Quote Originally Posted by Lullapie View Post
Another accelerant to high house prices is the availability of cheap money. Before I bought my first house, it was nearly impossible to get a mortgage (indeed credit of any kind). Then as the years have gone on, every mailer is an attempt to lend people more money.

I remember having to struggle to get my first mortgage because I was a business owner, plus being 22 years old didn't help either. There were no self-certificating mortgages then.

When my girlfriend (now wife) and I eventually managed to get a mortgage, the interest rates were really high. It was a form of financial slavery, but if you wanted to get on in life, the first thing to do was to buy your own bit of the world.

I was made to sign up for an endowment mortgage at 16 and had three, by the time I bought my first house. The Co-Op insurance salesman must have loved coming around our house.

Cheap money is the root of many evils. Some people can handle it and indeed flourish with the availability of it, but the vast majority struggle and never really manage to unlock the shackles. We were never taught at school about financial responsibility and only by making mistakes or being lucky and having people close to you to educate you on personal finance, do we come to terms with it.
With the lure of it paying off your mortgage with a nice, hefty, bonus on top but, no mention that it depended totally on the success of the investment portfolio. This meant that not only were you not guaranteed that hefty, bonus, it wasn't guaranteed to pay up the mortgage either and in fact, I know a few people who had to remortgage to pay of the original loan because of this.