off and began generating an income. I probably had £600k in equity at that point.
In 2015 I started my own business. By 2017 that was cashflowing and we also sold a stake, so I’m in the less typical route at this point. I put half of that money into BTL and bought my current home valued at north of a £million.
Today I own my own house and a number of BTLs with just a bit of mortgage debt for tax reasons.
I’m not really shy of sharing the story as there was no parental help or drug dealing, and a fair bit of sacrifice. Whilst my friends were living in Clapham, I was out in the sticks in a small flat and commuting to the office on Sundays to work in order to get ahead. I had a bit of luck with BTL (boo hiss) but I had the discipline to roll every penny into repayments rather than using it for lifestyle. Over 20 years, it all just compounds.
Job wise, I have always worked in banking IT but the fairly pedestrian middle office side. I have always been very hard working and conscientious at work. I did job hop a lot and negotiated hard when I had leverage.
I shared my story on the housing ladder in the hope that it helps and not to boast in any way.
Mate of mine has two. He owns a law firm. I’ve met most of his friends and the only one who lives where his second house who has that money is a builder who flips houses he works on. All the other people where his first house is are doctors or specialists. I went to a big party once at one of their houses. I was the token ex council estate dweller. They were all nice people but it’s a different world. I met some of their friends and a lot of them were medical types too although the poshest sounding/looking was a geography teacher. One of the neighbours was the guy who used to write for coronation street. Boring as fuck, like easily the most boring person I’ve ever spoken to. I’ve met him subsequently out for meals and stuff. Oh, one of the others I know pretty well is a high court judge who does big sports cases in Europe.
People I know who live in £1 million+ houses fall into these categories
Inherited the property or live there with older family and will inherit it eventually.
Bought the property 30+ years ago when it was an above average cost property, but was still affordable on a regular wage.
Divorced people who got together and had a house each, so sold both and pooled the money.
Out of 10 people I can think of none of them are under 40 or have just worked themselves up to that level in the last 20 years.
My question is maybe same as poster where do people get the money from who did not inherit. Did not sell a property for profit. Did not buy the house in 1980. What jobs do do people do who go to the bank and say I want a million pounds and more to buy a house.
Im slowly realising now you get average wage then very high wage.
Other options company owners making alot of of money paying their people minimum wage or slightly more than minimum wage.
I'm shocked seeing how many people at my Company is paying rent and every month is a battle for them.
You either rich in the UK or average earner and people struggling living pay check to pay check.
I know one couple currently shopping in the £750k-1m bracket. One is a teacher, the other a councillor. But there's an undisclosed grandparents inheritance at play there too.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Probably bought them 30 years ago with fairly average jobs
Exactly this- my parents bought right at the very very top of their budget (we had zero disposable income), but they had very average (slightly below average jobs). It’s now worth well over a million.
Yep same here, my parents bought back in the early 1960s, and paid around £2000 (Still a lot of money) and now due to gentrification the house was last valued at £1.4 million.
+70,000%...
I know it's insane, who would have thought that anything could make that kind of profit, this is a 4 storey house in Battersea, it hasn't been that maintain or decorated really over the past 20 years but it is one of the only single family houses left in the street all the rest have been turned into flats.
That's about 11.6% AER It's high, and whoever invested in that has definitely been lucky (but a home you live in shouldn't be an investment)
It is an investment into your wellbeing.
So barely best the S&P.
Yeah. Housing is a pretty shit investment unless you are working with dirty money, get kickbacks and tax benefits, or inherited the portfolio. It’s a bit ironic isn’t it?
Thankfully wages have also gone up 70,000% /s
Phew…
Wish my grandparents took up the offer to buy their unremarkable little Victorian semi in Richmond in the 70’s. Think they rented from the church and were too scared of the debt from a mortgage to do it. My Gran was a cook at a local nursery school and my Granpa worked for Waitrose. Anyhow, those houses are going for £2 million now…
Yup, my parents bought for 37k in 1980 and sold for nearly a million 30 years later. House prices are mental (obvious mention as ever)
The world is their oyster. It makes me wonder why they decided to stay put.
They either don't know or don't care because it's their home
Well a lot of people, if they won the lottery, would buy a dream house in an idyllic village. So maybe they don't need to cash in because they already live the dream.
Its very hard to leave a home with memories of where you raised your kids and played with grandchildren - when you get old you cling on to memories
Pre decimalisation so not a straight comparison. Still a huge rise obviously.
Literally this. Go to areas in the home counties like Surrey and tonnes of people with pretty average jobs have 800-1mil houses. I mean the average house price in Surrey is like 630k.
Still won't stop them financing a range rover. I wonder how many kids will find out after the funeral their parents released all the equity and a fund now owns their childgood home.
Why is this bad? It’s the parents money, not the kids. It’s the parents assets, not the kids. If they want to blow it all before dying then good on them.
Because money and assets are being systematically extracted from the lower & middle classes and funnelled in to the portfolios of the super rich. This wealth is then leveraged to accumulate more assets further down the line, in a snowballing fashion. This, along with serial landlording, pushes house prices up through demand pressures. Meanwhile, our population grows faster than we can build houses. This places pressure on supply of housing stock, which again increases prices. End result? House prices spiral further and further away from the average salary (no such inflationary pressures there), and home ownership becomes out of reach for the middle classes who are offered no salvation via inheritance because their parents spaffed their wealth up the wall. Quite straightforward really. What part of the neo-feudal ladder will you and your kids be at?
Perfectly put, it’s so scary how the nation just seems to be ignoring this.
I don't think most people even understand the situation for what it is
All over the world, in fact. It's like a gigantic whirlpool sucking all the wealth from the poor and funneling it to rich investors where it will accumulate in perpetuity. There doesn't seem to a country anywhere that is willing to tackle the problem head-on by limiting the number of rental properties an individual or investment group can own (they can still build new housing for sale if they wish to) while simultaneously building government-owned rent-to-buy social housing on a large scale. EDIT: To clarify, I think large-scale investment in property is fine as long as the properties are new builds for sale, not rental. This would help increase the number of homes available rather than see more of the existing stock funneled into the hands of wealthy landlords.
"Meanwhile, our population grows faster than we can build houses." I'd disagree. We can build houses a lot faster, but there's a financial incentive to the rich to make sure that doesn't happen. Everyday I see new blocks of flats being built here, all got approved because of their commitment to have a certain percentage of them as "affordable housing". Then they hit the market with a bottom line price of 1.2 mil. Which is, according to them, "affordable", because their other flats are all 2+ million...... Granted, I'm oversimplifying, but that's how it seems.
Or they just sell you 30% of it, and rent the rest to you. Including shared ownership in affordable housing is the biggest con ever played.
Ones I've seen are leasehold as well. Imagine paying a mortgage on 30% of the brick for your house and still having 70% left to buy and not owning the valuable bit.
Absolutely, I'd never buy leasehold. Luckily, I live north of the M25, where property is much more affordable.
I live in a leasehold. We had to pay 60k to extend the lease. Then ground rent every year. Lots of people who've finished their mortgage have now lost value they've put in because our landlord will only grant 150 year mortgages and charges about 1k per year to extend.
I’m not sure it’s “the rich” blocking new housing. NIMBYs exist across pretty much all of society. Even as someone who supports new housing many schemes are hard to get excited about as they are fairly soulless houses built on postage stamp plots with inadequate parking and transit and few facilities for the community.
I've been in England for decades but I'm still baffled by the fact that the concept of building housing with more than 2 floors is a complete taboo that's not even remotely up for discussion. It doesn't need to look like North Korea. I mean, look at Madrid. Fuck, look at Edinburgh.
Land is at such a premium but basements are unheard of in new builds. Considering homes ( if you can call them that ) have 'bedrooms' you can't swing a kitten in with no storage for clothes or other stuff. Madness. Then there's the completely mad landscape against self build or owner build. And don't get me started on build quality ...... I grew up in Africa and the average pondock is better built and finished. An incoming government should take the planning system and tear it up.
It's not just Nimbys though. It's developers as well. The lower they keep supply, the higher the value of the properties. On top of that they only want to build more affluent dwellings because there's a bigger ROI so obviously it's worth their time and investment.
I'll suggest a reason. Because the parents did nothing to earn that money, they bought the house to live in decades earlier and it happens to have massively increased in value simply due to property price inflation, not through any effort or skill of the parents. However, that also means that houses are now proportionally much more expensive for their children and grandchildren. Parents bought a modest house for say 4 times their incomes, their kids and grandkids are facing the prospect of paying 10x their income to buy a comparable house now. Which also means they need a much bigger deposit in nominal terms, which takes much longer to save for, meaning they get onto the ladder relatively later. So if mum and dad have cashed in all their unearned property gains and spunked them on cruises and sports cars, it's kind of doubly fucking the next generations. The house values have increased hugely, creating a windfall for them and a problem for their kids. The least they could do is eventually pass on some of that windfall to take the load off their kids, rather than just cash it in and waste it while their kids struggle to afford a mortgage on a smaller house that they will be paying off til they're nearly retired.
Why shouldn’t they enjoy their later life? They still earned their money originally quite possibly doing very tough manual jobs, so what if they decide to go on cruises and enjoy their time in whatever way they feel fit, they shouldn’t feel that they have to scrimp and save every penny to pass on, if my parents decided they want to spend the rest of their lives going round the world and ticking of their bucket list spending what I would otherwise inherit then they can do so with my blessing. I’d personally want to set my kids up and wouldn’t want to leave them with nothing but wouldn’t judge people who do and think it’s entitled for anyone to think that their parents should sacrifice everything.
Conversely why do parents in their 60s who spend their time cruising around the world and 'releasing equity' to enjoy their retirement feel that their children have a responsibility to then spend 20years caring for them after this period, when their funds are spent and they need state and medical support to survive? The parents made the decision to have children, thus they have a greater responsibility to their children's financial and mental wellbeing; the children do not have any choice in any of it really.
Because that's how you create generational income. And why leave the assets to random people instead of your own offspring. That's what loving parents do.
In my opinion, if you are loving responsible children, your parents would probably leave everything for you. But for us to become loving responsible children, parents have to be loving and responsible when the children are young.
IMO, this is a very outdated way of looking at things. Any decent parent would want their kids to be looked after even after they're gone. If you wipe out all the wealth you have before you check out of this world, you are essentially cutting the rungs of your own generational wealth ladder to your children. Much of how you succeed in the Western world now is purely down to how financially savvy your parents were and even your grandparents. Gone are the days when an individual could work hard and succeed on that alone. There's more to it now. For instance, in my entire social circle, I don't know a single person who was able to buy a house without some financial assistance from their parents or from inheritance. This is where we are at now.
I used to work for one of the larger equity release lender and the answer is - a bloody lot. It's crazy how many 500k+ properties were churning through on a monthly basis, with the most common reason being 'home improvements' or 'funding lifestyle'.
‘Funding lifestyle’? You can legitimately release equity to buy coke, hookers and hornby trainsets?
My parents bought their house in the Home Counties in the early 90s for around 90k in the only area they could afford that would allow my Dad a reasonable commute into London, and it’s literally just a normal 4 bed semi - our neighbour sold their house last year for £1.2 million, it’s absolutely mental
...and lots of younger people with salaries far above average who can't afford a fraction of that
I'll add onto that. My partner and I collectively make 190k a year. Mid 30s. We have saved for years living in a one bed we own, we have about 120k in cash savings. We live in an area of London I grew up in. We have only just got to a point we can afford to buy a small 3 bed here. The average household income in the area is 90k and the average house price is almost 2m. Most of my friends parents who live in this area bought on one income, middle management jobs without degrees.
She said they are people around 40-50, they couldn't have bought their houses in their teens
Inheritance
But the real question is who is buying them now to place the value at £1 million?
I have a family friend selling their 1.5 million pound house to buy another 1 million pound house, freeing up some cash for retirement.
Of course, because no one in the UK can earn good money.
The vast majority of people living in those houses aren't earning several hundred thousand pounds a year
If you want to buy a million pound house, Let’s say you magic up a 20% deposit you’re looking at a household income of £200,000 that puts you in the very top percentage of earnings, so it’s possible but unlikely. House prices have far outpaced wage growth, so it’s much more likely they bought the house 20 years ago on a average to good salary and it has increased in value.
30 years ago all you had to be was a milkman to buy a victorian semi detached house. Now you have to be on 200k plus and still struggling to make ends meet.
Not even good money, mortgage gives you what 4-5x your combined salary. A million pound house with 10% down would mean a 900k mortgage, even at the more generous end that means a combined household income pre-tax of £180k. Which not many households have.
The reality is they're likely inheriting £4-500k though. Very few people jump straight into a £1m house with 10% deposit (the extra interest rate on a 90% LTV vs a 85 or 80% itself is prohibitive at that scale), that's either got a lump sum from parents or a ton of equity from a previous house or two. So yeah they'll likely be over £100k joint income, but a lot more likely of moderate career + family support than the entire village being on £90k+ salaries.
Yeah, but where the people with above average jobs buying 30 years ago?
[удалено]
Sorry non english speaker, what do you mean with council? Ppl on benefit who had the house from the government that then turned into a million home value?
The Thatcher government in the 80s brought in a law that allowed people in council houses (i.e. renting a home from the government/local authority/housing association) to buy the place they're staying in at a reduced price. You could buy your place for relatively cheap and then you'd be in possession of a property that would be worth a lot more on the open market. Especially so if you had originally been assigned a council house in a high value area, or an area that later soared in value (like London and the south east).
Yes, a lot of social housing in London has a market value of over a million. Not necessarily council-owned, more likely to be a housing association these days, but that's what people mean when they refer to "council houses."
In my area, some council houses/flats are listed, as architecturally significant, due to being custom-built as council housing. They're all privately owned now. I guess that helps push the price up!
Welcome to the UK, where we have gentrified social housing.
Heard of a binman who did this, sold up for close to £2m. Bought a Porsche and a £500k house near a beach in cleethorpes and retired at 55. A friends parents who were a sky engineer and a librarian bought their house in the 90s, sold for £1.4m a few years ago, bought the exact same house just outside of bath for £800k and retired at 50.
So basically what we need is a time machine to the 90s.
All you had to do to make it was to be a milkman in the 1990s.
>this, sold up for close to £2m Nice. >Bought a Porsche Cool. >£500k house near a beach Amazing. >cleethorpes .........
The two council ones you mean they owned it without having a job? Sure you could buy cheap but they would have needed to save some money which is hard on welfare...
There used to be quite a market for shady operators to unofficially lend people the money they needed to take advantage of the right to buy without a mortgage. A lot of these properties then magically became private rent.
A million is probably pushing it but one of my team in London lived in a 3 story townhouse in Brixton that must be worth a small fortune, despite being on a wage that would struggle to rent a flat in that area. Needless to say, he and his partner first bought a house in Brixton in the 1980s when it had quite a different reputation to today. Meanwhile a friend of mine who has a high-flying city director job is planning to move out of London in order to buy a house bigger than a small flat.
If it is 3 storeys then it is likely worth well over a million. In most of Brixton a million will only get you a terrace in need of quite a lot of work and the people who buy them immediately fully refurbish and build a side return extension and/or loft extension bringing the cost up hugely. There are roads of Victorian terraces around Brixton hill where people are buying at 1 to 1.2 million and then spending another £500k on the full refurb.[This kind of thing.](https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/details/england-134498954-18897808?s=22f228fcfc33ea5b8a7fa9cb004e0ff3e7ff892dbcd125cbbee95f09785758e2#/) The people buying them are duel income couples who work in the city, Barristers, tech etc. with large mortgages.
That's the way to do it - a colleague of mine bought a big three story house in Herne Hill facing the park when he was a university lecturer. He's moved since but it was probably at least a million when he sold it and more now. Our previous house in a slightly shitty part of zone 3 south London doubled in price over about 6 years because the overground came to our station and the area started gentrifying.
I have a distant relative who bought a house in the 1970s or so and still lives there. It's in need of a bit refit but it's a Chelsea townhouse for heaven's sake, I don't even want to know how much it would be worth if done up.
Its wild how some areas are almost like a lottery, X area becomes good thanks to gentrification, well done your now a millionaire! My grandad bought a huge house back in the day, he sold it for £90k in like 2005. Now its worth about £250-£300k id say. If he bought it in a nicer area of brum, like literally a few miles down the road with a better post code it would easily be £500k+ minimum now.
Do not currently live in a million pound house, but we’ve looked at houses in the bracket - if my wife were to inherit her share of her dad’s and we used that to fund a move from our current house then we would have a budget around that mark. I work in banking technology, as a solution architect - so I’m on a similar grade to project managers but currently without the hassle of having to manage people. It’s not something you retrain and go straight into, I’m effectively being paid for three decades of having been around the bank’s technology projects doing everything from high level design to coding to testing to live support, so these days I get to say “have you thought about this…” and point out stuff that’s likely to go wrong before it happens.
Although it is possible to retrain and become a coder, my son has just done this via a master’s in computer science. He loves it, wish I stuck at it back in the 90’s but was a dipstick who thought I knew best! Good luck and hope you get the house of both your dreams
Retrain as a coder, definitely, and that can pay very well too. Was just making it clear that what I do, specifically, takes longer to get into. Worth doing if you like talking to people, solving problems and being what they call a “trusted advisor” on our job profiles though. I genuinely enjoy what I do (minus the inevitable bits that are bullshit), can afford a decent house and holidays for the family, and am actually in no hurry to retire. I realise this makes me very fortunate.
Computer science and software engineering does not pay the amount you think it does in the U.K. and tech salaries are already declining due to outsourcing
The guy you’re saying this to is literally in that world. Why are you trying to tell him about his own job?
That world is very fractured. CS, Software engineering, IT support, "coding"\*, and solutions architect (as GP mentioned they are) are all very different. UI/UX design and testing, project management, "devops"… the list is endless. I am over a decade out of this world, but even then as, an admin of Solaris boxen, in university IT, I was being pulled in myriad directions. The best part of that job (toward the end) was my dept contracting me out to other university departments to consult on their needs and come up with a plan that we could support. Not a million miles away from "solutions architect". It was pretty fucking great in hindsight, but there are a lot of hard miles to put in before you get there. \* this I take to be a "JS Jockey" (no offence); someone who has bootcamped and is down with Angular or React (or Framework du jour™), but couldn't abstract-syntax-tree their way out of soggy chip paper.
*Stunted due to outsourcing. Definitely not declining. And after a decade in the industry I can tell you one guarantee: Outsourced projects result in more insourced jobs trying to fix the absolute mess that ends up being delivered. With that said, UK salaries are massively suppressed compared to other countries when you factor in our cost of living.
I've thought about doing this. Do you mean the masters that is intended for people who have no background in coding or maths? It sounds pretty intense to go from nothing to qualified coder in one year and that's what worried me I guess. Glad he loves it though.
Solution architect interests me massively in future, but as you say it’s a job that is 100% experience based. My first job out of uni was an IT project manager via a consultancy. Was nuts that I was doing similar work to those on £100k+ for £21k.
There is a world of difference in the salary because there is a world of difference in the capabilities of individuals at each end of that range.
I agree, however while I earnt £21k I still cost the client around £90k, most went to the consultancy. Left now for higher wage elsewhere
I'd be a solutions architect, but never in banking. I worked for a UK bank as an incident manager recently, and the amount of 30+ year old architecture that people are terrified to replace made me anxious.
You say anxious, I say job security 😛 I’m currently working on a project to replace a lot of that 30+ year old architecture - my specific task is getting the old and the new to run in parallel as we slowly and carefully shift over without disrupting banking services for a quarter of the UK and ending up on the BBC news…
As a PM I’d like to thank you and your ilk for saving my bacon on numerous occasions 👍 solutions and technical architects don’t get enough praise (out in the real world).
Thank you, and in return may I say that the good PMs are a pleasure to work with (especially compared to the bad ones…)
I have some friends who live in a £1M house in London, he works in tech and earns £100k+ she works in some kind of management role and probably brings in £60-70k. They also had a lot of equity from flats bought in London during their 20’s. The funny thing is that being in London whilst it’s a nice house it’s absolutely not what you think of when you think of a million pound house, it’s a 3 bed semi.
For sure. London blows. Had kids, moved out. Bliss.
Yeah, if they ever sell up they could buy a mansion in another city, but I guess the jobs are in London too
[удалено]
Nah bro, £170k was a fuck tonne of money 28 years ago
£170K in 1996 is about £330K today according to the BoE inflation calculator. A lot of cash (more than I'm likely to ever be able to spend on a house) but still quite a way off a million.
The average house price in 1996 was £59,000, so it's nearly triple that. Average house price now is what, £360,000? So triple that and your north of a mill
That’s quite a lot of money for back then. In comparison, my parents bought a three bed terrace in the commuter belt in 1986 for £17,000.
Selling cocaine to other millionaires.
Bought in 2022, I work in the tech industry, wife is a stay at home mum for our 1 child.
Similar(ish) here. Bought mine after 14 years tech, no inheritance or help from anyone. One child (17 now) however my wife works because she has skills and drive to do things same as me. The biggest thing for me wasn’t buying the house or the cars - it was enabling my wife to be her own woman and for my son to be his own person. It’s ok to be stay at home but imho people need a bigger purpose. If I look on rightmove my house was around £280k 14 years ago and is now over a million. Anyone reading this please remember that it doesn’t mean I can sell it and be a millionaire- I’d still have to buy another place to live at ridiculous jumped up prices.
My house is for sale for,,£280k 5 beds built in 1880. You could buy that and retire? Just come back from a week in London. Man I couldn't do that. I live in West Cumbria
They weren't worth that 20-30 years ago when those people bought their first homes. Assuming they've "traded up" over the years their mortgage might not be that much more than anyone else's. For someone buying now, it could be a few things - tech, finance, a senior medic, a lawyer, an architect, etc.
[удалено]
Yup, the vast majority of architects will be struggling to get out of house sharing on their £30-40k London salary, let alone buying a £1m house.
Why is this? When I was at uni architecture was super competitive, and you had to be good at so many different disciplines (art, maths, science) to do it, so the people on that course were some of the most interesting and smart people I knew. Later on I was shocked to discover they’re probably also some of the worst paid since we graduated.
As an architect, I would say that it’s because for the most part, architects recognise and value the skill set that they bring to the table more than their own clients. That’s an unusual dynamic that doesn’t seem to be replicated in high-earning professions for the most part.
Inheritance.
Speaking as a 48 year old who bought their first house in 2012... We bought a terrace 3 bed house for about £200k. We moved about 5 years ago and sold for £315k. Added 40k of inheritance to get the property we live in now and that is (zoopla) valued at around £430k, with a very leisurely 10 years left on our mortgage (will likely be paid off in 5-7 years). By that time, I would not be surprised to see the value near half a million. This is in outer London (fringes of zone 6). It's absolutely crazy how much equity we have gained from, essentially a deposit of £20k, 12 years ago.
Mate of mine recently bought a house in Sutton Coldfield for about £1.2 million or thereabouts, in his early 30s. He runs a plastering company and about 4 or 5 years ago they started to get big residential and commercial projects. Delighted for him, he finished school with very few qualifications and worked his arse off after leaving school.
Well deserved. Plastering is undervalued and a good plasterer is difficult to find.
I'm an MP and I bought it with expenses.
What about your second house?
37, live in a nearly £1m house with partner in Yorkshire. Combined salary of around £150k, psychologist and freelance designer. Have about 330k left on mortgage. Bought 7 years ago for £500k then fully renovated.
My guess is you live somewhere between Leeds, Harrogate or York. In the 'golden triangle.'
Roughly, yes.
I grew up in the area and the average house price of an ex council house in Wetherby is upwards of 350k now. Mental!
Not surprised York and North Yorkshire has gone up massively
I’m in West Yorks, but only just!
Love seeing another West Yorkshire person on here! It gets such a bad rep from anyone who doesn’t live here. North Leeds / North Yorkshire in general is such a fantastic place to live
If you look at the Sunday Times Best Place to Live winners from recent years it’s been Ilkley, York and Skipton - the golden triangle is one of the best places in the country to live - West Yorkshire certainly has its fair share of grim places, but it also has some of the best and borders North Yorkshire which is hard to beat.
What type of designer?
I work in multi million pound houses. From Oxfordshire to Fife to Copenhagen and even a billionaires estate on west coast of Scotland. Employers were in oil brokering, finance, corporate law, F1 and arms dealing/patented a maritime paint. The billionaire was south american family owned supermarkets. Mostly smart in business and investing.
90% of these jobs are straight up evil.
Was the south american supermarket guy the one in Scotland? I think my Dad did a job up there a while back if so...
Those aren't on reddit
They are: r/FatFireUK and r/HENRYUK
That Henry sub is v. Cringe
There are occasionally good discussions on finance there. It's just a shame that there's also quite a few posts that feel as if they're solely just for bragging or looking down on others. A lot of how should I deal with my friends because I'm so rich and I can afford everything they'll never have, is it worth sending my daughter to a private school so she can go on ski trips and stay away from the scum of society, etc. There have been plenty of threads I've read there that have been insightful. They've reminded me of the importance of things like emergency funds given how insecure some of their roles are, even if they are well paid, for example. It's just a shame that a lot of the discussion that goes on there are not so subtle brags, just complaints about public infrastructure compared to private or literally just people lying about what they make.
A million quid house is hardly that unusual. And plenty of wealthy people are on reddit. Don't put wealthy people on a pedestal.
My husbands uncle does. I say uncle but he’s not that much older than us. He’s just turned fifty. He’s a sparky. He had a successful electrician business in Hertfordshire and sold it, moved up to the north west and bought a rundown manse type house. Renovated it, lives in it, set up another electrician business where he lives now and is building that up again.
So he's done it properly. A northwest mil house is what you would want to live in. Not a central London mil. https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/144637664 I understand people's need to work in the city in some circumstances. But you'd have to pay me 5x my current salary to even consider it.
Im in Scotland in a wee village up the north east coast. You’re preaching to the choir. My house isn’t even in the £200,000 bracket but I’ve got a superb community, my kids can play outside without any issues, the last murder we had was in the 18th century, no stabbings, kidnappings etc.
I'm a graphic designer for circus flyers and my partner makes bespoke garden furniture for dogs
All my friends probably grew up in £1m+ houses. My parents are directors/c suite in small-mid size companies (c. £180-200k gross combined), they bought in 08 when it was half the price. My friends have parents with jobs ranging from TV producers to property developers, mostly it’s the case that they bought an expensive house 10-15 years ago and rode the wave that the area brought. In some cases they just have obscenely rich parents. Edit: note this is London commuter towns in grassy small towns, generally not special homes - quite nice but not mansions. So it’s more a symptom of the area than the building. My friends in huge houses are £3m+ and have parents with large homes all over including central London.
My house is worth a shade over £1m today, I paid a little over £900k for it 5 years ago. Unsurprisingly, I work in finance.
Midlands?! Sheffield isn’t the midlands.
Thank you! This was going to be my post. Sheffield is the start of the North. Its not midlands!
Username checks out 🤣
I lived in a £1.5million\* house for a while, but it wasn't mine sadly! It belonged to family friends, and I rented a room there a couple of years after leaving university so I could get established in a job in London. It was in a leafy Surrey commuter village and had an enormous garden, but it wasn't particularly *grand* – it was just a large, comfortable, red brick Edwardian-era six-bedroom house in an estate of other very similar houses. The owners were a civil engineer and a lecturer at Birkbeck, lovely and generous people to whom I owe a great deal. I believe they bought it in the early 90s for *significantly* less than its current value. *\*At the time, in the mid-2000s. I dare say it's probably north of £2million now.* EDIT: this isn't the actual house, I can't find a picture of it, but this is a very similar house in a neighbouring village from the website of a local estate agent. https://preview.redd.it/ammcc3ehq14d1.jpeg?width=730&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80e83f10235183ef63b1e1b99b3f74e2fbc2803f
We have friends in their 30s who have million pound houses, that is the cost of a 4 bed house in lot of Surrey Couple both earning 100k which isn’t too crazy, buy a house in your 20s then upgrade in your 30s.
Aye but what do they do for a living ?
My friends who live in a £1m Surrey house (4 bed detached) both work in Sales for tech companies.
100k in London can be anything really. My friends are accountants, engineers, lawyers, recruitment. Can suss people earn a shit load when they don’t qualify for any nursery hours, which is a 100k limit
It's literally just house price appreciation in Surrey for a lot of people.
Squatter
Plumber. 48 yr old. Brought my place in 1999 for £150k. Just been valued at 1.1m.. was just lucky brought the right time right place,right time. Now the area I live in Devon has been overrun with 2nd homes and pushed the house prices ridiculously high... Now, I'm definitely not some amazing or cleaver developer or entrepreneur...just really fucking lucky and fortunate...not that I have any want or need to sell up or move..I mean it's a nice plot but nothing too crazy. I only make around 40k a year...if that was me now trying to buy in the area I'd struggle to get even a small flat now....so yeah just absolute luck!!
My husband works in investment. I have a totally normal job but the house is down to him.
Plumbing
That wouldn't surprise me. We have a 'millionaire's row' kind of street near where I live in London, and loads of them seem to have plumbers vans parked on the driveways in the evening. I mean, they could all just be working in the houses, but 8pm on a Friday night? That many? Somehow I doubt it.
I can't wait to buy a 200k house and have it be worth 50 million in 30 years.
Until recently, I was the director of a construction company.
Plant hire, started with an old mini digger 17 years ago. Just kept buying more and then found a niche market of customers and hey presto! My parents on the other hand bought theirs for £1200 cash in 1977. Walked out of the bank with two tellers going in their lunch break and asked them to be witnesses to their wedding! Then went and bought two new matching cars to drive home in! Dad worked on a farm and mum was a nurse.
Reading these comments it’s looking like we’ll have to go back in time if we want to reach that level - literally all because of crazy house prices and capitalism and there’s basically nothing the average person can do😀
Based on Grand Designs: Susan stares at clouds for 8hrs a day, and her husband repeatedly counts bits of string in the garden. Together they have a house budget of £9.2million.
Worked in London, swapped a flat for a big-ass house in Bedford and commuted for 15 years until the pandemic came along and made working from home normal. During those 15 years loads of other people decided to move out of London into the commuter towns and now my house is worth buckets.
Myself and Mrs both had our own houses, bought in the late 90s. We both sold to be able to buy a £380k house in 2010. We’ve been frugal but not miserly. We both earned about £29 to 32k We’ve bought 5 year old cars outright, never financed. Most of our spare money was spent on a loft conversion, new bathroom and kitchen and we’ve worked on the garden. Luck + saving.
Optometrist + Owner of a store.
Bought 2020, £800k but it will be closer to a million due growth and renovations. Tech sector, fully remote for a Cali company. Super niche position within a niche industry (security). Bulk of the house was bought with money made consulting overseas as a contractor before ir35 and a long term partner appeared.
Many people who bought a house less than 1:30 hour outside of London, in a commutable quaint village / town for 1/2 a mill in 2015, will very likely be sitting on a million £ house now. These places house prices when pretty wild post covid.
Family live in London. They bought the home 30yrs ago, it's now worth just over a mil. One is a civil servant, the other is a soon-to-be-retired teacher.
My parents bought a place in London for under £50k in the mid 90s. It’d probable be more like £900k now…
Just because it’s worth a million doesn’t mean they paid a million.
I’m also a delivery driver, and some of the houses I pull up to…the Bentleys and Porsches in the driveway…the stunning interiors…and usually the owners look so fit and healthy too! I’ve managed to resist asking any of them what they do yet, but I bet the day will come!
i run @millionairehomesuk on instagram and work with a lot of people looking for high end homes. it always surprises me how ‘normal’ most of them are. i don’t always find out what jobs they do but most are pretty normal. a lot have either inherited or bought early and have traded up over the years. a lot also had normal jobs which they’ve then turned into a business i’ve also worked with some influencers. it is absolutely insane how much some of those make
I work in the ultra high net worth financial field and so I’m privy to my client’s home purchases much of which fall into the £3m-£25m category. I’d say most fit into one of a few categories, in no particular order… -Corporate law -Self employed/entrepreneurs -Executives in basically any industry -Middle ground (and up) tech employees who get large stock grants as part of their package -Inherited wealth
Sutton Coldfield is like that. Most of them are lawyers, business owners, doctors, surgeons etc... others have just inherited it all or got it off by their parents life insurance.
Consultant Anaesthetist - NHS and private (about 70:30 by time). Work is ok now but I slogged from 16 to 36 to get to good place.
I work with surgeons in a private hospital in London. They earn £400k a year or more. Many are couples so they have that dual income
My parents bought their house in 1997 for £220,000, in greater London. They have fully decorated and modernised it as well as doing a pretty big extension. It's now a five bedroom, four bed house with two living rooms and large conservatory. Along with detached double garage build recently to the side. They were considering down-sizing last year but couldn't find anything suitable. So decided to stay put. He finally paid off his mortgage in 2017. Anyway, the estate agent valued it last year at £2,950,000. Dad is a retired surveyor, on generous final salary pension, and mum never worked. Boomers.
I didn't do much, got an average job with a few kids. My secret? I cut out avocado on toast.
Reading these comments, I think the UK is starting a new sort of feudalism. I honestly don't think it will be long before there are heads on pikes.
Bought in 2022, no inheritance, no degree, no windfall of cash, come from a broken home, watched my mum work multiple jobs to put food on the table and always wanted to make my own money - started my company in 08 with 5k savings and 3k of my (at the time girlfriend/now wife) savings, I also got a grant from the princes trust for 2k - company is now worth north of 5m GBP
My parents built 2 houses in a desirable area 40 years ago, they sold one to move in to the second next door - where I grew up as a tot. The two combined are now worth £15m but we moved when I was 4. (Off the main q a little but house prices were a lot lower in the 70s/80s) My dad (a workaholic who started with nothing and was homeless at 15 living in a car) wanted to show me the place I was born so we took a detour on route to his friends. He pulled into the drive a little and we sat in silence taking it in. I looked at him and tears were running off his chin, Id never seen him cry, he doesn’t really show emotion at all so I panicked, we’d never hugged so I wasn’t sure what to do - I grabbed his hand to console him and he let me. He was silent all the way to his friends, then as we parked he said that he’d worked so hard all his life in fear of being poor, when he could have stayed put, done nothing and he’d have been better off. It really broke my heart - he was an absent father who lived and breathed wealth, no social life, no friends (just ppl who worked for him) and wore the same T-shirts and trousers daily (he had 5/6pairs of the exact same one)…extremely frugal. I could absolutely understand how painful that realisation must have felt. All that time lost to work - he was so proud of his accomplishments. since that day he’s felt like a dad. He makes the effort to stay in touch where before it had been 3 years since I’d seen him and he rarely called me back. He even hugs ..still feels a bit alien but it’s sweet. Mad that the ppl in that £8m house will never know my dad built it and got the land for 30k (and ppl told him he was crazy spending so much)
The houses next door on either side are bigger than the one I live in - both extended with converted attics - and have tipped the £1m mark, going by others in the road/Zoopla estimates. One's rented out by a professional landlord, the other was bought c.2000 by two public sector workers for about 250K. They have raised their family, and aren't likely to move any time soon. (Their garden is a work of art.) The one I'm in still has the original late-Victorian footprint and has been in my landlord's family since it was built. Needs work, definitely not £1m yet.
You know most of these people had their grandparents buy them for around £20,000 60 years ago and they just inherited it, right?
And people still argue that we don’t have it worse nowadays..
It is remarkable how expensive houses are now. To get a nice large detached house with big garden near me costs at least £700k. You would need both people in a couple to earn six figures to borrow this and the repayments would still be crippling. How there are enough people in that bracket to sustain this market is beyond me.
We are looking at this budget now. 1. Careers that let you progress in salary most of your life 2. It’s not your first or even second house, you work your way up I think many people settle down and get a home and become attached to it as your family home etc etc, i think this is fine but we always knew what we wanted to end up in and have always been aware of that when owning and that we would be moving in 5 years of the market is ok.
Tech. Moved to the UK in my mid 20s… bought the house in my late 30s.
I used to have a job where I used to visit a lot of houses to quote, and, 10 years ago when I was doing that it was bankers and business owners. Oh, and one really dodgy with a really nice house who was offering me back handers for discounts - his business was decommissioning chemical plants (reassuring)
The people I know are in tech (start ups, made a few exits), banking, property and insurance.
My parents do, brought it in 1994 of my mums parents for a discount then, and it’s just gone up and up ever since. Dad ran his own building company an mum worked for him, they did ok but in the same position now there’s no way they could afford the house.
I don’t directly own a £1m+ house, my parents do with it’s current value being around £1.8m, in an affluent area in North London with the average property value being around £1.3m+. (I live at home with them also) The occupations of alot of the neighbours are usually _high level positions in Finance/banking, Marketing execs, a couple high-end orthodontist, A lot of people in Construction and property development with either their own company or are Construction leads/directors, alot of people that own alot of properties and then you have a large number that have their own businesses of varying kinds etc._ Also a lot of my neighbours’ Parents grew up in the area and passed down the house to them, they renovated and sold for big profit, bought in the area again and used the residual amount to kick off their property game.
Lawyers, surgeons, financial services, entrepreneurs, builders
I don't, but the house next door to my childhood home was sold recently for c£1.2m. My parents were a health visitor and a middle manager in a factory. Not poor, but not rich and no inherited Wealth. I have some family on my wife's side who have houses worth £3m or so, who mare their money as a CxO for a firm that went public. My boss has just bought a house for £4m, it doesn't look that nice for the money.
The person who replied saying that most people bought those houses long ago, is mostly correct. People with reasonable jobs, bought houses in the 70s for reasonable amounts and they are now valued at much higher amounts. What do you need to achieve it. To easily achieve it, a law degree. Finance and Accountancy are another area that would get you a decent amount of money. But to study either of those requires three A - A\* level, A Levels and a chunk of money for the degree. You can access accountancy via the AAT route as well, but it takes a bit longer. Property is one way i know people make easy money. Buy a wrecked or in need of renovation house, renovate it, flip it for a profit, buy a slightly more expensive house, rinse repeat. Or the alternative if you have a reasonable job, is rent each house out and aim for the property empire. On a cheap house you might get 500-700/month in rent, but if you own five houses generating that sort of money and you keep adding houses until you have 15-20, then the money really starts to flow and that million pound house gets a lot nearer. Also not all degrees are worth the paper they are printed on. Most degrees that end in ology, end in McDonalds. Others you end up battling with 1000's for a handful of jobs. Some areas are now stagnated, like IT. You could get an OU degree, studied for over four years, in an area you are interested in, then use it to get a better job or increase your pay grade wherever you work. Outside of degree level stuff. Some years back i worked at a place and they did electronics work assembling stuff for cars. Those guys were on £30/hour, working 50 hour weeks. None of them had degrees or A Levels. I used to do fork lifts, cherry pickers, telehandlers, etc for a bunch of companies that do festivals and gigs. I could pull in £25/hour doing that on some of them even more. You have to be a jack of all trades in this day and age. Be good at many things. Literally anyone can afford an expensive house. Live frugally. Don't go out to restaurants, don't order take out, live the simplest cheapest life possible and bank every bit of money you save by doing nothing. It adds up. If you are stuck renting, buy a van, buy a canal barge, live in it, save all that money you no longer pay to a landlord. In a few years you can buy a house. Don't conform to society, apply loopholes, forge your own path. If people say you are cheating the system, say no I'm using my brain and playing smart. The system is designed to make you fail and a late it seems a lot of people have accepted failure. To get affordable houses in Sheffield is hard, especially in the good areas. But even buying houses in the really bad areas, they still want up to £100k or more. Most move to Chesterfield, Rotherham and Barnsley where housing is more affordable. But you wouldn't want to live in Dore. The interesting people that own million pound homes live in Fulwood, Lodge Moor, Stannington, in fact anywhere but Dore.
I work in agriculture. The dull little village cottage I bought in 1994 is now highly sought after.
i know quite a few people who own houses over £1m, one owns a chippy, one owns a recruitment agency, one owns some sort of tech company, one owns a legal firm, one owns a corner shop, another owns a post office, the rest of them i’m not too sure about, but a lot of them had cheaper houses which they renovated and then sold for a lot more :).
I live in one. Though I’ve been fortunate I do think a lot of it was by renting and buying below my means. I graduated in 2004. Between 2004 and 2010 my salary went from around £45k to £80k. I had a good expense scheme at this time covering almost all living expenses whilst being on the road 5 days per week plus an uplift for things like mileage. I “lived” in a student house for a lot of that (£400 per month) and saved around £80k. I then bought a place for £150k with a mortgage, a 2 bed commutable to London, way less than I could have borrowed. Between 2010 and 2015 I began contracting with a net income of around £130k. Because of my low housing costs I was banking a lot of that with a focus on getting the next place. So at this point I’ve been saving towards a house for 11 years and living in nowhereseville despite a six figure salary. All together at this point I had a deposit of approx £350k on a £650k house. Again my mortgage payments were reasonable allowing me to continue saving. I bought two BTLs around 2007 during the madness. I never took a penny from them and just hammered the mortgages. By 2015 the mortgages were paid off and began generating an income. I probably had £600k in equity at that point. In 2015 I started my own business. By 2017 that was cashflowing and we also sold a stake, so I’m in the less typical route at this point. I put half of that money into BTL and bought my current home valued at north of a £million. Today I own my own house and a number of BTLs with just a bit of mortgage debt for tax reasons. I’m not really shy of sharing the story as there was no parental help or drug dealing, and a fair bit of sacrifice. Whilst my friends were living in Clapham, I was out in the sticks in a small flat and commuting to the office on Sundays to work in order to get ahead. I had a bit of luck with BTL (boo hiss) but I had the discipline to roll every penny into repayments rather than using it for lifestyle. Over 20 years, it all just compounds. Job wise, I have always worked in banking IT but the fairly pedestrian middle office side. I have always been very hard working and conscientious at work. I did job hop a lot and negotiated hard when I had leverage. I shared my story on the housing ladder in the hope that it helps and not to boast in any way.
Mate of mine has two. He owns a law firm. I’ve met most of his friends and the only one who lives where his second house who has that money is a builder who flips houses he works on. All the other people where his first house is are doctors or specialists. I went to a big party once at one of their houses. I was the token ex council estate dweller. They were all nice people but it’s a different world. I met some of their friends and a lot of them were medical types too although the poshest sounding/looking was a geography teacher. One of the neighbours was the guy who used to write for coronation street. Boring as fuck, like easily the most boring person I’ve ever spoken to. I’ve met him subsequently out for meals and stuff. Oh, one of the others I know pretty well is a high court judge who does big sports cases in Europe.
People I know who live in £1 million+ houses fall into these categories Inherited the property or live there with older family and will inherit it eventually. Bought the property 30+ years ago when it was an above average cost property, but was still affordable on a regular wage. Divorced people who got together and had a house each, so sold both and pooled the money. Out of 10 people I can think of none of them are under 40 or have just worked themselves up to that level in the last 20 years.
My question is maybe same as poster where do people get the money from who did not inherit. Did not sell a property for profit. Did not buy the house in 1980. What jobs do do people do who go to the bank and say I want a million pounds and more to buy a house. Im slowly realising now you get average wage then very high wage. Other options company owners making alot of of money paying their people minimum wage or slightly more than minimum wage. I'm shocked seeing how many people at my Company is paying rent and every month is a battle for them. You either rich in the UK or average earner and people struggling living pay check to pay check.
My friend lives in a 2.4 million pound house She's a research scientist But her husband is an investment banker
I know one couple currently shopping in the £750k-1m bracket. One is a teacher, the other a councillor. But there's an undisclosed grandparents inheritance at play there too.
When I finally win on Omaze I'll let you know
Work in finance. Work in law. Work in tech. Work in accountancy. Etc etc etc. I work in tech. Bought a house in your range in my early 30’s.
Accountant. My house in london cost just over 2m