The UK economy basically works like this:
Get paid £2,000.
Give £900 to a landlord. Give £200 to the council. Give £150 to energy companies. Give £300 to supermarkets. Give £300 to car insurance and fuel.
Spend the rest surviving until next payday.
Then get lectured by someone who bought their house for £37,000 in 1988 about how you need to stop buying coffees and cancel subscriptions.
Owning a £400,000 house with a £350,000 mortgage in the UK in 2026 means signing a 25-year contract to give the bank around £2,050 a month, in exchange for the right to maintain a building you'll spend another £4,000 a year keeping dry, warm and structurally sound.
At a 5% fixed rate, the total interest over the life of the mortgage is around £264,000. The total mortgage cost ends up at roughly £614,000.
The price tag on the front door says £400K. The actual cost of living in it for 25 years is closer to £750K, before council tax, repairs, insurance and the new boiler.
This is what the country has been calling 'getting on the ladder.'
@2147mill Yeah I'm bad with this but have an emergency fund(still needs to be bigger) and need to get it in a savings acc, but atm everything goes into stocks and shares isa