Going for a flat viewing

id never advise anyone to rent, even if its affordable renting never allows you to save and pins you in poverty.

is it possible to stay with your parents and build up savings by whatever work you do and then use that as a deposit on a cheap flat or property to which you can then get a mortgage on and buy? the mortgage will be cheaper... but even if its not, even if its the same... it eventually ends, and the property is yours, and your life gets cheap with property yours and ability to sell it to get the money back you spent getting it...

renting... it takes all your money, you can never save, you can never move out, youd be stuck in rent for life due to that, and over the years youd have given the landlord more money than the flat is worth in total and he can still kick you out whenever he wants and youd never have rights to it as you dont own it. renting is pretty bad, id honestly advise you to think on this first and consider whether you can stay with your parents and save up for a deposit on something that will be yours. as once you rent its very hard to get out of then. id call renting to be a trap, and the first main mistake of anyones life that could negatively impact their entire life and set them on a course of being pinned down, and with ever rising rents its very possible while pinned down you also get pushed out to homelessness by rapid rising rents you have no control of and no ability to save to escape it and even less ability to save once rents keep rising. so id think hard on this and weigh up your ability to stay with parents and save for a deposit instead.

Caelus said:

over the years youd have given the landlord more money than the flat is worth in total

If you own then you probably have a mortgage and have to pay interest, insurances and other fees that often end up adding up to the same - you pay someone else for a place to live.

I get it that owning has a reasonable chance of growth in its value over time, but the amounts required for this at the moment are astronomical so it is often the only way to access property on a reasonable flexible basis.

Caelus said:

id call renting to be a trap,

As is ownership if you buy when prices are high and the marker turns negative. I personally got stuck with this in the 1980s when the value of the property I bought dropped by over 30% and it took 7 years to get back to the value I paid, and I spent mos of that time trapped in a situation that I really wanted out of.

Property is a trap in whatever format but sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. At least with renting you have more flexibility.

i dunno theres no upside in rent at all on these points though as you pay more in rent than youd ever do in mortgage and you never get anything back from rent...

in mortgage even if property drops 90% and even if your interest made you pay 100% more than the property you brought paid... say you brought a 100k property, interest made you in the end pay 200k... and the property dropped in value to maybe 50k... you still at least have 50k at the end of it in property... and a free place to live that you dont even need to sell, but if you want its there for you to sell and get 50k back from it... while if you rent, you pay unlimited cash forever uncapped, by the time you paid 200k you still have nothing, you dont have that 50k or whatever loss to pull back out you have nothing, and you can be kicked out any time still and be left with nothing and likely no ability to move into another rental place in time resulting in homelessness. you will forever be paying rent into old age so you wont be able to modify your life expenditure to make it so that state pension can afford your retirement as rent will always be miles above state pension. if you havent got ownership and paid mortgage off before retirement, your not retiring... not at all. 

yeah if you travel then rent is likely better.

ownership is long term plan, like retirement planning and so on... absolutely need to own to retire otherwise there wont be a retirement as rents are mostly higher than state pension.

yeah if you travel then rent is likely better.

ownership is long term plan, like retirement planning and so on... absolutely need to own to retire otherwise there wont be a retirement as rents are mostly higher than state pension.