redrobo wrote:Just be grateful that although the increase in Interest Rate is the highest for 30 years to 3% when we got married in the early 70's the interest on our mortgage was a massive 14%.....
The issue is not simply the interest rate, it is how people will have borrowed. Many people had to max out their affordable borrowing in order to get on to the housing ladder in the first place. Any interest hike will be difficult. Add crazy inflation and oil companies making £8 billion profit per quarter, and many home owners will face genuine poverty.
Our first home was at the heights/depths of Thatcherism. We bought a property on Skerton that was a repossession. Our interest rate was 16% when we bought. I think it was 17% before rates began to fall. By buying at the peak, our repayments came steadily down. The couple who lived there before us had literally done a '
moon-light flit'. They had left quite a lot of stuff that they had been unable to carry with them. The cups were left, where they had their last brew before leaving. The repossession process took about eight months, so it sat empty for all that time... ...a loaf of bread in the kitchen
barked at us when we entered, and couldn't be thrown out until we actually owned it! You can imagine how mouldy it was. They'd also left piles of paperwork, a trail of slowly sinking further in to debt. Using credit cards to pay utility bills... It was really very sad. The neighbours said they were a lovely young couple. But, they were slowly forced under.
Welcome back to those days.
Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2022 1:27 pm
